Turn Left at Venus

by Inez Baranay

  ‘I didn’t know who you were.’

  ‘I wanted to know who you were,’ Julius would say. Ada was not used to this, no one wanted to know who she was, and she wouldn’t necessarily notice if they did. ‘I saw you and then I couldn’t find you.’ There was quite a crowd, Ada had to suppose one typical for this kind of thing. There were free drinks for a while over in one area, and people also gathered around a solo jazz saxophonist.

  When Ada was left alone unseeable to stare at a huge canvas streaked with expressive, improbable colour in conflicted movements, Julius could see her.

  A trolleybus went past, its name Parnassus large on its forehead, in this city of steep hills, spreading mists, pagan streets.

  One day it was summer, and everyone went outside, it might not last, summer days had no schedule here.

  Here you dreamed that you were on these very streets, in your dreams longing for them.

  Julius was famous-ish at this time but not anything like as famous as he desired to be and would be.

  He wanted a lot of attention, did what he could to let it find him, and liked being seen with a woman.

  ‘What are you, an actress?’ he asked Ada. Or he assumed she was one, being in talks with the filmmaker. He said something like, ‘I’m sure it’s a leading role.’

  Ada didn’t get what he meant at first but then gently said, ‘I’m not an actress.’

  Ada got respect from Julius because he knew she had been talking with SK. Julius, another young Napoleon, might already have been thinking that some way down the track there was another visual medium calling for him. There wasn’t anything like that going on with him then, not yet; Julius was fully invested in his painting, it took all of him.

  Julius never admitted to reading anything Ada wrote.

  He had his theories about writers, he knew from writers, he knew it all about writers, he told her about writers. Ada let him tell her about writers: it was his way, knowing all about it and forcibly telling you; he revealed more when he was encouraged, more than when she attempted an argument. Ada was entertained watching him pontificate, utter his American phrases, the way he said ‘tell ya what I’m gonna do’ or ‘he’s a real piece of work and a royal pain in the ass;’ she couldn’t tell if it was an affectation or if those phrases came naturally. Friend of his a writer, this and that and so forth, what happened to him and why his books sell or sell more than some other guy’s. Sell, that’s what you made art for, to sell more, to get noticed, invited, met.

  Julius going on about how famous he has to get now, he’s ready for a major solo show in New York that’s on the cards, glad he doesn’t live there but you gotta show there.

  Ada remembers walking around the rooms, not wanting to talk to anyone, wanting only to look at each painting, and there was a room of drawings also, and the sculpture with its slanting layers of grainy wood. At a vernissage it was the duty of people to drink wine, chat, make deals.

  When Ada let herself become invisible, captive to those paintings, their violence and elegance, she was not invisible to the artist. Who stood in a corner protected by his dealer and someone, maybe that guy who sold him his paints and had come to see what transmutation his raw materials had been subjected to. The new artists didn’t get their materials from the art store, they went to the hardware store.

  Sophie said, ‘So you’re going home with the artist?’ She knew before Ada knew.

  For a while then Julius existed in Ada’s mind as a source of amusement as well as something quite shattering and unbalancing, giddy-making and, well, it should be fleeting, because she wasn’t intending to stay in this city, though she did stay on a little longer than initially planned.

  Julius made himself as charming as he could be and he was provided with, had cultivated, a store of charm. He was occasionally charming to the interviewers and buyers admitted to his studio, usually with his alert dealer in attendance; at other times he was obnoxious.

  Julius was combative, competitive, ready to slog it out, he admitted it. ‘He’s got his dukes up all the time,’ said the dealer to Ada about Julius, maybe not that first night, just offering her an observation in the tones of ‘as we both know’. She knew this saying somehow, maybe from comic books. It was true Julius was ready to see a slight: everyone was plotting to bring him down, he didn’t get what he deserved, no one really got him right, and those who did were miserably failing to influence a stupid ignorant world and could she have seen that yet?

  Early on Ada saw how he could be obnoxious but it didn’t worry her, he was too determined to catch hold of that incipient flicker of something curious in her and turn it into fascination and desire.

  He had looked at Ada and seen her, set out to win her. He made her feel beautiful in his eyes, making her feel she knew how it felt to be desirable. She was into her thirties now, and this was the first time she had believed anyone really saw her like that.

  Ray had never said more than ‘you look very nice’ or ‘that looks nice on you’.

  Ada felt she never quite knew about men and went about trying never to meet their random eyes. She supposed them generally to be indifferent to her or to be complimentary because they had to be. In Australia compliments were a kind of impersonal assault; here they were a kind of impersonal politeness.

  But suddenly now in this city she wanted to look a man deep into his eyes.

  Just to know.

  Beauty was essential to Julius, even while his work was named as disturbing, unsettling; revealing and reflecting the rough edges of urban existence, its disharmonies, clashes.

  Like the music he played on his precious record player she was forbidden to touch in its dark wooden cabinet; the music’s edgy nervous phrases stepping into menace, pain, defiance and occasional passages of heavenly loveliness to transcend all, the soul is free.

  Outside, the music was the new music of the streets and all about its own newness. About heartbeat and sex and altered states.

  He was a short, stocky man, well muscled with his big belly attesting to big appetites not denied. Ada used to think he looked like a frog with his broad face and buggy eyes at the sides of his head, but he was also a bear, wide and hairy and warm. Fur grew all over him. He made her nervous – he intended to, he did all he could to unnerve her. She remembered him in a combination of the taste of red wine, and the smell of paint and turpentine and the yellow soap at the bathtub; the linens of his bed had a soapy smell.

  ‘How I came to think of it,’ Ada tells Noemi, ‘he had been sent to me for a lesson about the thrall of that kind of sex and extreme heterosexuality. Even while part of me was just watching from the wings, taking notes like an anthropologist.’

  Noemi says, ‘I have noticed the way you do that.’

  Ada says, ‘You told me that’s what I do.’

  Noemi asks, ‘Did it affect your writing? Was it a way to make it go queerer?’

  ‘I didn’t exactly think, I’m going to destroy patriarchal forms now.’

  ‘But you were in that territory,’ says Noemi.

  It was his triumph, to win Ada that night, and because he liked himself that way (a lover, a man in love) he convinced himself he was in love from the start, before finding any reasons to be in love besides that accident of timing, opportunity, attraction, need, the mood, the dynamic. He also liked to be love’s fool, to discover he had been dazzled.

  Life will deal you an artfully staged meeting and seduction at least one time, artfully timed too it has to be.

  Julius set about treating her body with the utmost tenderness, with delicate caresses that became cruel in their teasing insistence and feathery softness until something happened then he would slam into her as they howled and quaked in each other’s arms. Ada recovered and gave herself to wondering to which of her new characters this experience belonged.

  The element of detachment in her drove Julius to greater attempts to dominate her. How could he abandon if he had not completely conquered?

  But Ada could not b
e abandoned, for she was always about to depart, and depart she did, sooner than she even knew she would.

  Thankful for having been there, thankful for not wanting to stay.

  If he said anything bossy to her in the gruff tough manner typical of him, one he liked to perform, she said it back to him also tough.

  ‘I grew up in Newark,’ he said. Apparently it was pretty tough out there. On a street where gangsters lived, and there was a shootout one day that the kids saw, and the street was blocked off by police a time or two.

  ‘I grew up in the Western Suburbs and Kings Cross,’ Ada said, and explained: ‘with the working class, the refugees, and the déclassé.’

  Julius said he had an interest in Australia, he said he’d like to see the desert. At that time Ada had not ever heard even the faintest call of the desert. What was Australia to her? – it was her city and then it was all that lay beyond it, all of it a desert as far as she was concerned, as far as she recalled later.

  He liked his romantic view of Australia – desert, wilderness, he’d heard there were roads you could drive all day without seeing another human being. The desert was purification. To the extent she knew any of that it was the same way he knew it, from paintings and insubstantial reports. She would only ever see that Australia very much later and only as a tourist passing through.

  Julius had an obsessive interest in origins, he kept asking her who were her people, what did she know about them. Nobody, nothing. And telling about his, the grandparents, the parents, Ellis Island, but he’s an American, it doesn’t matter, in America none of that matters anymore, but we have to know where we came from.

  He was proudly an American but not in the way the kids were protesting about. He didn’t think his country should be making foreign wars, which are for making someone rich anyway, and powerful on a plane of power that you and I cannot touch.

  Ada declared that her origins were lost in death and madness, and she was in effect an orphan without blood relations.

  ‘You can’t be that way,’ he said, as if she really had a choice.

  It was supposedly summer in San Francisco, but there was always that famous fog they had all these sayings about. Rolling in, muffling sound, scattering the light, obliterating direction, making everyone who allowed it to turn inwards, everyone who could go inside go inside, and making the few who needed to go out into its depths.

  The day came when she was going to see Julius but could not seem to get out the door.

  Ada stopped going round to see Julius, she had hit her stride with writing the sequel, just wanted to finish it now, stay in its spell, keep whatever hours she felt like.

  Julius sent her a note in the post, to her hotel; it was a drawing, of a door, an open door, his open door.

  There had been some messages at the desk downstairs that he had telephoned. He didn’t have a phone at his studio. She hadn’t got around to phoning some number where he always got his messages.

  She mailed back a sketch of a typewriter and a pair of hands poised above the keys.

  22

  WRITING THE SEQUEL

  The Stranger liked the world of Lueshira, at least as much as Ada liked inventing it, and he thought he might want to stay, to live there, wanted to learn more from this world, wanted, you may surmise, to become a new kind of person.

  But there were the others from Dunya, the crew from his ship, circling Lueshira, monitoring his findings, ready to pick him up, it was time to go.

  That’s where Turn Left At Venus ended.

  Once The Stranger’s reports reached his home planet, other people thought they would like to try his experience.

  Ada’s work was to learn more about Lueshira, what would happen to those who thought they could come to live there, what new questions and discoveries they would have, would the newcomers make a prophecy of the Dark Saga.

  What if the Dark Saga turned out to be a warning about the future, not a lesson from the past?

  This time, the people from Dunya came with expectations, they had been briefed.

  What did they want?

  They wanted to go to the latest place where ‘nobody’ had been before.

  They wanted to have The Stranger’s experience, only in their case already knowing what he had had to find out.

  They wanted his reports to be their guidebook even while they wanted to feel like the first explorers.

  They wanted to learn.

  They wanted to teach.

  They wanted to make profits and make adherents.

  They wanted to see if any good deals could be made.

  They wanted to be among the first to get here.

  They wanted to be as far as they could be from home but able to keep in touch, able to return if they chose to, able to see if they could tell themselves that they would never return.

  They wanted to go somewhere that would transform them.

  They wanted transformation that was easy, an agreeable, gratifying process that told them they were fine people already.

  People came to San Francisco to be who they wanted to be.

  They came to try out being someone else for a while.

  Ada walked up and down the city slopes; the pathways and stairways seemed steeper even than those in Sydney. Jasmine tumbled down high walls, streetcars rocked on their tracks in the distance, light came from the sea, burned off the fog and painted the houses, for some moments the shadows were stark and clear. She felt deeply disrupted, deeply reassembled.

  Ada walked around the part of town where the kids had hitchhiked to from all over the country, to make their world one of peace, love and understanding.

  Some of them thought they would live forever in this eternal now of music on the streets and revolution in the air, that they would never wash off their face paint or take off their beads.

  Then they will find they want to and can’t. Then they will find they cannot return to their former selves.

  Am I dreaming? Ada dug her fingernails into her palms and felt it.

  So, people from Dunya make their way to Lueshira, because they think of it as a perfect world, a utopia, but they had not been brought up here, so, so they, so they, they don’t adjust as easily as they expected to, they don’t understand the rules and laws, they bring discord with them, it is the way of our world.

  In this story, the people from Dunya have heard about this world, about Lueshira, from The Stranger who sent back his spaceship without him, with the news he was going to stay where he was. In time you could pay to be in a group that was going there to live. It sounded like a world these people wanted to experience, to be part of. Naturally it turns out that they weren’t going to fit in or adjust all that well and you can let the reader see that coming.

  So it’s the story of the people who come to live on Lueshira, totally believing they are ready to live there, and can fit in. It starts out seeming to be a book full of optimism, at first all obstacles made to melt away in a kind of magic of good will, good intentions, faith in the good, a society where all good is common good.

  But then

  Humans being what they are

  Which you know from history and the present

  The war

  Always a war

  Is it other planets though?

  Other planet or other world?

  Other places. People write about people from ‘other planets’ when they talk of her Lueshira books, and her other books, but Ada never said planets. It could be planets. Ada might have said dimensions, ‘dimensions’ seemed a more accurate word, fitting her sense of other places whose distance is not understood in earthbound measures of space and time.

  Ada looked up into the boundless universe one night when the sky was clear and starry, galaxies, solar systems, a vast and indifferent amaze, and out there somewhere was Lueshira. There was so much space, space infinite, so much space that it could hold phenomena that did not exist in space as we know it. That’s how The Stranger from Earth travelled to Lueshira and that’s h
ow those worlds existed, even while on Earth massively funded astronomers and their machines searched for extraterrestrial intelligence and never found it, because they only searched in the dimension in which they themselves existed.

  Ada lay on her bed and began to dream. She tried to dig her fingernails into her palms and there was no sensation. She found herself on Lueshira, watching the new people arrive and expect The Stranger to meet them and become their willing guide. There was a married couple, who thought this trip would invigorate their life together. Ada followed them into the subsequent days. The woman wanted the two of them to learn how to change their sex as the inhabitants of Lueshira did. The man did not and sternly admonished her for considering it, for if they did not hold on to their identities, their natural roles would be irretrievable.

  In San Francisco, Ada tells Noemi, she learned that a woman can be all kinds of new things that aren’t in the old stories, until you go looking for them. They are not new things, they are things that were easily hidden.

  Keep your mouth closed and they will assume you have nothing worth saying. Watch and listen, they don’t know what you make of it. They don’t know you’re making anything of it. Mild-mannered Ada who is overlooked, disregarded, only she knows she is underestimated, super Ada who understands more than they know they are saying.

  Who wouldn’t prefer to live in another world, at least to try it out?

  In Lueshira. Where the idea of underestimating a woman cannot exist.

  Ada went to a party for women only, and after a while was taken by the hand and led into a bedroom.

  The woman kissed her, Ada kissed her back, everyone in there was kissing everyone.

  Why yes she had found her people.

  Hours passed in pliant aromatic flesh sticky fingers a mist of musk bruised mouth rippling orgasms reaching everywhere, unending in the aches that lasted days. The woman’s long dark hair fell over her feet as she sucked Ada’s toes; enlightenment flooded her for that time, mottled with tentative knowledge of the erogeneity of the entire body.