Lola Bensky

by Lily Brett

  ‘Was that funny too?’ said Lola.

  ‘Of course,’ Jim Morrison said. ‘Don’t you think it’s funny?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Lola. She felt disconcerted and uncomfortable. She thought Jim Morrison was enjoying her discomfort.

  ‘Why are you so angry?’ she said to Jim Morrison.

  ‘I’m not angry,’ he said. ‘I just hate some people.’

  ‘Who do you hate?’ she asked him.

  ‘My mother,’ he said. ‘My brother.’

  He looked at Lola for a few seconds. ‘You probably love your parents,’ he said with a smirk lurking behind his grin.

  ‘I think I do,’ she said. ‘Do you love anybody?’ she asked him.

  ‘No, not even myself,’ Jim Morrison said. ‘I love poetry. And Satan.’

  Lola looked at him. How could he love Satan? Satan was a concept of evil, of darkness and destruction. Maybe he saw himself as the physical embodiment of Satan? An adversary. Someone who was against everyone.

  ‘My father was the captain of one of the biggest naval carriers in the world,’ Jim Morrison said. ‘My father commanded three thousand men but in our house my mother was in command. She hollered at him. She told him to take the garbage out. And he did it. He took the garbage out.’

  ‘He’s very moody,’ Linda Eastman had said to Lola about Jim Morrison. Moody? Moody would have been fine. Lola understood moodiness. This wasn’t moody. Jim Morrison started irritatedly unbuttoning his shirt. He looked as though he not only wanted to shed his clothes, but would have liked to remove his skin. He was scratching at the shirt. As though he wanted to get through to something he had no access to.

  Lola could see Lillian on the other side of the club. She was still talking to Paul Newman. They looked as though they were best friends. She wished she could join them.

  ‘You don’t like me, do you?’ Jim Morrison said to Lola.

  ‘Not really,’ she said, surprising herself. ‘But I think you’re going to be very successful.’

  She felt a little bad. Maybe she should have just said, ‘Of course I like you.’ She thought Lillian was right. Jim Morrison was going to be huge.

  Two months later, ‘Light My Fire’ would hit number one in the charts and sell more than one million copies. Jim Morrison’s mother would track him down in New York. She would speak to him on the phone and ask him to come home for Thanksgiving. ‘I’ll be pretty busy,’ he would say. He also said he might see her when he performed in Washington, where his parents now lived. ‘Could you do your mother a big favour and get a haircut?’ she had said.

  ‘I don’t want to talk to her ever again,’ other people in the room heard him say when he hung up.

  Jim Morrison’s mother and brother came to his concert in Washington. He avoided seeing either of them. From the stage he screamed, ‘Mother, I want to fuck you,’ and looked at his mother with a vacant stare. Lola thought that Jim Morrison would not be a good candidate for her ‘Say Your Piece’ column.

  It was getting hot at The Scene. The club was still crowded. Jim Morrison gestured to the waiter closest to him. The waiter seemed to know what he wanted and brought him two drinks. Lola knew that Jim Morrison drank a lot and that he dropped acid. Lola wasn’t sure why it was called dropping acid instead of taking acid. LSD was a pill like any other pill. You didn’t drop an aspirin or an antibiotic.

  Jim Morrison’s speech was slowing down even more. It was hard not to look impatient or prompt him when the silences between his words felt interminable. The only advantage of this snail’s-pace speech was that she had no trouble taking notes.

  ‘Music and poetry are things everyone can take part in,’ he was saying. ‘They’re natural things like child’s play. It’s a good way to move through life. If there were more people playing, things would be a lot smoother.’

  If there were fewer people throwing rocks, things might be smoother still, Lola thought.

  Lola didn’t know much about either music or poetry. They had very little music and no books of poetry in the house when she was growing up. They had no books at all.

  Edek borrowed his detective-fiction books from a library in the city. Lola thought he had learnt most of his English from the detective-fiction books. Edek knew the terminology used in post-mortem laboratories and police stations all over the English-speaking world. Edek could talk about thoracic aortas and windpipes and sternums and how to detect the difference between a suicidal hanging and a homicidal hanging.

  Linda Eastman had come over and was standing behind Lola. She was taking photographs of Jim Morrison. He took no notice of her.

  ‘Have you read The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley?’ Jim Morrison said to Lola.

  ‘No,’ said Lola.

  ‘That’s too bad,’ Jim Morrison said.

  Lola knew that The Doors were named after a line by William Blake, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear as it is: infinite.’

  ‘He eats acid pills like they were peanuts,’ Linda muttered to Lola. ‘And he smokes bags of grass.’ Lola knew that Linda didn’t mean lawn cuttings. Everyone was talking about marijuana, grass. Grass, which currently seemed to be coming from Mexico.

  ‘What is important to you, apart from music and poetry?’ Lola said to Jim Morrison.

  ‘Art, literature, philosophy,’ Jim Morrison said. ‘The thing that really changed my life happened when I was very young. I saw a family of American Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death. There was blood everywhere. Blood all over the highway. Blood, blood, blood.’ The word blood was a very graphic word, Lola thought. Jim Morrison repeated the word a few more times.

  Blood was one of the things Renia talked about. ‘They took so much blood,’ she used to say to herself. ‘So much blood. They didn’t take it from a vein in a prisoner’s arm, they cut straight into the carotid artery,’ she would say, pointing to her neck. ‘They took as much as they wanted and would leave the person to die. The blood went to the German army,’ she would sometimes add.

  Lola wished she could talk to Renia about normal things. If the conversation had to be about blood, then maybe they could have talked about menstruation. When Lola was eleven and came home with blood on her underpants, all Renia had said was, ‘That is your period.’ Lola had thought that this ‘period’ was something that was only going to happen once. She got a terrible shock when it happened again, a month later.

  ‘As one of the American Indians was dying,’ Jim Morrison said, ‘his soul passed into my body.’

  ‘How old were you?’ Lola said.

  ‘About five,’ said Jim Morrison. Lola didn’t know why she’d asked Jim Morrison that question. She thought that it was because she didn’t know what else to say.

  Lola didn’t really think that souls could travel. She certainly didn’t think they would make dumb travel decisions, like landing in Jim Morrison’s body. She wondered if souls really could inhabit other people. Was she carrying other people’s souls? The souls of her mother’s dead relatives? Or her father’s dead relatives? She didn’t think so. Decades later, she wouldn’t be so certain.

  ‘Do you get on well with the other members of the band?’ she said to Jim Morrison. She knew it wasn’t exactly a smooth transition from the story of the American Indian whose soul had passed into his body.

  ‘Do I get on well with them?’ Jim Morrison said. ‘They can’t think, they can’t fight, they can’t fuck. They’re okay.’

  Lola didn’t think Rock-Out would publish that quote. They couldn’t print the word fuck. The sentence lost its punch without that.

  She decided she had enough material. And she had had enough of Jim Morrison. She turned around to Linda, who was still taking photographs. ‘I’m finishing,’ she said. ‘Can we have a cup of coffee?’ She felt a strong need to talk to someone who was easier to understand and more friendly than Jim Morrison.

  ‘Sure,’ said Linda.

  ‘Thank you very much for the interview,’ Lol
a said to Jim Morrison. Jim Morrison looked a little bewildered. As though he was just getting into the flow of things.

  ‘He’s not stupid,’ Linda said to Lola as they looked for a table. ‘He’s just mixed up.’ Lillian, who had just finished talking to Steve Paul, the owner of The Scene, joined them.

  ‘Shall we have a drink before we go home?’ Linda said. ‘Soda, seltzer or coffee all around,’ she said, and laughed. ‘You two are probably the only two people in here who don’t drink alcohol or do drugs.’

  ‘I don’t like being out of control,’ Lola said.

  ‘If you don’t let things get out of control, you miss out on some of life’s adventures,’ Linda said.

  Lola was tired. There was something about Jim Morrison that had depleted her. Or possibly more than one thing. He had seemed untouchable. And out of control.

  ‘I think maybe I’m not looking for adventure,’ Lola said to Linda.

  ‘Adventure isn’t a bad thing,’ said Linda.

  Less than two years later, Lillian would call Lola and say, ‘Linda says she’s going to marry Paul McCartney.’

  ‘Do you believe her?’ Lola said.

  ‘I think I do,’ said Lillian. ‘She’s never lied to me.’

  Anyone who could spread her legs that wide could probably get anyone they wanted, Lola thought. And then felt ashamed of herself for that thought. She thought that it was more likely to be Linda’s certainty, her fearlessness and her direct, no-holds-barred attitude that attracted Paul McCartney. ‘I believe her,’ Lillian said.

  ‘I think I do, too,’ said Lola.

  4

  Lola Bensky woke up on her thirtieth birthday to the shocking realisation that she had turned thirty and both her mother and her father were still alive. Lola had been living with the prospect of Renia and Edek’s imminent demise for most of her life. For years she had jumped at every late-night phone call. For years her heart had started racing if they were not home when she expected them to be.

  The thought that her parents wouldn’t be alive for very long had come from her parents themselves. ‘Daddy and me won’t live for very long, not after what we went through,’ Renia Bensky had said regularly since Lola was a small child. Each time she said it, Edek would nod his head in agreement. Lola occasionally wondered if her parents had some sort of pact about not living long. She didn’t really think they did. Edek just agreed with everything Renia said. He never contradicted her. He never offered another point of view. He didn’t even roll his eyes.

  ‘You are killing me,’ was another one of Renia’s periodic statements to Lola. It was often followed by, ‘You will cry on my grave but it will be too late.’ Lola had a sinking feeling, even when she was seven or eight, that Renia was right about this.

  Once, when Renia and Edek had been in a car accident, they had called Lola from the hospital. From the moment Lola had answered the phone she had been almost unable to breathe, even though her mother had said that they were both only bruised. Lola had been sure that this was finally the moment Renia had been talking about when, any second, Renia and Edek would both be dead.

  Yet here she was, thirty years old and both of her parents were still alive. She decided to relax. Her mother and father were both probably going to be around for quite a while. She thought that there was still enough time to fix things up. She wasn’t sure what it was she wanted to fix up. If she’d known that she had less than a decade left with Renia Bensky, she would not have relaxed.

  Lola got out of bed. Her husband was still asleep. She was married and had two children. She thought she was probably happy. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she had to get out of bed and sit on the floor at the end of the hallway of the old, Edwardian-style house she lived in, in Melbourne. She would sit on the floor and try to calm herself down. She would have woken up with her heart pounding. The pounding was so forceful that it felt as though her heart might burst through her chest. This mostly happened after she had eaten too much. Sometimes, her husband stirred slightly when she came back to bed, but he never asked what she had been doing. Lola felt that she was lucky to have her husband.

  From the time Lola was ten and taller than her mother, Renia had fed Lola a daily barrage of advice and admonitions. They all amounted to the same thing. In Renia’s words, ‘No boy wants to marry a fat girl.’ They had started as ‘No boy wants to have a fat girlfriend’ and moved on to ‘No boy will be serious about a fat girl.’

  Lola’s husband was a tall, blond, former rock star. Well, a former rock star in most parts of Australia. He had made it clear that he would prefer someone slimmer. She wasn’t at all clear about why he had married her.

  Lola wasn’t at her heaviest at the moment. In fact, she was lighter than she had been for years. She felt so light, she feared she might vanish. Her ankles, which, even now, were thicker than your average ankles, felt too weak to carry her. Lola, who was five-foot-nine, felt so insubstantial. The scales said she was still thirty pounds heavier, or five inches shorter, than she should be. But she felt slight.

  She had been dieting for ten weeks. Every morning she made herself a huge salad for the day. She mixed two cans of tuna with one large shredded cabbage, two large shredded carrots, five shredded zucchinis and twelve chopped radishes. Lola chopped the radishes, as shredded radishes, she found, became too watery. She dressed the salad with salt and pepper and half a cup of lemon juice. It wasn’t fabulous, but it did involve a lot of chewing and contained a lot of fibre.

  In the kitchen, Lola prepared breakfast for her children. She loved her children. They were beautiful children. Worth being married to someone you felt too fat for. Lola didn’t think her husband was a bad husband. She thought whatever unhappiness she felt had more to do with herself than him.

  Lola and Mr Former Rock Star had been married for nine years. Their wedding had been a complete fiasco. On the morning of her wedding, Lola had had to do the four-hour live television show she did every Saturday morning. Every Saturday morning, Lola sat behind a desk in the studios of Channel 0, in Nunawading, Melbourne, and interviewed rock stars and reviewed records. The other three women on the show mimed and danced to whatever music was at the top of the charts that week. Lola stayed seated behind her desk.

  Lola drove home from the studio on her wedding day to find that the hairdresser who was supposed to do her hair had had a meltdown over her boyfriend, and wasn’t there. Lola put some talcum powder through her hair to mop up the oiliness of the cream she had used to wash off her television make-up. The talcum powder only made her hair look worse.

  Renia Bensky had started crying when she had seen Lola’s floor-length, maroon velvet wedding dress. ‘You’ve seen it before,’ Lola said to her mother.

  ‘It didn’t look so bad,’ Renia said, sniffling.

  At the reception, the guests clung to their own groups. The groom’s family and family friends, the Church of England Brigade, as Lola thought of them, were stiff with each other, but they were almost frozen in the presence of the Jews.

  The Jews were too loud. Too emotional. And too obsequious to the Church of England crowd. There was also a lot of kissing from the Jews. And too much kissing for the non-Jews.

  Several Jews offered their condolences to Renia and Edek in sympathy for the fact that their daughter was marrying out. Renia and Edek brushed off the condolences. Neither of them looked as though they really cared. Renia shook her head when anyone mentioned it. She seemed much more concerned with the thought that Lola’s wedding dress already looked a little tight.

  ‘Did you put on more weight?’ Renia had said to Lola as they walked into the reception hall.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lola had answered. She had almost said, ‘Since when?’ But she’d known her mother would have known exactly how long it had been since Lola had had the dress made.

  Everyone at the wedding, Jews and non-Jews, told Lola how beautiful her mother looked. Renia was wearing a sleeveless, cream, embroidered shot-silk gown. The back of the dress had
a large circle scooped out, which exposed most of Renia’s back. Lola thought that her mother must be wearing one of her many strapless or backless bras. Lola’s maroon velvet wedding dress covered Lola from her neck to her ankles.

  With her large eyes, high cheekbones, bouffant hair and shiny, suntanned skin, Renia sparkled. She looked like a combination of Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, the two women in the world she most wanted to look like.

  Edek was trying to make sure that the guests mingled. It was a futile mission. Later, Lola saw Edek consoling himself with a chocolate-coated wafer he must have brought from home. He finished the chocolate-coated wafer just before he began his speech.

  The Church of England contingent didn’t understand a word that Edek said. He had tried to be very formal and in the process had lost some of his already shaky English.

  Lola thought that her new father-in-law’s speech would never end. So did most of the guests, particularly the Jews. They wore anxious expressions of intense concentration on their faces, as Jack Weldon Worthington Sr spoke and pontificated and quoted.

  Lola started thinking about her hair. She shouldn’t have put talcum powder in her hair. It was a really stupid thing to do, to put talcum powder in your hair on your wedding day. By the time Lola came out of her talcum powder reverie, Jack Weldon Worthington Sr was in full swing.

  ‘Marriage is an evil that most men welcome,’ he was saying. ‘And, as the old expression goes, keep your eyes wide open before marriage and half shut afterwards.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Well, our son certainly had an ace up his sleeve,’ he said. There was a puzzled rustle among the Jews. Even Lola, whose English had been praised by her parents and their friends since she was a small child, didn’t know what ace Jack Weldon Worthington Sr was referring to. Edek, a keen card player, nodded and said, ‘Yes, it is always good to have such an ace.’ He leaned over to Renia and added, in a whisper, ‘But maybe not in your sleeves.’

  ‘We are not able to make head or tail of it,’ Jack Weldon Worthington Sr said, smiling. ‘But then again, there is no hard and fast rule.’