My Hundred Lovers

‘Come on, Mum,’ Nana Elsie says. ‘Open up.’

  Sometimes the Suspicious Wanderer comes by herself to the nursing home. After she has visited Super Nan she always goes to the sitting room, where there are other old people whom nobody comes to visit. Survivors of themselves, washed up on some far shore, they are immeasurably happy if she sits with them, taking their bony hands between her fleshy fingers.

  She particularly likes one old man with a thick Scottish accent.

  ‘What are those people doing?’ he asks her once, indicating the other old people in the room.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says.

  One of the cheery nursing assistants tells the Suspicious Wanderer that the old man is originally from Edinburgh, and that he came to Australia as a young man to teach. His wife is long dead; they had no children.

  The next time the Suspicious Wanderer goes to the nursing home she takes with her a framed photograph of Edinburgh that she saw for sale in an op shop for fifty cents.

  But the old man is not in the sitting room.

  ‘He’s had a stroke,’ a nurse tells her. ‘He’s in his room, number fourteen. He can’t speak.’

  In his room the old man is by the window, lying in a reclining chair, covered by a rug.

  ‘Hello,’ she says. ‘I hope you won’t mind a visitor. Look what I found.’

  She walks towards the window, holding up the photograph. He tries to turn his poor, twisted head. His face has fallen in, one side completely collapsed; there is drool on his chin.

  He makes a gurgling sound.

  He looks at the photograph.

  The last time the Suspicious Wanderer saw her great-grandmother, Super Nan asked her what Paris was like.

  ‘Is it as good as Sydney?’ she said.

  She really did ask that. The Suspicious Wanderer wrote it down on a piece of paper because she was so struck by the clarity of the question.

  She never got to tell Super Nan that Sydney or Paris, Melbourne or Boston, no-one said ‘Anyway’ like her.

  SIXTY-THREE

  The wine lover

  THAT LIQUID OF THE FIVE senses, of myth and desire! Pearly, clear, tawny, the palest straw yellow, how I love your dance upon the tongue, the sound of you being poured into a glass, the smell of you.

  The shimmering ice-cold wine I drank with my new husband at a table in the garden of a faded hotel in the spa town of Royat, France. The leaves were starting to fall from the chestnut trees around our heads and on the table a perfect late-summer peach and two honeymoon glasses of the most fragrant, delicious grass-coloured wine I had ever drunk in my life.

  That first glass of champagne we drank after the birth of our son, the cork hitting the ceiling, the champagne overflowing from the bottle, spilling onto my husband’s shaking hands. The bubbles swarming in my throat, fizzing, bursting, excitement made manifest.

  The juicy Corsican wine I drank at Horatia’s stone house, that object lover with whom I was in love. We were on its roof, seated at the long wooden dining table under the stars, eating silvery fish. The fish might have swum up from the sea through the valley to our table, so fresh and alive did they seem.

  I turned my face to heaven, the wash of wine in my mouth, intoxicated by the air, the stars, by the stones beneath my feet warm from the sun. I had no money, no savings, no house of my own and yet I felt myself to be richer than Croesus.

  The mysterious alchemy of the grape turning to wine, the rows and rows of vines near Fitou in the south of France turning orange, red, russet, burnt, in the days before the vendange. Farmers, princes, the rich, the poor, everyone is equal before the grape, the workers filling up their plastic petrol containers with vin de pays through a rubber hose, the titled rich strolling through private vineyards as manicured as the finest tended gardens. The mysterious alchemy of the sugar-filled fruit turns everyone égalé because hierarchies disappear before it.

  The mysterious alchemy, too, of getting drunk, the wine working its way within me, running in my veins like a fresh, cool river, loosening my limbs, my shyness, my cares. The way being drunk makes me feel happy, loved and loving, everything wrong miraculously put right. The stars are reachable, the world has a meaning, and if alcohol is a depressant its message is undeliverable while wine runs like a stimulant in my veins, rendering anything possible. I know boys who have leapt off bridges and girls who have run naked down the street while that fresh, cool river runs exhilaratingly fast over fears, worries, over every rock blocking the way.

  That happy memory of drinking wine from one of the remaining fine crystal goblets carried in the suitcase of a sixteen-year-old blind girl from Ahascragh.

  Drinking wine from such an object was like supping with memory itself, raising a glass in the company of ghosts. I never once raised one of those goblets without being conscious of my pulsing fingers against the stem. I felt my fingers to be alive, sensate, warm, as the fingers of that blind girl, Rose, had been too. I felt the tracery of her fingers against my own and the imprint of her lips as I sipped. Each of us, every one, joined in the democracy of our transit.

  Drinking wine from those glasses turned every wine aromatic to the tongue, too. There was something about the shape of the fine glass, the sensory feel of it against the fingers, the way the bowl of the crystal sat upon the stem that distilled every wine to its essence.

  The glasses fitted my hands perfectly, as if especially made for them.

  Each glass had a fine turned rim at the top, perfectly shaped for swallowing lips. Just below the little rim, the glass was etched with a curly delicate pattern, so that the full fat centre of each glass sparkled in the light.

  Now there is one sparkling goblet remaining.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  Paris

  IN PARIS THE WOMAN, WHO was almost thirty, with no house or money or children, stayed in one of Horatia’s large spare rooms in her apartment on the rue Saint-Jacques.

  The apartment was enormous by Parisian standards, and opened up to the sky on both sides, with floor-to-ceiling windows. On one side it overlooked the busy street, but the windows were double-glazed and when they were closed every room was silent. On the other side there was a pretty square belonging to the Sorbonne, with trees and moss-covered statues.

  Rue Saint-Jacques was once the starting point for pilgrims leaving Paris for Santiago de Compostela.

  ‘You are reversing direction,’ said Horatia, whose opinion of Australia was low. She assumed that every young Australian woman would naturally wish to join the pilgrimage to Paris. ‘What does your country offer except sun?’

  The woman felt a hot surge of emotion. ‘Everything!’ she said.

  ‘Everything for the body,’ said Horatia. ‘If you wish a sort of vegetable happiness I am sure Australia would be most suitable. It is the same with America.’

  The woman hated it when Horatia, who had never been to America or Australia, made such pronouncements. ‘You’re being unfair, Horatia,’ she said.

  ‘Being unfair is one of life’s great pleasures,’ Horatia replied. ‘When you are as old as me you may be as unfair as you like.’ She smiled and offered the woman another kir royal and a rose-coloured macaroon.

  During the day the woman walked the streets, looking for she knew not what. She was wondering if she had fallen for some old idea of Paris that was no longer true, if it ever had been.

  What she noted with her fallible eye was the beauty of her object lover, the Pont Marie, still barnacled with vanished wishes.

  Everywhere she saw the marriage of stone, window, light, air, the convergence of separate elements which together fashioned Paris’s architectural splendour.

  Horatia had a theory that people instinctively preferred civilised Paris and its desire to call beauty to heel or else barbarous Rome and its desire to let beauty go.

  ‘You can tell a lot about someone when you know if they prefer Paris or Rome,’ Horatia said.

  ‘Can’t you like both?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Definitely not,?
?? Horatia said.

  Walking the streets each day the woman noted that even the poorest shopped carefully for the plumpest fruit, the sweetest peach, for the mouthful of sugar from the sun-heavy grape.

  Across the street from Horatia’s flat an old building was being restored and every day at lunchtime the dusty workers stopped to eat under a tree in the courtyard. They took out their napkins, their baguettes and several different kinds of cured meats and cheeses. They shared a bottle of red wine, vin de pays, which they drank from little plastic cups. ‘Bonjour, mademoiselle,’ they said courteously as she passed.

  She went by metro to Saint-Denis, formerly the stronghold of Communist Paris, part of the working-class banlieue, home to Arabs and Pieds-Noirs and Maghrebis. This was another Paris, but still recognisably Paris. She noted the council tower blocks and the families with too many children but she also noted the care with which veiled women chose tomatoes at the street market. Men looked too long at her and women too narrowly.

  Like them, she did not have money, but unlike them, she had the luxury of being able to pause between the hours in which she earned the notes she exchanged for food and shelter. These people on the outskirts of Paris appeared to live their whole lives without pausing.

  As she walked she thought about retraining as a nurse, or as a teacher, moving to a Third World country to live a more useful life, helping children construct an existence without want, to live working lives capable of incorporating pauses. What made a good life? Was it worth striving to live a life punctuated by pauses? She wondered if the quality of life might be measured in leisure hours.

  The Suspicious Wanderer walked the streets of Paris from morning till dusk, looking and looking. She wasn’t on holiday, she was pausing in the midst of existence, considering her next move, knowing how fortunate she was to be able to do so. She had the luxury of considering herself a recovering romantic, flushing romance from her blood, as if killing an addiction or infection.

  She was also running out of what little money she had. Since there was nothing romantic about running out of money, the Suspicious Wanderer turned her mind to making some.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  The beach lover

  HOW I LOVE LYING BACK upon the sand, spread-eagled, running hot sand through my fingers. How I love floating free and defenceless on oceans, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, my body spilling out into the vast arms of the comforting, cruel sea.

  I love crashing into the mighty force of waves pulled by the moon. Up! Pushing up from the floor of the sea to jump over white rushing foam or diving down just in time, my happy feet tickled by the froth.

  The taste of the sea, the roar of it! Having to shout across the ferocious waves, noisier than traffic, louder than a plane taking off. Don’t go out too far! I shouted to my son when he was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, still believing his body to be the equal of the ocean. He could never hear me over the crash and tumult of the waves, no matter how loud I shouted, no matter how I could already picture the rip which would carry him away.

  Once my new French lover and I went to stay in Horatia’s house on Corsica, that house I loved. It was late in the season, chilly by sunset, but at midday we floated on our backs in the calm warm sea. The ocean held us up and the sun stroked our faces and one day I swear I fell asleep in the arms of the sea. Either that or I entered a strange, dreamlike state, hypnotised by the gentle rock of the water holding me up. Everything in me armed and upright against the strains of life slowly unclenched, until at last I felt myself to be without edges, indistinguishable from the vast, apparently boundless sea. I floated into it, right inside it, so that there was no beginning to me, no end. I was going down, in, becoming water, salt, when I awoke with a shock, screamed, and stood up. ‘Ça va?’ my new lover asked, standing up too.

  ‘I think I was turning into a fish,’ I said, and laughed.

  Strangely, I was not frightened.

  Oh, the thick, coarse sand of a wet beach on the Côte Sauvage in early spring, the wind snapping, whipping our hair into our faces!

  The silky white sand along the coast of Queensland, miles and miles of unpeopled sand, devoid of footprints. Once I climbed an enormous sand dune on Stradbroke Island and Ro took a photograph of me naked and unbroken, the white sand all around, showing only the smallest border of blue, cloudless sky above my head.

  The strange blackish sand of Sweetwater Beach near Loutro, Crete, where I once spent the days observing two old men, Athenians, who travelled there every summer. From sunrise to sunset the two friends spent the day up to their necks in the sand, periodically emerging like two giant turtles to walk slowly to the water, where they rinsed themselves before crawling back up the beach.

  The glorious summer I lived with my son across the road from Rainbow Beach after I lost my husband. A broken-down fibro beach shack with lumpy, sweat-covered sofas of indeterminate fabric and a kitchen unchanged since it was built in 1950.

  The local Aborigines believed the coloured sands were caused by a spirit falling into the cliffs, infusing the sand with all the colours of the rainbow.

  We loved it there, my son and me, falling into bed when we grew tired, getting up when we awoke and running across the grass to the coloured sand, then throwing ourselves into the slapping ocean. We grew lean and tanned, the tips of my boy’s hair growing fairer, his bare feet rough and horny. We were at home in our skins, and hardly ever wore clothes.

  ‘Why doesn’t everybody live at the beach?’ he asked me.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know, sweetheart,’ I replied.

  My son thought every beach had sand with the colours of a rainbow.

  Once we spent the day walking at least sixteen kilometres up the beach, collecting gold, yellow, orange, pink and blue sands, so that at the end of the day we had a glass jar which held a captured rainbow.

  I still have that glass jar.

  It sits upon my windowsill here in my house in Fanjeaux, a slice of Australia; memory rendered visible.

  Ro never loved the beach. She preferred the mountains. Her skin was fair, for she was meant for the mists and the rain of a town in Yorkshire or Pembrokeshire.

  Ro did not like the sand or the heat or the wind and only accompanied me to Stradbroke Island that bright day as an act of kindness. She kept her large bottom swathed in a sarong from Bali and I told her she looked like one of Gauguin’s Tahitian wives but for her pale skin, which was already sunburnt.

  That burning sun! That sea! Those sands! So many of my numbered days have been spent as happy as a clam, rinsed by the water, baked by the sun, unspooled on the earth’s beaches.

  SIXTY-SIX

  The beautiful lover

  RO CAME TO PARIS TO visit me, staying in another of Horatia’s spare rooms. I was giving English conversation classes, running them out of Horatia’s flat, mainly to her wealthy friends and many acquaintances. Most did not have a hope of mastering a stroke of English but appeared to enjoy coming, possibly because of the English tea and exquisite macaroons accompanying the lessons. In the mornings I worked on proofreading jobs and editing work.

  Ro had broken up with Mick, after many years of an on-off relationship, because she had decided she wanted a baby and Mick did not.

  ‘Why don’t you have a child by yourself if you want one?’ Horatia asked.

  ‘Do you know how hard it is to be a single mother?’ Ro said. ‘I’ve got too many friends who are single mothers to have any idealistic notions about it.’

  Horatia sniffed. ‘Personally I can never understand why any woman would want to have a child. It compromises one’s life too much.’

  ‘I want my life compromised,’ said Ro.

  ‘Madness,’ said Horatia.

  Later, Horatia took me aside and suggested I advise my friend that generally men did not like women to carry too much fat around the rear end. ‘If she wants to attract a man in order to have a baby, she should start with that bottom.’

  ‘Horatia!’

  S
he tapped the side of her nose. ‘I don’t mind telling her if you won’t.’

  Ro was just as enamoured of Horatia as I was, and especially admired her take-no-prisoners pronouncements. ‘I’ve never met a woman with so much gall,’ she said.

  ‘Do you think it’s because she’s a lesbian?’ I asked. ‘You know, she hasn’t spent her life pussy-footing around men like we have.’

  ‘Pussy-footing. Interesting choice of words.’

  Horatia was ceaseless in her quest to persuade us to move to Paris permanently.

  ‘I could never live here full-time,’ Ro said. ‘Paris is like a film set. It’s not real to me.’

  Horatia smiled. ‘That’s simply because you haven’t lived here long enough. In time you’d see that it is just like anywhere else, except for the French genius of appreciating what is best in life.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Ro. ‘Tell that to the poor souls crammed into public housing. Or to the Algerian kids who can’t get into French universities.’

  ‘They all still flock to France, don’t they?’

  ‘Only because they mistakenly think they are coming to a better life,’ said Ro.

  ‘They are,’ said Horatia.

  ‘I hate how smug the French are. And you’re not even French, Horatia! You must know that it was the French genius for appreciating what is best in life that caused them to surrender to the Germans. They didn’t want Paris to get bombed.’

  Horatia smiled again. ‘That’s a good enough reason to surrender, isn’t it? For beauty’s sake?’

  I met the beautiful lover at the opening of an exhibition of sculptures by an old friend of Horatia’s, a handsome Frenchwoman. I noticed him at once, and not only because he was one of the few men in the room.