Geography

by Sophie Cunningham

  I didn’t like what he was saying; but he affected me. I felt like when I breathed him in, he changed me. He made my heart race, my eyes sting. I wondered if this was what people meant by ‘chemistry’.

  ‘You can see why I don’t like to talk about my taste in books on the first date,’ he said. ‘Want another margarita?’

  At the end of the night Michael took me along Rodeo Drive. We were driving through Beverly Hills at three or so in the morning when a siren went off behind us and stayed there. Michael pulled over. Drunk, I opened the door to get out of the car and Michael pushed me back into my seat, startling me.

  ‘What are you doing driving around at this hour?’ asked one of the cops, the one who was looming—slightly theatrically it seemed to me—over Michael. His gun was in his hand, though, which was not the kind of theatre I wanted to see.

  ‘My friend is new in town, I’m showing her around.’

  ‘Sure.’ They stood over him, belligerent, lecturing him to be more careful. Their guns remained in their hands all the while.

  After they left Michael sat staring at the wheel. ‘I will never, never get used to the police in this country. They really make you feel they could shoot you at any moment. I need a drink.’ He turned to me, agitated. ‘And what did you think you were doing? You could have been shot, trying to get out of the car like that.’

  I apologised, put a hand on his arm. ‘Come back to my room,’ I said. ‘I think there’s something to drink there.’ I was lying, I had no idea if there was anything to drink in my room or not.

  As it turned out there wasn’t a mini bar. Michael sat down on the only chair, his head in his hands. ‘Let’s go to my place. I’ve got some tequila.’

  I sat on the end of the bed, reached out, barely touched the back of his trembling hand with a finger. ‘Stay here,’ I said.

  Michael hesitated a long, long moment before sliding out of the chair and kneeling on the floor before me. He took my face in his hands, and paused again. ‘I’m not sure about this,’ he said. And then we kissed.

  ‘Feel free to keep trying,’ I said, after Michael and I had been having sex for an hour or so, ‘but I can tell you now it’s not going to happen. Not after hours of drinking. Not the first time.’

  ‘There might not be a second,’ he said and I couldn’t tell from his voice whether he was joking or not. ‘I’d make the most of it if I were you.’ It had been a long night. We finally called it quits, the job half done.

  ‘You are beautiful, you know,’ he stroked me gently. ‘I meant what I said. But you’ve got more flesh on you than Uma. I like your flesh.’

  ‘One more mention of Uma Thurman and this affair is over,’ I said, causing Michael to laugh out loud.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ he murmured as I was dozing off. As if he had a right to my thoughts and feelings.

  ‘I was thinking about something very corny,’ I said. ‘About a poem that seems geographically appropriate: Licence my roving hands, and let them go / Behind, before, above between, below / Oh my America, my new found land.’

  I can’t believe I said that now, looking back. The things you say when you are young and confident.

  ‘You don’t need to quote Donne at me,’ Michael rolled me over so my back was to him, spooning in behind me, putting his arm over my waist and placing it between my breasts, pulling me close. ‘You’ve got yourself laid already.’

  When I woke he was putting on his socks and shoes. He was polite, but all the intimacy of the night before had evaporated. ‘I’ll call,’ he said, ‘about dinner tonight,’ but in such a way that I wasn’t sure if he would; I couldn’t read him at all. My relief when he did call was immense.

  We went to a Mexican place that night and I ate chocolate chicken for the first time. Food tasted good around him. Wine went more quickly to my head. All my senses had become more intense in the three days since we’d met.

  ‘I’m going to give you a Hollywood tour,’ Michael said, ‘then let’s go to a movie. I missed The Piano the first time around, but since Holly Hunter’s won the Oscar I’ve got a second shot at it.’ I didn’t tell him I had seen it already. I’d been to Hollywood Boulevard too, though when we got there it was different to the times I’d seen it during the day, looking like a rundown fairground. At night the lights brought it to life, and the shadows covered the seediness.

  We started the tour at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, which, according to Michael, was the centre of Hollywood in the twenties. We zigzagged back and forth across the boulevard and looked at the buildings on either side. We walked past the Frederick’s and Newberry Company buildings, in all their art deco glory. Past the Egyptian Theatre, which struck me as having seen much better days. We stopped at the Lee Drug Company building on the corner of Hollywood and Highland to look at the neon Coca-Cola signs set under frosted glass in the pavement of the entrance. We passed the Max Factor Building, the Paramount Theatre and the Masonic Temple.

  When we walked past the Chinese Theatre, there was a premiere on with a red carpet and spotlights. I saw Brad Pitt get out of a limousine and I gasped.

  ‘So he does it for you, huh? It’s his film that’s opening,’ Michael said. ‘Legends of the Fall.’

  Michael waved at one of the women walking down the carpet, and she smiled back at him.

  ‘Who was that?’ I had abandoned attempts to act unimpressed.

  ‘A film producer,’ he said. ‘Not one you would have heard of.’ But she looked like someone I’d have heard of, with her long dark hair and clinging silver gown. I looked down at my own outfit: long grey skirt, flat shoes and a navy polo neck. I began to feel self-conscious.

  ‘That’s the forecourt with all the handprints,’ Michael said, gesturing off-handedly. ‘You have to be a mega star these days to get a shot at it because they’re running out of room.’

  We went to see The Piano at a smaller cinema on Sunset. At the moment Baines fingered the hole in Ada’s stocking, there were sharp intakes of breath around the cinema. Michael leant over to me and whispered in the dark, ‘Is that power? Or love?’

  After the film we went back to Michael’s house in Venice. He wandered into the kitchen and I stood in the middle of the living room, awkwardly. Not sure what to do with myself, not sure whether he wanted me to stay or not.

  He came back into the room and up to me, standing close, his body almost touching mine. He put two fingers under my chin and lifted it up, forcing me to look into his eyes, then pressed against me gently, pushing me backwards until I felt a table against my thighs. ‘Lift your skirt,’ he said, placing his hands on my hips and hoisting me up onto the table. I kicked off my shoes and lay back so he could remove my skirt, my underwear. I lay myself out for him. He had a big cock, and though he pushed into me within seconds, I was wet. I had been wet all night.

  ‘Tell me what you want to do,’ he whispered into my ear. ‘Tell me what you want.’ I didn’t have courage to say what I was thinking: fuck me hard, fuck me really hard, turn me around, bend me over, fuck me from behind, bite me. But we did all that anyway; he made me feel brave.

  We moved from the living room to the bedroom and made love some more, and when we had finished, he whispered, ‘Let me stay inside you,’ holding me close as he fell asleep.

  I lay awake for what was left of the night, hearing the sirens, the helicopters that circled, the ambulances in the distance. I felt safe, surrounded by the sounds of chaos.

  I was used to feeling anxious all the time at home, for no reason I could articulate. But here it was different. Anxiety was in the city and its streets, it was in the air—but it was outside, not inside me.

  At dawn, I gave up trying to sleep and woke Michael to say good morning, goodbye. We kissed sleepily for a while before I said, ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Don’t,’ he kissed my neck, reached down and stroked my cunt slowly with the tip of a finger. ‘Are you sore?’

  ‘A bit,’ I said. I looked at him, at his face even more crum
pled than usual by sleep. I gazed at him. He licked the end of his fingers before reaching down again, pushing one gently inside me.

  ‘Too sore to fuck?’

  I moaned as he lifted himself onto me. ‘Get your aim right,’ I whispered, reaching down to hold myself open for him with one hand and position him with the other.

  ‘Now,’ I said. ‘Push.’ And he did, slowly at first because I was raw but then I opened up, and the wet came and he was deep inside me.

  ‘I’ll be gentle,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be,’ I said and after that things became hazy—until, with a jolt, I remembered the time.

  ‘Shit, I’ll miss my plane. I’ve really got to go.’ I put my foot against him and lifted him out of me. It was only when I got out of the bed I saw that I had begun to bleed, which was a surprise. Usually when I travelled I stopped menstruating altogether.

  ‘I’ll take that as a memento,’ Michael said, looking at his ruined sheets. ‘Or perhaps some primitive marking of territory. Wait, I’ll get up, I’ll walk you to the car.’

  Disorientated by the sex, by the lack of sleep, I looked the wrong way and stepped out onto the road as a car was bearing down on me. Michael grabbed me by the hand, pulled me back to the footpath.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘Scaring me for the second time.’ Then he took my hand and led me over the road like I was a child.

  As we walked past the corner store he pointed at a newspaper cage. ‘It’s over.’ The headline on the screamer read, ‘2 Officers Guilty, 2 Acquitted; Guarded Calm Follows Verdicts in King Case’.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘We’re safe. I’ll see you when I get back to LA?’

  ‘I’ve got your numbers in New York,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you.’

  In the years that followed, I kept thinking back to those first two nights Michael and I spent together, trying to work out the moment that he got under my skin. Trying to pinpoint the moment things shifted from play and romance to obsession. Was it when the sex got good? Was it when he made me feel like an adult? Was it when he made me feel like a child? Was it Los Angeles? I tried to work it out. I wanted to make sure it never happened again.

  Two

  It looks perfect. Whitewashed, with windows overlooking the ocean. If we looked ceiling-wards we would see there is no fan, but it doesn’t occur to us.

  ‘We’ll take it,’ I say to the owner. She is an elegant, pale Moslem woman dressed from head to foot in white. Her name is Mrs Kalid. She scrutinises us carefully. She is, after all, letting us into her home.

  ‘You may stay,’ she nods at us. ‘Would you like a Sprite? Or a cup of tea?’

  Ruby and I are in Galle. In biblical times King Solomon bought his gems, spices and peacocks here. Now it is a picture-postcard walled town, a tiny place that hasn’t changed for centuries. Its fort walls overlook a cricket pitch on one side and the sea on the other.

  ‘This ground is famous,’ Ruby says. ‘Some very important games have been played here.’

  Inside the walls are Dutch churches with blue alcoves, old colonial hotels with large verandas and whitewashed mosques from which white-robed men pour out at regular intervals. Banyan trees drape over the streets and public squares. It is under one of these trees that we shelter after a storm breaks, though by the time we get there we are soaked already. We huddle together, enjoying the drama of the weather, giggling like young girls. A group of school children are giggling too, as they walk down the street, sharing umbrellas.

  ‘I haven’t travelled during the monsoon time before,’ I say. ‘I had no idea it would be so fun—to start with anyway. I’m sure it would exhaust you after a while. The build-up of humidity all day, the explosion late every afternoon.’

  ‘I’ve been waiting for this,’ says Ruby. ‘And now it’s come I have to leave it.’

  The monsoon is a mystery to me, its beginnings and endings seemingly as variable as the unexpected changes you encounter crossing a street in Manhattan, or climbing down just a few metres into the Grand Canyon. There is no monsoon fifty kilometres east. There is none to the north. But here the clouds tower up above us like skyscrapers, laden with water. Tomorrow we’ll leave the rain behind us. Ruby and I have decided to keep travelling across into South India together and, if our travel guides are accurate, will be dancing around three different monsoonal zones.

  I don’t really know why we have decided to travel together though I suspect Ruby thinks my age makes me interesting. I like her because she is relaxed, and sure of herself. She doesn’t drag history around behind her like I do. We are comfortable with each other.

  That night, after we have dried off and dressed up, we head to Sri Lanka’s most luxurious hotel, the Lighthouse, for dinner. The columns and patio merge with the rocks and sea below. We order gin and tonics.

  ‘A tuk-tuk driver told me,’ Ruby says, ‘that not far from here is a famous beach called Sunset Point.’ She leans forward and points to our left, to a cove some kilometres away. ‘And, this man says, on that beach Arthur C. Clarke, David Hasselhoff and Lord Mountbatten have all stood. He said these men’s names in one breath, as if they were all equally significant. David Hasselhoff—who remembers him?’

  I laugh. ‘I remember him,’ I say. ‘I was a big “Night Rider” fan and I even saw his fine performance this year in Shaka Zulu: The Citadel.’

  ‘Well,’ Ruby says drily. ‘Let’s change the subject so I can continue to respect you.’

  Ruby tells me she is intimidated by how much I have travelled and I tell her that I travelled a long way and to many places without getting anywhere. That I worked overtime to impose an order on things no matter how far I strayed from home.

  Ruby isn’t buying it, doesn’t believe I’d still be travelling if it were just a form of narcissism. She says there is nothing wrong with being younger and making young-people mistakes.

  ‘We all stuff up,’ she says.

  I hesitate. I’m not sure I know her well enough to ask her what her mistakes might be. Me, I’m talking about my past because I am shedding it. She is watching me slough off my old skin.

  We order more drinks. The humidity makes us drink quickly and the gin and tonic is working its effect. Ruby asks me how I imposed order on things.

  ‘Perhaps it’s a journalist thing,’ I say. ‘I have a series of grids. When I travel I read the papers, watch TV and get caught up in any local media event. Afterwards I organise the event—in my head anyway—according to the decade it happened in, and the place, and, more bizarrely, the man I was seeing at the time. It is like playing with building blocks. Building things, creating meaning, to soothe oneself.’

  Ruby raises an eyebrow. ‘Have you heard of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?’

  ‘Like this,’ I recite my litany in a sing-song voice. ‘I was born in the sixties, and that is when I first went to America and that is when my parents separated. I was at high school in the seventies, I got a new dad, and there was Cyclone Tracy. I studied journalism in the eighties. I fell in love with my geography teacher, our family ended all over again, there was the Ash Wednesday bushfires and I went to India. I worked for a travel agency in the nineties and I met Michael. And Max was born. There were bushfires and earthquakes and blizzards. I came to Sri Lanka in the new century—a girl like me loves it when there is an actual new century—and the airport was blown up.

  ‘You see how neat everything is?’

  ‘A new dad?’ asks Ruby. ‘How many do you have?’

  ‘Two. I call my first father Father, and my second father Dad.’

  ‘So it’s like this,’ Ruby says. ‘We are sitting in a hotel in Sri Lanka in August, 2001, and it’s your turn to buy the drinks.’

  We go back to our room to find that it has heated up like an oven. ‘No fan,’ Ruby grimaces. ‘And these windows, they don’t open. There is only this grille at the top.’

  We lie on our beds, tossing and turning; it’s partly the drink but mainly the heat. Our beds are only six inches apart and
I can hear Ruby’s every move, her efforts to rearrange her limbs as she seeks out the cooler parts of the sheet. Her low moans of frustration and irritation. I periodically fall into a half sleep and sweaty dreams full of dread. Telling Ruby my story is making my time with Michael come back to me with the kind of intensity I haven’t felt for years. I am restless with rushes of loathing, not desire. I cannot believe I let this happen, that I lost those years. I won’t tell Ruby everything, I can’t, but even in the partial telling I find I remember more.

  At around three a.m. I say, ‘Do you ever feel that you’ve been beaten by something that other people think is quite trivial? And then you hate yourself twice over: for being defeated, and for the cause being so…nothing…compared to what most people deal with in their lives?’

  ‘It’s not a competition,’ she says; then, after we have lain silent for a few moments, ‘Let’s go outside and walk around the fort walls. It will be beautiful at this time of night.’ I pull on my clothes. She takes me down the street to the 340-year-old battlement walls that look across palm trees and rocks and ocean, all grey silver white in the moonlight. She takes me outside, where it’s cool.

  The first time I was in Los Angeles my mother and father tried to make me walk out of the airport into the carpark, but the noise—people, planes, taxis and buses—upset me and I had to be carried, like a baby. It is hard for me to remember details. I can remember that I stared through the taxi windows, at the Los Angeles suburbs sprawling out and away.

  I know, because I was told, that we caught the train from San Francisco to Boston. I don’t know how we got to San Francisco, though when I drove down Highway 101 almost thirty years later, along the coast and through Big Sur, I thought I could remember the landscape from this time, from when I was little. But memory does that. Makes you think things have happened that maybe never did.

  The train we caught was red and we were on it for three days and two nights. We slept on little foldout beds attached to the wall and it felt like magic to me, like living in a doll’s house. I remember that I spent most of the time reading books of my favourite fairy tales: Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White.