“He may well prove to be smarter than me. He’s already a lot wiser.”
“They’re going to find him here. You know they will. They’ll figure it out,” she said.
“They’ll find him happy and safe if they do, with a chocolate moustache.”
“What do you mean if? They will find him; it’s just a question of how soon. They’ll both be frantic. It’s not going to take them long.”
She got up and went over to him on the floor. He held her in his arms, and they looked at your beautiful son gently breathing half into the pillow.
“When will they find him? They won’t be that fast,” he said in a low voice. “ ‘The emotions are not skilled workers.’ ”
She repeated the line to herself after a moment’s thought.
“Is it Eliot?” she asked. He shook his head.
“Dylan Thomas? No. Yeats, isn’t it?”
“No,” he answered, running his fingers through her hair.
“Who wrote that, ‘The emotions are not skilled workers’?” She put her head in his lap.
“That’s a story in itself, Angel. It is a beautiful line, isn’t it? Attributed to a man who never said it, by two men who wrote it and then pretended they were a third man who never existed.”
“Wait just a minute. Start again. Tell me slowly.” She closed her eyes and repeated softly, “ ‘The emotions are not skilled workers.’ ”
“In 1944,” he began, “a very young editor of a fairly radical literary-cumarts journal received a letter from a woman enclosing a couple of poems she had found while going through her late brother’s things, poems she said her brother had written and never shown her.
“Her brother was born in Liverpool toward the end of the First World War and, when his father died of war wounds a couple of years later, the family moved to Australia. His mother had family here. They lived in Sydney where he went to school till he was fifteen, when his mother died. He hadn’t done very well and his sister was powerless to keep him from leaving school and getting a job in a garage at Taverner’s Hill.
“He kept the job for a couple of years but became restless and moved to Melbourne when he was about seventeen. His sister didn’t hear much from him for a long time. Eventually someone she knew met him and reported back. They told her he was living in a room by himself somewhere in South Melbourne, by the sea. They said he was selling insurance. Worried about his health, he had always been frail, she wrote to him to reestablish contact but didn’t receive a reply for quite a long while. Finally, she got a letter from him. It was 1940. The war was still young. He wrote that his health had improved and that he was making some money repairing watches and doing odd jobs.
“After that, she didn’t hear from him again until the year he came back to Sydney, the year he turned twenty-five. She got him to come home and it was then that she realized that he was ill, although his stamina concealed for a time the extent of his illness. Eventually, he told her that he knew what was wrong, that he had Graves’ disease. He said he would die from it.
“In the weeks before his death, his agitation and irritability gave way to a kind of calm in which he would talk to his sister almost as to a confessor. It seemed he had fallen in love with a woman in Melbourne but it hadn’t worked out. He was by now very weak and often incoherent. He died in the winter of that year.
“His sister found the poems some six months later while going through his effects. She showed them to a friend who thought they had something to them and that she ought to try to have them published. So, along with a covering letter and postage for their return, she sent them to the young editor. Now, literary editors who are at least half serious about their work and aren’t just in the job because they didn’t know what else to do with their lives dream of receiving an unsolicited gem through the mail, a collection of words that can move them, that can excite a very positive response. This editor, who was only in his early twenties, was no different in this respect. But he was in other ways. For a start, he was a poet himself. But the poetry he was interested in was modern, avant-garde. It wasn’t accepted by the mainstream till much later. In addition to being a poet and a modernist, he was a ‘crow-eater,’ like you.”
“A South Australian?”
“Yes. He was born in Mount Gambier and later moved to Adelaide. If all of this didn’t make him different enough to the Establishment, he was also a Jew. So, you’ve got this impossibly young modernist editor, a rural South Australian Jew, and he reads these poems written by a lonely young man without much formal education, a man who knew he was dying. Imagine him, Angel, discovering gold. He shows his colleagues the poems the sister had almost not found, and it was decided that these poems ought to be published.”
“What were their names, the poet and his sister?”
“Ethel and Ern Malley, not such romantic names. But then they never existed, either of them. They were the products of the collective imagination of two more conventional poets of the time who claimed to have set up the whole thing as a hoax—as a kind of experiment. They believed that, by promoting modernism in poetry, the journal, and particularly the young editor, were promoting poetry which was bereft of any meaning, structure, and craftsmanship. They regarded modernist poets as nothing more than con artists.
“The hoax was an experiment to determine whether the critics who lavished praise on this kind of poetry were capable of distinguishing it from deliberately concocted nonsense. They invented Ethel and Ern Malley and Ern’s life story as part of the experiment. The poems themselves were said to have been produced in one afternoon by the two poets through the random choosing of words and phrases from whatever books they happened to have lying around, such as the Concise Oxford Dictionary, a dictionary of quotations, and some American report on the drainage of the breeding grounds of mosquitoes. They had Ern Malley attribute to Lenin the line ‘The emotions are not skilled workers,’ but this was also false.
“The Ern Malley hoax, as it became known, was reported in the mainstream press around the country and ultimately in the London Times and Time magazine. Poetry was on everybody’s lips. People all over the English-speaking world delighted in the humiliation of the modernists, whom they had never previously heard of but whose denigration, it seemed, gladdened their hearts. The editor was made a laughingstock, and worse was to come.
“In late 1944, seven of the Ern Malley poems were deemed by the South Australian police to be ‘indecent advertisements,’ and the edition carrying them was alleged to be ‘indecent, immoral, or obscene.’ The young editor was charged and put on trial. As insane as it may sound, he was found guilty.”
He looked down at the part of her face that was exposed. “What is it, Angel? Does my memory frighten you or have I bored you to tears?”
She was crying silently. He held her closer against his chest. She took deep breaths, trying to get the air past her throat. Empson and Sam exhaled almost in time with each other. They were all of them on the floor in one corner of the room. The television showed the flag of an oil company blowing in the wind. This is how it all looked and this is what you would have heard in the last moment before the door was kicked in. They pushed it in with one kick, although it was locked. There were three of them, uniformed police, two men and a woman, with a warrant for Simon’s arrest. They didn’t need to kick the door in. He would have opened it. By the time they got to Simon’s place you would have been well and truly contacted. Your husband would have reached you by then. How did you feel? I have never been paged at an airport. You know how it is. It’s always someone else.
15. So this is where we are now—all of us separate people. William has been calling me but I haven’t returned the calls. He hasn’t gone to see Simon yet. He’s got to blame somebody before he does anything else. First things first. He’s got me in his sights. And why not? He’s got to get something out of this. I think he knows he can’t get his money back. I don’t have it. We drank it at the Esplanade. He probably wants to see me lose my license, i
f not arrested.
It had occurred to me that it would not be possible for Simon to get you out of his system without actually seeing you again, without establishing contact. My thinking was, with respect, that you could not help but disappoint him now. This would have hurt him very much in the short run. It might even have driven him back to his darkened bedroom. But after a while his despair over the reality of you, as opposed to the idealization of you, would evaporate, and with it a lot of other things. I told him this. I think he was coming around. I think it could have helped him. You could have—just by being the person you are, with whatever fears and weaknesses you have, just like the rest of us. You could have told him you remember it all fondly—at least that. It would not have taken much. He nearly called you several times. You weren’t to know. He nearly called you last night.
They really do get one phone call, like on television or in the movies. He was scared. He called me. He said he didn’t know whether they were going to keep him in the lockup or send him to the Melbourne Assessment Prison, so I don’t know exactly where he is going to be after today. I don’t know how they knew where to find Sam so quickly either. There’s a lot I don’t know—but I do know that your son had never been in less danger. And I also know that you’re the only one who can help Simon now. You’re the only one that can save him. Simon told me as much just now on the phone. He said you’ve got to tell them that he is your lover, that he had your permission to take Sam. That is the only course that can save him. Why would you want to save him? Because he’s ill and because he’s never stopped loving you. Among other things, he is ill because he’s never stopped loving you. I’m not saying you owe him anything beyond that which we all owe each other but—when we are all finished being told that everyone out there must take responsibility for himself—what’s it like when we get home? What’s it like inside? He had been cast out and he had never done anything wrong, till now. You think it would be the end of everything to help him like this, but it would only be the end of some things. What are you going to do? You’re involved. You are finally involved, after all these years, and there is no way out of it. There are a few people you can help now. I nearly called you last night.
part
two
1. I am irritating her. Again. I can sense it. Without even seeing her face I can sense it. Over time I have learned to register the signals. It is there in the slow exhale of sulfurous breath in the morning as she lies beside me in bed staring at the ceiling, or else in the way she turns away to one side. It is there in the way she stays and stays on the same page of a book or a magazine, pretending to be reading. Anyone could do this but not the way she does it. I cannot prove it, but there is no need to prove it anymore. To whom am I trying to prove anything? The jig is up. I suspect it is up for both of us now. This is what we suddenly have in common. After years of drifting apart, suddenly, we have this in common—this and our son. Everything will come out now.
We check on him several times throughout the night, several times each, never together. He sleeps but we don’t, not properly. I keep replaying everything in my head, stopping and then starting again at different scenes, each with its own configuration of supporting casts. I am in all of them. Anna is in many of them. Sam is in the last of them, and now I know there are two other people with him. One of them is a prostitute. I know her. The other is an old, old boyfriend of Anna’s. I don’t know him. The police said Sam wasn’t harmed at all. The doctor said it too. He slept soundly throughout the night, and I have to believe them. I have to believe them and yet, this is my son and I want to kill.
I want to kill. It’s a brand new way of waking up, wanting to kill, wanting to hide, wanting to vomit, wanting to start again. It isn’t any kind of waking up I’ve known before, but then I didn’t really sleep. Neither did Anna, but for a long time now we have had the grace to pretend that we don’t know that the other is only pretending to sleep. Anna is wearing something white, silky, shiny, brief. It mocks us. When she turns over it rides up to reveal her underpants, also white, shiny, and brief. There was a time when this would happen and, quickly aroused, I would pull them down and be inside her before she had a chance to fully awaken. There had to be a last time that this happened. Would I remember it as the last time? It might have been the morning she looked over her shoulder into my eyes as I entered, saying matter-of-factly, her eyes barely open, “It’s rape, Joe.”
Her stomach is unsettled. I am offered this through closed lips as the explanation for the displeasure that has landed and is nestling on her face.
“Would you like a cup of tea?”
“What?”
“Would you like a cup of tea? It might help settle your stomach.”
“No . . . only if you’re having one.”
She says this and somehow manages to cover each word with a semipermeable viscous membrane of bitterness. I don’t really want a cup of tea but because as a child I was brought up to believe that cups of tea helped, although even then I knew it was the offer that helped, and because I know that there can be no commerce between us until her stomach is settled, and because now we really have to talk, I get out of bed, go into the kitchen, and make us both a cup of tea.
I put on the leather slippers she had Sam buy me for Father’s Day. I put on the robe I had bought for myself, the Armani. This robe really should have made Anna suspect I was seeing someone. Isn’t that what the magazines tell women to look out for? A husband comes home unexpectedly carrying a designer bathrobe. Anna didn’t say anything about it. She’s told me to pick it up on occasions when I’ve left it on the floor. I didn’t buy it because I was seeing someone. I needed it. I needed a new bathrobe. She would never have noticed that I needed one. I wasn’t seeing anyone. I sleep with whores.
When I bring the tea back to the bedroom she says nothing and does not look at me. I set her cup down on her bedside table, get back into bed, and start to sip mine. This draws her attention. She looks at me for the first time this morning. How can she possibly blame me for all of this? She can’t, but a wave of contempt splashes across her face for an instant. It is involuntary. I have sipped too loudly, reminding her that she should never have married me. And still I ask her, “How are you feeling now?”
2. My mother wanted me to become a priest. The really funny part is that I actually thought about it. I was ten years old, maybe eleven. My father was away, the second time. Maybe it wasn’t the second time. I remember it was around the time I started bringing my mother cups of tea. The cup would rattle in the saucer. I couldn’t keep it still. The television would be on. It was always on. The girls watched cartoons as soon as they got home from school, and Mum always had to watch Temptation with Tony Barber. Seven or seven-thirty. She called it Great Temptation but that was the name of his old show, the one that had been on during the day. We watched it with her if we were sick and she’d let us take the day off. Getting sick was about the best way to get some time alone with her, without the others.
But not without Roger. He was almost always there after she’d realized that school wouldn’t do him any good. She would take the afternoon off and I’d sit beside her in Dad’s black chair, the big vinyl one, the one we all fought over every night, and Mum and I would watch Great Temptation. Tony Barber asked the questions and the lovely Barbie presented the prizes while Roger lay on his back, eyes rolling around wildly inside his head. He breathed too loudly when you were trying to watch TV, always farting or whirring like the sound of a broken washing machine that no one could fix. We had a washing machine like that. It stopped in the middle of every cycle so it took twice as long to finish. We put it out on the curb. No one would take it, so we brought it back in and Roger would impersonate it. Bubbles of saliva would come out of his mouth as he lay on the floor and, just for the half hour of Great Temptation, without pronouncing upon it, Mum would let us ignore him.
I would bring the two of us cups of tea, two sugars each, and we would watch.
“Who am I?”
Tony asked rhetorically. “I was born in Italy in eighteen ninety-eight. As a designer of racing cars, my name has become synonymous with speed and style. I was president of the company I founded, which came to be known around the world by my name.”
“Do you know that one, Joseph?” she’d ask me.
Roger would be mixing his spit with the threads of carpet he’d lifted with his fingers from the floor.
“Who am I? Anyone?” Tony asked.
I slapped the side of Dad’s black chair and made the sound of a contestant’s buzzer with my mouth.
“Yes, Joe?” my mother would ask.
“Ferrari!”
“No takers?” Tony said. “Enzo Ferrari.”
“You knew it. Aren’t you a clever boy, Joe!”
When the program was over the transmission of our lives would continue as normal. I would feel the cold on my feet. My toes would find the heads of the nails through the carpet. She would carry our empty cups and saucers back to the kitchen to wash them and I’d take the opportunity afforded by her absence to give just one quick perfect boot to Roger’s chest, just to hear the sound it made, just to shut him up, just to do to him what he did to all of us every day, in all the ways he could never and would never understand.
I think there were times when I blamed Roger for our father’s absence, although it would have been more reasonable to blame Dad for Roger. He had made him too quickly, in a hurry, in one of those regular tourist-like visits to our house in which he would stay for just long enough to tell us that the spongy, black vinyl chair in front of the television was his chair, just long enough for the checked, fleecy-lined jacket, his brownish orange lumber jacket, to hang on the peg in the hall covering all the things we had put there first. For a time I was the only one who could reach that peg. Mum used to tell the others to get me to hang up their coats or hats there for them. There was only one peg. I told him that during one of his visits. He said he knew it, who did I think put it there? Who did I think brought the winter inside? Some nights Sarah or one of the others would wake me at three or four in the morning to get their coat from the peg. They were too cold to sleep.