by Cate Kennedy
‘Hmm ... no, I don’t think so ... just let me check this bit again ...’ They giggle together. Stella feels a pulsing drag deep inside her, a slow-motion somersault.
‘Oh my God, I have to blanch the vegetables for the tempura.’
‘Not in that stunning dress, surely. You’re a vision, sweetheart.’
She smiles.
Champagne for when the guests arrive. The professor and his wife punctual to the moment, so Stella lets Daniel pour the drinks while she slips out to the bathroom to check whether she needs just a touch more blusher. Her eyes in the mirror are glittering. She brushes her hair up off her face and sprays it with volumiser. The scent hits her somewhere in the back of her mouth. She leans on the edge of the tiled sink, and gags. The doorbell. More of them are arriving.
‘No, it’s Stella’s apartment,’ Daniel is saying. ‘Much grander than a struggling doctorate student could afford.’
‘But Daniel spends a lot of time here,’ Stella adds with a smile. She and Daniel have always referred to it as a flat. Large and old, it has two bedrooms, one of which was recently vacated by her ex-housemate Helen. Stella has meant for some weeks to advertise the room, so that the rent becomes more affordable, but this last week she has found herself standing in its doorway, watching the light fall into the empty space, trying to envisage it piled with Daniel’s books, a desk, a lamp. Her mind treads down the path nervously, craning to see ahead. A cot.
‘Also,’ Daniel continues, refilling glasses, ‘Stella’s life is civilised enough to have not only a dining room, but six matching chairs. Isn’t she lovely?’
Daniel goes on living at the university, he has told her, because he needs the privacy for his work and he wants tenure. He can attend functions, keep an ear to the ground, make himself a permanent presence on campus so that he will seem a natural choice for a position. He tells her this on a Sunday morning, lounging on her bed eating croissants and reading the paper, which she has slipped out early to buy, looking so much a fixture there, so familiar and in place, that it makes her want to weep with frustration.
He is listening with the appearance of deference now to the visiting Fellow, underdressed in that careless academic way in a shrunken fair-isle vest and colourless corduroys. Daniel listens and nods, squeezes his hands between his knees, looking at the floor with a small smile on his face. Everyone in the room except Stella mistakes this for respectful attention. The fact that she knows better, that she has seen him sprawled naked in the morning, dozing, and ragged-breathed with desire, quells her apprehension.
‘And what do you do, Stella?’ asks the professor’s wife, whose name, in her nervousness, Stella has forgotten.
‘I am a publicist.’
‘Oh, that must be interesting.’
‘Well ...’ Stella takes a breath. At this moment, she knows, she is still mysterious. There is still the possibility of wit and assurance; she could now simply by opening her mouth and saying the right thing command the surprised attention of the whole room. Daniel’s pretty girlfriend, and do you know she had the most interesting stories …
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘it is.’ The professor’s wife looks a kind woman. Stella is aware that she has published a volume of poetry and that she is involved in the university Dramatic Society. Stella has managed large productions that she knows this woman has dressed up to see in the city. She has some tales to tell of stars’ tantrums, some choice morsels of backstage gossip and hair’s-breadth financial cliffhangers, which would give her the floor right through the tempura and yakanori. She could divert the conversation like a river from the discourse of metaphysical poetry to something in which only she had insider knowledge. Stella considers this power, holds it concealed like a rabbit in a hat.
‘It can get a bit hectic, though,’ she says.
And feels poised attention shift back, sliding away on another current altogether.
I don’t care, thinks Stella, putting her hand over her champagne glass as Daniel does the rounds again. I can relinquish this easily, easily. The thought of conception has shrunk the importance of the status of work. She even catches herself thinking of it as the job she used to have, an old role. Underpinned with conception, even the discourse of metaphysical poetry seems an etcetera. There is a hotter vein running under it now, a molten lode which heaves up, causing fault lines, cave-ins. Stella hugs the chaos to herself. This is not a discourse. It will never be reduced to discussion.
Stella seats herself last at the table, and lifts her spoon of clear soup. A gust of seaweed assails her nose, the smack of a wave under a pier, piles of kelp and mermaid’s necklace crusty in the sun.
‘Delightful,’ pronounces the visiting Fellow, and she catches Daniel’s loving eye. It has been worth it, making the stock from scratch. She had to read the recipe several times; surely she wasn’t meant to throw out all the vegetables she had sliced according to directions? But she sees now, what seemed like waste is actually a kind of gift. Something reduced to its essentials, a sum total strained of its parts. Stella bathes in the appreciative silence, concentrates on keeping hers down.
In the kitchen a little while later, she hears Daniel’s voice rise, the professor’s respond, the professor’s wife interject something flippant and conciliatory. When the visiting Fellow begins to rumble dogmatically, Stella’s fingers tremble over the hot oil. There is going to be an argument.
The oil turns slickly in the wok. She drops in a tiny spoon of batter to test the heat, and watches it sizzle, prepares the plates with radish flowers and cucumber. She drops battered vegetables into the oil, fishes them out when they’re golden onto absorbent paper. Her stomach pitches and tosses at the sight of so much grease. Perspiration stands on her forehead. I am pregnant, she thinks. This is how it feels, this seasick, heavy ache.
She hears the professor tap the table for emphasis, it sounds like someone knocking on a chest checking for false sides. She moves back into the dining room, bearing a platter of tempura. Each piece is golden and crisp, and she moves around the table selecting some for each plate, thanking the women as they praise her skill. The three men, staring at each other’s mouths, waiting for their chance to speak with barely disguised impatience, hardly notice. Daniel pauses, looks down at his black lacquer chopsticks as if they, and the food he must eat with them, are something in a museum.
Stella bends her head to a secondary conversation started by the Fellow’s wife, her eyes drawn again and again to the gerberas, so vivid they could be cartoon flowers.
‘Ah, I have a story for you,’ Daniel says, swallowing wine. Stella glances up and is in love with his face in the candlelight. The argument is dissipated — this is what academics do, there is no need to be upset. She knows the story he will tell; they have read it together in a volume of Zen parables that morning in a bookshop. Daniel, instead of finishing his mouthful, scoops another piece of sushi between his lips, and talks around it.
‘There was once a man who worked in a factory, a very cunning man. The factory owners had heard rumours that he was a thief. And every day when he left the factory, he would be wheeling a wheelbarrow heaped full with sawdust.’
Stella experiences a shock of realisation that Daniel has recalled the story word for word. She herself, preoccupied with a lurching stomach, with packages of fish, with nerves, had barely skimmed it. Daniel takes another piece of raw salmon, scrapes off the wasabi, eats it. Inside her, Stella imagines another fish, eight weeks old and gilled, clamped, trembling. I have some news, sweetheart, unexpected for me as well as for you …
‘Anyway, each day the guards sift through the sawdust, suspiciously looking for things he might have stolen. And each day there is nothing there but sawdust, and they wave him through the gates.’
You’ll have your doctorate in November, we’ll have a whole three months to get ready. Who knows how it happened? Who knows how anything happen
s. Don’t you ever feel your body might take the decision out of your hands for a reason?
‘Finally …’ Daniel pauses for effect, making eye contact with each of them. ‘Finally they realise he is stealing wheelbarrows.’
They clap, they smile appreciatively. Laughter should not greet a Zen parable; it is not that kind of punchline. Daniel grins at Stella. He will be a great lecturer. He scissors another piece of sushi in his mouth, chewing as casually as if it were a French fry.
Stella had reached a point, with that raw salmon, where it had ceased to become food. Shaving it with the cleaver, she had seen it reduced to a single dense slab of flesh, of matter. Twenty-seven dollars, but it contained no secrets, nothing precious, nothing worth fetishising, despite the pompous mystique. Even the fishmonger at the market had lifted it away deferentially, handling it with almost a caress. It is ridiculous. It is quite right that Daniel — in fact, all of them — should eat each laboured-over morsel with such carelessness. She had had one piece, and the feverish image had risen in her mind that she was devouring a sliver of pressed tongue. Yes, perhaps she is feverish. The gerberas are positively oscillating in their own radiance, five flowers so perfect you could hardly believe in them.
‘Coffee?’ says Stella, rising in her beautiful black dress, steadying herself with the thought of a cold face cloth to the neck and forehead. Just through the kitchen, and into the bathroom. Then in a half-hour they will be gone, and she can break her news on the cusp of this dinner’s success, on the gentle end of a wave, the battle over, the shore in sight.
‘Would anybody care for chocolates?’ she says, and as she moves past Daniel she feels him give the flesh of her backside a squeeze. Stella thinks of the magician’s assistant, keeping things seamless. She thinks of the fishmonger.
She wipes her face, brushes her hair. Deep inside her, a ratchet is tightening up, each new calibration a metal nip of pain. ‘I just want to spew,’ she says to her reflection, and the word, so immediate and earthy, seems as shocking as fuck. How would it sound in the rarefied company of the dining room?
Her throat is tight as she re-enters that atmosphere, heavy by now with cigarette smoke and words, a sickening broth of indifference. Nobody asks her where she has been; nobody asks her opinion.
I might be a dummy, thinks Stella, wonderingly. I might be made of sawdust.
‘Marvellous meal,’ says the visiting Fellow to her lover who has spent the afternoon reading a book. Daniel, smiling genially, says, ‘Oh, I didn’t do much.’
‘Yes, thank you so much,’ says the professor’s wife to Stella, and Stella can tell by the odd stumbled inflection that the woman has meant to say her name, but has forgotten it. And why shouldn’t she, thinks Stella, holding the edge of the table. I am just someone with a dining-room table and six chairs. I am something you sift in passing, looking for something worth having.
‘Goodnight,’ she says. ‘Goodbye.’
Stella kicks off her shoes and treads back unsteadily to the bathroom. Unwillingly, because it is dawning on her, with an exhausted certainty, what she will find there. She knows what the pain is now, feels it sharpen into something recognisable. That tilting drag, her queasiness, that accumulation of tension on the verge of becoming something else. Its familiarity springs her like a punchline, her obtuseness seems almost hilarious. Her teeth are chattering. As she unzips and steps out of her dress she observes her own devious body, its skipped cycle last month like a blank shrug. She sees her mistake. Her fingers skim her belly, one hand reaches between her legs, and then moves before her face fluttering with a bright flag of blood. She will not need to say her lines about the body making choices. This body, her body, has already hidden and then disclosed, revealed itself palm upwards. It is not a vehicle for carrying something else. Stella sits drained and naked on the toilet, and bleeds.
She hears, some minutes later, Daniel’s solicitous knock.
‘You okay, darling?’ he says from the other side of the door.
Be careful, Stella tells herself. He is cunning. ‘Yes, just a bit sick,’ she answers.
‘Could it have been the raw salmon?’
‘No. Just ...’
‘Women’s troubles?’
Prudish bastard. Fool.
‘Yeah. Would you mind going? I’m really tired.’
She can feel him weighing it up behind the door, frowning.
‘Sure, if you think you’ll be okay. Call you first thing?’
There is a pause. Stella feels her insides contract and unclench like a pulse, the fist turning into a hand.
‘Goodnight,’ she calls. ‘Goodbye.’
Stella runs the bath. She will not be home first thing. She will be at the café, drinking pale China tea and writing an ad for the window, advertising the room. Thinking about it now, she savours it, a distilled flavour, runs her hands down her breasts and hips and legs. She is all here, and the cramp is lifting off her like steam.
Sea Burial
There’s something so quiet and dignified about a burial at sea. It wasn’t exactly that Alan had had a nautical past, but he’d loved the ocean. Loved that little yacht of his.
Up at Port Douglas he was never off the water, given half a chance. When I came in here just then and let myself into the silent house, it made me realise how very final death is. A cliché, I know, but true.
I’m glad I went with my instinct, and not decided on an ordinary plot. I don’t know how people stand it — walking away leaving a loved one to be pressed under forever by damp clay. Instead I felt light. Divested, somehow. Oh, I was drained, certainly, but with what my new book from the library calls closure. Just a final goodbye, and a slip away. Beautiful.
I should have had time to get used to the quiet of the house, what with Alan away for weeks at a stretch in Singapore with his business. His business. Right up until the actual Commission Inquiry, I foolishly believed his business was the importation of woodcarvings. I swallowed everything he told me. Must have been a laughing stock. Even Alan realised at the end it was pointless even calling me as a witness.
So. The Philippines, doing God knows what, or else up in Queensland gambling with his cronies.
The ladies who came for bridge were always sympathetic about his absences. ‘I don’t know how you put up with it,’ they’d say, when I told them Alan was away again, stocking up on new carvings.
The truth was, I’d gotten used to it. I had the house, of course, which meant I had the beach, and plenty of what Alan called play money. I had fresh freesias ordered every three days from the florist. So expensive, freesias, but they’re my favourite flowers. I’d sit there looking at them, inhaling their perfume, and marvelling at the strangeness of fate.
When you think that only four years ago, after all, I’d had to borrow money for everything. Even for the funeral. Imagine that. My own daughter, and I had to have her cremated because it was cheaper. Borrowed money for the flowers, too — oriental lilies. Twenty-two dollars. They’re too powerful, those flowers, aren’t they? The scent. Stood there breathing in that sickly sweetness as I wept. Didn’t shed a tear today for Alan; funny, isn’t it? Completely dry-eyed. But then, I had closure.
Lilies are expensive flowers too, of course, but they’re death flowers. Freesias are like a luxurious, perennial spring.
I loved arranging them, loved sitting on the leather divan with my nails done and a pile of glossy new magazines, carefully tearing open the sample perfume sachets. I’d subscribe to all the expensive ones. Country Life. Vogue and Vanity Fair and everything.
I was comfortable.
Comfortable — now there’s a good word.
‘I’m only thinking of your comfort.’ That’s what Alan would say in his wounded voice when I complained how often he was away, how I was marooned there in the beach-house.
‘Sorry, sweetie,’ Alan
would say shortly, ‘but business is business.’
And he bought me a cocker-spaniel puppy before he took off again. Within three months all the wives in the bridge club had one. There we’d sit, talking about puppy preschool and our husbands’ heart medication, lining the mantelpiece with photos of our dogs.
‘Never say you’re rich, say you’re comfortable,’ instructed my mother, the instant expert, like someone who watches a game but never gets to play. She saw my marriage to Alan, my door into a new life, as her own leg-up into the upper echelons. My wedding day was the happiest day of her life. When she found out that Alan had hired the same florist as the one who did the Packer wedding, she cried tears of real joy.
So here I was, comfortable. Thanks to Alan, who was also supremely comfortable.
In fact, the only time I ever saw Alan uncomfortable was when he was subpoenaed. There he was on the stand in his thousand-dollar suit and his face so florid and uneasy. He visibly winced at the word ‘trafficking’. It offended his sensibilities. Well, Alan always kept his hands clean. He knew the value of good staff. Someone else opened doors, someone else changed gears. It’s only good sense to have someone else who signs cheques. He was a businessman. The trouble was that woodcarvings were not, in the end, the business.
But he was confident that things would all be fixed up and he was right, of course. Alan had a broad range of acquaintances. He’d spent a good many years cultivating friends in high places, and quite a few in low. He’d survive.
No, what really bothered Alan after the inquiry, what really got him popping those heart tablets, was not the law, but someone outside the law, someone still on the outside with an axe to grind. I have to hand it to him. His instinct, as usual, was absolutely unerring.
I’ve been thinking today about the funeral, and me standing there holding the lilies, thinking my heart was going to break. I think maybe that it did break, or else something else broke. Something came away and drifted off like an empty boat.
