by Linda Jaivin
Bram has been enjoying a comeback. He has a huge following among the “alternative” crowd in Newtown and Glebe. He and Chantal have become friends. They meet for coffee occasionally. He’s been too embarrassed ever to drink in her presence again.
As for Helen and Sam, the Chantal and Damien thing certainly made them a lot closer. They see quite a bit of each other. Sam is rather keen on Helen, and as we know, Helen’s been rather keen on Sam for a while now. But the little fling with Marc and the experience with the truckie really threw her, and she reckons she’s got to sort out her head before she gets involved with anyone else. So, she and Sam are in a kind of relationship without sex—quite a nineties sort of thing to do, when you think about it.
I think Julia secretly continues to mourn for Jake, but she’s always quick to bounce back and since him (and Mengzhong) there’s been a twenty-three-year-old Thai kick-boxing champion, a twenty-eight-year-old Rastafarian from Brighton, and a young bushie from Bourke. She’s currently seeing a twenty-five-year-old artist from Guatemala. She always puts on this big casual act, like, it doesn’t really matter if these flings don’t last longer than a few weeks, or a month, or whatever; but I think, underneath, she really does want a more steady relationship. Just the other night, we were having another one of our veg-out evenings. There was this wildlife documentary on the tube, and when the narrator said something like “After mating, animals automatically turn their thoughts to nesting,” Chantal commented that it was probably just the females that turned their thoughts to nesting. The males were probably off looking for some more mating action. Julia burst into tears. We all looked at her, quite shocked. She quickly wiped her eyes and mumbled something about “PMS, don’t mind me,” so we thought it best to leave that subject alone.
As for me, well, you know I don’t have a real sex life. I’ve told you before—I’m mistress of the V-words: voyeurism and vicariousness. I’m most deeply into the F-word: fantasy, of course.
None of us girls have been afflicted by gamomania or biological clock watching. Not yet, anyway.
As for the rest, well, Marc has started to see a girl his age, but he still secretly dreams of Helen. The truckie is now constantly on the lookout for women with motor trouble, but while he’s fixed a lot of engines, he’s never had a second offer. Not like that one, anyway. There’s been a renewed vigor to Mr. Fu and his wife’s sex life. Mengzhong haunts the restaurants and bars in Peking where the foreign girls hang out and has discovered Julia’s not the only Western girl whom he can charm with his snake. As for Jake, well, Helen was right. I was at that gig at the Sando. I’d gone to tell Jake I didn’t want to see him again. Not long after that, he met Ava; and they’ve been living together for several months now. I hear that they have the most extraordinary grocery bills.
Philippa hit the “save” button. Wouldn’t it be nice if everything really did resolve itself in such a tidy manner, she thought. Fat chance, she murmured to herself, leaning back on her ergonomic stool and stretching. She’d have to get ready soon. She was meeting Jake in just an hour.
Chapter Twelve –
Eat Me
Ellen was the first to arrive at Café Da Vida. Although it was a late winter’s morning, the tables outside the popular café were already chock-a-block with people reading the weekend papers, dogs and children at their feet. The table between the cake display and the window, the one she wanted, the only one with a bit of real space between it and the rest, was taken. The other window table was free, however, and she parked her coat on the back of a chair to stake her claim and went up to the counter to order a cappuccino. She briefly considered ordering some tsurros as well. As tempting as they were, she decided she didn’t really need the oily pastries. She was trying to watch her weight—in a sensible, nonbulimic, nonanorexic kind of way, of course. Ellen was what her grandmother called zaftig, Yiddish for “healthy.” She had thick curly brown hair, intense dark eyes, and strong features that would have looked out of place on a more waifish figure anyway. She cut a striking figure in the ethnic-inspired clothes she favored—swirls of colorful fabrics from Africa, Indonesia, Latin America.
Looking around at the cheesy reproductions of famous oil paintings, breathing in the comforting aroma of freshly ground coffee, she tried to collect her thoughts.
Several days earlier Ellen had dropped into the campus bookstore for a browse, as was her wont. As she lectured in English and Australian literature, she liked keeping up with new writing. Erotica was a special interest. When she spotted Eat Me among the new releases, her heart skipped a beat. Wasn’t that the title that her writer friend Philippa had chosen for her own novel? Last she’d heard, Philippa still hadn’t found a publisher. Besides, as Ellen examined the cover, she discovered that this one was by someone with the revolting name—pseudonym, surely—of Dick Pulse. What a regrettable coincidence! When she flipped it open, she was stunned. The first chapter was almost word for word exactly the same as the story Philippa had read to them nearly a year earlier when she first started on the book. How bizarre! Although the girls had asked several times, Philippa never read them anything else from the book. She had always seemed a bit shy about it.
What really made Ellen’s heart race, though, was what she saw in the next chapter. Art hadn’t just imitated life, it had swallowed it whole and spat it out again. Horrified, she thought she’d better get a copy and take it home to read. She spent all afternoon and evening reading it. Then she’d called Jody and Camilla. They were just as astonished as her, but agreed they shouldn’t say a word to Philippa before they’d all had a chance to read the book and discuss things among themselves.
“Ellen! Sorry I’m late!” Jody bounded into the café, chucked her gym bag under the table, and sang out “a latte please” to the handsome Spanish waiter who always seemed to appear, as though by magic, when Jody walked through the door. Her long black hair was up in a ponytail and she wore a classic black-and-white herringbone coat, her latest op-shop prize, over a lime green turtleneck, black leather hot pants, purple opaque pantyhose, and blue Docs. Her neat olive features were flushed with physical exertion and the cold.
“You’re not late,” Ellen reassured her. “I was early. Just come from the gym?”
“Yes,” Jody replied, “You know, it’s funny, but I was thinking today while I was working out about the way men make so much noise when they’re exercising. They huff and they puff and they phooo and they aaaarrgh. The women, on the other hand, manage to do all their routines with just simple, healthy exhaling and inhaling, none of that Sturm und Drang of the male jocks. And yet in bed it’s just the opposite. Unless they’re into talking dirty, and that’s another thing altogether, men usually just stay unnaturally silent until the moment of orgasm, when all that macho self-control breaks down and they let go with a wee little phut. Some guys just grimace or bite their lips or press a hand against the side of their face. Women, on the other hand, will shout and moan and pant and gasp and squeal in bed without the least bit of inhibition. Now why do you think that’s so?”
“I reckon,” Ellen ventured, “that it has a lot to do with expectations, performance anxiety, and peer pressure. Men fake it more often in the gym, and women fake it more often in bed.”
“And what are you two talking about?” Camilla laughed as she moored her bag on the back of a third chair and, shuffling off her own coat, settled elegantly into the seat, each long slender limb automatically finding its most aesthetically appropriate position. “Before I forget, copies of the latest issue for you both.” She hauled two copies of Pose out of her bag and handed them over.
“Cool,” Jody cooed, flipping through the pages. She stopped at one and, screwing up her face in an expression of disgust, pointed at one of the pictures. “I can’t believe that style’s coming back in! I was so pleased to see it go the last time.”
“Never mind.” Camilla shrugged. “It’ll be gone by the next season. And then a year or two later, if I know you, you’ll be scouring the op
shops for one.”
“I’m not that much of a fashion victim, am I?” Jody looked horrified.
Camilla cocked one perfectly tweezed eyebrow and gave Jody’s outfit the once over. “I don’t know, darling. You tell me.”
“Takes one to know one,” Jody replied, reaching out to ruffle Camilla’s new blond crewcut.
They were still laughing when the waiter set their coffees in front of them. “I’m really a musician, you know,” he explained unprompted to Jody, lowering heavy eyelids over black bedroom eyes and rolling his r’s on really. Jody smiled wanly at him.
“I wish he hadn’t said that,” she whispered when he retreated to the counter. “I mean, you can fantasize about them being artists or whatever, but they shouldn’t just tell you like that. Spoils the mystery.”
“Speaking of mysteries.” Ellen tapped her copy of Eat Me, which she’d placed on the table, and which they’d all managed to avoid eyeballing until then.
The others pulled faces. “How could she have done that to us?” Jody moaned. “I mean, really, it’s not like she even made much of an attempt to disguise our identities.”
“The disguise is so thin,” Camilla concurred, “it could be Kate Moss.”
“Hold on a tic,” Ellen cautioned. “Are we absolutely sure it was her? After all, she tells us she’s still looking for a publisher. And the name on the book is Dick Pulse, not Philippa Berry. The biographical note reveals almost nothing, just that he’s a Sydney writer.”
“Yes, but, isn’t it pretty obvious?” Jody protested. “Tell me you don’t see yourself in Helen. And us in Julia and Chantal. And, of course, there’s Pippa herself, totally cognito. Anyway, if you hadn’t been disturbed by all these coincidences too, we wouldn’t be sitting here.”
“Absolutely true. But let’s think about it. Would Philippa represent me as that confused, ideologically speaking? I mean, I don’t feel that confused. I don’t think I come off as that confused to others. Personally, I don’t see any contradiction between being a feminist and a sentient human being, full of irrational and unpredictable desires and whims. But then again, maybe that’s why I teach literature, not women’s studies as such. And I’ve certainly never deflowered a student. Mike, who had orange, not green pigtails, turned out to be gay, remember? I’m Jewish, not Catholic. And”—Ellen sounded a bit huffy now—“I never, ever wear beige.”
“And I’m a vegetarian. I would never eat duck.” Jody pouted. “What really gets me, though, is that Josh, ‘Jake,’ whatever his name is, slept with Philippa too.”
“Jody, darling, didn’t I warn you that slacker gigolo was bad news?” Camilla shook her head. “What I can’t work out is, how did she know about my jumping up and down in my office when I got the promotion? I’m sure no one saw. How embarrassing. Not to mention dragging that miserable Trent skeleton out of the closet. I thought I’d exorcised him from my life around the same time I chucked out all those goth togs. And I don’t think Jonathan would have been highly amused by Trent/Bram lizarding across our bed to perform the Technicolor yawn. Bloody hell. Where does she get these tawdry ideas?”
“That’s just it!” cried Ellen. “I don’t think it was Philippa. Look, you know her writing teacher, Richard?”
“Do you think she really did it with him on her ergonomic stool?” Jody giggled.
“Maybe,” Camilla said. “Maybe not. But I think I see what Ellen’s getting at. Perhaps, darling, Pippa’s been pipped to the post.”
“What?” Jody didn’t get it.
“Consider the facts,” Camilla said. “As far as we know, he’s the only one who’s seen the whole manuscript, right?”
“Yeah, but—” Jody demurred.
“But what?” Ellen cut in. “He’s supposed to be writing women’s erotica too, remember? Philippa told us that ages ago.”
“Chapter nine to be specific.” Camilla nodded. “I mean, in fictional terms.”
“So, don’t you get it?” Ellen pushed on. “Philippa wasn’t letting us see any more of the manuscript possibly because she was so obviously basing so much of it on us. To give her the benefit of a doubt, let’s assume she was going to rework the material as she went, making it more fictional. But she was also showing her early drafts to Richard, who basically just ripped off the material and elaborated on it. Dick Pulse—Richard. Get it? She was feeding off our experiences, and he was feeding off her writing. ‘Eat me,’ indeed! Isn’t it as plain as day?”
“Do you think Philippa has seen it yet?” Jody wondered. “If your theory is right, and she’s been ripped off that badly, she should be spitting snakes.”
“The other thing, of course, is that it’s just a little, uh, tame, don’t you think?” Camilla poked the tip of her tsurros into her latte and then fellated the long pastry for Jody and Ellen’s benefit. The Spanish waiter immediately shifted the focus of his attention from Jody to Camilla.
“Yes, Madonna.” giggled Ellen. “Seriously. Maybe that’s our fault. Philippa should find some friends with raging sex lives if she’s going to get most of her material from them. My sex life is totally Australian—long periods of severe drought followed by flash floods.”
“And I’ve been with Jonathan for two years now. All very predictable, really. Nothing much to draw from me.”
Jody laughed. “Well, at least I’m keeping up my end of things. She—he—Dick Pulse got that right. I do wish, however, that I didn’t have such an unerring instinct for finding the wombats among men.”
“Wombats?” Ellen looked puzzled.
“Yeah, you know, the kind that eats bush and leaves.”
“Old joke,” commented Camilla. “And,” she added kindly, “just as fresh as the day it was born. But to get back to what I was saying about it all being, well, rather weak. Like take the scene where Helen deflowers Marc. If I were going to write a deflowering fantasy, it would have to be a bit more out there.”
“Definitely,” Jody concurred.
“Like what?” asked Ellen curiously.
“Oh, say,” Camilla inhaled and blew a smoke ring as she pondered the issue, “I’d do all five of the boys in that really young rock group tinstool—all at once and on stage.”
“You think they’re virgins? Can someone really be a rock star and a virgin in this day and age?” Ellen sounded incredulous.
“Assuming. They’re only fourteen or something. But you see my point, though, don’t you?”
“I suppose so,” Ellen considered. “But what sort of sexual fantasies were you thinking of, Jody?”
“Here’s one of my favorites,” Jody offered. “You travel to the American West. You’re some place where they’ve still got cowboys. You’re on a horse—horses are so sexy, and this is the sexiest one of all, a big creamy Palomino called, oh, Shilo or something—and you’re galloping over the proverbial plain.”
“I hope you’re not wearing an equestrian helmet, darling,” Camilla interjected. “I know it’s dangerous but your hair should be flowing free.”
“Of course,” Jody reassured her. “You don’t have to wear helmets in fantasies.”
“Yes,” Ellen agreed. “That’s exactly why they’re so wonderful. No one gets hurt. But we’re interrupting. Do go on.”
“You’re in jodhpurs and you’ve got a red-checked shirt on with a cute little bandanna around your neck. In the distance, over by some amazing rock formations like the ones in Thelma and Louise, you spot him. At first, all you see is a cloud of dust, and you hear the pounding of hooves, and before you know it, this man is galloping right next to you on a huge Appaloosa. Even at this speed, you can see that he’s got cheekbones to die for. He looks like one of those models in that issue of Vogue for Men when they did that special on the cowboy look. You know, designer stubble, piercing baby blues, tousled hair, square shoulders, leather chaps, nothing but a g-string underneath.”
“Ouch,” said Ellen. “Isn’t he going to get saddle sore?”
“Ellen, didn’t you just say no one gets hurt i
n fantasies? He’s bare-assed, and that’s that. Anyway, he leans over and says, ‘Goin’ my way?’ and you say, ‘Sure thing, cowboy. Show me your way.’ ”
“You are such a tart, darling,” Camilla said admiringly.
“So he lifts his cowboy hat into the air, goes ‘Yee-ha!’ and leads you and Shilo, at a full gallop, to this gorgeous little sheltered watering hole. You dismount and tether the horses. You feed and brush them down while he builds a fire. Shilo gently nuzzles your neck, licking off the sweat, and his horse, whose name is Buck (‘so that he don’t’), snuffles your ass and cunt. The smell of the carrot sticks that you keep there as a special treat is driving him wild.”
“This reminds me,” interrupted Camilla, “of my favorite line from The Sound of Music.”
“Which is that?” asked Ellen.
“You know, close to the beginning, when Sister Maria has gone off to sing that the hills are alive etcetera and the other nuns are looking all over for her. One asks, ‘Have you tried the barn? You know how much she adores the animals.’ ”
Jody, who’d taken advantage of the break to sip at her coffee, spluttered with laughter. Wiping her mouth with a tissue proffered by Ellen, she continued. “You kiss both of the horses on their soft lips and bury your face in Shilo’s thick mane, breathing in the sweet grassy smell of his sweaty neck before joining Buck—that’s the cowboys name too (‘cuz I do’)—round the fire. The sun is setting in a rather spectacular manner. As he shifts closer to you, he suddenly jumps up, jutting his firm round buttocks out in your direction and twisting his head round to look down at them.
“ ‘Doggone nettles,’ he says.”
“I thought no one got hurt?” Ellen objected.
Jody ignored her. “ ‘I’ll get that,’ you say. ‘Kneel, cowboy.’ He does. You lean over, running your hands over the warm, firm, hairless flesh. You kiss each cheek. His ass smells enticingly like saddle leather. You pull out the nettle with your teeth. Your fingers, meanwhile, have worked their way under the strap of the g-string and are pulling it down. His cute little pucker-kiss of an asshole comes into view, looking for all the world like it’s just there for your delectation. You extend your tongue and lick the sweet, tangy little entrance. He groans. Moving your attention down to his balls, which are gigantic (you can’t see the rest of his riding tackle yet, but you’ve got all night, and the next few weeks if necessary), you fondle them and then take the whole saddlebag into your mouth to suck on the balls one at a time. He has come down on all fours by now, and spread his legs apart in the prairie grass, that pert ass pointed high into the clear starry sky.
