Maureen has prepared a dinner complete with candles and aperitifs. It is their first proper meal together, he could not have refused; and he sees all the indications of its importance, the nice plates, the flowers, the artillery of forks and knives. He sees the hours in front of him. “Devils on horseback,” she says, offering a plate to his chest. The concoction of prunes and bacon is the sort of thing Justin never eats — he has a shepherd’s taste in food. She knows, but serves this anyway. Like a voice mumbling into a sleeping ear, she works to alter him. She thinks that alteration is what he wants, and what is good for him. And, at first, Justin had been eager to change. He’d wanted to be the kind of man this smarter, older woman might think equal. Now, though — now that Maureen’s intelligence has so often proved a tedious test or trap, now the years that separate them have lost their power to intrigue, now he’s witnessed her at her most basic, and it’s lowered his awe to earth — it is humiliating to recall that old willingness. How easily impressed he had been. “Did you see David?” Maureen’s asking, and he sips champagne from an anorexic glass and admits, “No. I hid.”
“Hid? What for?”
“I didn’t hide,” he says, because it’s simpler to inexplicably change the story, he can’t be bothered following the path down which the admission will lead; and she doesn’t remark on his apparent schizophrenia, she doesn’t even seem to have heard. She is wearing a white jumpsuit which has a line of stainless-steel studs from breastbone to waist — he imagines the banging, like firecrackers, that would accompany the removal of the jumpsuit. Her feet are bare, which he would have once found enticing; now their calculated nakedness seems pitiful, worse than the exposing of an undesired breast. She glides close to him, and were it not for the devil in one hand and the glass in the other, she would try to make him waltz. She once suggested accompanying him to a club or a disco, somewhere they might dance. It has never happened, and it never will. “Look at you,” she’s saying. “Standing here, like you belong.”
“Maybe I’m here too often.”
“Hardly. What does your mother say? Poo?”
Justin smiles stickily. Cydar had said, “Something’s not right about her.” And it isn’t right that she knows his mother’s word, which belongs to Justin’s childhood and to Justin’s family. She hangs against his shoulder, a habit he no longer finds endearing; her open-necked collar channels his sights down her cleavage, and even this fails to please. He’ll always think her body is beautiful; but he won’t want it, in particular, anymore. “We’ve got your sister to thank for tonight,” she’s saying, and every word sounds like the ingredient of a potion. He struggles to slow this slide into aversion — he doesn’t want to hate her, having once believed he loved her — but what’s left of his affection tumbles downhill unstoppably. It has to end, it’s already ended. He didn’t know it when he knocked on the door, but he has come to say good-bye. “I don’t know how we coped without Aria. She’s a bonanza.”
He’s still smiling. “Maybe you shouldn’t get too friendly with her.”
“Justin! Aria’s an innocent. She’s completely without guile. It’s just a bit of fun.”
Justin swallows the champagne. If she has Plum, Cydar had warned, she has a weapon. And it had not sounded crazy. “What can she do?” Justin had asked. “She can’t do anything. She’d risk losing too much.” And Cydar, standing at the chest of drawers spinning the oddment bowl, replied, “Rubber bands. She might be willing to lose.”
So it must be done, this very night — Justin’s anxious, now, to have it done. Maureen is an anchor he hadn’t meant to drop. There are rowdy companions, there are preferable girls, there are concerts and beaches, bars and sunrises, parties, hangovers, card tables, football games. There are scuffles in the street, cars to drive fast, half-remembered taxi rides into the beds of strangers. There are ways to live that don’t involve lying, explaining, apologizing. The most energizing aspects of infatuation die suddenly, and make for embarrassing, inconvenient corpses. Between himself and Maureen the thrill is gone, what sparkled is stale, the need has extinguished. If things are different for Maureen, that is regrettable. He doesn’t want to hurt her, he wants her to be happy, he’s even prepared to stay friends, if that’s what she wants. In fact, living side-by-side as they do, it will be easier if they’re friends. But he doesn’t need or love her, and any feelings Maureen has for him are her own responsibility: he won’t be blamed for them. When he leaves, he won’t be carrying anything with him.
“Maureen —” he begins.
The oven alarm yells raucously: Maureen grips his wrist and guides him to the dining table. “I hope you’re hungry. It’s apricot chicken.” The table is a circular arrangement of chrome and smoked glass — it’s hard to imagine eating a satisfying meal off such a thing. Justin sits alone, annoyed. The moment is lost, but he is resolved, he won’t put it off another day. Maureen returns from the kitchen with plates on which repose flanks of chicken doused with sizzling apricot sauce. She brings brown rice in a clay tureen that has a decorative matching ladle. Justin pours while Maureen serves; when she sits, she raises her glass to him, and he hurriedly hoists his own. “You look handsome,” she says. “Is that shirt new?” Such must be their conversation — they have no mutual friends, no shared occupations, no rich entwined history to review. He won’t talk of the future, which belongs to him; of the present, so little remains to say. Forever after, Justin will credit Maureen with teaching him the startling fact that fucking alone doesn’t make for sustainable conversation.
“Is the rice all right?”
“Yes, it’s perfect.”
“Not undercooked?”
“No, fine.”
He feels her gaze moving over him. “I wish I could sit at this table with you every night.”
Soon she’ll be talking about divorce. Cydar had said it in the voice of a necromancer. They’d been sitting in the bungalow, stoned as pagans; Justin had laughed aloud. Marriage, infants, divorce, old age — these things don’t concern him. Now, as he seeks the bone with the point of his knife, Justin feels a stab of unshirkable urgency. “Maureen,” he says, “I think we should stop — this. I want to.”
From across the iceland of table she stares at him, a cheetah reflected in glass. The first time he’d seen her, Justin had been stunned. He’d been mowing the naturestrip and she had strolled by with an envelope in her hand. Beneath the roar of the mower she’d spoken to him; he had shut off the motor, and she’d spoken again. New to the neighborhood, she couldn’t find a postbox. He had given her directions, and they’d looked at each other. “Thank you,” Maureen had said. A feather had flown up Justin’s spine.
“No,” she says. “Why should we?”
He can’t say, I’m cold. “Think about it, Maureen. I like you — you know that. But it can’t work — you know it can’t.”
“No, I don’t know that.” The cutlery in her hands is subsiding. “Are you saying it can’t work because I’m married? Are you feeling guilty?”
He’s felt lustful and swinish and craven and captured, overwhelmed and expanded and spirited and bored, but he’s never felt guilty, not about anything. “Of course.”
She answers immediately, “I’ll leave him.”
“No.” It’s all Justin can do not to scramble from his chair. “You can’t do that. You’ve got this life. You’ve got this house. With me, you’d have nothing —”
“I’d have you. That’s all I want.” She sits back and she doesn’t seem angry, just bemused by his failure to see what’s plain. “It’s not asking much, is it? One person, out of all the world?”
“But what about David?” The recollection of the child is a sudden spark in Justin’s mind. “He needs you.”
From across the table Maureen stares at him. Her knife and fork, slumping in her grip, have dotted the glass with apricot sauce. Outside, a car toots, shooing a cat off the road; from the record player in the corner comes a jazzy beat that Justin can’t bear. “I don’t under
stand.” Her voice is flat now. “What’s changed, Justin? Nothing. So why should we change? There’s no need. No one knows. No one is being hurt —”
Justin snatches at this means of release. “But they are. People are being hurt.”
“Hurt how?”
“Hurt because . . .” He reaches for something that feels true. “It’s like they’re being — poisoned — but they don’t realize it. Even if they don’t know about it, it’s still happening. And it’s not right, Maureen. It’s just . . . mean.”
She shakes her head. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“It’s not ridiculous.”
“It’s not?” She considers him. “Why care about this now, Justin? You never did before.”
“That’s not true. I’ve always cared. You do too.” Words so meaningless he’s surprised they can be said. “Look,” he says, “I love you, but doing this isn’t right —”
“And leaving the one you love is right?”
“Sometimes. Yes.”
“Have you found somebody else?”
“No!” He’s startled. “No. Only you.”
She nods, looks down at her dinner. She prods the peas with her fork, pushing a stray back to the herd. Justin watches a smile come to her face, and grow. She looks up and says, “You won’t be able to leave. You’ll start thinking about me. Me, sleeping beside someone who isn’t you.”
“I think about that all the time,” he answers; and he does. “Look, I love you,” he says again, and it sounds like a concession this time, a kind of bargaining. “But we need to think of your husband and child. That’s all there is to it, Maureen.”
“Really? I thought there was you and me.”
“There is. But some things just can’t happen.”
The woman sighs; her gaze moves over the sideboard, the drinks cabinet, the archway, returns to him. “So you love me, but not my situation.”
He tries, “I make things difficult for you.”
“But if things were different, you would have stayed?”
“Yes — probably, yes —”
“Then we’ll make things different. It’s easy enough. You and I will stay the same, and everything else can change.”
Something in Justin springs from its seat shrieking. “Maureen, we can’t. We just can’t. I should go. I’m sorry —”
“Justin, no, sit down! You haven’t finished your dinner!”
But he’s already pushing out his chair, he won’t be stopped again. “I’m sorry, Maureen,” he repeats, “but I can’t.”
He leaves her at the dinner table, steam roiling up from the meals. Through the house, down the driveway, to the footpath, across the lawn: he goes leaving nothing in his wake but a fast-flying kind of relief.
At home the television is burbling behind the closed door of the den. Justin changes out of his good clothes, then trots downstairs again. David and Plum are slumped on the couch watching a talent quest. They look up at him, David sleepy-eyed. Justin asks, “What time is Rosemary’s Baby on?”
“Are you going to watch it with me?” Plum struggles upright with hope.
“Maybe. Where’s Mums and Fa?”
“They went for a walk,” says David, and Plum nods. It is a typically inconvenient thing for his parents to do, right at this moment when Justin needs to get David out of the house before Maureen uses the child as an excuse to come to the door. He has no option but to tell Plum, “The lights are on next door. Mrs. Wilks must be home. You should take David back now. Then we won’t be interrupted during the film.”
Nothing gives Plum more joy than to watch movies in the dark with her brother. “Home time, Davy!” She chivvies the boy from his seat. Justin drops into the space they vacate, and as the girl and the child shamble from the room the thing that’s clearest in his mind is a thankfulness that Cydar wasn’t here to see it happen.
The cutlery is heavy. She had not wanted heavy cutlery, but there it is, this weight. The heaviness is all there is — after he left the room, there was nothing to see; after the front door closed, there was nothing to hear. She sits before the plates of unfinished food, the bottle of wine and the half-filled glasses, the pepper grinder and the single lily, and all of it is like a backdrop that can be rolled up or thrown away. Finally she puts the knife aside, and pats her cheeks, smooths her eyebrows, straightens her clothes. She sees, then, the pink petals and lime stem of the flower. She sees that the apricot sauce has lost its sheen. “Waste,” she says; and rather than flowing into the room, the word ducks back inside her throat, causing her breathing to hitch. Her fingers are weaving between each other, and her hands feel wintry. Long ago, a palm reader had told her that her father would die unexpectedly, that she would have four sons, that she would know hard times financially, that in middle age she’d have problems with her heart. A life so unremarkable that Maureen had jokingly replied that she might as well lock herself inside the average garage and start the average car.
“You have to be somewhere and live somehow and do something and be someone,” her mother always told her. “What’s wrong with what you are?”
But her mother is satisfied with smallness. Ordinary is enough for her. She has never had high expectations in terms of happiness, achievement, depth of thought. Maureen, who can think of so much that’s depressing, can’t think of anything worse. To live like something taken from the shelf of a cut-price variety store.
The chicken is inedible, its sauce is glue. There’s a trifle in the refrigerator — in the morning she will dig a hole and upend the dessert into it. The sponge and cream hitting the soil will make the sound of a monster.
When her mind goes to Justin, Maureen meets a whiteness that expands never-endingly.
She returns to thinking, instead, of her mother. Her mother is the sort of woman who says, “Be glad you have your health.” Her mother can’t see that life can be a boat on sapphire waters, a wild wind-trammeled cliff, the sleeper carriage of a transcontinental train, murder-suicides and reunions in the rain. That even a failure to be healthy can be a beautiful thing. If her mother were here, she would say, “It’s better this way. You’re a silly girl, Maureen.” And if Maureen were to explain that Justin is a wind-trammeled cliff, her mother would scoff. Silly girl.
Maureen begins crying, one tear at a time. The tears drop from her jaw and spatter the gold-rimmed edge of the plate.
The knock on the door startles her, yanks her out of her chair; she is up and moving instantly, she’s flying down the hall. The house is an indecipherable maze, the door torturously far away. “Wait!” she whimpers, terrified she won’t reach it before he disappears. She wrenches the handle and pulls the door, and the sight of Plum and David is inexpressibly cruel, her hands flutter up in fear that she’ll be sick. “Darlings!” she cries. “Come inside! Has it been raining? Have you had a lovely night? Has David been behaving? Have you had a lovely night?”
She backs down the hall with her son in her arms, her mind a runaway horse. The girl must not ask questions, she mustn’t see the dining table. There cannot be silence, or Maureen will disintegrate. She chatters all the way down the hall, David sagging against her shoulder, ice-creamed face on the spotless jumpsuit. In the nursery Maureen lays the boy on the bed and tucks the blankets around him. “Wait,” she says, “let me get you some money,” and darts from the room leaving the girl beside the child, and skitters down the hall.
In the kitchen she clutches her stomach, gouging at the soft flesh there.
Her head is already hurting when she returns to the nursery. Plum is fiddling with the Smurfs that squat along the windowsill. “Aren’t they awful?” Maureen says. “Bernie buys them for him. Such ugly little things. So what did you two do together? Did you have a nice time?”
“We watched television —”
“And how are your ears? Have you been using the methylated spirit? Show me — no, wait, just stand there a moment. Something about you looks different.” Maureen cocks her head, brows tensing. “Aria, I th
ink you’ve lost weight!”
The girl is thrilled. “Really? Really?”
“I’m not joking! You have! I told you you would, didn’t I? Come here, let me hug you!”
And the knowledge that Plum is not the hugging kind makes infinitely more satisfying the fact that she flings herself without hesitation into Maureen’s arms. They embrace deliriously, noses pressed against each other, Plum the padded totem pole, Maureen bony as a goat. “I’m going to buy you an outfit to wear at your party,” Maureen promises, holding on to Plum tight. “You deserve something pretty, you wonderful girl! I’m so glad we’ve become friends! Aren’t you?”
Later that night she’ll remember this moment, and wonder if she’s ever hated anyone more.
THE FINAL WEEK OF PLUM’S YEAR is golden. It reminds her of a fairground ride she’s seen in black-and-white movies, where a swan-shaped boat glides through a tunnel on submerged tracks. She would like every day of her life to be lived inside a cup-like swan that knew where it was going, and where it would end.
The weather, of a sudden, loses its brashness; the north wind stops blowing, the sun retreats, and summer is finally done. Plum’s school dress stops catching on patches of sweat, her armpits aren’t muggy as tea. Her stomach is used to deprivation now, and no longer writhes noisily; when Caroline asks, “Where’s your lunch gone, Plummy?” she’s confident enough to say, “You don’t need three meals a day. Lunch is why people are fat.” And her friends ogle her, and she feels the bread turn to sand in their mouths.
Classes are good; she does well in a math test; the Youth Group leader had sat beside Rachael at the meeting on Saturday night, so the friends have something over which to thrall. When Rachael had told him she’d miss the next meeting because of a friend’s slumber party, the leader had answered, “That’s no good,” and there’s much to discuss about how he’d said it, whether sadly or indifferently. “I think it sounds like he was disappointed,” Plum generously tells her friend. In recognition of the approaching birthday, the girls treat Plum with deference in small ways. They laugh at her jokes and collect her rubbish with their own. On Wednesday, Rachael, Samantha and Dash announce that they’ve bought the present toward which they’d clubbed their money. “You’ll love it,” Samantha promises; “You need it,” says Dash.
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