His dejection had an unaccustomed weight of its own, and I respected it. I reached my hand to his arm and caressed it. This was a gesture of extraordinary warmth for an Australian male. Beyond my own shock, I even looked forward to telling my wife about Jacko’s, given that, on sound evidence, she doubted Jacko’s humane qualities.
At last I needed to go. The graduate writers would already be gathering, sipping their coffees, opening the two bottles of wine they took turns to bring. I apologized about leaving, but Jacko rose and came with me anyhow. Why didn’t he talk about these matters with Lucy? I wondered. Why was I the confidant?
It’s just about the truth to say I had to lead him to the corner of Thomas Street and direct him home to his loft. But he delayed me on the corner of West Broadway by the big Korean grocery.
—What am I going to do, mate, about this mad Jewish sheila?
I said, You know what I think.
—Yeah.
He closed his eyes.
—Just go over that stuff about television again.
—It sounds so bloody pious.
—That’s okay. I’m used to it from you. You know what I mean …
—Well, you know … I think television demands great saintliness of its practitioners. The medium, since it deifies men and women … it forces the necessity on them to live calmly or else destroy themselves.
—Live bloody calmly? With little Dannie after a bloke’s kidney fat?
—I think I’d go home to Lucy, Jacko. You’re not saying, are you, that you don’t know how to tell a young producer to get lost? Well, you’ve got the force of character to tell Dannie to get lost.
—How do you know?
—Because it seems to me you’ve got enough character to be appalled by the Sondquist story. Not just as television material. Appalled by the history.
—Oh mate, he said in a near whisper. That’s different. The poor bloody Anodyne Kid eh.
He opened his eyes again and considered me.
—You’re like everyone. You’re in love with Lucy.
I didn’t feel any threat in this accusation.
—Not the way you are with Dannie.
—Come on, mate. No fantasies?
—Jesus, I protested. I suppose I was being punished for my advice. If you want to know, she’s off limits in my mind. Forbidden degrees of relationship.
—Okay. You’re a mad bastard. You’re not telling me you were always ridgey-didge with Maureen. Loyal in all bloody circumstances, mate.
—I wish I could. We’re so happy now, and if you can’t see that … Well, if my work was better, I’d be globally happy. And drink less with yobbos like you.
—Okay, okay. No more challenges to you tonight. Look, I’ve got to go, and you’ve certainly got to go. Back to your happy home. Why does good old Maureen put up with you?
—I wake up at night with a nearly crippling regret for some of the pain I’ve inflicted in the past. That’s what’s ahead of you if you don’t watch out.
—Thanks for the fucking cheery forecast.
He lumbered past the plastic and deal-encased annexe where a Korean with an axe cut kindling for sale and trimmed the flowers his family sold. What a weapon in a hold-up that tool might become.
Even now there was the chance that Jacko would seek a final comfort with the First Precinct cops at Coghlan’s or with the sentimental Irish in Mary O’Reilly’s.
The mystery of Jacko’s not being happy with Lucy continued to exercise Maureen and me. My wife told me Lucy’s version of why she did not travel with him on his Live Wire weekends. They fought when she did. In the end she offered to stay home, hoping he wouldn’t take her up on it. He said that was probably wise. He gave her the usual promises about his behaviour – this still my wife’s version of Lucy’s version! Lucy spent the weekends going to galleries and concerts, more often than not with Maureen. Maureen and I were becoming the parents of these two dislocated children.
Maureen argued that it was Jacko’s culpable choice not to be content. He had, she said, the air of a man who hadn’t yet come to rest. I defended him of course. I argued that he was as bemused about it all as any of us.
And whatever the women (if they’d known) might have made of Dannie’s stated desire, it seemed to me to have little meaning to Jacko one way or another. It delayed him not a second longer on the corner of Thomas Street or sent him home not a second earlier.
The following night I watched in cringing fascination as old Bob Sondquist squawked away to Jacko on Live Wire about Sunny and spelling bees, about how, in the pattern of her childhood habits, when she disappeared she had been studying linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His enthusiasm for the vanished girl seemed, in the light of what Jacko had told me, so fraudulently poignant. The unjust father redesigning his own daughter’s childhood, working up into some sort of effigy the ashes of the burned years. All this to accord with the culture’s lust for that wholesomeness, that sheen of redemptive niceness, which habitually – at least in Jacko’s zones of malice – covered monstrous sins.
It was ghastly viewing, but I viewed it just the same.
7
Some time after my first visit to Burren Waters, I made accidental contact in Sydney with Jacko’s younger brother, Francis Emptor, through a friend of mine, Oscar Mulcahy. Oscar was an operamane, a member of the Board of the Australian Opera, headquartered as it was beneath Joern Utzon’s great white ceramic sails on Bennelong Point.
Oscar was a big-boned, beefy, generous and polemical sort of man, deriving perhaps from the same hulking Scots-Irish-farmer gene pool as the Emptors. People often said his shoe manufacturing business was the largest in the country, but Oscar would tell you it was the only and the last. Imports from Asia, he robustly declared, were killing him.
With an elegantly thin wife he had nicknamed Hefty, Oscar lived on the upper floor of a beautiful art deco apartment block above Elizabeth Bay. The Mulcahys’ was one of my favourite places for a party. From its windows you could see the beautiful mid-Harbour, the Heads and, close in, the little green island on which vegetables had been grown by a lovesick lieutenant of Marines called Ralph Clarke during Sydney’s first few starved years as a British gulag.
There was also the excitement inherent in the fact that next door to the Mulcahys lived the greatest Australian diva since Nellie Melba, Dame Roberta Murdoch. A large-boned, pleasant woman, widowed some years past, as iconic as Michael Bickham but more open. Less terrifying to the beholder, she was occasionally found at Mulcahy parties. A great part of the year she lived in Switzerland, from which she had access to the great opera houses of Europe and where – according to sniping opinion – she found a more congenial tax regime than she might enjoy in Britain or Australia.
Some Sydney operamanes, participants in the brother-and sisterhood of those great white wings of the Sydney Opera House, fashionably believed – at least on the days she did not come to Oscar’s parties – that Dame Roberta was past her best. They even showed a common anger that the mass of the Australian public did not participate in their belief in Dame Roberta’s decline and remained devoted to her and were excited by her as by no other singer. They were somehow annoyed by the well of love and respect the public harboured for her. It seemed, too, that the managements of La Scala or the New York Met, bereft of the sophisticated tastes of some of Mulcahy’s guests, went on ignorantly renewing her performance contracts, and Philips records went on reissuing new editions of her recent work.
The proposition that Dame Roberta suffered from diminished timbre was not one on which Oscar and his sylph wife Hefty laid particular stress. Their fixed idea had more to do with what they called the gay clique amongst the devotees of the opera. They would fulminate about it in front of their thin, middle-aged housekeeper, René Fabre, a former ballet dancer from London. René, French by birth, would frequently agree with the Mulcahys, camping it up and telling the assembly at cocktail parties, These young queers are not as responsible as w
e older women.
But whatever René and the Mulcahys said never seemed to cast doubt on the standing of young Francis Emptor, Jacko’s brother and a notable member, if not a focus, of the clique. Without question, the Mulcahys loved Francis, and René admired him.
—Very wealthy, my dear, said René, explaining young Emptor to me as Hefty took tall Francis’s cloak of ermine off his shoulders and hung it in the hall cupboard with the coats of less flamboyant opera buffs. Works all week, just like a wage slave, even though he’s so wealthy, don’t you know.
René had learned to speak his English in the corps of Sadler’s Wells, so that his conversation was full of these don’t you knows and my dears.
—Independent wealth, said René. But he labours away as an airfreight agent during the week, my dear. Says he wouldn’t be able to fill in his time without work.
I had heard nothing about Francis’s wealth from Chloe, and very little about his friendships with the renowned. But at the Mulcahys’ or at the opera, you could find Francis speaking with Sydney’s wealthiest and most cultivated people, although, as Oscar would readily tell you, the two categories did not always coincide.
Francis Emptor had the enormous, plate-faced look of Stammer Jack and of his brother Jacko, but of course somehow different and refined down by the input of Chloe. The truth was – and I hesitate to say it since it is such a cliché, though even clichés recur with a biological frequency – that Francis Emptor resembled the young Oscar Wilde. The similarity existed in the enormous brow and long jawline, and was heightened by Emptor’s taste for Wildean dress. He had that same celestial quality too. None of the houndlike sexual avidity which sat frankly beaming on Jacko’s features.
Francis lived with a houseful of boyfriends in Woollahra, but that did not draw any sort of comment, nor did it make him look one iota less ethereal, less pre-Raphaelite, less like a visitant angel with significant tidings to impart.
—Life isn’t fair to heterosexuals, said Oscar – who had also seen the resemblance to a Renaissance saint. Or maybe it’s too fair. Women put up with a lot of grossness in men. But those buggers root all night and still look like the Angel bloody Gabriel.
One evening in Sydney’s bright Opera House, I found myself sitting beside Francis Emptor at a performance of Il Trovatore, a neutral performance not involving Dame Roberta. I’d never been an opera lover, and Mulcahy frequently invited me out of a kindly perversity. I argued that the form was a kind of largely nineteenth century folk opera, which had become gratuitously sanctified to the point where people who wanted to be seen as respectable attended as at best a sort of necessary religious observance. A religious observance which then had to be subsidized out of consolidated revenue. I half believed this rhetoric, though I was always captivated by Dame Roberta Murdoch, who transcended all the rules.
The night I sat beside Frank, however, did suggest the limits of opera by featuring a fine English soprano who was nonetheless some fourteen-stone in weight. Her voice was as slim, piercing and angelic as Francis Emptor himself, but over her body – we were led to believe – the tenor and the baritone were willing to enter a death struggle with each other, or take into their hands the means of their own destruction.
The set designs that night were magnificent, the work of a man who shared a house with René, an older and soberer gay than Francis Emptor.
At the end of Act I, my wife Maureen and I left our seats briskly, keeping up with Francis who, as it proved, showed an unapologetic urgency to reach his preening station near the champagne bar. We talked with him about the designs. I said they were the only things I liked about the whole rampant excess of the thing, and he asked nicely whether I didn’t think the design was totally out of character with everything else.
—Rococo and the surreal just don’t fit, he threw over his shoulder.
We were separated. I saw him from a distance, laughing by the bar, a flute of Moët in his hand, amidst a flock of young, seamless-faced men. He was a young man so frankly enraptured by the elements of his life that I, a so-called straight boy from the west of Sydney, could imagine embracing him more or less as a kind of aesthetic congratulation. I was taken by the look of him, the same transcendent appetite I would come to see in different circumstances and in a different tone on his brother Jacko’s face.
Maureen and I went back to our seats. We were close enough to the curtains to hear the urgent thump of stage hands. Francis returned too and settled himself.
—I met your mother at Burren Waters, I told Francis.
—My God, he said. You didn’t meet my father the stammerer?
—He was sick.
—Tell me about it, said Francis, arching his epicene eyebrows. The man is so full of hate. I wish I could do something for him. Above all, for my mother.
—She’s a rare woman.
—Oh yes. Lost up there amongst the cattle. Her only salvation: the arts program on ABC television! Don’t worry, I’ve asked her to come down here and live at my place. I mean, all this … she’d love this.
In one sense it was true. But I imagined Chloe amidst the sybaritic pack giving off the same air of discontent as she did amongst Stammer Jack’s dusty herds.
—She might simply love your father, I suggested, the result of an odd impulse to challenge him.
—Well, he said indulgently, she likes he-men. That’s a weakness. She would like your friend Mulcahy. Oscar’s the muscle man of the Australian Opera.
So we had another act, in which the English soprano delivered herself of the gravity of her size and achieved the weightlessness of her top register. I saw that beautiful Francis Emptor dozed for a time, his faintly tanned cheek leaning towards the shoulder of his cape under the weight of his own perfection.
I was more fascinated by him now than by the action on stage, the relentless coloratura of Verdi. When he woke up in the near dark, he seemed embarrassed. I looked fixedly at the stage to convince him I hadn’t noticed. Just in case I had, he yawned at the end of the applause.
—It’s the San Francisco Opera season, he said as people rose around us for the interval. I’ve gone over there the last two weekends out of three. Sometimes I feel my brain is located halfway across the Pacific. Neither at one opera house nor the other.
He rose wearily, but was soon sparkling in the company of others, this time in the Opera Board’s enclosure, where drinks were served to business folk like the Mulcahys and to the stars of the opera audience. It became impossible to get near Francis – a woman parliamentarian from Macquarie Street was hogging his attention.
When we were back in our seats, I had time to ask him, How often do you go to San Francisco for the opera?
—I believe it’s twenty-one times in the past nine months, he told me, certain of the authority of these facts.
—That’s two weekends a month, I said, doing my awestruck sums.
—Sometimes three a month, he told me softly.
He was readier than I would have expected to give me the logistical details.
He always ended work half an hour early on Fridays, since a limousine arrived then to take him from his office block in the city to the airport in time for the evening flight to San Francisco. He lay back in his bed-like seat in first class, took champagne and a sleeping pill, and slept all night. He knew all the stewards on Qantas, he said, and they were very kind to him. It was like spending a night in a good hotel where the staff respected you and did all they could for your comfort.
Due to the mercies of the dateline, he arrived in San Francisco on Friday morning, at an hour earlier than he’d left Sydney. He had lunch with friends, took a nap, attended the San Francisco Opera, where he said he felt just as much at home as he did at the Australian Opera. He had made friends with Delva Costa, the great American contralto, and he was frequently invited to attend her levees after the performance. He told me in confidence and without braggadocio that he was very well known in San Francisco – a radio station had interviewed him about his passion
for crossing the Pacific just to hear Delva Costa on Friday nights.
—They think it’s a long way, of course. We Australians are the only ones who know the secrets of the size of the world. We know it’s not such a long way.
Then he would catch the noon plane from San Francisco for Sydney, shedding Sunday as again he crossed the dateline, stopping in Honolulu, and arriving in Sydney around six in the morning, just in time to have breakfast and to go to his desk.
—That sounds really punishing.
—I love it. I absolutely love it. I’ve got this weekend off, but I go again the following weekend. I get high on Delva’s great amber voice, and on champagne and jet lag. I mean, other people are terrified at not knowing what the time is. I’m stimulated by it. Sometimes though, midnight does hit me on the head in the middle of the morning.
—You land at dawn and work at your desk all morning?
—Oh yes. I know the air cargo business backwards. The whole operation would fall apart if I weren’t there to tell them what to do. That’s why I stay on. What would I do with my days anyhow?
I imagined him on humid Sydney Monday mornings, returned from Delva Costa and capeless at his computer.
It was only when the applause had died and Francis Emptor was turning to me to say goodbye that I remembered Mother Emptor’s large objective.
—You know your mother wants to meet Michael Bickham?
—Yes, I know.
He made a tushing noise with his lips.
—I’m sorry, he told me. There’s nothing I can do now. We fell out. I’m not really Michael Bickham’s kind of queer, though his friend Khalil likes me. But with Michael – persona non grata.