Invented Lives

by Andrea Goldsmith

  The two weekends were far more difficult. Sylvie had met some people from the university who shared her interest in letters, and she’d made arrangements with them on both weekends. Leonard was pleased for her, he wanted her to be happy, but wished her new friends had not appeared right at this time. In the end, he played golf on the Saturdays, and on the Sundays he went to the beautiful minister’s church.

  16

  YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

  Sylvie was sitting at the table in Mark’s kitchen. A ripe washed-rind cheese oozed onto a board alongside a crispy baguette, and the coffee pot was on the stove. Leonard was playing golf, and she and Mark had the whole afternoon together.

  A rally was to be held at the city square in support of Nelson Mandela, and Mark had suggested they might go. Mandela had been transferred from prison to hospital because of a flare-up of his TB, but would be returned to prison on his recovery. The rally was to protest his imprisonment, both past and future. With the exception of the Vietnam moratoriums, when even conservative people with sons of call-up age took to the streets, Sylvie had never been to a political rally.

  What do you do when you start so far behind?

  That she should steer a steady course her entire life, and only at this late stage diverge onto the road less travelled, was incredible. That she should be a woman in clear sight of old age when first she experienced passionate love was incredible. That she might be washing dishes, peeling potatoes, driving for the Blind Society, baking for the hospital fête, and actually feel Mark’s hands on her, feel his mouth graze her neck, his body enfolding hers, his head pressed into her breasts, his legs entwined with hers, his tongue, his breath, his hands caressing her, it was incredible. Before Mark, she’d never made love during the day.

  Where to begin when you start so far behind?

  If she were to attempt to make up for time lost when she was twenty or thirty or forty, then she would miss out on the possibilities offering now, to middle-aged Sylvie Morrow. Once time was lost, it seemed you were always in arrears. These days, she found Mark in the pages of books and in the daily newspaper; she found him at the supermarket and at the petrol station. The most mundane aspects of her life had been changed by knowing him.

  There had been times during the years when she could have screamed with boredom and frustration, but she had stifled those feelings, knowing they’d pass. And besides, she had no good reason to complain, although she did wonder if other wives experienced the same dissatisfactions. She’d recently read an article about the Women’s Liberation Movement changing the lives of women. It hadn’t changed hers, nor indeed the lives of her friends; the women’s movement simply hadn’t touched her. But Mark Asher had.

  Was any marriage as simple as she’d once thought? How many husbands were like Leonard, men who loved their wives but sought sex with other men? She’d consulted a library copy of The Kinsey Report, and learned that 10 per cent of males had sex with other males; this meant there might be as many as two or three men in their social circle just like Leonard. Since meeting Mark, she had also wondered how different her marriage might have been if Leonard had been like other men. There would have been more and better sex, she supposed, and given her response to Mark, that would have made a difference. But what else? And again she acknowledged that perhaps it was Leonard’s being as he was that attracted her, that without this odd quirk of nature he would have been far less appealing.

  She wondered, too, how many women in strong and enduring marriages took lovers. She’d prefer not to be deceiving Leonard, but, at the same time, she felt surprisingly little guilt, and no sense whatsoever of betraying him. Mark didn’t threaten her marriage — her marriage hadn’t changed — but the borders of her life had shifted substantially. These days it felt as if there were no borders at all.

  She could hear Maggie accusing her of self-delusion, and knowing this, had not confided in her sister. But neither did she feel a need to confide. You confide when you want reassurance, or when you are conflicted; she did not need reassurance, nor did she feel conflicted. She loved her husband, and she had taken a lover.

  So much to experience when you start so far behind.

  She had always been a keen reader, but with Mark she was discovering vast new literary territories, all of which added currency to her life. He had introduced her to the system of inter-library loans, and she now regarded it as one of the wonders of the modern world. Such delight in collecting a book from her local library that originated from a distant suburb; one of the books she’d ordered had come all the way from Canberra. She found a book called Letters to Merline by a German poet, Rilke. She believed it to be wrong, like a literary peeping Tom, to read a famous person’s letters whose work you didn’t know, so Letters to Merline sat untouched while she read a volume of Rilke’s poetry. Such charged, singeing poetry. She read Rilke’s poetry, she read his letters to Merline, and she fell for Mark Asher; she suspected she was not the first person to have read Rilke while falling in love.

  So much to learn when you start so far behind.

  Mark was risk and passion, he was possibility made real, he was life writ large at a time when so many of her friends’ lives were shrinking. Mark pushed old age to the horizon and then, with a nonchalant shove, toppled it out of sight.

  She was passionate about this man who had crashed into her life, and she loved being with him, but as to whether she truly loved him, she could not say. With Leonard, there was no such doubt. Her love for her husband had returned to where it always had been: essential and central. They understood each other and needed each other; they shared a son, plus thirty years of life. Leonard was bedrock. But Mark tapped into previously neglected aspects of herself, and all of life was richer for it. And Mark was new and different, and for reasons she couldn’t explain, she now seemed hungry for change. Even an afternoon tea of a washed-rind cheese with fresh bread was a novelty to one more accustomed to orange cake and Nescafé.

  No matter what happened, there was no going back.

  Mark spread some cheese on a hunk of baguette and handed it to her. He moved his chair closer, brushed a strand of hair from her forehead, then traced her hairline down to her ear and lightly, slowly around the earlobe. The touch shot down her spine. She shivered.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said with a smile, ‘I think your entire body must be an erogenous zone.’

  A short time ago, she would have floundered in embarrassment at such a comment, now she just giggled. She swiped some oozy cheese from the side of the crust and sucked it off her finger, then took a proper bite and chewed slowly.

  There was a tiny spider moving up the wall opposite. It was approaching a picture, a framed photo of Mark’s daughter, Zoe, with her mother, the two of them on a beach dressed in swimsuits, their arms around each other and laughing. As the spider disappeared behind the picture, Sylvie found herself thinking about secrets, perhaps exposed yet not actually seen, like the laughing woman in the photo who, within a few months, would kill herself.

  Mark must have seen her looking at the photo. ‘She looks so happy — they both do,’ he said quietly. ‘But Rhonda was struggling at the time; she just wasn’t showing it.’

  ‘And yet women are supposed to be so emotional,’ Sylvie said, ‘and so emotionally undisciplined when compared with men.’

  Was this just another myth promulgated about women, she was wondering. Her own experience, and there was nothing exceptional about it, made the case. She’d suffered multiple miscarriages without giving in to hysterics. She’d responded calmly and efficiently when Andrew had fallen off his bike and broken his arm, and similarly, when he’d fallen from his treehouse and broken the other arm. She’d responded without histrionics through any number of emergencies.

  ‘Women are supposed to be so emotional,’ she said again. ‘But it seems to me that many of us are experts in hiding our feelings.’ She paused. ‘And not just our feeli
ngs: we’ve learned how to hide what we really want.’

  ‘Is that what you’ve done?’

  She nodded. ‘Until I met you,’ she said, and made a wry smile. ‘But if you hide what you want and what you feel well enough, and for long enough, your desires end up out of reach — not exactly forgotten, but somehow rendered unimportant, even irrelevant.’

  Mark’s gaze was still directed at the photograph of his wife and daughter. ‘I’m not sure about that. I think what we hide, consciously and deliberately, tends to be truer to the self.’

  ‘But wouldn’t that suggest we’re ashamed of our true selves?’

  He was rummaging in his unruly hair. ‘Freud might say that’s exactly the case. Or should be the case. The untamed self has to be controlled, even repressed, otherwise we’ll all run riot, and civilisation will be doomed.’

  ‘Of course, Dr Freud aside, you could widen the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable behaviour, and thereby allow for a little more diversity.’

  ‘You don’t think we’d all become savages?’

  She shook her head. ‘I actually believe that human beings are fundamentally good, that we’re all fundamentally cooperative, and that we all want to build community.’

  ‘My own idealist,’ he said softly.

  She shook her head again. ‘No, that’s too simple. I also believe in the human capacity for change.’

  She heard the words from her own mouth, words that just months ago would have been no more likely than her speaking Chinese. But she’d come to see life differently. Home with its familiar routines was so comfortable, so secure, but there had to be more to life than a perpetual warm bath.

  Open your front door and anything might be possible.

  She reached over and let her hand rest on his wrist. Then she pushed the sleeve of his jumper up to the elbow. She brushed her fingertips over the pale skin of his inner arm, slowly, from wrist to elbow. They both watched her fingers on his skin. ‘Who would have thought this was possible,’ she said.

  ‘This?’

  ‘This love affair.’

  ‘Is that what we are?’

  She leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the lips. ‘You’re the experienced one, you tell me.’ She drew back, smiling.

  He held on to her. ‘Don’t stop.’ His face was centimetres from hers. ‘I don’t want you ever to stop.’

  Mark was not smiling.

  ‘You know what I’m saying?’ And he’s grasping both her hands. ‘I want us to be together all the time, Sylvie.’ He tightens his grip. ‘I want a lover and a wife.’ And to ensure there is no misunderstanding: ‘I want to marry you, Sylvie. I want you to leave your husband and be my wife.’

  Her stomach is sinking, her heart is thumping, and her brain is shouting, No, not yet. And briefly she wonders if she might stretch this out, have another month or two of Mark. Waver a little, give him reason to hope, string him along. A brief moment before the temptation is expunged.

  She knew this time would come, has always known, but hoped it would be a good deal later than this. She doesn’t want a husband; she has a husband. She has wanted, and still wants, a lover. But it’s no good if the lover wants a wife.

  He is leaning forward, he is clinging to her, his whole face pressed into a plea. She loosens his grip, and hooks her hand around his neck. She touches the familiar skin and lightly moves her fingers; she must remember the texture of this skin. She draws him towards her and breathes him in; she must remember the scent of him. She holds him against her, his chest, his hips, his thighs; she must remember the weight of him. And she kisses him, slowly she kisses him, and he picks up her rhythm, their mouths together in the supple, cushiony fleshiness of a kiss she must never forget, a kiss that must last forever.

  Sylvie missed Mark. She missed him that afternoon when she arrived home hours earlier than expected, she missed him the next day, and the day after. She missed him through all the days and weeks that followed. Perhaps if they’d had more time together, perhaps if they’d had less, it would have been easier. Perhaps premature departures are never easy.

  The day after their last time together, she wrote him a letter. Just as he had wanted to be entirely clear about his desires, she needed to be entirely clear about her decision. It was a hard letter to write, not simply because she wished she didn’t have to write it, but because despite years of immersion in other people’s letters, she’d written very few herself. A single page took a morning to complete — not to her satisfaction, satisfaction played no part in this whatsoever, but a letter that could not be misinterpreted.

  She used notepaper that had sat in her drawer for years. The sheets were ivory and lightly textured, with a watermark of a patterned shield. She had chosen an envelope with the same brown-tissue lining that Mark had used in his letter to Zoe, the letter that had brought the two of them together. The gesture would not go unnoticed.

  Dear Mark,

  In all our times together we never talked about the future, nor did we speak of an ending. We were for now, & as long as we held tight to the present we would continue.

  Our being together, this now, was perfectly timed for both of us. If we’d met any earlier, you would have been too tied up with Rhonda’s death & your troubles with Zoe, any later, & some other woman would have snapped you up. As for me, my neat & tidy life had already started to fray. You found an opening & dived in.

  You have given me more than I ever thought I wanted, more than I ever thought I’d missed out on. As you once said, quoting someone famous, ‘Life is not a rehearsal.’ I know that now. My future will be immeasurably different from my past because of you. I will live it differently because of you.

  You probably think it is foolish of me to end it now. That I could have more, much more, if only I were prepared to take a leap. But if we had discussed the future I would have been clear: I’ve only ever wanted one husband. I married Leonard for better & for worse, & I married him until death do us part. But it’s important that you know I’ve only ever had one passionate love. I didn’t talk about Leonard to you, it would not have been right, either to him or to you. He was separate from you, as you & everything we did together was separate from him.

  I expect there were features about my marriage you guessed from my behaviour, but I had neither need nor desire to discuss my marriage with you. However, it was never my intention to deceive you.

  Now each of us must forge our own life apart. For me, I go from you having been changed & strengthened, I have been bettered. I hope there’ll come a time when you look back at us with the same gratitude & love I feel now.

  Perhaps one future day when out with Leonard I’ll bump into you. You’ll have Zoe on one arm & your new wife on the other, & we’ll greet each other with unabashed delight. And when we embrace, as surely we will, we’ll hang on just a little too long, before turning away from each other & re-entering our own lives.

  Until that time, goodbye, dearest Mark.

  With love & gratitude from Sylvie.

  Before she could make any more changes, she folded the sheet into the envelope, sealed and addressed it, and left the house. She was sad but calm, and in no doubt whatsoever about what she had chosen to do.

  On the way to the letter box, she passed old Mrs Payne’s place. There were massive construction works underway, and she was forced to step off the footpath into the street. The old house and garden were long gone, and in their stead were the outer walls of two townhouses. She remembered so clearly how she’d felt when she first read those love letters from Lucien Barbier to Sophie Herbert; most particularly, she remembered their lovers’ duet in haiku. How she had marvelled, how she had ached. Never had she known such passion, nor, she thought at the time, was she ever likely to.

  She pressed Mark’s letter to her chest and continued to the letter box. She stood a while, extending the moment, the leave-taking. Then she push
ed the letter through the slot, heard it fall to a cushion of letters below, and made her way back home.

  In the brief time she’d been away, Leonard had returned from church. She found him standing at the kitchen sink staring out the window, just like she had done every day of their long marriage. He twisted around when she entered, and must have seen something in her expression, because he walked over to her and wrapped his arms around her. She leaned into him. He was so much bigger than Mark.

  She was fifty-two years old, and this was her husband of thirty-plus years, and this, the two of them together, was the deeply forested landscape of their marriage. It was contentment of a kind.

  They stood locked together for a long time. It was so silent in the kitchen, and when Leonard spoke she felt herself start. His breath was warm on the top of her head. He was suggesting they go somewhere for the afternoon. ‘Like Andrew’s Saturday outings with Galina,’ he said. ‘But for us, a Sunday.’

  ‘And after our Sunday outing,’ Sylvie replied without any forethought, ‘let’s go to Europe.’

  He laughed. ‘This evening? Tomorrow?’

  She pulled back, wanting to see his face, this face she was still adjusting to without the moustache, and she wanted him to see hers. ‘Soon,’ she said, ‘I’d like us to go soon. A proper journey.’

  ‘To Europe?’

  ‘Europe or anywhere, as long as it’s far, as long as it’s different.’ And an idea suddenly came to her. ‘No one we know has been to South America. We could go there, start a trend.’

  She saw Leonard’s surprise, saw his confusion: this was not the wife he was accustomed to. What an irony, she was thinking, if her affair was discovered not because she was caught in flagrante delicto with Mark — she would never be with Mark again — but because of how she had been changed by their time together.