Affection

by Krissy Kneen

  DRAG AND THE DRAMA QUEEN

  Brisbane 2008

  My brother-in-law pulls a photograph out of his wallet. It is a picture of a girl in a bikini. She is pretty in a glossy-magazine kind of way. Long legs, blond hair cascading down a perfectly tanned back. No cellulite anywhere on her body, no stretchmarks, a breezy summer face. He shows the photograph to the boys, his brothers. My husband leans over and takes the photo out of his hand. They are alike in some ways, the three brothers. They are tall and share strong features, chiseled jaws, long bones. En masse they are impressive, like young stags, sparring, locking horns, showing off. The three of them nod at his photograph, and his other brother rummages in his own wallet. Another photograph, another swimsuit model, this one his own. I glance at the pictures, their beautiful leggy girlfriends, and I feel sad for my husband. No photograph in his wallet, his chubby dark-haired wife slouching back toward the couch where her book is waiting.

  There is a photograph of the extended family. The parents, the aunts, the three boys with their respective partners. A summery beachside photograph and all of them grinning in their pastel shirts and shoestring straps and boardshorts. I am the odd one out. I am overdressed, in a black gown. I look like I have been transported there from another planet. I am an alien amongst them, the foreigner. We laugh about this photograph. “One of these things is not like the others,” my husband says. I laugh, but I am sad for him, my husband with his attractive family and their attractive extended family, their bikini girlfriends reading their glossy magazines and sunning themselves on deck chairs, and me.

  I am approaching my fortieth birthday. I do so with a sad drag of my feet, walking toward the disappointment of my unmet goals. And then there is the dislocation between my appearance and my actions. I feel like a drag queen, strutting a rampant sexuality that is just an overblown façade. Smoke and mirrors and not particularly thick smoke at that.

  In the cruel light of day I really can’t bear to look at myself. That is the problem with stopping to think about it all. In the moment of sex there is nothing but forward motion. There is pleasure, the active taking of pleasure and then giving back and everything is in motion. Now, with the light and the stale sheets still damp, there is a pause and I am left with myself and I am ashamed. This is what other women feel, I am sure of it. I see the signs of it in their eyes as they fail to meet my fierce gaze.

  In my own head there are indigestible clues.

  I walk past a group of boys who sit spotted and ugly in the drunken gutter. I hear one of them howl like a wolf and yell out, “Dog.” It is only a moment later that I realize he is referring to me. The moment lodges in my brain like a blood clot.

  The fetid drunken homeless man shambles past and looks up at me, blurry eyed, his breath a nightmare as he spits out the word “Fat” and moves on. Another clot forms, throbbing in my temple.

  The group of men at the pub who point at me and call out, “There’s your girlfriend,” and splutter laughter to each other. A hook in my head that could catch fish.

  I am unlovely. I am overweight. I am strident and combative. I do not wear matching underwear. I do not wear perfume or makeup or work out in a gym. I have grown older as we all grow older and there are still kids to grow up into that teenage moment of desirability.

  I stand amongst the stained sheets wishing it were darker, wishing there was no mirror in the room, wishing there was still flesh pressed up against mine because when it is all kissing and sucking and touching there is no room for looking or pondering over those brainhemorrhaging kernels of derision lodged in my memory.

  UNIVERSITY

  Brisbane 1987

  I chose to study drama because I didn’t want to be a journalist and I couldn’t think of another course that would teach me to be a novelist. I could have studied literature, I should have. I chose drama because of the musicals and the first kiss and the idea that there might be more stage kisses that might lead to other things. I chose drama because of the idea of sex.

  The drama students reminded me of the peacocks we kept at home. Flamboyant. They regaled each other with loud and theatrical stories during breaks. They leaped up on tables. They all seemed to love Shakespeare and quoted scenes from Shakespearean dramas at every opportunity. I watched, entertained but slightly disquieted. They were all so beautiful. The girls were thin and had clear skin and intelligent eyes. The boys were toned and fit with interesting haircuts. I snapped back into my shell. I was a silent witness to their performances. I was an average student. I couldn’t sing my chakras in Voice and Movement like the other students could. I felt silly standing in a circle and feeling the energy of the rest of the group. We all had to leap in the air and say “Ha!” when the energy was right, but I was always a fraction late, responding to the sudden movement of the students rather than some kind of universal force. They spoke about spirituality as if it was a science. They talked about “the muse.” I went back to my lonely flat in the evenings and wrote my stories and my poems as I always had and I suspected that there was no muse, there was just a lot of hard work and persistence. I couldn’t say this to them.

  One day we were sitting in the refectory and they were talking about sex. I had begun to collect the classic texts, Anaïs Nin, Georges Batailles. I read all the books that would have been banned at home. I had a growing appetite for voyeurism. Sometimes in my night wandering I would look through curtainless windows and see people copulating, and I would stand and watch until it was done. I was learning about sex. There was nobody to practice with, but there was a whole world of information churning in my imagination. If the other drama students could talk about sex then so could I. I suspected I could hold my own.

  They giggled as they spoke about head jobs, cunnilingus. The forbidden things that their parents had warned them of but they had discovered were more enjoyable than expected. I felt as if, finally, I had adult contact, adult conversation. Nothing could be prohibited in such risqué and exciting company.

  “I never expected I would actually enjoy giving a head job,” one of them said, blushing slightly but continuing with her bold talk. We were drama students, and sex talk was like that: dramatic and bold.

  “Condoms,” said one of them and was treated to a deluge of condom stories.

  “Orgasms,” said another and the orgasm stories rained down.

  “Anal sex.”

  “Oh,” I said, “I haven’t tried it with a boy, but I like it. Or I like doing it to myself.” I laughed. At last I could join in with their bawdy talk. “I like the feel of it. It’s more exciting, maybe because of the pain. Maybe that focuses the pleasure.” The others just stared at me, in silence. I had overstepped some kind of invisible boundary that I didn’t know existed. I needed to back out quickly. “But I haven’t tried it with a real person. Only masturbating. Only just a little bit. Not a whole penis, small things, hardly anal sex at all really.”

  Someone changed the topic. I wanted someone to respond so that I could valiantly defend my stance on anal sex, but they moved on to other things. Put some distance between them and me. I was embarrassed back into silence.

  One of the other girls mentioned her new job modeling. Katherine was a sweet girl, luminously beautiful, statuesque with long black curls and porcelain skin. Her family knew artists, not artists like my own mad hermit family, but rich artists who threw proper parties and exhibited in private galleries. Katherine modeled for a few of them and found there was a circuit of modeling to be done.

  Back in my cold unloved flat I pored through my collected Anaïs Nin. Stories about artists and their models and the sex between the two, and yes, stories about anal sex and the pleasure that can be had, a pleasure that reflected my own. I suspected that no matter how sophisticated and worldly they seemed, the drama students were wrong, that it was all right to enjoy this kind of physical sensation. That no sensation should be taboo. I thought about my evenings with Emily and The Rocky Horror Picture Show and I curled up inside my cupboard, and I mastu
rbated. I inserted a finger into my anus while I did it and enjoyed it despite them.

  The problem with taking my clothes off in public was my relationship to my body. It was a young body, not quite nineteen yet. It was tighter than it would be in subsequent years. It was fitter. Drama classes provided a regime of movement that stretched and toned and whittled away the puppy fat. I had started to eat since leaving home, but my diet consisted of small cups of couscous with avocado sliced into it, some tamari, tahini on rice crackers. I ate occasionally and on the run. I couldn’t bear to sit amongst the other girls in the Country Women’s Association accommodation dining hall. I tended to help myself to an apple and some crackers and cheese, hover at the edge of the dining room, swallow it down with a coffee, before grabbing a coat and racing out into the night. I couldn’t bear to be alone in my flat. I walked for miles and sometimes I would stop and fish a novel out of my satchel and curl up under a streetlight to read for a while before wandering off again. My restlessness burned calories.

  My body would not look nicer than it did in those days, and yet, when I stepped out of my clothes in front of the students, all I could think about was the dimpling on my thighs, and the midget proportions of my calf bones compared to the rest of me and the soft place on my belly. I undressed in the crowded room because there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to do it. I stood naked and faced the students who would be studying my body.

  They were art students and this meant there was a lot of cheesecloth in the room. Hairstyles were colorful and full of texture. These students were not as beautiful as my own class, they were thin and pale and beaky, but still they seemed more beautiful than me.

  I stared them down. When the lecturer suggested I should do a series of quick twenty-second poses as a warm-up, I made sure to have eye contact with at least one student for each pose. This is how I survived it, that first time. Later it would be easier, but that first time was a challenge and I faced it as such. The room was cold, the students were my own age.

  That first time my poses passed without comment. I did what was asked of me and then I dressed hurriedly, took my cash and left the room. I didn’t even glance at their sketchbooks. I didn’t want to see myself interpreted through their eyes. Later, at another session, a young student whined that they always got fat models and I was mortified and almost quit the job. But he was a pimply, consumptive type with a fringe that covered his eyes and when I looked at his sketch pad he had turned me into a stick figure anyway. His figures were not at all beautiful. I could see his criticism for what it was, he was blaming his tools as any bad artist does. My mother had taught me that on our afternoons painting in front of the television. A bad artist blames the tools. I dressed and walked toward the bad artist at the end of the class, brushing past his mediocre images, making his easel wobble.

  Sometimes I posed for Katherine’s clients in their big houses with their expensive canvases. I didn’t particularly like the work I saw on their walls, but they were rich and I supposed their work must be more valuable than I could judge.

  “Pretend you are washing your hair,” one of them told me. I raised my hands to my scalp. This is how I washed my hair. It wasn’t a particularly interesting pose.

  “No, no. Like this.” He showed me. Some kind of lean and bend, an athletic kind of personal grooming that I had never seen before. So this is how other people wash their hair, I thought. I am doing it wrong.

  I was constantly astonished by the real world. Everything was new and strange. I had never experienced other people’s lives. I had never stayed at someone else’s house before leaving home, I had never spent quality time with anyone outside of Dragonhall. I entered university trusting blindly that everyone else’s way of doing things was probably the way things should be done.

  I kept up the modeling, wondering when one of the artists would find me attractive and proposition me, as in Anaïs Nin stories. I waited, and slowly, session after session, began to realize that none of them found me attractive at all.

  I wrote to the boy from Gladstone and he wrote back to me. I love you, he told me. I love you, I said back, but I knew I was just speaking from the kind of loneliness that bites into your bones, the kind you could die from unless you found your way out eventually. When I let myself back into the Country Women’s Association late at night and rode the elevator to my floor, I felt numb. When I sat on the single bed there and pulled off my sandals I would find that I was crying, and wonder when the tears had started. I would pick them off my cheeks and let them drip from my fingers, curious. I was crying and I knew that probably meant I felt sad, but really I felt nothing at all.

  RAYMONT LODGE

  John, the boy who played the clarinet, lived across town in a lodge in Auchenflower run by the Uniting Church. I sat quietly with him at a café and I no longer felt all that teenage angst and longing that had plagued me through the years of high school, but it was good to see him again.

  He lived in Raymont Lodge, more expensive than my own accommodation and not as close to the university, but I didn’t care. I had to leave the Country Women’s Association where I knew no one and barely came home to sleep.

  I spoke to my mother on the phone, and she was worried. There were boys there. It was a unisex accommodation. She was happier with me at the CWA, in the cloistered safety. I told her that I almost always stayed late at university and missed meals and came home hungry and broke. I told her that I was lonely and couldn’t bear that place any more. I threatened that if it wasn’t Raymont Lodge then it would be a share house with some people from my course, boys probably, a share house full of drugs and boys and sex. She agreed, reluctantly, and John helped me to move my few possessions to a room at the lodge.

  The rooms were grouped around a communal kitchen. The girls in my cluster were friendly enough, but they were as alien to me as the girls at the CWA. I heard noises and smelled things coming out of their units that I couldn’t identify. They showed each other makeup they had bought and set unfathomable rules for the collective kitchen, endless lists of things that should or should not be done. They were always on diets. Sometimes the units smelled of boiled cabbage, and some weeks there was nothing but silver Jenny Craig containers cluttering up the refrigerator. They shared diets and stories about boys and jokes about popular culture that I didn’t understand. In the daytime there were soap operas on the communal television. At night there were sitcoms and the only difference as far as I could tell was the laugh track.

  I would cross the central courtyard to John’s wing with a cask of wine, which was against the house rules, and we hid it in the garden and skulled coffee cups of the stuff after dinner. It was an easier time. I still felt restless in the evenings and found myself spending time in a nearby park overlooking a train station, watching the commuters trudging home through the puddles of streetlights and reading the names of dead people on the memorial statue.

  In the set of rooms close to John’s I noticed a group of boys. They had pulled the table away from view and huddled around it. They would spend their evenings quietly, erupting into laughter before shushing each other back to quiet. They were an odd bunch, badly dressed and not seeming to care about that. A couple of them wore the trademark black stovepipe pants and pointy boots of goths, but even they were half-hearted about their costume, venturing out in flannelette shirts and T-shirts torn at the seams. One of the boys was the same age as me, but had a beard down to his midchest and a receding hairline that made him look quite grandfatherly. One night I ventured in for a closer look.

  Dungeons & Dragons. They slapped the Dungeon Master screen down as soon as I entered their enclave but I had seen it. I could see it still, despite the heavy chemistry textbooks they nudged casually on top of it. Dungeons & Dragons was banned at Raymont Lodge, the magic and demons considered an affront to Christian values. It was specifically written into the rules. No closed doors if you had a visitor of the opposite sex, no alcohol, no drugs, and no Dungeons & Dragons.

 
The boys were pocketing their twenty-sided dice and their little metal figurines when I approached them. The boy closest to me smiled, a cheeky cherubic grin, and held out his hand to shake my own. Robert was studying information technology.

  “Krissy,” I introduced myself. “Drama student, but don’t hold that against me. I play a ranger.”

  “Evan,” said a red-haired, blue-eyed boy with a shy smile. “Girls don’t play Dungeons & Dragons.”

  “Well I do, and I have wine. I think that entitles me to join your game.”

  I sat between Robert and Evan and filled their coffee cups under the table. We played quietly, secretly. When we heard people approaching we hid the module under textbooks and pretended to talk about exams. I laughed. It was the first time I had laughed since leaving Dragonhall. I teased the boys and they teased back and we became friends quickly. I was invited back the next night and the night after that and soon they knew how I liked my tea and sometimes Evan would wander across the complex carrying two cups of tea, spinning them in twine slings he had crocheted to prove the existence of centrifugal force, not a drop spilled. I still spent time with John but it was not just John. I had friends now, a group of them, and sometimes we wandered into the city, and sometimes we caught a train to the cinema and I would come with them to Hungry Jacks afterward to watch them eat greasy burgers, excusing myself by explaining my vegetarianism.