by Paul Thomas
Chas’s Volkswagen Golf is parked in front of my flat. He gets out, flinging the door shut.
‘About fucking time,’ he says.
I don’t know why. I can’t have kept him waiting because we didn’t have a rendezvous. I’d take it for the juvenile trash-talk we’ve always traded but that usually comes with a grin or a pantomime sneer. Something’s definitely amiss. Chas prides himself on his hipster nonchalance but today he scowls and smoulders like a hormonal teenager.
‘What’s up?’ I say.
‘How long have you got?’
This is evidently a serious question.
‘Well, I could reschedule my dominatrix.’
My little joke dies messily on the footpath, like a trodden-on snail.
‘Are we going in or what?’ asks Chas.
We go in. I offer plunger coffee or tea. He wants beer.
‘Finished for the day, are we?’
‘You could say that.’
So it’s to do with work. Another surprise, since Chas has always breezed through the academic year without anxiety or visible effort. Having a rapport with the students helps, of course, as does his ability to charm or brazen his way through whenever his short-cuts or minor negligences come to light.
‘Had lunch?’
‘No.’
He inspects my bookshelves like a first-time visitor when in fact he’s a regular and I’ve long since kicked the compulsive book-buying habit.
‘You want a sandwich?’
‘Whatever.’
I put a sandwich and a beer on the table and retreat to the kitchen side of the bench. Whatever it is, it might be contagious. He sits down, muttering thanks.
‘All right, Chas, let’s hear it.’
He sighs and stares at the ceiling. ‘Have you ever told me that my cock would be my downfall?’
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ I say. ‘That doesn’t sound like me.’
‘Have you ever thought it?’
‘It might’ve crossed my mind.’
‘In what context?’
‘Oh, you know, the old staff-student sexual interface. But then I’m hazy on exactly what you can and can’t get away with. I took it for granted you’d know where to draw the line.’
‘I might be cavalier,’ he says, ‘but I’m not stupid. If it was that fucking simple, I wouldn’t be in this mess.’
I’ve heard Chas likened to a fox in a hen-house. Not a pretty comparison nor, in my opinion, entirely fair. A fox will kill every hen in the hen-house; that’s its nature. Chas takes his womanising too seriously to be indiscriminate.
Each year he takes his pick of the crop, trading on his looks, position, reputation and showy, theatrical lectures, a head-turning package for the dreamers, bookworms, groupies and opportunists who pour into university wanting, above all, to be dazzled.
He has a few rules. He never asks twice. If they don’t come running, he backs right off and thereafter keeps his distance to avoid any suggestion of pressure or harassment. Subsequent contact is conducted in an atmosphere of cool formality and if he’s in two minds over a grade, he errs on the side of generosity.
He favours young women who are either exceptional, and therefore not in need of patronage, or just going through the motions and therefore not looking for a leg-up. He warns them that they’re not the first and won’t be the last. At the first hint of instability, neediness, excessive ambition, doctrinaire feminism or familiarity with the machinery of grievance, he cuts and runs.
Chas thought he had it all under control. Then Emma happened.
Emma was the drug he couldn’t take or leave. But she wasn’t the only post-graduate whose doctorate he was supervising; there was also Jane. Plain Jane as he thought of her, although she wasn’t unsightly, she was just older. With her kids at high school, Jane had decided to pick up where she’d left off and get some use out of the perfectly good brain that had spent fifteen years in mothballs.
With Emma, the heat was always on. They sparked off each other intellectually and every exchange was charged with an electric sub-current of desire. Jane, though, was making up for lost time and earnest to a fault. She was a suburban mother who coached her daughter’s netball team and went bushwalking with her husband, who worked in human resources. Time crawled whenever she updated Chas on her thesis, a revisionist study of a trio of forgotten women writers of the 1950s. He didn’t consciously short-change Jane but he never made an effort to correct the inevitable imbalance. Emma’s doctorate ran smoothly and was deemed sufficiently heavyweight to land her a junior lecturer’s job at Victoria University. Jane’s never really picked up steam. When the assessor sent it back for salvage work she lost heart, abandoned it and dropped out of sight.
That was five years ago. Yesterday Chas was summoned to the dean’s office and shown a dossier chronicling his personal relationships with female students going back a decade. There was a statement from the woman whose abortion had taken precedence over my wedding. Another contributor dwelt on her suicide attempt triggered by an abrupt severance after which no correspondence was entered into. (Chas informs me that she spectacularly failed the stability test.)
The dossier was compiled by Naomi, a student with whom Chas briefly dallied last year, under the auspices of a campus feminist group which, it transpires, has had him in its sights for some time. Naomi meticulously recorded pillow talk in which Chas discussed previous relationships and how, despite his best efforts, the personal/professional line sometimes got blurred. Emma and Jane came up in this context.
Naomi, the compiler of the damning dossier, the pretty second-year who laid the honey trap into which he obligingly sauntered, is Jane’s daughter.
This is Chas as I’ve never seen him: self-pitying, diminished, defeated.
‘What now?’ I ask.
‘I have a choice,’ he says. ‘Grovel to every woman I’ve ever made eye contact with, take a demotion and a pay cut, put out a statement expressing deep shame and undertaking to change my evil ways. That’s the attractive option. The alternative comes under “or else”.’
‘Have you actually committed a sackable offence?’
‘We’re way past that. If I fight it, I’ll be on my own — no one’s going to go into bat for me. The femmos would love me to fight it; they want my head on a stick. They’d turn it into a great moment in feminism, the media would be all over it, and there’s no fucking way the university’s going to swim against that tide.’
‘What about negotiating an exit — agree to go quietly if they throw money at you and bury the whole thing, then get a job somewhere else.’
Chas rolls his eyes. ‘Get real, Max. It wouldn’t matter a fuck what the university agreed to, these bitches aren’t going to let it fade away. And how would you rate my chances of getting another job after they’ve sent their shame file to every women’s organisation at every university in Australasia? I could probably squeeze some fuck-off money out of them but what do I do when that runs out? Anyway, it’s all hypothetical. I don’t want to move and I’m way past starting over as a junior lecturer at somewhere like Adelaide or Otago, even if they’d have me which, as I say, is highly fucking unlikely.’
There’s the saying that we always kill the thing we love but, as has been pointed out, that works both ways. And we’ve all heard, more often than we’d like, of that phoney ancient Chinese curse about getting what you wish for.
We follow our impulses and desires despite the risks. That’s sometimes called living life to the hilt. Chas thought he had it made: he was a big man on campus, a rock star. He could have found his girlfriends somewhere else but that would have taken considerable self-denial, walking away from all those sweet things who didn’t have to be pursued or persuaded. All he had to do was notice them.
He was having too good a time to realise that the seventies were long gone and the world had changed. The university, once an enchanted place of pliant minds and bodies where no one grew old, had become a battleground in an attritional war
to make the world unsafe for men like him. But the infatuation, the constant, grateful submission, blinded him to the danger. He wasn’t even aware that he was dancing in a minefield.
Poor, dumb Chas.
Both of us have done what we want, without compromise. And look where it’s got us.
seventeen
Stanley rings to present me with a fait accompli: the party — my party — is now fancy dress.
‘Otherwise it’s just another fucking party,’ he says. ‘Same little cliques, same old conversations. Fancy dress breaks the ice. Trust me; I’m experienced in these matters.’
‘Why would we need an ice-breaker? My friends all know one another.’
‘I was getting to that: I’ve taken the liberty of whistling up a few ring-ins. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘You’re the host,’ I say. ‘You can invite whoever you like. Just as a matter of interest, though, how many’s a few?’
‘Who’s counting? It just seems sensible to do the housewarming and meet-the-neighbours thing while I’m at it. They’re probably killer bores but if they’re drinking my piss, they won’t be calling the cops to complain about being woken up by Led Zeppelin at three in the morning. Parties need critical mass, Max. I’m sure your friends are hell-raisers from way back but there’s not that many of them.’
‘Is that my fault?’
‘Let’s not get into the blame game,’ he says. ‘The point is, quality rather than quantity is a perfectly sound strategy for a dinner party but your full-on knees-up needs a good turnout.’
‘You’ve left it a bit late, haven’t you?’
‘It’s all under control — I’ve got a party organiser on the case.’
‘A what?’
‘A party organiser. I would’ve thought the term speaks for itself.’
‘How did you find this person?’ I ask. ‘I mean, are party organisers listed in the yellow pages?’
‘How the fuck would I know? It must be fifteen years since I looked in the yellow pages. I did what I always do: I asked around. By the way, I spoke to your brother-in-law.’
‘Shit, did you?’
‘Wasn’t that the idea?’
‘Not really. He ambushed me. Even then I only agreed to it because I assumed you’d have a rubbish bin full of unsolicited business cards.’
‘Yeah, but this one came from you, Max, not some bozo whose name I didn’t catch.’
‘Well, I appreciate it, Stanley, but don’t take it any further on my account. For all I know, he might try to sell you the harbour bridge.’
‘I think I can handle it, Max. I’ll do what I always do: I’ll ask around, I’ll talk to people in the know and I won’t be parting with a cent until I know exactly whose pocket it’s going into and what it’s buying. And I told him that. So what’s he like?’
‘What can I say? He’s my brother-in-law; I wasn’t consulted.’
‘And if you had been?’
‘He wouldn’t have got my vote. But that’s a personal view. As far as I know he’s pretty good at what he does.’
Stanley snorts. ‘He’s a fucking real estate agent.’
‘Yeah, well …’
‘It could be worse, right? He could be a crack dealer or a gay escort. Which reminds me: the fancy dress has a theme — Bring Back the Seventies.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘I wasn’t ready for them at the time. I sure as hell am now.’
It’s April Fools’ Day. I’m fifty years old.
I check my look in the mirror: peroxide fright wig, red-framed glasses, Mao jacket, glazed idiot-savant stare. The face is all wrong but then I’d have to live on steamed vegetables and mineral water for a year to have Andy Warhol’s sinkhole cheeks. Still, it’s more of an effort than I was going to make, having started out in the spoilsport spirit of doing the bare minimum. I’d rather not be laughed at but with any luck there’ll be sillier sights — perhaps someone with his cheeks stuffed with cotton wool making constipated noises about offers that can’t be refused. With any luck there’ll be a Star Wars mutant or a Bay City Roller or a varicose-veined bag of bones who thinks she’s a perfect 10.
The intercom buzzes. My ride’s here.
Chas lounges in the back seat of the cab. He’s got on brown leather trousers, a loose, collarless white shirt, cowboy boots and aviator sunglasses. There’s a dark rinse through his hair and he must have stopped shaving as soon as he heard from the party organiser. He looks a lot more like Jim Morrison than I look like Andy Warhol.
‘Jimbo, quelle surprise. Why, it seems like only yesterday that I visited your grave.’
‘I faked it,’ he says. ‘Things were out of control. I had to break the spiral and disappearing seemed to be the only way. For the last twenty-five years Elvis and I have been sharing a bungalow in Mount Roskill. When I say “sharing”, I mean in the sense of co-occupying, although I have to admit that late at night, when the demons come and the loneliness kicks in, I sometimes find myself thinking, “You know, if you just lost some weight …”’
‘What, thirty or forty kilos?’
‘Well, that’d be a start. Of course, Andy, you realise that we — I’m speaking as the real me here — have something in common: rabid feminist bitches tried to destroy us.’
‘That’s right. I’d forgotten Andy stopped a bullet.’
‘Fired by the woman from SCUM — the Society for Cutting Up Men.’
‘Well, let’s hope she’s not there tonight. Speaking of the fairer sex, I can’t help but notice you’re flying solo.’
Chas stares as if he can’t believe I’d raise that subject. ‘Given the events of the past few weeks I think it’s prudent to pull my horns in, as it were, on the boy-meets-girl front. But every cloud has a silver lining — that opens up the option of getting methodically and piggishly drunk, which I fully intend to do.’
‘A noble ambition, young Harley. However, I see a flaw in your plan.’
‘Which is?’
‘Once you’ve got a couple of drinks into you, you won’t be able to help yourself.’
‘There won’t be any unattached women there, will there?’
‘I’d say there’s every chance. Stanley’s beefed up the guest-list. He felt my friends were too few, too staid and possibly too poor to make the party go with a swing.’
‘Well, well,’ says Chas. ‘No harm in checking out the lie of the land, I suppose.’ He tosses a gift-wrapped hardback book onto my lap. ‘Happy fucking birthday. First-edition early Dellasandro. I spent an entire fucking day on the net tracking the bastard down.’
‘Good for you. Which one is it?’
‘Dead Air,’ he says. ‘I’m reliably informed it’s unreadable.’
‘Does the term postmodernism mean anything to you? Readability’s an outdated concept.’
‘Call me old-fashioned but I prefer novels that have a narrative and don’t give you a headache.’
‘I bet you like happy endings too.’
Chas turns his sunglasses on me. ‘The odd one wouldn’t go amiss.’
Brazier fires blaze along the sea-shell drive. The house looms through the smoke, lit up like a cruise ship. Two penguin-suited Samoans of the brick shithouse persuasion guard the door. They want to see our invitations. Chas produces his but I have to confess that mine is otherwise employed (marking my place — page thirty-something — in the new Dellasandro, as it happens).
The Samoans exchange a fatalistic raised-eyebrows shrug, like surgeons who have carved someone open only to discover it’s hardly worth sewing him back up.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ says one. ‘This function is strictly invitation only. Our instructions were very clear.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ yelps Chas, ‘he’s the guest of honour. It’s his fucking birthday party.’
‘We’d appreciate you minding your language,’ says the other Samoan, stone-faced. ‘We’re Christians.’
Chas is about to give them the free-speech speech but I head h
im off, suggesting it wouldn’t be helpful or particularly germane. When I turn back to the gatekeepers, they’re consulting a clipboard. ‘Mr Napier?’
‘That’s me.’
‘Mr Muir thought you might forget your invitation. He said we could make an exception for you.’ They stand aside, all smiles now. ‘Happy birthday, sir. Have a great evening.’
I feel like I’ve gate-crashed an impersonators’ convention. There’s a late-period Elvis with what I hope is a cushion down the front of his spangled jumpsuit; a John Lennon–Yoko Ono couple (in white suits, thankfully, rather than their Amsterdam love-in skin); a Mick Jagger with his Bianca, who has baulked at the see-through wedding outfit; a Stevie Nicks peering through a riot of frizzy hair; a couple of zany Split Enzers; some cavemen heavy metallers; and a he and she David Bowie: she’s dolled up like Ziggy Stardust, he’s the Thin White Duke.
Hollywood provides a white-tuxedoed James Bond, a Dirty Harry who can’t be persuaded to put away his gun, a Luke Skywalker, two Sally Bowles, Jane Fonda in both her Klute hooker persona — shaggy hair, long overcoat, microskirt — and as Hanoi Jane with red bandana and Ho Chi Minh T-shirt, a Kojak whose freshly shaved head is coming out in a rash, and a man in drag whom I take to be Myra Breckinridge although that might be fanciful. I tentatively ID Norman Kirk (another stripped sofa), Germaine Greer and Jackie O, but there’s no mistaking Fred Dagg or Billy T. James.
Some I can’t place, either because of obscurity or poor execution. I feel better for knowing I won’t be the only John Doe.
A Playboy bunny, one of those young women who look pretty from the other side of a crowded room, materialises with a tray of champagne flutes.
‘Bubbly, gents?’ she asks brightly. ‘It’s Dom Perignon.’
Chas tells her he’s not fussy. She giggles and moves on. I wonder if she can feel his gaze crawling up the seams of her stockings to the blob of white fluff on her backside. Abstinence, I sense, is very much an hour-by-hour proposition.
The action — rock ’n’ roll music (the Rolling Stones’ ‘Tumbling Dice’), bull-elephant trumpeting, girly shrieks — is coming from the rear of the house, the pool area. At the mention of the pool, Chas’s expression freezes.
