Turn Left at Venus

by Inez Baranay

No, she did not see the women again, she went back to her room and did not leave the neighbourhood. She had to write her Sequel.

  ‘That theme in my life,’ Ada tells Noemi, who knows it well.

  ‘You only thought you could not both have a life and write,’ says Noemi.

  ‘I thought it because it was true, you know that,’ says Ada.

  ‘You were afraid of intimacy, afraid to be known.’

  ‘Stop telling me that, everything is different now. Anyway, I was only afraid of not finishing the book.’

  Eventually Ada didn’t want to stay even in San Francisco, though she would come back. When the book was done, then if she wanted to write something different she had to go somewhere new.

  It was a choice, Ada explains to Noemi, at that point: write the book or go hang out with the women and become something new.

  She would become something new again after writing the book and going somewhere else.

  They work out the dates, and Noemi was in San Francisco at the time.

  ‘You would not have left if that had been me who took you by the hand.’

  Ada holds Noemi’s hand. ‘I wasn’t ready for you then.’

  How do people die on Lueshira? Do they age? Should she think about this now? Does this go into this novel, does this issue concern the bossy woman, the irrepressible optimist, the irrepressible pessimist, the one brought along as a reluctant fiancé, the one who wants to leave the group, the one who cannot learn to communicate with the people of Lueshira, the couple who came to strengthen their relationship but fell apart in conflict.

  The first book did not pay attention to the question of death. At first Ada thought that people would not age on Lueshira, but then later it came to her that on the utopian world some aged people were all serenity and wisdom, some were all wisdom and fire. Not rage, but a florescence of spirit.

  No, maybe not go into that now. Who knows, another sequel. There might be yet another. There must be more questions arising out of the search for a perfect world, the perfect way for a world to manage itself.

  You came to this new world and you made yourself into a new person but the old person from your previous life could not perceive this. This is the story of the Earth people’s marriage that falls apart on Lueshira, calling into question what kind of place is this that causes such disturbance.

  The new people come with a dream of perfection, and mostly they only find and create disturbance.

  23

  WERE WE THE DEAD?

  Ada wrote the last page of The Shelf of Bone and came downstairs and there at the hotel desk was Leyla.

  The day that Ada typed it out freshly, the one major revision that completed it, her second book like her first and like they all would be. Two drafts.

  And a carbon copy.

  Or Ada was just returning from taking the manuscript to Sophie. Headed back to her room, dreading its emptiness, needing something transitional, while she decided what came next, wanting to decide very fast what came next, hoping to soon know what it was. About to step into a punishing need to be clear about what to decide now.

  She could see more of this city, but became aware of a fear the next fog would smother her in melancholy here. She couldn’t quite see herself going back to Sydney yet. Where do you go when you could go just about anywhere?

  Leyla was standing by the desk demanding to know when Ada would be back.

  That same day Leyla’s card arrived in the mail. A row of palm trees seen from below receded into the distance; the picture was in black-and-white and yet somehow it was clear that the palms were of a bright sun-drenched green. Inside the card, Leyla’s handwriting said, ‘I’m coming!’

  They laughed. ‘I beat the mail,’ said Leyla.

  ‘You got here just in time.’

  ‘Timing is everything.’

  ‘I wrote the last page yesterday.’

  Ada felt she was a week later than she had meant to be.

  ‘I let you finish it,’ said Leyla, as if she had chosen her arrival with an occult knowledge. And kind consideration.

  And look at the timing.

  Ada had been in San Francisco for seven months, writing in her room with the blue checked curtains and bedcover. On her typewriter, yes. That same old one.

  ‘You sound so Australian!’ Leyla said as if it were an accusation.

  Leyla now spoke with a bit of an American lilt, but inconsistently.

  Turn Left was about to appear in a new edition with the new publisher, and Sophie had somehow arranged some prepublication reviews. The author name now appeared as A. L. Ligeti. The bio note read only ‘Turn Left At Venus is A. L. Ligeti’s first novel. Its sequel, The Shelf of Bone, will be published in the fall.’

  Leyla never asked to see the book. Whether Ada expected congratulations or not, none came.

  Leyla never said she had read Ada’s book or that she would or that she wanted to.

  But one thing Leyla did say, Leyla said she had told Ada to write the sequel.

  Noemi says, ‘“I’ll prove how much I like you by never reading your book.” That’s what some people say, or at least think. They’re afraid of reading a friend’s book in case they don’t like it.’

  ‘No,’ Ada tells Noemi, ‘I think it’s more like she did not want to acknowledge there was a part of me she could not know.’

  Noemi says, ‘There always is, isn’t there?’

  ‘Oh. Could be. Sure. But in this case, she didn’t admit it.’

  ‘But you didn’t know her, either, in any life but your own.’

  ‘I know.’ Ada knows because this is the kind of thing Noemi insists on talking about.

  ‘I, on the other hand,’ says Noemi, ‘and you were spared this also, was best known for my professional self and that led to some little disasters if anyone wanted to get intimate with that person I was seen as. Who I actually wasn’t. In other contexts.’

  ‘When it comes to the relationthing thing, I think disaster always comes,’ says Ada cheerfully.

  Leyla was the most vivid person Ada knew. There were no mild responses, things were either fabulous and impelling or dreary, unworthy of attention.

  Leyla demanded a level of vitality and, just like that, she made Ada rise to that level of vitality again.

  Ada might have been thinking, I have to see Leyla to feel like this.

  They had both succeeded in this, they had escaped, they weren’t living among The Squares, they had escaped the people still looking for kangaroos, anyone who would thwart or question their present lives while to live such lives was their vocation.

  ‘Being married is hard,’ Leyla told Ada. ‘You don’t know how hard it is because you never made a commitment.’

  ‘I will when the time is right.’

  ‘Especially in LA,’ Leyla said. It seemed to be a city that made it hard for people to stay married. ‘It’s so materialistic,’ Leyla said. Ada didn’t ask Leyla what she meant; if she was supposed to know she should be able to work it out.

  While up here there was a quite different climate, though the two cities were not as far apart in distance as Sydney and Melbourne, . ‘Not just the weather,’ Leyla pointed out. ‘I quite like dressing differently here,’ says Leyla, who was wearing pants and a sort of Japanese-y jacket in audacious combinations of coloured prints, with multiple strands of beads and pendants, Native American and African.

  Leyla knew how to be looked at. She prepared herself as if composing a visual art piece, ready for any curious or discerning gaze. She dressed herself without example or guidance, only her own sure instinct and ruthless accumulation of uncommon pieces. On anyone else they’d seem mismatching; on her they seemed artfully blended.

  Ada wore her flea-market leather blazer all the time in those days, over old clothes she’d kept, the sweaters to mid-thigh, the skirts to mid-calf. (Mini-skirts were ‘in’.)

  The kids out there were wearing beads but Leyla wore works of art beads. ‘But let’s go see the kids,’ said Leyla.
<
br />   They went to the part of town where young people played guitars and drums in the streets with painted faces, dressed in tie-dyed pyjamas and military jackets, adorned with fresh flowers. The kids had run away from all over the country to be here. They wanted the world to be different and were living like it already was. They had places that would give them food and let them crash. They weren’t going away, and more kids were going to arrive as the summers went on. It could just keep on going and going like this.

  The painted kids on the street were said to hate and fear anyone over the age of thirty but a bunch of them called out to Leyla and Ada, ‘groovy ladies’, ‘switched-on mammas’. How the two of them laughed, and called themselves groovy mammas all day.

  The kids only wanted to be among gentle people and knew to live outside the law you must be honest. But now you heard that bad things could happen, flower children of the new age sometimes trusted villains who gave them impure drugs and imprisoned them one way or another.

  About her husband, Leyla did not say very much. She might have been trying to determine what to say to Ada. ‘It’s nice for us to have this little bit of time apart,’ Leyla said. ‘I need it, he needs it.’

  Ada had left Ray, or, they’d agreed to separate she preferred to say; she’d had a brief fiery fling with Julius, that was something to talk about; ‘and now,’ Ada said to Leyla, not disclosing everything, with her own set of things she didn’t know how to tell yet, ‘I just think there are possibilities I might want to discover.’

  ‘Southern California,’ said Leyla, ‘is the most spiritual place there is.’

  A card from Julius also arrived, and Ada had to show Leyla at once as they were spending all day together, for a few days. He’d made a drawing, a bed, his empty bed that she recognised, and a pair of dark tights like only Ada wore discarded on the floor.

  ‘Subtle,’ said Leyla sarcastically. ‘So is this a relationship? I hate that word. Relationboat.’

  And Ada and Leyla laughed, and repeated it a few times for a while before the word settled down and stopped annoying them.

  Ada sent Julius a card on which she drew a book open at its last page with the word ‘end’ on it, and a picture of a plane, though she was not going to take a plane.

  What plane? Ada thought she was going back to Sydney but the thought didn’t feel right.

  ‘Why would you go back there?’ asked Leyla.

  No reason. Not even if you fondly remember the Harbour, the Cross, the friendly g’day from Mick in the newsagent. Let her be away for longer, see if she misses any of it more or less.

  Ada would go the other way. Clearly, she would take a train across this continent to New York.

  They spent the day walking along the waterfront, inspecting pleasure craft at the marina.

  The time Leyla called someone else a ‘real writer’.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ada dared to ask. Leyla did betray a fleeting discomfort, she did not like to be asked what she really meant. She was hardly going to say what she really meant. She meant that she had picked up a notion of Ada being outside of the world of literature, real literature, the stuff classics were made of. Also, outside of, as different as this was, the world of people who wrote the films, and could do it because they had been around and around and knew people and knew what a good story was.

  Leyla couldn’t seem to quite settle on how she should treat Ada’s writing life and would ignore or dismiss it at times, at times offer condescending advice. ‘Read a successful writer and see how they do it,’ she said. ‘I could write a book but I haven’t got the time. Someone will write a book about me.’

  Leyla was staying in a fancier hotel, a kind of businessman’s hotel. She said she did some work for her husband, his business, his colleagues; it was vague, it was hard to remember from the start because it was never clearly explained and Leyla tended to contradict herself, and lash out if questioned.

  ‘You don’t know what real people are like,’ Leyla said, hadn’t she said this before, didn’t she always say this to Ada? This was Leyla’s construction of Ada, not to be changed. Head in the clouds Ada, clueless Ada who didn’t know what to do with her life until Leyla told her.

  Ada never challenged her.

  Leyla apparently was in demand as someone who could put together a party, she was a kind of producer, she knew the best caterer, best cleaner. They all had their parties in the daytime in LA, they all went to bed early. The parties were held around swimming pools, and you didn’t get into the water of course, the pool was for lying beside under an awning, or lying in on a rubber float, baking and cooling in the endless sun that made everything golden. They all talked about the light in LA. But mostly only about the business. At the end of some parties people went into the pool, thrown in, jumped in in their clothes, or with their clothes off. But mostly people kept these pools smooth and blue, water for reflection.

  ‘They love to see their reflection,’ said Leyla.

  ‘Well you are very entertaining,’ Ada said lovingly and, ‘So are you entertaining,’ said Leyla back lovingly, probably meaning something different.

  They aired the idea that this city was like Sydney with its slopes and parks and huge harbour, huge bridge. Bridge as synecdoche.

  ‘Is LA like this?’ Ada asked. You didn’t say Los Angeles, you said LA, and the other things they called it.

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Leyla.

  ‘What will I see? Are there hills everywhere?’

  The hilly areas were the canyons, and there was the beach, the boulevards, the valley – Ada could not quite imagine them; she had begun to read novels set in San Francisco, where people who disappear end up being found in an intricate plot of nasty schemes, pawns in a nasty game.

  The band’s name meant that those who had died were grateful to those who let them go, who eased their passage from this life to the beyond. Down at the park the crowd grew, and the music kept on going, the musicians playing on a stage far away. Leyla had the tiny pieces of blotting paper. Just swallow it. She had taken a trip before, in LA or somewhere near there. The purifying desert. Ada and Leyla found themselves on a grassy slope, the band and the crowd at a distance below them. For a while they only laughed, the clouds above spinning in the shapes and sounds of their laughter, Ada feeling her face break apart as she laughed, making her laugh harder. Breaking apart over and over but still there to keep breaking apart. Then laughter turned to a deep sigh, the music sighing through them, their sighs the breath of the cosmos. It was the way it always was when it was the two of them, they were a twosome inside an impenetrable barrier, no one else would ever find a way to admittance, others did not dare, or took their pleasure in leaving the two to be how they were. How splendid the two of them were, lying on the grass in the big golden park. Rainbows and revelations whirled around them, in more dimensions than they’d ever known, they saw the same ones. Aeons passed in a moment, you could get inside moments and find them stretched to vast tracts of time in which worlds were created, bloomed, declined. They touched their future knowledge, knew for a while everything that could be known. The music came from pure divinity and pure embodiment, spiralling in colours in the air. They looked upon each other with something that combined fresh amazement with deep familiarity, gods beholding their own creations, wiser than wisdom.

  A long time later they wandered further into the park, stopping at a water fountain, splashing themselves and drinking a little; water was the entirety of the sustenance they ever wanted. They were at their pinnacle, while they were calmer too, now, the undulations of the world gentle, infinitely beneficent.

  The park extended, paths stretched through gardens and fields and encircled an occasional building. It was all vivid, supernaturally so but it was what nature was, every blade of grass in the lawn and every leaf on the trees and every flower in the flowerbeds glowing and vibrating with the pure energy that was the only substance in existence. The people who occasionally passed them were also in a psychedelic haze, and th
ey greeted each other with deep recognition, wordless, requiring no sign. Things meant whatever you made them mean.

  Ada would always remember two teenage boys in jeans, one had patches of bright fabric sewn on his jeans; it was something about the way they were together that mirrored her and Leyla’s one-ness; the way they all smiled at each other, in recognition of the bliss.

  The sun disappeared behind clouds.

  They were sitting upon a wooden bench.

  Staring into a flowerbed.

  At one flower.

  This flower in the flowerbed was bright with vivid colour and juicy with vigorous sap, but then look, all its pigment and sap were draining out, the whole process taking place in one slow blink, the flower was now colourless, dried up, crumpled, ready to be buried and disintegrate where it once arose. Something of it would become part of the soil, feed another flowering plant.

  The people who walked by were briefly blooming. The dead were all around us. Everything was going to die. You’ve always known but not really known, only known as a thing that is known, not as a thing that you know with your knowing. It was as if knowing itself were making itself clear to you. Who could live all the time knowing this as clearly as this? Witch, mystic, priestess, scientist. Seeing the bright grass turn brown and crumble, blow away as dust in dry cruel wind.

  Ada looked up to see a group of people skipping and singing, coming off the pathway to the lawn behind the flowerbed, and then pirouetting away and as they did their own life juice all went out of them, and the flesh was no more, and only their bones danced, just before finding out they were also going to crumble.

  A moment of real horror then just look hard at it and it turns into dust, into nothing.

  Were we the dead?

  To whom or what will we be grateful when we are dead?

  When Ada and Leyla began to talk it was about an insight they’d both had: that they were already dead, they had passed into the realm beyond.

  They would continue to live their lives knowing they might not actually be in this world at all.

  They might have already left it.