Despite the wonderful strangeness of these days I spent far too long in phone queues trying to get a plane ticket out, as if a day or so made a difference. I rang Michael each day and each day he sounded more distant.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, ‘if I’ve a ticket out for tomorrow or the day after.’
‘Don’t stress,’ Michael said. ‘You’ll sort it, I’m sure. But if it takes until the weekend I mightn’t be around—I’m thinking of going away with friends.’
‘Right,’ I said, feeling defeated, not sure what I should expect. Wanting to scream: but aren’t you missing me? Do you care? ‘Well, I’ll let you know.’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Ben’s over, I’d better go.’
‘You two sound very formal with each other,’ commented Anna. ‘You sounded more relaxed when you talked to your boss and told her you’d miss a couple of days’ work.’
‘Michael blows hot and cold,’ I said. ‘Says he’s busy or has a friend around so he can’t chat. It makes me nervous.’
‘I don’t have much experience with men,’ said Finn. ‘In fact I have none. But if he cared about you he wouldn’t be doing that. You’d be able to be yourself.’
Finn was right. I realised Michael and I had not been talking as directly to each other in person or on the phone as we had in our emails when we were thousands of miles apart. I found myself on the phone to Marion, pretending to tell her about the blizzard and asking what Max was up to, pretending to be interested in the irony that Melbourne was sweltering with temperatures over thirty degrees while we were sinking deep into snow. But really I was just trying to make sense of things with Michael.
‘It’s confusing. He was very gentle with me when I first arrived, but something’s not quite right. We had lots of great sex…’
‘I wondered how long it would be before you got stuck on this,’ Marion interrupted.
‘Let me finish,’ I interrupted back. ‘What I was going to say is that after we have the sex it is like my brain stops working. It sounds like I’m making a joke, I know, but it’s actually quite extreme. I become really passive, like I’m stoned. I feel unable to be direct. When I was staying there he went out quite a few times and didn’t ask me to come along. Every day he said he had to work on some paper or other and was at his desk for hours—even on Christmas night. I felt as if I was in the way—but it’s him who asked me here.’
‘Sweetheart,’ Marion said, ‘this stuff is not new. I can’t believe we’re having this conversation again. He’s not good for you. I suspect he’s not good for himself. Will you please look after yourself? Please?’
‘I will,’ I placated. ‘I promise.’ But after I hung up the phone I realised I didn’t really know what this meant: to look after myself. I did not know how to stop the sense that Michael was inside me. Under my skin.
Four days after the blizzard I arrived back in Los Angeles. It was late at night and I caught a cab. I was buoyed up by the drama of the blizzard and the uncomplicated, loving company of my brother and Anna. Michael seemed pleased to see me and smiled broadly as he opened the door. He took my bag then started kissing me hard and quick all over my face, running his hands down my tight leather jacket and nudging me onto the couch. We barely said a word, just smiled and murmured at each other as we removed our clothes.
‘What flight are you leaving on?’ was the first coherent thing he asked, when we lay in bed the next morning.
‘My flight out is in three days,’ I said, ‘like it would have been if I came back on January 2.’
‘Three days? That’s difficult,’ Michael rolled over. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea.’
I could feel myself shrinking, willed myself not to. ‘I told you this on the phone—it’s the only flight I could get. A lot of people had to change their travel plans because of all the drama, and fuck you for making me feel so unwelcome.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that; you’re wilfully misinterpreting me. I just meant what I said. That it makes things difficult.’ He got up, angry, walked into the bathroom and shut the door.
‘In what way?’ I opened the door, stood there, belligerent.
‘Work,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a lot on.’
I left the house and spent that day walking around Venice. Hidden in the back streets were spectacular modern houses in amongst the old: metallic boxes next to Spanish villas next to run-down weatherboard cottages. It was full of palm trees and spiky jagged gardens. Claes Oldenburg binoculars standing three-storeys high, Frank Gehry bars and houses. By the next day I was bored and restless in the way that you can only be when you are waiting for someone else to make things okay. Michael worked and I shopped. I bought things that caught my eye: a pretty dress, some CDs, a bright red Mexican crucifix with soft-drink tops nailed into it. When I went to put my purchases away I found the things I had left behind when I went to New York in a plastic bag at the bottom of the cupboard. I noticed for the first time that the candles he had around the room, that he had lit when I was first here, were much lower than when they’d last been lit for me.
The next day, my last day, Michael went out for a few hours. ‘I’ve kept this afternoon free,’ he said. ‘For you.’
I sat around and waited, reading. Michael came home for lunch, as he had promised. As he was serving the gnocchi he had brought with him, I took a photo.
‘Stop it,’ he said, as I went to take the shot. ‘You know I hate having my photo taken.’ I still have the picture: the scowl on his face, his body twisting away from me, his hand held up towards his face as he tried to cover it.
‘What is it with you and cameras?’ I asked, flustered. Michael shrugged, irritated. ‘I don’t want to argue,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and look at those second-hand bookshops I told you about. I’ve been meaning to do that since you arrived.’
We wandered down Main Street, holding hands, then turned into a small side street where there was a ramshackle bookshop that was a cafe as well. People sat around in old armchairs and read. Michael and I spent a couple of hours looking around.
‘Look at this,’ said Michael, at one point. ‘For a moment I thought it was a first edition of the English translation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. That would be worth more than $2000. But alas, it’s only a tenth edition.’
‘I bought a less fancy but still very gorgeous edition of that book for you two years ago,’ I said. ‘Then didn’t give it to you because you were four hours late for dinner one night.’
‘Don’t start,’ he said. ‘We’re trying to have a nice time here.’
I had a flash to the scene in the film I had hated but had not been able, after all these years, to get out of my head. Malkovich stiffly rejecting Michelle Pfeiffer, repeating over and over, ‘It is totally beyond my control.’ Then remembered what Michael had said to me that first time we argued, that one day I’d understand, and I thought about what Marion had said about giving bad behaviour more dignity than it deserved by dressing it up as romance and literature. Sometimes I felt as if I had half a dozen conversations running around in my head, from the past, and from imagined futures. With people and books and films. It was exhausting.
‘Catherine?’ Michael said again, but this time putting an arm around my shoulder and giving me a squeeze. ‘You’ve vagued out on me. Let’s go. We’d better get home if we want to be out again this evening. Look, I bought you a book.’ He was smiling at me. Cheered up, perhaps, by my disengagement.
‘The Lonely Planet Guide to Mexico?’
‘It’s only six months old,’ he said, looking pleased with himself.
‘But we’re not going there,’ I said. ‘It will be well out of date before I ever get there.’
‘You’ll just have to come back soon, then, won’t you?’ He kissed me on the cheek. ‘Let’s go.’
That night we went to a Japanese bar in the hills above Hollywood and sat looking down over Los Angeles. The pollution lent intensity to the sunset; the sun was a ball of dark red, the sky and haze around i
t deep orange.
‘Why is it that pollution makes things so beautiful?’ I asked.
‘If you want to see unnatural beauty, wait till it gets darker and watch the planes taking off and landing at LAX.’
Michael was right. As the sun went down the lights on the planes became brighter and it was like watching dozens of shooting stars fly west over the sea, east over the city. We sat together quietly for a while. Watching them.
‘Why is it,’ Michael asked, abruptly, ‘that you haven’t got a boyfriend? Someone like you? I don’t understand.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. Not telling him the truth: that there was Tony, but I had never met anyone I’d wanted as much as Michael.
‘You understand that this can’t last, don’t you?’ said Michael. ‘Not once you leave here.’
‘No I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Why can’t it?’
‘How could it? I’ve done the distance thing before. I’m not doing it again. We just can’t do it.’
‘We can,’ I was surprised at my forcefulness. ‘In fact, we have been, in a fashion, for almost three years now. You are making things more difficult than they need to be. You say you will be coming out at Easter. I’ll be back again for work in June. If things keep going on and we make it to the end of the year I’d be prepared to move here. To be with you.’
Michael looked flustered, looked at the barman. ‘Two more margaritas,’ he said. Then, after a few minutes, said quietly, ‘It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I don’t trust myself,’ he said. ‘I just don’t think that I can do it.’
‘But we could try,’ I was insisting. I had never wanted anything so much. The more he resisted me the more certain I felt.
‘I just don’t think that I can do it,’ he said again.
I woke up that final morning at dawn, hungover, knowing I had to pack and leave. The alcohol had made me all jangly and nervous. In the face of the damage I was doing to myself over Michael I simply dropped all my defences, and my main memory of that morning is of the most intense vulnerability. I arrived, briefly, at the moment I always pursued with Michael. The moment when we both moved as one, when I was outside myself, when I glimpsed what I called spirit. And the thing about Michael is that for all that things were wrong between us, we could do this for each other. There were seconds when we could be in each other’s company and be truly, intensely happy. I could feel that he loved me, my skin vibrated with the knowledge; it was on his lips, in his fingertips. He felt my belly, stroked my breasts. ‘You’re full,’ he said. ‘You’re silk. You’re…beautiful.’ It was true that my body had swollen over the time I was with him, at the thought of him, under his touch.
We made love slowly and for hours. I would think minutes had passed and glance at the clock by the bed to see that more than an hour had gone by. I curled into a ball, he fucked me from behind, his fingernails gently scratching the small of my back. I was like an animal, mewing, breathing heavily. I couldn’t speak. Michael, usually voluble during sex, finally was at a loss for words.
Ten
‘I want us to go to Land’s End at the tip of India,’ Ruby says. ‘I think you’ll like it there.’
‘I’m sure I will,’ I say, ‘but it’s ten hours in a bus in the opposite direction from where we planned to go next.’
‘It’s a sacred place,’ she says, firmly. ‘You are here to rediscover your spirituality, and I’ve organised us a lift.’
We’re driven there by a middle-aged Indian couple Ruby met when she was watching the cricket on TV at our hotel in Munnar.
‘We are here in the tea plantations for our second honeymoon,’ Gita told Ruby. ‘Now our children have all left home.’ Gita and her husband, Rajeev, both grew up in Uganda but they met in Bombay after they’d been forced out by Amin during the seventies. Now they live in London.
‘Our marriage was arranged,’ Gita tells us on the drive. ‘So it was not like falling madly in love. Actually I loved someone else.’ Rajeev drives on stoically. ‘My first boyfriend, he was better looking than Rajeev. But not as rich and not from such a good family.’
I start to laugh, then stop myself, for fear of offending them. I needn’t worry. They have told this story many times before.
‘I had a very sexy girlfriend myself,’ Rajeev says. ‘More sexy than Gita, but also, not as rich.’ Gita starts to laugh, then Rajeev joins in. They crack each other up.
‘Actually,’ Gita recovers herself. ‘Our love was slow to come, but now it is good. Sometimes we are quite bored, but mainly, we love each other very much.’
Rajeev turns around and winks at Ruby who is in the back seat. ‘When it is too boring,’ he says, ‘I can always watch the cricket.’
‘This is a very nice hotel,’ Gita says when they drop us off. ‘Rajeev, why aren’t we staying at this hotel?’
It is a very nice hotel. I am taken aback. ‘I booked it,’ Ruby says. ‘Special for us. Let’s dump our stuff. It is not far off sunset and I want to give you a present.’
I don’t understand the connection between these two things, but we walk down through the fishing village, and the shell shops for tourists and pilgrims. Ruby leads me through the tangle of touts to a patch of ocean that has rocks banked up all around, creating an artificial lagoon. The water is full of women in saris and men in dhotis. They squeal and flick water at each other before reluctantly going under.
‘Come,’ Ruby says. ‘Follow me.’
She walks to the water line and then keeps on going, full-length skirt, long-sleeved shirt and all. She turns to make sure I’m behind her.
I join her at about waist height and then we hold our noses and go under together, trying to ignore the colour of the water. It is putrid and brown.
After we have done that she hugs me then puts a hand on my shoulder, and holds me at arm’s length. She says to me, formally, ‘This is where the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea meet. Gandhi’s ashes were spread here, where we are standing. That is why it is a sacred place. That is why you must wash yourself here. It is something like the Christian notion of washing away your sins—it leaves you open for life’s blessings. Like you said when we first met, this is an important time for you: you are being reborn in all directions.’ She kisses me ceremoniously on the forehead.
It is a nutty, lovely thing to do. I smile at her, kiss her back.
‘As an added bonus, this is one of the few places in the world where you can see the sunset and the moonrise at the very same moment—every April. Since it’s September we will have to make do with watching the sun set tonight, and being able to see the sunrise tomorrow, while standing at practically the same point.’
‘I love this kind of cosmic symbolic stuff, you know that, don’t you?’
‘Of course I know,’ Ruby says, looking proud of herself. ‘Do you think I’d have gone to all this trouble if I didn’t?’
Later that night I am woken by a thunderstorm that doesn’t quite come. The sky is rumbling and there are bolts of lightning, but no rain. It is like the song from Lagaan says, Let loose not the sword of lightning, but the arrows of raindrops! I sit up and shake myself, hoping that if I can properly wake, perhaps I might properly rest. I look across at Ruby. Her face is angled towards a shaft of moonlight that has broken through a gap in the clouds. I sit, wakeful, and watch her sleep.
Tony was waiting for me at Sydney airport, which surprised me but made me happy. We had exchanged the occasional email while I was away, and it seemed to me from the emails, from the fact he was here, that he wanted to forget our fight so we could go back to being friends. I launched into the details of my trip but I hadn’t judged things between us right. He cut across me. ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘It’s the blizzard I want to hear about, not Michael. I get the picture. Full moon and fire gone. Waning moon and snow instead. You are such a hippy. But in this case, go with the signs. I think they’re right. He’s a jerk; I don’t know what you see in him. He’s not even good looking, like me.’
‘His nose isn’t as big though,’ I said, pushing my luck even further in an attempt to get us back to how things had been. To my immense relief, he laughed.
‘Take me to the beach,’ I drew him into a hug. ‘I want to swim. I have been pining for Bondi.’
When we got to the water and I dived into the waves, I finally felt I had come home. It was cold and refreshing and to be so close to the sea, to spend the day in and beside it, felt like a blessing. In the afternoon we went together on one of my favourite walks on the North Shore, around from the Taronga Zoo to Clifton Gardens, where the bush was so thick that, if it wasn’t for the sight of the occasional ferry heading past on its way to Manly, you would think you were in the middle of the country. To add to the adventure spiders’ webs, in the middle of which sat big fat spiders, were strung from one side of the path to the other—sometimes a dozen in only a hundred metres.
Tony had packed a picnic for us and after walking for an hour or so we sat on the lawn that led down to the beach at Clifton Gardens and ate crusty bread with avocado.
‘Do you think I should listen to him when he says he loves me, or when he says it’s over?’ I couldn’t help myself.
‘You really must be losing it if you think it is okay to talk to me about this shit. After what happened between us.’
I went to speak, but then didn’t, because he was right. This thing—and it was more than Michael, I knew that—was bigger than me and it left me with no judgment.
‘I’m going to let you off the hook this time,’ Tony went on, ‘because I drove all my friends crazy when I was breaking up with Julia.’ He put his hand over mine. ‘I don’t approve, and I need you to shut up. But I understand.’
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