My Hundred Lovers
LISTEN TO THIS: IN A global survey of some twelve thousand five hundred souls, almost sixty percent admitted they preferred a good night’s sleep to a night of magnificent sex.
In nine out of ten western countries, men and women confessed that sex was all very well, but sleep was essential. Only horny Canadians preferred sex to sleep.
I lost my ability to sleep after the birth of my son. I became an incurable insomniac, listening for each newborn breath. I was his guard, and for a while I thought I had to breathe for him. By the time I discovered that I did not, it was too late, and I was tipped forever from sleep’s rosy arms into wakeful vigilance.
For many years my bed, like my body, was my son’s playground and his kingdom. I surrendered to him, willingly and grudgingly, because by then I knew that ambivalence lived beside me and in me, inhabiting everything, even that unbreakable watchfulness between mother and son. By then I was no longer a romantic.
When my son was a growing boy, long and stretched and fatless, his legs like gnawed chicken bones as mine had once been, I loved to watch him sleeping.
He tucked himself into sleep as if into the most comfortable of beds. He locked himself tight into its furthest corner, sealed into sweet oblivion. At the time he liked being asleep more than anything else. When he was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, his voice not yet broken, his body invisibly knitting itself into new adult dimensions, he slept for hours and hours.
He was like a newborn again, except that it was his adult self being born. He was lost, happy, found, away, in a beautiful place of his own making. His face was as composed as a mask and only occasionally would his eyelids flutter with a dream.
Now, my vigilant nights have a particular sweetness, my long-ago moments coming again in the stillness of the hour. My body’s memories crowding in, my endless loves, once more awake.
FORTY-THREE
Coffee
THAT SUMMER IN PARIS BEGAN in one single, gleaming day. One evening the Suspicious Wanderer went to bed with the sky starless, unseen clouds dense with rain. In the morning she opened the shutters to a glittering new world. Sunlight polished windows and rinsed the streets, shutters and doors and windows were open everywhere, flowers had bloomed overnight. She thought she heard laughter.
She looked down at herself, dressed in one of Nasser’s oversized T-shirts, shrugged, then grabbed her bag and the house keys. ‘Paris, here I come,’ she said, running down the circular stairs two, three at a time. The old stairs with their narrow wooden steps and thin, curved wooden handrails never failed to lift her heart and they lifted it now, high, high, higher.
On the street everyone looked happy. It was already hot, and she wasn’t wearing anything beneath her T-shirt. The cotton rubbed satisfactorily against her high pink-tipped breasts, still unsuckled. She strode purposefully down Avenue du Maine, past Metro Alésia, past the beautiful creamy stone church on the corner, past scooters and markets and old ladies with shopping baskets and students with cigarettes and scarves.
‘I will stop at the first café I like the look of,’ she said to herself, and by this she meant one that faced exactly the right way into the sun, with a table and chair situated exactly in the position she wished it. It drove Steph and Nasser mad, her insistence on choosing exactly the right café, with exactly the right chair at the right table.
‘Just bloody sit down, will you?’ Steph was likely to say.
‘S’il te plaît, Madame Marie-Antoinette,’ said Nasser.
But now she was alone. She saw a café up ahead, one facing the right way into the sun. She sat down. Immediately a waiter, wearing the obligatory white Parisian waiter’s apron, came up. ‘Mademoiselle?’ She ordered and sat back, happy.
She recommends that anyone suffering tristesse drink one cup of well-made coffee, slowly and deliberately, savouring the milk, the heat, the roast. Savour the flavour upon the tongue, the entrance into the body. Think of your great good fortune in being able to sit and drink a cup of coffee with your own two hands, of the pleasures of being able to taste it. You don’t have to be in Paris to feel blessed: Burwood, Sydney, will do, or Brookline, Massachusetts, or the far reaches of unattractive Leytonstone.
Is there anything more seductive than the smell of coffee beans rising to the nostrils? That rich, deep aroma, conviviality made manifest, the brown, ripe smell of harvest. The woman remembers once carrying freshly roasted coffee beans home on a bus in Sydney and how the smell rose to her nostrils, which suddenly struck her as the organ through which God breathes, in that she and everyone else on the bus breathed in as one the same rich dark scent.
‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ said the woman sitting next to her.
‘Divine,’ said the elderly woman across the aisle.
The bus rattled along with everyone on it sharing the same beautiful smell of coffee beans; the smell of shared confidences, of friendship and of pleasure.
Later, the woman drank the most perfect cup of coffee of her life, not in a nameless café in a street somewhere off the Avenue du Maine, or in a café in Melbourne, but in a room in the hills of Umbria. The steamed milk, the coffee beans, the ritual of making the cup of coffee to bring to the table, all combined to make her feel lucky to be able to drink it, with a tongue in her mouth to taste and two hands with which to hold the cup, a stomach in which to catch the earth’s bounteous spill.
But on that long-ago summer morning in Paris the young woman had not yet been to Umbria. She was happy to find herself sitting alone on the first bright morning of summer in the lucky western world, feeling her unbound breasts, her free toes, the sun, her lover, warm on her skin and the wash of freshly made coffee in her mouth.
FORTY-FOUR, FORTY-FIVE, FORTY-SIX
Three men in one day
IF THE SUSPICIOUS WANDERER EVER thought that flying away from the turban, the magic carpet and the beautiful sister would rid her of them for good, she soon realised her mistake.
When she returned to Sydney she found that the sister had grown even more beautiful, the mother more drunk, the father on his magic carpet even further away with his endless maps and horizons. The poor brother had long since stepped onto that drinking path which would lead him to an early death. The dog, Rhett, was arthritic, blind, a creature so reduced that it took him a few minutes to understand that it was her, returned, and to consequently thump his patchy old tail against the floor. The very next day the mother took him to the vet to have him put down, as if she had timed this occasion expressly for the young woman to witness. ‘It was a mercy,’ she reported afterwards. ‘He just faded away.’ Miss Meow had disappeared some months before.
She was back in the arms of the shadow lover, but she was also not really back. Even as she kissed his ghostly lips, her spirit was away.
She slept with a film-maker many years older than her, who wanted to film them fucking. She said yes, but she meant to say no. Afterwards she wondered if the film-maker had wiped the film as he promised.
Sometimes she wonders if somewhere in the world today there is a film of a young woman, recently turned twenty-two, looking as if she is not sure what she is doing, if she is here or there, asleep or awake.
She slept with a sad-faced boy at a party because the shadow lover was at the party too, except that she could not find him. She searched every room, the front yard and the back, before finally glimpsing him down the lane behind the backyard of the house. He was fucking a girl against a fence and the Suspicious Wanderer quickly ran inside and grabbed the hand of the sad-faced boy and led him to the nearest bedroom.
She slept with an Italian hairdresser with the splendid name of Leonardo della Francesca, who came on her stomach because he did not trust women. He said all women were manipulative by nature and every woman wanted a husband. He would not put it past one to trick him into marriage by accidentally-on-purpose becoming pregnant.
One day she inadvertently slept with all three. This is how it happened: one evening she went to bed with the older film-maker, a sensual and laz
y lover who lapped at her lips and between her legs. In the morning they made love again, still slippery from the night before. Every girl in the whole world was on the pill then, and no-one used condoms.
Walking home from the film-maker’s house she met the sad-faced boy. He promised to cook her lunch and afterwards they spent two gentle hours on his Indian bedspread, beneath a poster of Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser printed with the words: For the man who said life wasn’t meant to be easy MAKE LIFE IMPOSSIBLE.
When she reached home she ran a bath and soaked pleasurably for an hour. She put on her favourite nightie and crawled between sheets freshly washed the day before. Luxuriating in the full splay of her limbs, her toes flexed against the top sheet tucked tight into the end of the bed, she sighed. She considered her body honoured, even worshipped.
She was almost asleep when she heard a knock at the door. It was Leonardo della Francesca, with a bottle of Asti Spumante and a dozen red roses. ‘Ciao, bella,’ he said.
She knew that if Leonardo della Francesca knew there had been two men before him he would turn on his heel. Yet she also knew as she took his hand that she felt free and alive. In those days she still calculated her worth on how many men wished to sleep with her. She had no idea how to calculate her own value so she put herself up for market valuation, not knowing the fallibility of the marketplace or the fickleness of the laws of supply and demand.
‘No coming on my stomach tonight,’ she instructed Leonardo della Francesca as she took his hand and led him to what she thought was her triumphant bed.
FORTY-SEVEN
Skin
THIS HOUSE OF SKIN, THIS empire of net in which I am captured, how well it has held me. Full of breath, blood, cellular intelligence, its own plans. All my stories written on it, my skin memories, the tiny crack just below the hairline where my father failed to catch me when I jumped from a tree into his catchless arms, the white stripe on the back of my thumb from a cut from a shard of porcelain, the scar high up on my hip where I burnt myself while ironing naked, my attention having wandered into an erotic daydream of the dissolute lover who made my stomach lurch whenever I saw him, as if travelling too fast in a car over an unexpected hill.
The skin tags scattered around my neck, soft brown nubbles of flesh, round. When my son was learning to speak, he loved nothing better than trying to pick one. ‘’Tana,’ he said, short for sultana, which he imagined they were, since he could see no reason why my plentiful body, the source of everything he needed and desired, should not grow sultanas.
The first lover I slept with after I lost my husband sometimes traced his fingers around my necklace of sultanas. ‘Fruits of the body,’ he said, like a poet, and I was struck by how closely this matched my baby son’s description.
Ro, with a battleaxe for a mother, betrayed by her own net of skin. Staunch Ro, firm friend to Steph and me, felled at forty, well before her mother the battleaxe, who died comfortably in her bed at ninety-three. A tiny mole on the skin, so infinitely capable!
Ro, that great hulk of a woman, with an enormous bum that sprouted straight from the middle of her back like an African woman’s, that bum which rolled impressively when she walked, each gigantic buttock apparently independent of the other. ‘There she blows,’ Steph used to say fondly as she approached, and indeed our Ro resembled a great seaworthy vessel, unsinkable.
Sometimes, even now, I lift the phone to ring her.
Sometimes, even now, I want someone to tell me where the dead go.
FORTY-EIGHT
The lover who fell in love with desire
BACK IN AUSTRALIA THE SUSPICIOUS Wanderer no longer felt at home. She had entered that parlous state, the terrain of the liminal, one foot in night and one foot in day. Her body was in Australia but her heart was in France, which was not her home either.
She stayed away from her family as politely as she could. She was still busy abasing herself at the hands of the shadow lover, who was telling her that she was not clever or anywhere near as beautiful as her sister. She was busy sleeping with as many lovers as possible, with as many glamorous and feckless men as she could find.
In between sleeping with men and abasing herself at the hands of the shadow lover she was busy sewing words. She was happiest of all when her fingers were swift and acting, taken up with the task of mending the word-lace. She found work as an editor on a reference book about gardens, and found beauty and satisfaction in equal parts in tidying up the scraps, the last loose threads of black upon white. You could say her fingers were searching on her behalf for a more satisfactory mode of being.
One morning a young landscape gardener came into the office. He had only ever written one or two articles before, and the Suspicious Wanderer’s boss asked her to oversee the writing of an article she had commissioned. The landscape gardener, who was called Nick, was much the same age as the young woman, with an attractive looseness about his person.
That winter in Sydney was the coldest in sixty years. Snow reached the Blue Mountains, even Hornsby, and could be felt as a kind of vibration in the air. Frost frilled the mornings, enamelling the earth.
Throughout that famous cold winter when the young woman slept with Nick he kept a fire burning in his strange, falling-down house. He kept that fire burning all day and night in an old blackened pot-belly stove he had rigged up, held by wire to one gaping wall at the side of the house. It was like camping, staying at Nick’s, his bed a mattress and a few sleeping bags on the floor, in a part of the house without walls. At night they lay with their faces turned up to the trembling air, looking at the stars. Nick wore a beanie to bed and the young woman took to wearing one too, pulled down hard over her ears because otherwise they throbbed with cold.
Nick was a wonderful kisser, and the Suspicious Wanderer loved kissing. She loved the creamy thrill of it, the closed-eyed sway. She loved the intimacy of her tongue inside another person’s mouth, the tongue that moved words around, the tongue that was thick and alive and rooted deep in the floor of her mouth, and in his, muscled, pulsing.
The landscape gardener called Nick did not enter her the first night they lay together.
He kissed her instead, for one minute, and then two; for five minutes, for ten. He kissed her, standing up at first, then on the sofa, kissing and kissing. She felt for him beneath his clothes and he was already hard, straining, so she reached for his belt—but he stilled her hand. His hand moved instead to her jeans, which he unzipped, pushing aside the cotton of her underpants, his fingers diving between the creamy folds.
His touch was perfect, exact, and the wetness of his mouth, the dreamy slide of the kissing, the glide of his tongue mirrored the movement of his fingers so that before long her body was engaged in a dance of throb and sway, of rise and fall. His fingers and the lips and the sliding went on and on, for so long that she knew she would come. She had to hide her face for shame, for she could feel the flicker start up inside her, the joyous heat building and building, drawing closer with each careful stroke of his fingers. His forefinger danced, around and around, up and over. She swelled and blossomed, breathing hot into his shirt, her breath fast. She squeezed her eyes and came in a shivery wave, her blood beating.
To cover her embarrassment, the Suspicious Wanderer placed her hand upon him, still hard, trapped inside his jeans. Again the landscape gardener stopped her hand.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Don’t be scared.’ She tugged at his belt.
‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked, breaking away and standing up. ‘Beer? Wine?’
He tucked his shirt into his jeans and turned away.
The same thing happened the second time they slept together.
And the third.
And the fourth.
And the fifth.
And the sixth.
And the seventh.
The Suspicious Wanderer did not know the landscape gardener well enough to ask him what was happening. She hardly knew him at all and everything that they did not know about each oth
er stood between them.
Oh, those days! Those days in which it was possible to know the intimate geography of another human body without knowing a single thing about them. It was possible to know the exact dimensions of the left nipple with a soft hair sprouting from one side, or the precise colouring of the puckered skin around a testicle, without knowing another thing about what went on within their breathing hearts. In those faraway days girls often slept with people they did not know.
Each time the Suspicious Wanderer and the landscape gardener came together it was the same. The first kiss, the move to the sofa, the unmade bed. In the bed on the floor beneath the freezing stars he never kissed her, never tried to enter her. They lay side by side like virgins.
‘Do you understand the principles of astral navigation?’ he asked her one night, long after she believed he was asleep.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Well, sort of. Isn’t that when ships steered by the stars? Before compasses?’
He did not answer. Her head was full of questions and the night was cloudless, empty but for the steering stars.
The young woman wondered if the strange young man suffered from some nameless embarrassment or a rare medical condition. She might have thought he did not want her but for the evidence of the stiff press of his penis. Perhaps he was like an Indian yogi who had learnt to withhold his pleasure for hours and hours, except that as far as the woman knew, even a yogi engaged in penetration and eventually arrived at his destination. In every other way Nick was ardent in his passion, from the embrace to the stiffened penis to the tremble of his fingers each time he approached her. Was it her fault?