My Hundred Lovers
Afterwards, Ro buys her an extra-large slice of carrot cake with sticky cream-cheese icing from The Pudding Shop in Glebe. Ro keeps stroking her small hand as the Suspicious Wanderer continues to cry.
‘I’m such a fuckwit,’ she says through her sobs.
‘I know you are,’ says Ro. ‘Never mind.’
She is not supposed to have penetrative sex for two weeks after the abortion.
She is supposed to have the wit to say no to the plump man who wants to fuck her.
She is a feminist, a new type of woman, strong and independent, who will not birth eleven children and be at the mercy of a big fellow with a gun who cuts off her hair.
Then why is she letting the plump man into her post-abortion bed? He is not even her type, being too large, too loud, too there. He is a big-shot publisher, often in the news, and her occasional boss.
He says, ‘Oh, come on, Debbie, these things are just arbitrary dates. I promise I’ll be gentle.’
And he is. He is gentle, certainly, but she is not engaged, let alone aroused, and would in fact prefer it if he were not there. She would prefer it if she could learn to say the word ‘no’ instead of worrying about hurting a man’s feelings or whether a man will cease to like her if she says it or refuse to give her another job. Oh, poor Suspicious Wanderer, so nice to all men!
That afternoon in the small bedroom in Balmain the light was blue. The curtains were cream and blew softly in the wind. There was a cry, far off, almost out of earshot. There was a man in my bed and I did not know how he got there.
FIFTY-FOUR
History
EXCEPT FOR RARE AND EXTRAORDINARY occasions, no-one knows if they are experiencing history’s beginning or its end, if they have just lived through that critical moment when a seemingly inconsequential action tilts everything in an unheard-of direction. It is a well-known fact that private obstinacies take precedence over history.
Super Nan did not know when she kissed her husband goodbye that a stranger would return wishing to cut off her hair. She did not know she was living through the Great War. She was looking the other way, tying her shoelaces, and did not know what was approaching.
Super Nan did not know that she was living in the last days of the old world, when great ships still sailed the earth taking people away from their homelands forever. Her blind mother came from the village of Ahascragh, near Galway. She carried in her suitcase six goblets of the finest crystal, given to her mother by the wealthy Anglo-Irish family for whom she had worked, and which her late mother had bequeathed to her. Super Nan told me that during the journey from Ireland to Australia her mother grew watercress on a flannel so that she might have something fresh to eat. It took four months to make the crossing, and days before that to make the journey to Limerick from the house where she was born at 10 Church Avenue, Ahascragh. The house had a lemon tree in the back garden which Super Nan’s mother had outlined with her fingers, inch by inch.
Super Nan saw the introduction of electricity, telephones and flushing toilets. She was there for the invention of aeroplanes and cars. In her allotted thousand months she birthed eleven children because she knew no alternative. When she was born the Wright brothers were pondering the mechanics of human flight. When she died women were on the pill and men were on the moon.
When Super Nan was a girl her Irish father, Joseph, told her stories about the bushranger Frank Gardiner, who long before had held up his carriage on the road to Orange. ‘I says to him, “It’s a poor house here,” and Mr Gardiner dipped his hat and let us on our way,’ her father said. He added that he was surprised to learn that the same man had later held up the gold escort. ‘He did not appear the type,’ her father said.
In 1891, the girl who would grow up into Super Nan did not know there were no more bushrangers. All she understood were her own personal obstinacies, which included a fear of bushrangers.
‘Anyway, I was too scared to go to the dunny at night by myself,’ she said. ‘I used to get my sisters to come.’
Maud, Aggie, Josephine, Mary and Ethel standing in a line, giggling, while their scaredy-cat youngest sister, Lil, tried to pee. She was terrified a bushranger would jump out on the way to the dunny and get her.
Aggie regularly snuck around the back of the dunny and whacked it with a large stick. Lil never failed to shoot out, her pants around her ankles, running for her life.
‘You’d think I’d learn, wouldn’t you?’ said Super Nan, giggling along with her giggling sisters, now ghosts.
Nana Elsie, Super Nan’s beautiful daughter who would grow up to become my grandmother, did not know she was witnessing the birth of the atomic age. On the morning of 6 August 1945, when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, she was a young woman arguing with her husband, Arthur, about his long-standing refusal to learn to dance. Art worked on the docks, a reserved occupation, and, anyway, he was a bit too old to be called up. He hated dancing.
Elsie and Arthur had been to a dance the night before and Elsie had danced with a handsome captain. That morning, as she cooked Art’s eggs, their argument continued. Art glowered at her and Elsie said, ‘What am I supposed to do if you won’t dance with me? Sit on my hands?’
At that moment, a few thousand miles to the north, husbands and wives were going up in smoke.
In November 1956 my mother did not know that the Cold War had just been invented. When she failed to reach selection for the Australian swimming team for the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games she sat home and sulked. There was something going on in the Suez Canal, a place she had never heard of and could not pinpoint on a map, and the USSR had invaded Hungary.
What relevance had this to her, June Gilmore—a champion swimmer relegated again to second place? June knew she was a better all-round swimmer than Dawn Fraser, yet here she was, forced to spend weeks and weeks listening to everyone going on about Dawn’s ruddy gold medals.
In the last weeks of 1956 June spent as much time as she could in her bedroom, imagining the moment when everyone would recognise the magnitude of their mistake.
As for me, I did not know that I was living in the dying days of the sexual revolution. I did not know I was experiencing those last reckless days before once again sex could kill you.
I lived in the last days of typewriters, hot metal presses, the Berlin Wall and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
I was there for the invention of computers, mobile phones and the internet. I was there for the invention of time travel, when anyone could fly in a jet from one side of the world to the other, sometimes arriving the same day they had left. The rich, the poor, the Irish, the Australians and the French: anyone with a passport and enough money could go.
Throughout, my knowledge of history was suspect. Like everyone, my sensibility was personal and I experienced history from the feet up. I was full of private obstinacies, history’s bit player, always looking the wrong way. You’d think I’d learn, wouldn’t you?
Nonetheless, here is the world, ceaseless.
Here is the world, going on.
Where is the sound of wicked Aggie whacking her stick against the dunny wall?
Where is that lost line of giggling sisters, each with a headful of memories?
Where is the scent of the lemon tree, once traced by vanished fingers, inch by inch?
A thousand months!
Mademoiselle Emilie Joubert, let me acknowledge your longing for the smell of baking bread and the lost sound of your father’s whistle before I forget.
FIFTY-FIVE
The dissolute lover
THE SKIN REMEMBERS THE SMALL triangular scar high on the left hip, made upon it when the woman was twenty-four years old, a burn mark from ironing while naked.
She was ironing naked because she was twenty-four years old and she hardly ever got dressed, being newly in the grip of a passion for that dissolute lover.
At last she left the shadow lover. At last, after five blind years, she left that lover she could not see and who was possibly a fi
gment of her imagination. At last she went to live with that dissolute lover. Out of the frying pan and into the fire!
She left the shadow lover and all the lovers lined in a row for the dissolute lover whose skin felt like home, whose body was an answered prayer, who felt like her own physical self in male form. Skin of my skin, breath of my breath, if I were a man I’d be you. She wrote these words on a scrap of paper and left it by the pillow one morning as he slept. But by the time she got out of the shower she thought better of it and screwed it up.
By then the Suspicious Wanderer knew her romantic streak was fatal. By then, even though she was composed of private obstinacies, she knew enough to keep them covered up.
The dissolute older lover was a Labor Party apparatchik whose louche behaviour would eventually cause him to fall into disgrace. He had bloodshot blue eyes starting to go to seed and his wrecked, handsome face was already on the cusp of dissolving.
Her new lover was not a shadow. He was knuckle, muscle, hair, the drip of sweat, the slick pink flesh of cheek inside an open mouth. His skin was always warm and gave off a sweet fragrance, like the skin of a baby. He had full, fleshy lips like her own. He loved her mouth, her porn-star lips, which he said always looked ready, open. Her lips seemed to have found their fellows and sometimes she lay with her new lover on their shared pillow for long, unbroken minutes, kissing with their kindred lips. Like her, he loved kissing.
She lived with her new lover inside an erotic swoon, sometimes forgetting to move the car forward when the traffic lights turned green because she was remembering a particular moment from the night before. She left saucepans too long on the stove, lost her concentration while ironing, and understood what it must be like to be a teenage boy with a permanent erection. Unlike the lover who fell in love with desire, unlike the shadow lover and all those other lovers in thrall to that brief joyous throb, to that most mysterious of human seconds upon which marriages, careers, religions and kingdoms rise and fall, the dissolute lover wanted to spend his whole life in those seconds.
She had never met anyone like him.
He was irresponsible. He was a madman. He was intoxicating.
He got drunk and swallowed, smoked or snorted any drug going.
‘What on earth do you see in that arsehole?’ asked Ro’s boyfriend, Mick, after meeting him for the first time.
The Suspicious Wanderer could not have explained that once she had seen her new lover address a rally for Aboriginal land rights. He was eloquent, electric, sexy, and secretly, guiltily, she thought it was like being at a rock concert.
Remember Justine Gervais? Even the Suspicious Wanderer detected a pattern, a penchant for men and women with a political cause and a desire to burn at the stake.
The dissolute lover described himself, smiling, as a ‘sectarian leftist’ and she guessed that this was intended as a joke. She did not know what it meant but laughed anyway.
‘Most of them think I’m a Trotskyite mole,’ he said.
Before the Suspicious Wanderer moved in with him, he woke Mick and Ro at three o’clock in the morning by turning up drunk with a vase of expensive orchids he had confiscated from the rich and which he intended to present to her. When he discovered that she wasn’t home he kicked a hole in the front gate. The neighbours called the police.
The first time the Suspicious Wanderer slept with the dissolute lover he placed a tab of acid on her tongue. Afterwards they drove Claudette for miles, right up to Palm Beach, throwing money out the window.
They were looking for a precipice they could drive Claudette over. They shared a glorious dream of flying through the miraculous air, their hair streaming. For some reason, there were no precipices to be found. By the time they realised this, dawn was breaking and they were coming down.
They drove, laughing, all the way back to Balmain, looking out the window for the fistful of notes they had tossed to the wind.
She wished to be forgetful and reckless, like him.
After the Suspicious Wanderer moved in with the dissolute lover she took to going to work without wearing underwear, so that she could feel the pleasure of the soft wet mound between her legs. Between her legs was a sweet sticky feast, his and hers, the succulent spill of them. When she awoke in the mornings the mound of her pudenda was swollen, ripe, smeared with fragrant, gliding come so that her fingers, which loved her, naturally found their way there.
Every morning her fingers slipped in and around the delicious wet slopes of flesh, the raised blood-swelled tip, and she imagined being fucked again, him once more raising her into the air. He entered her so perfectly, so precisely, she was filled. She imagined him coming over her breasts, her face; making her watch while he fucked someone else. She imagined herself tied to a chair, her legs wide open, wanting him to fuck her instead of the other girl. Lying next to her lover in the bed, the woman tried to be quiet but once an involuntary cry escaped her lips and woke him.
‘You bad girl,’ he said. ‘You very bad girl.’ He rolled the woman onto her front and thrust into her straight away while the first orgasm was still in her.
She attracted men’s stares in a way she never had before. Like a bitch in heat the woman must have emitted some secret odour. Standing at bus stops men pressed into her hand scraps of paper scrawled with their telephone numbers. Once, when she and her lover were having dinner and her lover excused himself to go to the bathroom, the restaurant manager walked quickly to their table and asked her out. Beneath her skirt the new burn high on her hip was raw and weeping.
The mark of it can be found there still.
FIFTY-SIX
The impotent lover
MEMORY IS NOT DEMOCRATIC. IT creates its own hierarchy concerning what will be at the top and what will be at the bottom. Memory decides what it remembers and what it forgets, and what emerges from the daguerreotype.
Look! The impotent lover approaches, that loyal, sweet lover who preferred sleep’s caress. I knew him in the dying days of the dissolute lover, back before the birth of my son, back in those days of warm sleep.
When romance died between the dissolute lover and me, exactly two years, six months and twenty-five days into our relationship, neither of us could bear it.
When we awoke in our warm bed to discover that the erotic dream in which we had dwelt had disappeared, neither of us could stand to live instead an ordinary, companionable existence. Rather than be pitched into routine sex and routine days we sought new bodies to conquer.
In our last days together the dissolute lover returned to that which gave him succour, that is, the bodies of women. Despite his ruined face he still had about him a wrecked grace, a plaintive charm that saw the most unexpected women succumb.
I returned, too, to that which gave me succour, the bodies of men. In this we were childishly alike: we sought the restoration of ourselves through the conjuring of desire in new bodies. We believed this moved us far from the helplessness of sadness.
We hardly talked.
I recall only a few words the dissolute lover ever said to me. I recall him, drunk, making a distasteful joke at my cousin’s wedding. I remember the sound he made when he came.
I remember that he once declared, ‘I may be in love but I can still feel the wall behind me against my back.’
Once, in our desperate last days, I had to go to Melbourne for an editing job. In truth my mission was to talk a children’s book writer down from the ledge (it is a well-known fact that the authors of children’s books are the most delicate of creatures). The dissolute lover supposed me to have a rendezvous with a man I knew, a former lover, who worked for the same Melbourne publisher. By chance this former lover happened to call two days before I was due to fly out. After I hung up the phone and told the dissolute lover who it was, I saw fear upon his face.
‘He’s going to be in Adelaide,’ I said. ‘Otherwise we could have had lunch.’
Did the dissolute lover nod? He obviously believed he had overheard a coded plan for me and my former love
r to meet up.
When I returned to our shared house in Sydney there was a lipstick not my own in the bathroom cabinet and red welts from fingernails not my own on the dissolute lover’s warm back.
He was very insecure, despite being a Labor Party apparatchik, despite being a sectarian leftist and a celebrated madman. Critical theory is all well and good, except when life rushes in with its insistent hot breath.
In search of solace in those desperate last days, I suggested a drink to a pleasant man I occasionally worked with.
Damien was a short, dark-haired Englishman, head of the poetry department. He had tanned, swarthy skin, and did not look like my concept of an Englishman.
‘That’s because I’ve got gypsy blood,’ he said, smiling, as he handed me a drink.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘So do I.’
‘No, I have. Really. My mother is Romany.’
I was not entirely sure what a Romany was, so he proceeded to give me a short, romantic history. Before long I pictured myself travelling with him on a gaily painted narrow boat down an English canal, my feet bare, a pot of red geraniums by the door.
He said he had to go home.
He said his wife, Lorraine, would have dinner waiting. I had met her once, a pretty, fair-haired woman, a primary school teacher. I had seen photographs of their two daughters, one pretty, fair-haired like the mother, one pretty, dark-skinned like him.
He said he had to go home and then I kissed him, that magic kiss of which everyone is capable but which only some of us choose to culpably employ.
We went to a swish hotel up the road. I stood to one side while he chivalrously handed over his credit card. I had already offered mine, being a member of that new breed of women who had money and credit cards and the right to sleep with whomever we wanted.