My Hundred Lovers

Before long the Suspicious Wanderer began to grow nervous before each meeting. She grew self-conscious as he began to kiss her and the approach of his mouth felt like a test. She was filled with contradictory emotions: a desire to conquer him, to see him fall to the rapturous moment, and yet also she felt ashamed, embarrassed for herself, as if he considered her an animal, raised to do tricks for his enjoyment.

  She began to withhold her pleasure, for she did not want him to witness it, and soon the kissing felt like undeclared war.

  Soon the Suspicious Wanderer began to make excuses when the landscape gardener called Nick asked her to the strange, cold house. She was going out, or she had work to do, or she had the flu. He called again and again, and every time she had a reason not to go to the strange, cold house.

  She finished editing his article.

  After a while he ceased to call and so the young woman never got to ask the landscape gardener why he preferred the building moment over the starburst spill.

  In the end she satisfied herself by supposing him to have fallen in love with desire, to have fallen in love with being perpetually held in longing’s grip, with the exquisite tension of never arriving.

  Sometimes now, on vigilant nights, she pictures the landscape gardener grown old, still looking up at the navigating stars.

  She thinks of him lying there, the beautiful moment never arriving, never ruined, never disappointing, over. It must be sublime dwelling in that house of longing, forever poised on desire’s trembling tip, before everything is wrecked.

  FORTY-NINE

  A dress

  ONCE I FELL IN LOVE with a dress. You never forget the first dress you fall in love with, and this dress was like a template for all the dresses in the world that girls longed for, rushed down the street in, got married in, sailed away in.

  It was a real dress, but it was also a dream dress, stitched from wishes. A particular shade of orangey-red, beautifully cut from the finest cotton, two elegant twists of fabric at each shoulder. Whenever I put it on I felt like a different person, a person without cares. In that dress my body relaxed and became taller, stronger, happier. I rushed, laughing, down the rue de Rivoli wearing it, holding hands with the man I was going to marry, hurrying to get to the jeweller’s shop before it closed to claim the gold wedding rings engraved with our names.

  I wore that perfect dress for fourteen years, until its weave wore so thin in the back the material frayed in the spot where I sat down.

  FIFTY

  The lover oblivion

  SOME TIME AFTER FLYING HOME, between the shadow lover and the landscape gardener who fell in love with desire, between the dissolute lover who made her stomach lurch whenever she saw him and the Italian lover with the splendid name of Leonardo della Francesca, the Suspicious Wanderer’s blood began to boil. It was as if her blood sought release from its prison of skin, as if everything inside her struggled to escape.

  Whenever she was on a bus or a train the young woman fought a hot, vertiginous feeling that she must get off, rush away, be anywhere other than trapped where she was with a hundred eyes upon her. Her heart thrashed, her mouth grew dry, her palms ran with sweat, soaking tissues right through. All the pints of Scottish and Irish blood and her splash of French blood rose and slapped against her skin.

  Paradoxically, she also felt herself to be skinless before the world. Boiling, skinless, trapped.

  The Suspicious Wanderer could hardly bear to go to work. Sitting in the open-plan office trying to edit a book her body was primed for escape. Her blood and nerves and senses were on constant high alert, so that she only had to look up and chance upon a glance from a harmless passerby to find herself convulsed, flailing, jumping up and scrambling for the exit.

  ‘It’s called a panic attack,’ the doctor said. ‘Nothing to worry about. In fact, the worst thing you can do is worry about it. Some men find blushing very attractive.’

  He wrote out a prescription for a muscle relaxant.

  The Suspicious Wanderer may have been ashamed of something.

  Or she may have arrived at that moment when the dizzying responsibility of being alive was revealed to her.

  She understood that she was more than a brain, a set of porous lungs, a vagina. It now appeared that she was expected to become a republic of one, even a universe.

  Who was in charge here?

  For many months, the rush of blood to the Suspicious Wanderer’s guilty face caused her to shun the company of her fellows. Soon she became phobic about going out, lest her blood begin to boil, lest everyone wonder what it was that made her so ashamed. She had witnessed no murders, no wars and no tragedies. She was not dying. Yet she appeared to be a vehicle for suffering, a conduit for the wretchedness of the world. She was more ashamed of herself than before.

  Staunch Ro tried to winkle her free. ‘Valium! God, Deb, you’re not a 1950s housewife!’

  She was living in Ro’s tiny cottage in Balmain, in the miniscule second bedroom that could barely accommodate a single bed. The house seemed too small for Ro and her gigantic bottom, and for Ro’s cheerful boyfriend, Mick, a hippy working temporarily at a biscuit factory because he was saving to go overseas, and who every night brought home flawed, broken biscuits.

  The young woman could not stop eating flawed biscuits and soon acquired a comforting layer of protective fat.

  In Ro’s tiny house the Suspicious Wanderer felt lumbering, huge, and when she stood up her hair seemed almost to reach the ceiling.

  Like Alice, she was too big for the house.

  She appeared to be growing.

  ‘You’re looking porky,’ said her father when he next saw her.

  ‘I suggest a diet,’ said her mother. Her sister smiled.

  For the first time in her life it appeared the young woman could not eat anything she liked. Those well-sculpted thighs and the graceful scooped back of her girlhood were swallowed, completely gone. No-one would mistake her now for a gymnast.

  It was a revelation. She noticed that being a great lump of a girl had its advantages, in that the larger she grew the more invisible she became.

  She could happily live the rest of her life as a great lump of a girl, invisible, drugged, eating as many biscuits as she liked.

  One morning, though, Ro strode over to the rubbish bin.

  ‘This is how you save yourself,’ she said, throwing away the pill bottles, the repeat prescriptions, everything that stood between the Suspicious Wanderer and panic. ‘And now we are going out,’ said Ro. ‘Get your shoes.’

  The Suspicious Wanderer followed obediently in Ro’s mighty wake, sluggish. Ro was naturally commanding, preternaturally composed, possibly as a result of being the daughter of a battleaxe. A woman of few words, she was as cool-headed as the young woman was hot-headed.

  ‘Keep up,’ Ro said. ‘Walking is a kind of cure. It’s good for the lungs, it’s good for the heart and it’s especially good for the soul.’

  And it was true: the young woman’s feet held a flesh memory of freedom. As she placed one foot in front of the other, sadness loosed itself from her limbs, some unnamed, residual feeling that had lived within her for a long time, of being too long a lover of oblivion, too precariously balanced within its trancelike grip.

  She could not keep up with Ro, but she kept her eyes fixed on her beautiful rolling bottom, leading her as it were through the swell.

  But anyone who has ever loved knows the lover will not be thwarted. It did not take the young woman long to get another prescription. For many more months she continued to float in the loving arms of oblivion. Her mind did not seem to be involved, in that her addiction was more like a compulsion of the muscles, and her body wanted what it wanted, and did what it needed to do.

  Valium’s chemical promise quelled the boiling of her blood, placing an impenetrable wall between her body and the world. It reminded her of the single time she had snorted heroin, courtesy of a rich, pompous barrister, a friend of a friend, who was a recreational user. ‘I think of hero
in as an occasional treat,’ the barrister said. ‘Like a good bottle of Petrus.’

  The young woman adored the way heroin made her feel, and how far from fear it carried her. But she was worried that she loved it too much, and never used it again.

  In time in that little house in Balmain the Suspicious Wanderer became aware that the sounds of the world were increasingly muffled. Her mind was sluggish and she could not think. Everything inside her felt like it was lying down.

  When her contract ended with a publisher who published cooking books she had difficulty finding more work, and when she did get jobs, publishers rarely used her a second time. Once she proofread a travel book about Australia and failed to notice that an American writer had misspelled Sydney as Sidney.

  Finally the day arrived when the Suspicious Wanderer could no longer command her own fat legs.

  She was walking home when her fat legs stepped off a kerb seemingly of their own accord and she was thrown backwards onto the pavement by a car.

  She was not hurt because the car had barely been moving, having just taken off at a green light. But the driver got out and screamed at her for ten minutes before the Suspicious Wanderer collapsed, shaking from shock.

  Up until that moment the Suspicious Wanderer had not known she did not wish to die. She had believed herself in love with oblivion but in that shocking moment she understood she was in love only with escape and not that final dark place.

  She stopped swallowing Valium and flawed, broken biscuits, pouf, just like that.

  FIFTY-ONE

  The hairdresser

  IS THERE ANYTHING MORE CRIMINALLY frivolous than having a hairdresser massage your scalp over a basin of warm sudsy water? Anything more indulgent than letting your body relax into the swoon of ministration under the hairdresser’s healing hands? A few moments of ease in the quotidian days, with no other purpose than to soothe and pass fingers not your own through the strands of your dying hair.

  FIFTY-TWO

  The blind lover

  HOW MANY BODIES I PLUNDERED, how many mouths I kissed before I kissed the mouth of the prince! For uncertain reasons I needed to learn many lessons involving the tongue, the hands, the ears, the belly and the fallible heart.

  The moment I laid my eyes on Stephen Porter’s blind eyes I knew he would become my lover. Because of the many romantic stories I had heard Super Nan tell about her blind mother, Rose—who when she was sixteen bravely sailed by herself all the way from Limerick to Australia—I had always been fascinated by blind people.

  I was still with the shadow lover, in the fifth and final year of my disappearance. I was back in my body, free of drugs and biscuits, but still, still, still not free of the shadow lover.

  Stephen Porter was an Honours student, majoring in French, a tremulous young man with a guide dog and a white stick, who lived down the street from Ro. She knew him vaguely and introduced us one morning as we were getting into Claudette.

  ‘Deb’s a Francophile, too,’ Ro said. ‘Like you she conveniently forgets France’s shameful role in collaborating with the Nazis. She thinks everyone was in the French resistance.’

  Stephen Porter smiled at me. ‘Then we should get together, mate, and toast la vie française,’ he said.

  I watched him walk off, his white stick tapping the concrete. I was back in my body and wanted to test it.

  After that first time, I met Stephen Porter several times walking down the street. He often had a small food stain on his T-shirt or a toothpaste smear around his mouth, because he had recently moved out of the family home into a house with some other students, thoughtless boys, who did not notice or care. He was frail-looking, a long-haired blond, with a fine wispy beard and an attractive way of speaking, very precise, with a slight lisp. Stephen Porter’s face was vulnerable, sweet, and either his blindness had turned him gentle or else he was born that way.

  When he first held me, it was with a surprising firmness. I looked into his blind eyes and he held my head between his hands and kissed me.

  ‘I’m no different to anyone else you know, mate,’ he said. ‘I find girls hold very romantic views about blind men.’

  ‘I don’t!’ I said and he laughed, a giggly laugh that made me laugh too.

  ‘I know perfectly well where all your best bits are,’ he said.

  His eyes were a strange, indeterminate bluey-brown colour, and sometimes looked like everyone else’s seeing eyes, except that one pupil was slightly larger than the other and occasionally wandered off to the outside edge of his eye. Sometimes, too, his eyes closed of their own accord, as if they were looking into the memory box inside his head. At other times his unseeing eyes looked straight into mine.

  When Stephen Porter laid me on the bed it was with tenderness. He traced my form, a fingertip analysis of each curve, each crevice, each rise. His gentle mouth came to rest upon the mound between my legs, a soft suckling, bringing my own scent to my lips when he raised his head again to kiss me. My scent was caught in his moustache, a lingering fragrance. When I kissed his thin hairless chest the scent travelled with me, down to the pointed tip of his penis. We coupled gently, nuzzled, tender, arriving at our moment of sweetness in silence.

  He took me to meet his family. Straight away I envied him them and wished they were mine, a measured, happy, musical family, who treated each other respectfully. The father was a metallurgist, and the mother worked with blind children, retraining after her second son was inexplicably born blind, his optic nerves having failed to develop. Sometimes they sang together around the piano, like a happy family in a children’s story.

  Stephen Porter’s family refused to treat their blind son any differently to a sighted child. As a consequence he had repeatedly broken arms and legs, chipped a front tooth, and had given himself a white scar down the left side of his face in his quest to climb trees, shoot bows and arrows, and travel too fast on skateboards like other boys. He played the piano beautifully and the guitar badly, singing Leonard Cohen songs in his precise, high voice, transforming them entirely.

  I told him Super Nan’s mother had been born blind, too, but no-one knew why.

  ‘It was a long time ago. In Ireland,’ I said.

  ‘She was lucky she wasn’t tossed into the nearest well for being a witch,’ he said. ‘There has always been a lot of superstition about blind people.’

  Not long before I slept with Stephen Porter for the last time, I asked him if he could imagine light.

  ‘I think of it as being cream and white,’ he said.

  ‘But how can you imagine colour?’ I asked. ‘How do you even know what cream and white is?’

  ‘Colour is just a concept I’ve picked up over the years. I think of dark as being green, or red, or black.’

  I closed my eyes.

  ‘I see everything from the inside out,’ Stephen said.

  As I lay on the bed with my eyes closed I tried to imagine redness. How did anyone begin to picture colour without the help of the vibrant vegetable world?

  I tried to dream my way inside Stephen’s frail blond head, where he had memorised existence. ‘Most of us have gifts we never use, you know,’ he said as we lay holding hands.

  Stephen Porter remains one of the kindest, most thoughtful men I have ever met. I tried very hard to fall in love with him but I could not.

  Lying on the bed holding hands with Stephen Porter I tried to feel what it must be like being him, not being able to see my own body, and how strange it was, since the outline of my body had come to represent the outline of myself. Lying with my eyes closed, the world dark, it seemed to me that my consciousness was situated within my physical self. How could a blind girl have had the courage to traverse the world by ship? Without being able to open my eyes and see where I was in space, where I began and ended, I felt as if I did not exist.

  My eyes sprang open as the darkness pressed upon me.

  ‘You think it’s like being dead,’ Stephen said. I looked at him. He was lying on his back, staring at
the ceiling, speaking softly. ‘What happens is that after a while all your other senses become more acute. Hearing. Smell. Touch. I don’t have to look into someone’s face to know what they are feeling; I just have to hear their voice.’

  I did not speak.

  ‘I’m not talking in metaphors, mate,’ he said.

  My blind lover went away to teach. The Department of Education sent him to Orange, the town where Super Nan grew up and where Nana Elsie was born. I visited him twice. He taught farm boys and girls who did not care if French was the language of romance. He lived in a little flat above the main street and together we walked out of the town and along roads that cut through brown open land scattered with sheep.

  We never decided not to see each other, or even spoke of it. I did not know how to be intimate except through my body, as if I believed that in opening the door of my lips or my sex I had opened the door to myself.

  We let each other drift away, Stephen Porter and me, him with his metaphorical eyes that had memorised the world.

  FIFTY-THREE

  The boss lover

  BEFORE LONG SHE IS PREGNANT.

  She knows she is pregnant because her girlish pink nipples take on a rich dark hue and a strange brown line runs down her belly like a tattoo. The smell of eggs revolts her.

  How did she get pregnant when like every girl in the whole world she is on the pill?

  And who is the father?

  The shadow lover?

  Stephen Porter?

  Surely not Leonardo della Francesca?

  Ro accompanies her to the abortion clinic where the Suspicious Wanderer disgraces herself by sobbing as the act is performed by a kindly Chinese doctor wearing a wedding ring.

  ‘It’s all right, sweetie,’ coos Ro into her ear. The kindly Chinese doctor has let Ro stand in for all the absent fathers.