Seven Types of Ambiguity

  “You . . . take it all off.”

  “Joe.”

  “Don’t look like that.”

  “Joe, you’ve been drinking.”

  “Drunk or sober . . . I’ll pay you. Thirty pieces of silver I believe is the standard . . . the market rate for these things. That’s ten from me, ten from him, and ten from Anna. Don’t you love my son? I always told you he was cute.”

  “Joe, if you want to talk—”

  “Oh, I want to talk but . . . not just talk. I want you . . . on your front, please . . . ass in the air . . . Oh, so round.”

  “Joe, I can tell you, I will tell you what happened, but not here. Not like this. You’re clearly upset.”

  “You’re right. I haven’t been so happy lately. Face down on the pillow. That’s the way.”

  “Joe!”

  “There’s a guy I met, Buchanan. You’d like him.”

  “I think we should talk first. We need to talk, Joe.”

  “Face down. Good girl. Buchanan’s got this incredible handshake. He doesn’t let go. He’s still got one of my hands.”

  “Listen, Joe, he was asleep most of the time. He wasn’t hurt a bit.”

  “So perfectly round. I’d forgotten how perfect it is.”

  “I can understand you being upset. I didn’t know Simon was going to take him, really . . . I didn’t.”

  “He’s got one of my hands, but the other one is . . .”

  “Joe, what are you going to do?” I asked him from on all fours. I’d never seen him like this.

  “The other one is in my pocket and . . .”

  “Joe, he didn’t tell me that he was going to take Sam. I was there when he brought Sam home, back to his place, but I promise you I . . . Do you want it . . .”

  “You are blessed. Perfectly round. It’s a gift,” he said, stroking my cheeks.

  “Do you want to do it first, Joe? Then we can talk. Is that what you want?”

  “When thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.”

  “Why don’t you come inside for a while, Joe. Might relax you. This way?”

  “Here’s a little something for your trouble.”

  “You’re not going to do anything silly, are you, Joe?”

  “Rolled up it’s a perfect fit.”

  “Jesus Christ! What are you doing?”

  “It’s only what I owe you.”

  “Joe! What the hell . . . ?”

  “Well, things are a little rough now. Fits perfectly.”

  “Jesus Christ, Joe!” I said in horror, pulling out the suppository of cash and recoiling at it in my hand.

  “Now you know how I felt, you fucking bitch.”

  “I think you’d better leave.” I was gagging. I was frightened. It’s only when they know you, even slightly, that they can really humiliate you. That is why the regulars continue to hold the biggest threat, no matter how long they have been pretending to be kind. People might think that it’s safer with regulars. I used to think so. Someone new is, by definition, completely unknown. He could block the door. But if he blocks the door and you’re on the bed, he can’t touch you. If he leaves the door, you go for it or else for him. He could cut you but you’re likely to see that coming and call for help, not that a new guy is more likely than a regular to decide that a gaudy room alone with a naked you is exactly the place he would like to have a violent psychotic breakdown.

  On the contrary, it is the regular who is more dangerous than someone new. The regular is the more dangerous for two reasons. Firstly, no matter what you know or have been taught or how long you’ve been doing it, you are most likely to let your guard down with a regular. When you are tired or maybe a little sad, when you are lonely or some part of your life is hurting, a regular, a clever one, a smart one, can have you trusting him. You might, just for a moment, need to think that you are friends. Second, someone new is usually much too scared to try to slap you or cut you. And if he’s not, you can sense it. You can smell the mental illness on him, on his skin, in his hair. And even if you can’t, he is still unlikely to go too far before you get out or get help. But a regular, a smart one, a longtime remember-your-star-sign one, he can humiliate you. He can take what it is that you do day in, day out, and hand it back to you in front of your face, at eye level, so that nobody can pretend that there is anything professional, therapeutic, or glamorous about it. He can make you feel foolish for ever thinking that you are anything but a slave to the need of every man with the price of your enslavement nestling snugly in his wallet next to the photo of his wife and kids, or else tight inside a white-knuckled fist along with the car keys. However dimly he discerns it, this is the humiliation that only a regular can bring.

  It had gone far enough. I didn’t know what else he was going to do. Barely getting myself upright I slapped the intercom attached to the wall and called for security.

  “Hey!” he said with hands in the air, as if responding to a stick-’em-up command in a cartoon robbery. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “I think you had better go.” I was shaken.

  “But we’ve got so much to talk about.”

  The door burst open. I covered up as two of the boys came in and picked him up, one under each arm.

  “Come on, mister.”

  “What’s going on here? I’ve paid. I fucking paid. There’s no problem here. I fucking paid.”

  2. I would have reacted faster if I hadn’t felt guilty. The way he looked at it, I had breached a code. The problem was that I knew this as soon as I saw his face. He was drunk, angry, and the betrayal he felt was genuine, more genuine than anything else in the room, and on seeing it like that in his face, for the first time I realized how deceived he must have felt. My pity and my guilt blinded me to the menace in his eyes, in his voice, and in the way he stood there, naked to the waist. If ever any of them turn nasty you never waste time feeling in any way responsible. You’re out of there or on the intercom before they know what they’re doing. But with Joe I knew too much about him. I knew he was connected, in one way or another, to people I care about. Well, connected to Simon. I think of Simon all the time, even though I know where his thoughts are. I can’t see him now.

  I was under the impression we were making progress, progress as a couple. We were. We were sharing more. I have never been as close to someone. I was sure I was helping him, too. And then he goes and does something crazy, so crazy that now I can’t see him. I had no idea that all his questions, his incessant questions about every aspect of their lives, were designed to facilitate the kidnapping. The police didn’t believe this, and Joe was even less likely to believe it.

  There are plenty of men, one-hit wonders, Christmas-party-goers, teenage premature ejaculators, and, of course, regulars, whom you could imagine hurting or harming in some way. These are the men whose grotesque or just stupid faces, insensate faces, you see when you wake in a sweat, the men whose putrid breath lodges in your nostrils for hours, for days, whose skin smell stays with you no matter how much you shower or how vigorously you scrub, the men that make you dry-retch till even the viscera you thought they could not touch are bruised. Of course, after all those showers, the soaps, shampoos, conditioners, moisturizers and deodorants, body sprays or perfumes, the physical basis for the smell of these men has gone. The molecules containing their essences have all washed down the drain. But the scent is lodged in your memory and the soap and water can’t get there, not to your memory. Nothing is as evocative as smell, nothing can as quickly or as certainly take you back somewhere. But Joe was not one of those men whose scent was material for a nightmare. I didn’t dislike him at all.

  Kelly, my housemate, even suggested I get stock tips from him, if not for me, then for her. She wanted to play the market with his advice, not just once or twice but seriously, regularly. She thought his expertise could be her ticket out of the industry, and mine too, if I wanted one. But she will never have a ticket out. She will leave when the market kicks her out of
bed.

  “Why couldn’t I get a stockbroker as a regular?” she complained. “You should really make use of this. Get him talking about his work. Milk him for all he knows.”

  “Jesus, Kel, now you sound like Simon. He’s always telling me to do that.”

  “No I don’t. I only want to know what to buy, what to sell, what are the good dot-coms, that sort of thing. He wants to know . . . I don’t know what he wants to know. He wants to know everything about this guy and his wife, doesn’t he?”

  “Well, yes, he does.”

  “Angie, I hope you don’t mind me saying this. I mean, it’s staring you in the face really, but . . . your boyfriend is a little crazy.”

  “Yeah, he is,” I had to agree. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “No, really, sweetheart, I don’t mean . . . you know . . . just a bit of a dreamer. He’s a little . . . unhinged, isn’t he, with all this . . . ? It’s like spying.”

  “Hey, Kel, whose boyfriend wants to videotape you doing it with a dog, for fuck’s sake, a dog, and then use the tape to jump-start a career in pornographic movies?”

  “I don’t see him anymore.”

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore.”

  “Pity. Cute dog.”

  “Yeah. Wasn’t even his dog.”

  “He stole it?”

  “No, he borrowed it. Told me it was his, though, when he saw how much I liked it.”

  “A liar, too?”

  “Such an asshole,” she concurred.

  Kelly is a little younger than I am, but she has worked in the industry longer. I like her a lot. It was she who took me under her wing when I started, and we’ve come to look out for each other. She’s sweet, but I doubt that she has ever felt deeply about anybody. Or ever will. In letting her talk about my relationship with Simon, I am humoring her. She and I are different in so many ways, and Simon is one of those ways. If I am less childlike than her, less childish and less childlike, then it is due to Simon. There is nothing special about me, save for knowing him. She will never know anyone like him.

  But before Simon and I were close, there were times when Kelly seemed to be the only one I could talk to, and for that she will always be dear to me. She is the only one I can talk to now, and Alex, I suppose, but I feel a little awkward talking to him. I do now, anyway. Not because he’s a psychiatrist but because he is Simon’s psychiatrist. At least he was. Maybe he still is, if they let your private psychiatrist visit you in prison. I’m half expecting them to have a falling out, too.

  Actually, it was well before Simon took the little boy that Alex and Simon had become more like friends than like psychiatrist and patient. Alex would meet us for a drink at Simon’s place or else at the Espy. The two of them would go for walks around Elwood or St. Kilda. Sometimes I went with them. I liked just being there. I remember the three of us walking along the St. Kilda pier one day. It was overcast and windy and I caught myself feeling about as good as I have ever felt, without really knowing why. It was before what I subsequently took to calling, at least to Kelly, my “inconvenience.” Simon was holding forth, as he often did, and I tried not to distract him with how good it was to be there.

  “You read a novel in which the hero or the antihero, the one you like, or simply the one whose progress you like to follow, well, this character commits a crime, say, a violent act. Who do you feel sorry for? You should feel sorry for the victim of the crime, but you don’t. Why don’t you? In your normal life you condemn violence of any kind, yet you don’t condemn this act of violence, even though it’s brutal. Perhaps you dislike the victim. Or perhaps you don’t actually dislike him but you don’t actively like him either. So where will your sympathies lie? Who will you feel sorry for?’

  “Who? The perpetrator?” I asked.

  “Partly. He has to live with the moral and practical consequences, the guilt, the mess, and the fear of detection. But who else?”

  “I don’t know. Who else?”

  “You, the reader, Angel. The reader will feel sorry for himself.”

  “Why, because he has been tricked into thinking the violent scene is somehow morally ambiguous when, of course, it isn’t really?” Alex chipped in.

  “No, because he has identified with his preferred character, the perpetrator of the crime, and therefore shares his guilt and his fears.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. As we walked, Simon tried to explain.

  “The thing is, readers usually identify with one or other of the characters in a story so that they can the better escape from the problems and boredom of their own lives. That’s why most of them read fiction in the first place. They need to identify with some character in a story, or with different characters at different times if the story is true to life, in order to be drawn into it. And they need to be drawn into the story, to be pulled along by it, because they want a break from their own lives. This is a need, a need that is recognized at least unconsciously by every reader and—”

  “You can’t recognize something unconsciously,” Alex interrupted.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Think about it,” Alex said kindly. “If it’s unconscious, you are not recognizing it. You are not aware of it.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Simon,” Alex continued, “you used two expressions just then: pulled along and drawn into.”

  “Oh, Alex, don’t give me that Freudian-slip bullshit. The point I’m making is valid, for once.”

  “Well, in any case, I think you are wrong. Not all novels are purely escapist, to be read only for entertainment. Fiction, at least some fiction, can also confront us with truths we might otherwise never have encountered. It can provide us with insights we would never have gained elsewhere.”

  “Yeah . . . I guess you’re right . . . I don’t know. These days I often don’t know.”

  I had never known people who talked like this socially, as distinct from in a literature class. I didn’t know what a Freudian slip was back then, not exactly. They were aware I was struggling to keep up with a conversation that even then I suspected was for them just a throwaway verbal joust, not something they took seriously. But they took me seriously. They took me more seriously than anybody else ever had. The three of us got along, and the two of them got me through.

  “For all that, you might have something, Simon,” Alex continued as my understanding dropped in and out like the reception on a cell phone.

  “If the writer is able to properly convey to the reader the social and psychological forces acting on a character whose behavior is unacceptable—and isn’t it the mark of a good writer that he can?—then the reader might well end up feeling sorry for the character, and insofar as he identifies with him, sorry for himself. Of course, you realize this gets rid of the bad guy in literature?”

  “Oh no it doesn’t,” I said with a confidence born out of nothing but joy. “There’s still a bad guy. The writer, for making the reader feel sorry for himself.”

  At that the two men stopped to look at each other for an instant before laughing uproariously. Then Simon took me in his arms and held me so that the wind stopped. By that time we had reached the end of the pier.

  I have tried to think of that moment, to preserve it exactly as it was. Being with him made me feel that I was okay, that there was nothing wrong with me or with what I had done with my life, that I was clean. It wasn’t just his intellect; it was the kindness and understanding he showed me. His kindness wasn’t the product of some New Age relativism, as he called it, that refused to judge anything. That was itself one of the things he railed against. He could get angry, although he never got angry with me. Even now it is not anger, not really. And though we laughed all the time, he never laughed at me. He didn’t think I had ruined my life, that I had done anything irreversible. He thought it was not out of the question that I could study, or get a job in one of the new e-bus
inesses. In his opinion I was okay. But I’ve ruined that now.

  One night, not long after we first met, he took me for a long walk along the bank of the Yarra, not near the city, but between Hawthorn and Kew, past the backs of what he told me were the houses of the wealthy. I was still fairly new to Melbourne, and he told me that if I was planning to support myself sleeping with the husbands, fathers, and sons of the well-heeled, I ought to see where they lived and what their houses looked like. We walked and talked for quite a while without touching. It was a very still night and the moon was full and perfect. I was sure that he felt like I did, that this was not at all a booking but a date, the kind you have when you’re very young.

  Standing at ridiculous angles to each other by the river, near midnight, we silently interrogated each other. He looked so vulnerable. He was afraid, afraid of getting involved with anyone after Anna, afraid of getting hurt. And I was elated. I had always hoped that one day I would meet someone who could make me feel the way he made me feel. Everyone does. But I had found him, and he even knew what I did. I had found him on the street. What are the chances of that? He has said he wasn’t looking for a girl, that he was just walking. When I started talking to him he didn’t know I was propositioning him for money. That’s what he’s said anyway. For me, meeting him was the beginning of the end of a terrible time.

  He will say it is because of me that this is a terrible time for him, and it is true, this is a terrible time for him. But it is not my fault, no matter what he says. What I did was done out of the deepest feelings I have ever had for anyone. Maybe one day he will understand that. But now I am in pain. My sleep is fitful, and I wake up screaming. The muscles in my legs ache from thrashing around. I have to force myself to eat. And I can cry suddenly when I think I see him in the street, which is not infrequently.

  I think that I see him crossing the street, but I know it’s not him, that it cannot be him. And if I look closely I can see that it doesn’t even look like him. More and more it now takes only a distant or faint outline of a youngish man for me to think I see him and for me to ache. I remember the luxury of being able to tell him I’d seen him somewhere, or thought I had. I will never be able to do that again. He has all but assured me of that.