Forty-Seventeen (14 page)

‘We'll go our own ways,' she'd said when they'd been
in Vienna, ‘but it seems silly for us to split up if we're both going to be in London and then going on business together in Israel.'

Edith called the next morning, on the telephone from her room at the Basil, to see what he was doing that day.

‘How did your reunion go with your lost love?' she asked, trying to exclude from her voice any suggestion that she vied with the younger woman for his time, or that she, Edith, had any claim on him – yet these ridiculous and unreasonable shadows were there.

‘She is not, as you know, my “lost love”, Edith, although I wish she were in some ways my found love and yes, I've lost her. It is all in the past.'

That didn't sound very coherent.

‘You are fortunate that you have so little in your past,' she said. ‘I trust, anyhow, you had a pleasant enough evening.'

‘Yes.'

He'd become quite drunk on his own in his room watching television and had then for a time sat in silence.

‘I didn't,' she said, accusingly, ‘I ate at the place around the corner and found it execrable – you were going to recommend a place but of course with your urgent personal life you went off without a word. I'm afraid the places I used to know around here have long gone.'

He let the complaint pass.

‘Anyhow I thought,' she continued, ‘that you might
like to make it up to me by coming to the Summer Exhibition at the British Academy – we could walk from here. Do us good.'

‘I'm seeing my friend, I'm afraid, Edith.'

‘Oh? Again? Things must not have gone so badly then. You should watch that you don't allow yourself to be hurt again.'

This was a new kind of advice. This was not matrimonial, this was, this was maternal. That was too much.

‘Oh go to hell, Edith – I'm afraid I can't squire you around London. I'm sorry, but no. That's not my role.'

‘You mean you can't waste your time squiring around an old woman.'

‘I found your advice a trifle maternal.'

‘I don't know which is the more insulting,' there was a pause, ‘I thought you were more sophisticated – I thought of you as a friend.'

She was lying to herself. Ah for the pure
friend.

‘I'm afraid, Edith, that I do have my own business to do here.'

‘You didn't seem to object that much in Vienna. I can remember times when you were the one glad of company, glad of a friendly face at breakfast. And, I dare say, you will feel the same way when we resume our business in Israel.'

‘This is London. This is a personal visit. We are not required to be together.'

‘I well appreciate that,' she said, coldly, ‘all I was
asking of you was whether you would …' she now enunciated each word, ‘accompany/me/to/the/Royal/Academy.'

‘No. I will not. I have, repeat, my/own/things/to/do/if/you/don't/mind.'

He hung up on her.

Oh God, that had all sounded sickeningly matrimonial. He had no sense of being severed from her at all, he'd gained nothing from having spoken his feelings. The exchange would heighten his awareness of Edith for the rest of the day in a perturbing way. And, simultaneously, he was in a welter of desire for the girl, and an agony of fear that he would be denied her by something. ‘Girl whore,' he said it aloud to himself, ‘girl whore.'

Then he said, ‘Old bitch, old bitch.'

I'm going crazy.

He began to dress. Would he change his clothes before meeting her? How should he fill the time before she came? I'm going crazy.

He left the Basil intending to go to a gallery to fill time. The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition was usually a mess. He could walk a little further to the National.

He had to walk by the Royal Academy and as he did he felt he might as well look in. He tried to dismiss the chance of meeting Edith. ‘I can go to the Royal Academy alone. I am in no way excluded simply because it was her wish that we go there together.'

He entered the gallery. He saw Edith at the other
end of the gallery. He gave a nervous, jerky wave. She did not wave back but returned to her catalogue.

They moved about the gallery as if fixed on opposite ends of a long rod. He determined that he would not leave ‘because of her'. He did not want his behaviour to be in any way determined by her existence. But he acknowledged that his consciousness of her was inescapable. The irritating thing was that he should be stuck like this, manoeuvring around a seventy-year-old woman in an art gallery, simply because a bureaucrat had placed their names, two strangers, together on a list of suggested delegates on a government mission.

He completed the rounds of the paintings, only half-seeing, aware that sometimes he and Edith drifted closer together but then a navigational correction would be made by either or both and they would move apart.

He lunched alone at Bentley's, which was far enough away from the Academy to avoid any coincidental meeting with Edith, and then returned to his room.

As he dressed to meet the girl he noted that in the past when visiting a brothel he had always shaved and considered his dress and personal hygiene, not wanting to show disrespect. It was after all some sort of a date, a special sort of personal transaction.

He thought he sometimes got the performance of ‘going to a whore' right. When his mood and inclination was for nothing else – when it was not a substitution for anything else or a pretence for something else. He sometimes desired the anonymous, unthreatening – or
‘threatening' in its own peculiar way – autonomous sexual act which contained within it the very faint mimicry of love but was not intended as a substitute for it. It was still two humans exchanging something, a small conversation, a small physical act, a simple, limited, stylised touching of two human beings. Sometimes it worked so well, the prostitute acting and interacting slightly, and he the client, acting the client and also, sometimes, interacting in that slight, very slight way. It was such a perfectly ‘simple' act but highly refined by history. It surprised him how often it contained simple ‘good will'.

But this was more now, he was courting her, wanting maybe to win her back from her boyfriend. About ‘Johnny' he was uncertain; he did not know how to approach the claims that Johnny might have on her. Maybe he really wanted to displace Johnny and to be both her lover and her pimp. How to dress as a lover? How to dress as a pimp? How to dress as a client? Did pimps really have a style? How did that idea arise?

He went to the bar to wait and rehearse his conversation. He felt randy. A stirring of life.

Life, like a martini, should be stirred, not shaken. He'd say that to her.

He waited until she was well over three-quarters of an hour late. He then went to reception and asked if there was a message for him. Maybe she was ‘working back'. There was a message. He opened it and it said that she had on second thoughts considered it best not to meet him again. ‘Let's part while we're ahead.' She
said she felt a special kind of love for him but nothing could be done about it just now.

Just now.

He felt a shock of thwarted desire. It was not that torment which came from withheld love, it was thwarted desire. No remedy presented itself. He did not want a drink. He wanted to court her but that really hadn't started. He was not lovesick, he was thwarted.

He went to his room, pulled off his so-carefully-tied bow tie, restless with lost equilibrium. He was annoyed that he felt, too, a slight cowardly marginal relief from not having to face her and the strangeness which surrounded her.

He tried laughing at his expectations. He saw himself swirling in fantasies from times past, a Berlin Weimar fantasy of decadence which he'd never found.

The telephone rang and he picked it up, relieved instantly from his turbulent condition, back on full longing alert for her, but it was not her, it was Edith.

‘I rang to apologise,' she said, ‘about my uncivil behaviour in the gallery this morning – I realised later that you'd come to, well, make a gesture, and I rebuffed you. I'm sorry. I was imposing on you. For that, also, my apologies. But thank you for coming to the gallery.'

‘Oh,' he stumbled, ‘oh that's all right, I was the one who was rude. I owe you an apology.'

‘Well, I'm out of your hair. I'm booking into another hotel. I'll fade into the night. After all, we still have Israel to do. We'll see enough of each other.'

‘That's not necessary, Edith. No. Don't go to that trouble.'

She was silent, wanting maybe further encouragement to stay.

He said, ‘Let's have a drink.'

‘A drink? It's a little early for me. But, well, what the hell, yes.'

‘I'll see you in the bar.'

‘Will I get to meet your lady friend?'

‘Oh no – I've put that off. How about we have a drink and then go down to Hazlitt's tombstone. In St Anne's.'

‘Love to.' He felt her consciously not pressing for details of his personal life.

As he waited in the bar he read from Hazlitt: ‘To live to oneself – what I mean by living to oneself is living the world as in it not of it: it is as if no one knew there was such a person and you wished no one to know that.'

He mixed the martini in the jug, stirring with studied performance. ‘Always stirred, never shaken,' he told her.

‘I've never drunk a martini in my life.' She made it sound as if she were now fifty and had astoundingly missed the martini. Instead, she was seventeen and with no reason to have tasted a martini. ‘We can pretend we are in New York.'

‘Paris. It was actually invented by a Frenchman.'

‘All right. If you like you can be in Paris and I'll be in New York. I really want to be in New York.'

‘That'd be no fun.'

‘We could call each other from those night-club table telephones.'

‘I like to know the vermouth is there,' he said, scholastically, sniffing the jug for the vermouth, ‘many don't. The great martini drinkers just want the gin mixed with mystique. Let the beam of light pass through the vermouth bottle and strike the gin – that was sufficient, sayeth Luis Buñuel.'

‘Who is Luis Buñuel again? I know you told me once.'

‘Buñuel is a Spanish film director. When we are in Spain we'll go …'

‘…
Belle de Jour
! Right?'

‘Correct. I took you to see it in some town in Victoria.'

‘What I remember is you at the motel afterwards.' She giggled.

‘When we go to Spain we'll go to Buñuel's birthplace.'

‘You made me take money from you.'

‘Aragon.'

‘You showed me how a whore does it. And why do we have to go to people's birthplaces?'

He hadn't answered that question before. ‘You're too questioning. You go to see where the magic started. You go to see if you can be touched by the magic. To see if there is any left.'

He carefully carried the brimful martinis to her on the balcony of the beach house.

‘You're incredible,' she said, taking her martini, ‘you've even brought along the proper glasses. I know they're martini glasses, that much I do know.'

‘The glass is half the drink.'

‘As you always say.'

Was he beginning to repeat himself?

He looked out at the sea in which he'd swum as a boy. ‘I've never made love to anyone here in my home town – you are the first. That's unbelievable in a way, given that I lived here until I was seventeen, your age …'

‘I'm eighteen now – you keep forgetting.'

‘Sorry. But it took me to this age, well, getting
towards forty, to have sex in the place where I was born. Says something.' He tried to muse on this but nothing occurred to him.

‘What does it say?'

‘I don't know yet.'

‘Was it different?'

He kissed her fingers, one still slightly pen-calloused from her schooling. ‘It's always different with you.'

‘No slimy answers,' she said, ‘tell me how it was different. I want to know.'

‘Did the earth move?'

‘Don't make fun of me. Tell me.'

‘Different because of “formative circuits”,' he teased. ‘Do you want me to say things like that?'

‘Whatever screwing circuits. Tell me!'

‘I think you seek poetry.' He couldn't tell her now. ‘I'll tell you when I've worked it out. I'll write a sonnet.'

It was different because he was getting emotional cross-tunings. He was making the cross-tunings.

‘Another thing,' he said, ‘is that it's my parents' home. Or at least their beach house. Which will do.'

‘Will do what?'

She bridled when she sensed he was using the conversation to talk to himself.

‘Well there is always, you know, the mother, always the mother, if it's not the bed where I was conceived, it's near enough.'

‘Yuck.' She moved swiftly away from that. ‘It's a beautiful drink. I could become really hooked on martinis. But what do you do with the olive, do you
eat it at the beginning or the end of the drink or is it just a … garnish or what?'

Garnish, nice word.

‘That's a personal preference. It's useful to play with during conversation. You can prick it with the toothpick and the olive oil seeps out.' He did it. ‘See, the olive oil comes into the drink.'

‘The olive on the toothpick gives the drink an axis.'

Yes, she was right.

She pricked her olive.

But regardless of the cross-tunings he was getting, seeking, he wanted also to imprint at the very same time a uniqueness onto their experience. To mark her off from his crowded personal history. He had used up so much – she couldn't be his first, well, first anything just about, not first love, first wife, nor first adultery, not even his first seventeen-year-old – and he couldn't give her any of the body's six or seven significant virginities, although at seventeen – eighteen – she seemed also to have exhausted most of these herself. Well, not all. And some she had given him. And they did share one or two sensual firsts of the minor scale. He supposed he was trying to consecrate their experience by bringing her to his home territory, the aura of kin if not kin. Into the family beach home – almost home – if not as a bride then as someone in her own significant category. He wanted to rank her equal with love if not
as love.
He couldn't tell her this yet.

‘The olive is like leaking radioactivity,' she said. She was preoccupied with nuclear war but not as an issue –
more as a macabre firework or as a sort of video game.

‘I'll give you a twist of lemon next,' he said, ‘that's the other classic garnish.'

She moved against him, began to arouse him, but he was in another mood, and said, ‘I thought this was the cocktail hour.'

‘I want to get rid of that sad look you have.'

‘I'm not sad.'

But cross-tunings were coming in across the sea from his youthful marriage to a girl from his home town (although they'd never had sex in their home town – except for some vaguely recalled, fumbled caressing on a river rock in bushland, a ‘fully dressed rehearsal', which he chose not to count). And a crude, bizarre ejaculation in a classroom late one afternoon – but no entry. The cross-tunings were entries of ill-handled love, their artless fumbled living …

 

In the sedate lounge of the Windsor he called the waiter. ‘This martini is too warm, we asked for it very cold and very dry. It is neither.'

He was relieved that at twenty he had got the complaint out, slowly, and with some force.

‘Yes sir.' The waiter went to take their drinks away.

‘Leave mine,' Robyn said. ‘Mine's all right.' She put her hand out over the drink.

‘Yes madam.' The waiter took only his drink. ‘I'll bring a fresh martini, sir.'

The waiter moved away.

‘You are a pain in the arse sometimes,' his wife said.

‘I thought you were big on consumer rights. Waiter!'

The waiter turned and came back to the table. ‘Take my wife's martini also – we'll both have a fresh one.'

‘Yes sir.'

She let the waiter take the drink this time.

‘You give me the shits,' she said.

‘So much for our second anniversary.'

‘Fighting with waiters isn't my idea of a good time. It's alcohol, isn't it? I thought that was all you cared about.'

He knew he'd complained as a way of getting at her. He didn't really care about the martini.

He wanted to be in New York drinking martinis in Costello's bar with Thurber. With the sophisticated Louise.

‘I wish I was in New York. In Costello's. Only the Americans know how to mix a martini.'

‘What would you know about Costello's or New York?'

‘Travel isn't the only way of knowing.'

‘The martini was invented by a Frenchman, anyhow.'

‘Crap.'

‘Have it your own way, I read it in
Origin of Everything.
'

‘Crap.'

‘And stop big-noting yourself,' she went on, ‘you're just a country boy – you've drunk only one martini before in your whole life. You get it all from Scott Fitzgerald and you get it wrong.'

He remained silent, stung, taking balm from a private relishing of a secret score against her – that on the day before they'd left on their anniversary trip to Melbourne he'd drunk martinis in bed with Louise.

He reached across to take her hand, reversing the mood to place her at a disadvantage, gaining himself virtue for making the move to heal the mood while at the same time continuing to relish Louise.

‘I'm sorry,' she said, taking the blame onto herself.

‘We don't have to stay the country boy and girl all our lives.'

‘I'm quite happy to be the country girl,' she said, quietly …

 

‘Stirred never shaken,' Louise said, putting a finger on his nose to emphasise her point, stopping him with her other hand.

He'd been doing an American bartender act with the cocktail shaker, Louise being the first person he'd known to own a cocktail shaker.

‘That's how I've seen it done in American movies.'

Louise laughed. ‘You have been going to the wrong movies. There are some cocktails we do that way, my love, but not the martini, never the martini.'

‘That's how we do them in my home town,' he said, trying to joke over his naivety.

‘I'd believe that.'

He put the shaker down and removed the top and looked into it. ‘They seem all right, they haven't exploded.'

‘They'll be bruised,' she laughed, ‘or at least that's what an aficionado would say.'

‘Should I throw them away and start again?'

‘No – I'm sure we can drink them with impunity – and I have an idea.'

He stopped himself asking who the aficionados were.

He began to pour them but Louise again stopped him. ‘Tch, tch,' taking away the wine glasses he'd taken out and bringing back martini glasses, ‘a classic drink demands a classic glass. And my idea is that we take the martinis to the bedroom and watch the sun set over the city.'

She led him to her bedroom, he slightly trembling with desire, the martini slightly spilling.

Looking out on the city at dusk from her bed he felt regret that he should need to be doing this against his young wife, felt the abrasion of his spirit. But it was numbed away with the lust for Louise, Louise who had the skills of living and such completeness.

‘What's wrong, love – guilt?' Louise asked.

‘No,' he lied …

 

‘What's the matter?' He turned over in bed to face the question from his seventeen-year-old – eighteen-year-old – girlfriend.

‘Memories spooking about,' he said.

‘But you said you hadn't brought anyone else here.'

‘That's true,' he said, putting a hand to her face, ‘but the heart is a hotel.'

He reached over and took his martini from beside the bed and finished it.

Where had his young wife learned about the origins of the martini back then? He had looked in the book
The Origins of Everything
, she hadn't got it from there.

‘I don't want you thinking of other women while you are sexing on with me.'

He smiled. ‘They have their rights.'

She rolled on to him and began to arouse him again.

‘Mix another drink,' he said, ‘first.'

She left the bed and went into the bar, her naked, youthful grace tightened his heart. She looked into the cocktail jug.

‘There's some left,' she said.

‘It'll be mainly melted ice.'

He was taking from her the flavours of young, first love. She was trying out her own explorations.

‘I'll make a new lot, tell me how,' she called.

He was collecting pleasures not taken when he'd been seventeen. He was taking also perhaps the last taste of pure youth.

The first martini, though, had honoured his ex-wife and Louise. This next one would be theirs.

‘One part vermouth, five parts gin,' he called back to her, ‘some would argue – but that's my mix now.'