2. When the tutorial was over, I made a point of standing next to someone I vaguely knew who seemed to know him. We all congratulated him. He had acquired something tantamount to instant celebrity with his paper, even if only among a handful of undergraduates. The small group, mostly women, went to the student union building, as it was then called, and I insinuated myself next to him in the line to buy coffee. I let him pay for mine, and he let me ask him about Billie Holiday.
“You’ll probably think I’m stupid but—”
“Why would I think you’re stupid?” he asked.
“Well, because of my paper, for one thing, and—”
“Your paper was good.”
“Oh, come on. You really don’t have to say that. It wasn’t.”
“No, really, Anna, I enjoyed it. I probably went a bit over the top with mine, but I liked yours. It told us a bit about you and about all those saints. I know very little about that sort of thing.”
“About saints?”
“Yes, the religious ones.”
“What other ones are there?”
“Secular ones, canonized by someone other than the Church. Some people might accuse me of beatifying Billie Holiday.”
“Well, to tell you the truth . . . I don’t know anything about her . . . other than that she’s something of a cultural icon.”
“Yeah, I suppose she is. And deservedly, I think. You should hear her sometime.”
“I’d like that.”
I could not have been more obvious if I’d crawled under the table and torn at his jeans. He asked me to choose the time and the day, which was a little unfair, but when, as arranged, I met him later that night after the library had closed, and we went back to his place, I was glad he had. I had heard Billie Holiday before but never the way I heard her that night. I saw Simon again two nights later and then, abandoning all pretense at reticence, I agreed to let him take me to his parents’ beach house at Sorrento, on the Mornington Peninsula, the following Saturday.
My parents were immediately charmed by his polite but quickly engaging warmth when he picked me up at home that morning. They would certainly have noticed, standing there on the front porch, that he opened and closed the car door for me. After we started for the coast he played the first of what would be a series of eclectic compilation tapes he made for me, many of which I still play. This one was a mix of Stephen Cummings, Billie Holiday, Bach, and Microdisney. I sat beside him talking, laughing, listening, and looking out at the bay. I was trying not to show my excitement or my nervousness. I was wearing a skirt and remember being concerned about my legs, particularly the way they seemed to expand against the car seat. Within half an hour it felt like the most natural thing in the world to be sitting beside him there. I wanted the journey never to end. The traffic was light. It was a sunny day. I thought I might marry him.
The house was a single-story ranch-style house on a half-acre block backing onto the beach. It would cost a fortune now, but Simon told me the place had been in the family since before he was born. We had it to ourselves that day, and it was that day when we made love for the first time. When I left him some two or so years later I told myself that I wanted to know other men, experience their bodies and the way they did things. That was true but largely irrelevant. It had almost nothing to do with my ending it, but I knew it would sound reasonable enough to anyone but my parents or perhaps the nuns. It would sound reasonable enough should the other reasons, the real reasons, fade from my memory in years to come and should I need to remember why. There is no doubt a certain excitement in the very newness of a new relationship, but it is transitory. After a while the novelty of the novelty wears off and you have to resort to deceiving yourself about the quality of whomever you’re knowing at the time. You do this in order to forgo another round of mechanical strategies, stop-start uncoordinated gropes and moves that leave you colder than being alone. It’s a very dangerous time. You can ruin your life then in the time it takes to say “I do.”
For all that, when I left there was some small element of truth in the pretext that I wanted to know other men. I just had not considered that their “otherness” would always make them worse. Right from that first afternoon at his parents’ beach house Simon could always satisfy me. It wasn’t a matter of anatomy or athleticism, not alone. It was his way, his empathy with my body. He slid my skirt down to my ankles and made me sing as I’d never sung before and I kept on singing, amazing myself. He played me like a musical instrument. When you leave you never begin to consider the possibility that, in leaving the best you’ve had so far, you are leaving the best you will ever have.
I showered before we packed to go home that first time. Standing naked in front of the bathroom mirror brushing my hair, I saw Simon behind me just watching. For all that had just happened I was still far from relaxed enough around him to have him see me naked with equanimity and I was about to say something when he suddenly asked, “Tell me about your aunt?”
“What?”
“Your aunt, Anna, your father’s late sister.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Is there really a photograph of her as a little girl in Italy with your father and all his family?”
“Yes, my mother really did have a copy made for me,” I told him.
“I’d like to see it sometime.”
Along what road had his mind traveled in its journey from the sight of me naked in his parents’ bathroom to his recall of my aunt’s photograph? I asked him, but he wouldn’t tell me. I kept at him, but he said he didn’t know. He didn’t know what made him think of her photo. I didn’t believe him then. I came to believe him later. The Simon I knew then didn’t lie.
Had he been looking at me brushing my hair in front of the dressing-table mirror some ten years further on, he would have seen, under the reflection of a woman quite like the one he’d watched those years ago, photographs of her in different disguises, all elaborately framed and carefully assembled so as to appear a random assortment of snapshots of her life. The photographs were of me and my husband, me and my parents, one of his mother, but mostly they were of my son, Sam—alone at various ages, or with us, or my parents. Home decoration was not among the few activities Joe and I undertook together. The choice and placement of these photographs was an exception, almost the only one. Both of us were involved in their collection and arrangement. It was done without much discussion, but the message was clear, as sharp as any of the images, a message to ourselves and to each other. This is who we are today. Get the picture?
Most of the photos had been staged, not merely posed for like the one of my father as a little boy in Italy, but staged. There were the wedding photos, of course, black and white and highly stylized. My sister, Sophie, and I had chosen the professional photographer after visiting several of them, looking at their portfolios, and listening to their sales spiels.
“Anna . . . may I call you Anna? With the help of my assistant, I can guarantee to forever enable you to vividly and joyfully recapture the day.”
I heard the man say these words, he was the fourth photographer we had seen, and it was not that I thought of Simon but rather that I caught myself thinking like him. I found myself internally tearing apart the words he had used. With his assistant’s assistance he could guarantee something. He needed help with the guarantee. And what was the something he needed assistance to guarantee? My eternal ability to joyfully recapture the day. Whatever it was that I was embarking on, his capture of it would be a source of delight forever. Simon would not have let this go, but he had gone. He had been let go, but still I heard the words as he would have heard them.
The photographer was paying more attention to Sophie than to me even though I was the reason we were there, but I resisted taking offense—after all, I was getting married. Sophie eventually talked me into choosing him over the other three we had seen earlier. Did we really like his work the best? I only know that he had secured Sophie’s advocacy with the implied promise t
hat there would be at least one man, a man on the payroll but still a man, and one critically important to the success of the day, who could be relied upon to flirt with her throughout the proceedings. But if her advocacy had helped, it was his vacuous, cliché-ridden language that had really swung things his way. For though I did not think of Simon, I did catch myself with Simon’s cast of mind combing the photographer’s language, and it was a cast of mind I wanted violently to shed. I didn’t want to be scrutinizing this man’s, or any man’s, language. I wanted to be one of those people who feel no shame in squealing with delight with her sister at certain of the photographs in his portfolio when he absents himself to answer the phone.
If I were not one of these more spontaneous, less hyper-analytical people, I wouldn’t have been able to tolerate all those fittings for the bridal gown and bridesmaids’ dresses, all those floral arrangement appointments, all those band interviews. I wouldn’t have been able to go through with the whole thing, not just not with Joe, but not with any of the men I met after Simon, all of whom would have been able to converse smoothly, frictionlessly, with the likes of this photographer. And I couldn’t have married Simon; it would have been too stultifying. This meant marrying one of the others or not marrying at all. And I had to marry someone.
3. I had to marry someone in part because it was what my parents wanted for me. But to say that is to so discount what it was they wanted for me, and how badly they wanted it, as to be almost misleading. In their eyes, no accomplishment, no university qualification, no career, could replace marriage and children as the unquestionable reason for my being. I was a beautiful piece of ripe fruit, not too firm, not too soft, perfect for picking, which was going to spoil and rot at any moment, so “now, now, now” was the optimum time, the only time. I was then twenty-two.
But it wasn’t just that my parents wanted it for me. They had talked so much and for so long about me marrying that I had internalized their wants. I wanted it too and, as unbelievable as it is to me now, I had started to feel the first faint stirrings of panic, a panic that was only slightly mitigated by my awareness of its absurdity. There was always a younger version of me waiting, not in the wings but at the front door, whom no gentleman caller could fail to miss. She was every year the winner of the “Miss Junior Me” contest, a contest brought to me, to Sophie, and to each gentleman caller, by my parents. And I, I was getting older than the winner by the minute. I had to get married then and there, and to Joe, or one of his many clones. They were the only men around, other than Simon, and I’d left him.
My parents’, particularly my father’s, delight was captured in many of the photographs taken at my wedding. Brushing my hair in front of the mirror and looking down at the array of photos on the dressing table, some of which were taken at the wedding, I thought of the professional photographer—he went out with Sophie a couple of times after the wedding—and I realized that he had indeed enabled me to vividly recapture that day. But not as he’d guaranteed, not joyfully. A photograph can capture more than the instant it freezes. It can capture the past that surrounds the instant.
It was from that past that I was suddenly rescued by a noise. It came from outside, downstairs, somewhere in the garden. Two men, grown men, were prowling around trying to photograph my son through the windows, trying to capture him forever, not just in an album but in the newspapers. The day before this, my son had been taken from us, just briefly and unharmed, but without our permission. It was now these men’s job to capture my son and keep him forever a six-year-old victim of what they insisted was an epidemic of crime against children.
The telephone had been ringing all day as journalists from everywhere tried to get us to talk to them about the kidnapping. Would we consider a few minutes with Sam? I’d stopped taking the calls and though they hadn’t stopped calling, it had never occurred to me that anyone would try a stunt like this. Joe wasn’t home. He had taken his mother to visit Roger, his intellectually impaired brother. At least that’s where he said he was going. He had left with her, but the home they had put Roger in wasn’t that far away. Joe should have been back by then. Perhaps he was still with his mother? He could have been anywhere. It had just recently been brought home to me what I suppose I should have long suspected. Joe had often been anywhere, and he could have been anywhere again. But he shouldn’t have been there, he should have been home then. I shouldn’t have had to face these photographers on my own. If we still shared anything, it was an address and a son.
I raced downstairs, pulled Sam behind me, and drew the curtains.
“Sweetheart, do you want to go upstairs to your room?”
“No,” he said, a little afraid.
“Well, I’d like you to go upstairs now, okay?”
“No,” he kept repeating as I rushed around the house closing all the curtains. Alarmed at my response, he started to cry. I picked up the phone and called Joe on his cell phone.
“Joe? Joe, it’s me. Where are you? You’ve got to come home.”
“What’s wrong? Why is Sam crying?” he asked.
“There are journalists . . . photographers trying to photograph him through the windows.”
“What?”
“Can’t you hear me?”
“What are they doing?”
“It’s the papers, Joe. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing. People want to see him, interview him.”
“Interview Sam?”
“Or us. I can’t get rid of them.”
“Have you called the police?”
“I’m calling you, Joe. Are you coming home?”
I had been about to call the police, but I hadn’t gotten further than picking up the phone before I put it down again. I didn’t want the photographers there, but I didn’t want the police there again either. They might have frightened Sam even more. And anyway, somehow, even though it was I who had known Simon, I was inclined to half blame Joe for what had happened. It wasn’t rational. It was just how I felt. It was because of her, I suppose, because of the prostitute he’d been seeing, the prostitute who, it appeared, was also involved with Simon. I thought it was Joe’s job to clear up this mess.
Joe’s car came screeching to a halt in the garage in a way I suspect he had always wanted to drive it. Why else have a car like that? There are other ways of showing that you’ve made it. There are other cars, equally prestigious, with which you can demonstrate your success. He chose that car not just to show how well he had done (or how much he was capable of borrowing). Speed was the thing. It was almost everything. He was one of those people whose unconscious taste for violence was in the normal course of their lives channeled into their driving. But this was not a normal day.
On this day he could have the foreplay in his car and then open the door and step out for the real thing.
“Hey!” he called out, slamming shut the car door. Sam, who heard the car pull in, lifted the curtain above his head to look outside. He saw his father chasing the one remaining photographer. I regretted not calling the police. I looked through the curtains, too, moving from room to room to follow Joe as he chased the photographer, Sam trailing behind me. Joe had to have been working out at the gym at least some of the time he claimed to have been. You didn’t get to move as fast as he was moving simply through once-a-week sex with a prostitute. I could hear the fleeing photographer calling out to Joe, trying to mollify him. Had he realized how futile it was even to try, he might have run out into the street instead of further into our back garden.
“You fucking prick!” Joe yelled. Then he threw himself at him. In our backyard by the pool with Sam and me watching through the curtains, Joe lunged at him, using the man himself to break his fall. The man’s camera fell on the stone paving around the pool.
“Mister, there’s been a mistake,” I heard the photographer plead, breathing hard underneath my husband.
“No mistake, you fucking cunt. That’s my son in there. He’s crying.” Sam’s crying had stalled. Joe put his knee across the man’s t
hroat.
“I’m going to fucking kill you,” he screamed at the photographer. Then he began punching him in the face again and again. I saw my husband’s fists going methodically, rhythmically, into the man’s face, splitting his skin and each time knocking the back of the photographer’s head onto the stone paving. And though my instinct was to keep my son from seeing this, the truth is, it was not my only instinct. My first instinct was to watch Joe. It was a kind of shocked fascination. This was not one of those scenes for which one has time to rehearse a response. On reflection, it was one from which you can learn more about yourself than you might care to know by simply replaying it and your part in it over in your mind.
What was it that made me stare transfixed for so long through the window at my husband beating this man senseless? In part it might have been my outrage at his assault on the already badly breached peace and privacy of my little boy. But in part it must also have been the simple human fascination of the train wreck or the car crash or the wreck that was our own marriage, our lives, of which Joe was then making an even bloodier mess. It was almost an epiphany. Here was this crude man I had somehow married who was always struggling to hide the essential animality that we both tried to pretend had not been inherited from his father, and all you had to do was stand at the window and you could see it all come out. What did Joe think he was doing? Was he defending his son, his wife, his home? Was he proving himself to me or was he long past caring what I thought of him? Was he trying to prove himself to himself or to the world? Was his attack on this man a defensive reaction to what he saw as an attack on his vital interests? If so, what were those interests? Sam—yes—but there was also the house, his property rights, and there was also his self-image, which was so heavily dependent on what others thought of him. So did I just stand there because I wanted to see how much worse Joe could make everything for himself, how much more he could hurt himself? Was that the reason I didn’t call the police?
Seven Types of Ambiguity Page 56
