Reunion

by Andrea Goldsmith

  His mother was in the audience, together with old friends and acquaintances. Over drinks he had mingled with former colleagues – they’d certainly be watching his performance tonight – as well as two former students who had done rather well for themselves. There were snipers out there too, Connie knew exactly who they were, academics who had been quick to target him as all charm and artifice twenty years ago and had used the time since to practise their punches. Connie had long been aware that reputation was considerably less sturdy than he would like, but with his career now well established surely it would take more than a lecture to a home crowd and a few bitter philosophers to topple the cumulative effects of twenty years’ work.

  And Sara was out there too. He peered around the wings. Sara, ‘it rhymes with tiara’, was in the fifth row on the aisle and already on friendly terms with her neighbour. All glossy brown skin in her skimpy black dress, he definitely wanted to impress her.

  It was a part of Australian folklore that expatriates only returned home when they were on the wane in the wider more important world. But his star had never been brighter. He had been attracting huge crowds both here and in the States; even the Europeans now acknowledged him. Such suspicion attached to popularity, yet in his own case there was no reason for popularity to condemn him as a lightweight. If there was a problem, and he was unsure whether there was, it lay with the well-known collegiate capacity for envy. For the fact remained that while he might be tired and unduly anxious, and yes, he was very popular, irrespective of what some of his dryer colleagues might think, popularity did not rule out a serious and significant contribution. Dickens had been popular, Russell too, and Einstein had been a celebrity. Not to mention the de Bottons and Shamas of his own age – although he harboured the same doubts about them as he did about himself.

  He moved deeper backstage; if he hadn’t already had more than enough to drink he would have nipped back into the hall for another glass. He found a small room with table and chairs and settled himself down with his notes. Logic insisted there was no reason to worry: his work was rigorous, it was relevant to these volatile times and it reached a substantial number of people. Moreover, it armed them for the challenges of a fractured uncertain world far more effectively than turgid papers cobbled together in neglected corridors of academe. And his reception since he had arrived back in Australia could not have been better. His lectures had been well attended, the radio interviews deferential, and talk-back sessions had presented him as revered seer on all matters contemporary; there had been TV spots usually reserved for celebrities, and, to top it all off, there had been exotic Sara – her background was Chilean – to remind him of the man he still was. Of course he wasn’t finished yet.

  His own expectations had always been the hardest to satisfy – a quality he shared with his friends, although his situation was different from theirs in that no one would ever question the seriousness of their work. Helen was stamped with the imprimatur of serious science; Jack’s choice of a corner of comparative religion so obscure that he had been forced to work in universities equally remote was of little consequence now he had been resurrected as the background expert of choice on Islam and the new terrorism, and Ava had been treated seriously from the publication of her first novel. Only Connie’s work was questioned. His last two books, both exploring communication, power and the fall of knowledge, had received what was, even in the desperately hopeful view of the author, a muted reception. No one had actually criticised him, no one had labelled him lightweight, but the reviews were without muscle and the reviewers themselves seemed lightweight. He suspected that among his more serious colleagues he was thought to have sold out, while others believed he had peaked with God and the Webmaster. Yet by his own reckoning he had plenty of good years left. And even if God and the Webmaster remained his best-known book, he wouldn’t be the first writer of renown with a long career and high output in which one book dominated. He recalled Joseph Heller’s response when asked whether he was disappointed he had never written a novel to surpass Catch-22. With such a book, Heller had replied, is there any need to better it?

  Was God and the Webmaster Conrad Lyall’s Catch-22? The barb in the question did not escape him. He truly believed there would be other books, better books, but with expectation such a powerful shaper of opinion he needed other people to think the best was in front of him too – all other people: his friends and family, the strangers who came to listen to him, the readers of his books, even envious back-stabbing philosophers. He wondered whether Ava with her stellar career was still vulnerable to public opinion and decided to ask her. A moment later he knew he would not: there was something unpalatable about a man who desired the good opinion of everyone, including those he neither liked nor admired himself.

  Connie collected his notes and made his way back to the wings. The auditorium was vibrant with hundreds of voices. Harry came up behind him. ‘Ready?’ he asked. And before Connie could reply, ‘You know this is a crucial part of our campaign,’ – it wasn’t a question – ‘and we’re relying on you.’ With a nod in the direction of the audience, he added, ‘There’s a lot of money out there.’ And after a matey pat on Connie’s back, he walked out on stage.

  The silence was immediate.

  Harry began by welcoming the guests ‘to this auspicious occasion’, then he provided a brief history of NOGA and an account of ‘its already substantial achievements’. He singled out the NOGA Energy Forum – ‘the most up-to-date information bank on energy research and development across the globe’, and also the leading role taken by NOGA in monitoring new developments in bioweapons, mentioning Helen by name. Connie was listening in spite of himself. Far from rambling as used to be his way, Harry showed himself to be a succinct and witty speaker who knew exactly how to hold an audience and exactly when to stop. After some remarks about the Network’s plans for the next triennium, he introduced the chairperson of a steel corporation that was one of NOGA’s main backers. Sir Richard Treat, with thick greying hair and pin-stripes over a softening girth was, Connie decided, a perfect fit for his knighthood. As his voice boomed through the hall, Connie made a final check of his notes, while a technician grubby with stubble attached a body microphone and repeated his instructions from the earlier sound check. When he was finished he patted Connie on the backside and wished him luck.

  What on earth was that? Connie wondered. A come-on? An over-the-line familiarity? An accident? An insult? He might well be the contemporary soothsayer, but he simply could not read the gesture.

  He shuffled his weight to ease the ache in his knees and tightened his stomach muscles to reduce the press of his belt. Before he had left America he had been sufficiently concerned about his health to have a medical check-up, but whatever was infecting his spirits wasn’t revealed in medical tests. A temporary malaise was the most likely explanation. After all, as Oscar Wilde once said – or was it Somerset Maugham? – only the mediocre man is always at his best. Exercise might help, and he made a note in his organiser to investigate the sports centre at the university. And he needed to deal with the Linda problem.

  A decade with the same woman was a record for him, and for the first five years he had been almost monogamous. He should never have married again. Two failed marriages were proof enough that for a man like him only short-term relationships were advisable, two or three years at most, with insufficient time for the issue of children to arise. Not that he didn’t love Laurie and Oscar, nor for that matter Hugh, now twenty-five, and the twins almost sixteen – another note not to forget their birthday – but at five and four Laurie and Oscar were exhausting. It was impossible to work when they were home, and none of the nannies was as effective as their mother in maintaining discipline. The situation would be much improved if Linda had not insisted on returning to her practice. But as she was quick to remind him, anaesthetists earned considerably more than philosophers, so if either of them were to give up work to look after the children it should be him.

  Yo
u can’t turn yourself into someone else, particularly not at his age, and surely better to acknowledge his limitations and cater for them rather than allow them to run roughshod over those he cared about. Linda said that everyone had to compromise in relationships, but he had reached his limit. He needed to make some hard decisions, and he needed to make them now, otherwise he would be faced with ending his marriage after Linda and the boys arrived in Melbourne.

  And he needed time to explore this thing with Sara. Just thinking about her caused a gripping in his abdomen. He had met her only three weeks ago in Brisbane. A Melbourne girl, she was researching her PhD in an archive up there, not philosophy but a topic located in some arcane outpost of post-colonial studies. When he was ready to leave on his lecture tour, to his delight so was she. ‘On the road with Connie’ was how she described it. Twenty-four-year-old Sara, who twenty-four hours after they met was groping him under the table as they sat in a restaurant with a group from the university discussing the widening communications gap between the first and third worlds. Yes, there was definitely more of Sara to explore.

  And for the first time in decades his closest friends were in the same city. Ava, Jack and Helen, the three he had always relied upon for wise counsel, how he wanted them to be impressed, how he needed them to tell him how good he was. He stepped forward again and looked around the wings. Ava and Jack were in the front; Helen, as usual, must be running late.

  Jack was leaning towards Ava, but then Jack had been blindly leaning towards Ava ever since they first met. How much he had missed of life, the only one whom they had designated a genius, a man who had produced no new work for years, who lived in the same flat in which he had grown up, who had stripped his life back to the white clatter of bones. Even the revival of his career would not by itself loosen his fixation on Ava.

  And Ava herself. It occurred to Connie that as a young woman she had revealed many of the same qualities which now attracted him to Sara. He had not made the connection before. Ava at eighteen stretched across the rug in his office, the lush hair in a lovely tangle about her face, the unbuttoned blouse, the perfect white breasts, her jeans knotted around her ankles. Nearly thirty years ago but still so clear. The shabby maroon rug, the floor hard against his elbows and knees, and while a large age difference and student status had never stopped him before, with Ava – he did not know why – it seemed courteous, responsible too, to express a certain caution.

  ‘We can’t take it back once it’s done,’ he remembered saying.

  Her knowing look, the half-smile and her reply, he had forgotten none of it: ‘Enough with the pre-coital clichés,’ she had said, hooking her hand around his neck and pulling him down.

  Sara had done much the same three weeks ago.

  It was all too simple to suggest he was using Sara to hold on to his own youth; Sara would be viewed as a catch by most men. Something more fundamental was happening. If anyone had asked him as a twenty-year-old whether there would be a time when he was not reliant on other people’s good opinion, he would have responded with a confident, ‘Of course.’ From the stand-point of youth, maturity always seemed so secure, so worry free. And yet here he was in sight of sixty and requiring approbation as much as ever. Even as he drew his last breaths he would probably be wanting reassurance that he was dying in the best possible way, the most intellectually rigorous way, dying with humour rather than cynicism, with grace rather than fear, with dignity not resentment.

  There was a burst of applause. The steel magnate had finished and Harry assumed the podium again. Jack was still hard up against Ava. If anyone was holding on to youth it was Jack. Nothing was simple any more, Connie was thinking as he stepped out on stage, but unlike Jack, he, at least, had plenty to show for his years.

  4.

  Connie strolled across the stage to the podium. He arranged his notes on the lectern, he raised his head slowly, he looked out at the auditorium and he smiled. Ava glanced along the row and saw people smiling back. Connie had not said a word yet already he had captured the audience. For the next thirty minutes he would give his usual compelling performance, the crowd would remain transfixed, and Jack would lean heavily against her and probably not hear a word.

  Poor Jack, what a waste he had made of his life, although Ava no longer blamed herself. For years she had felt responsible, not simply for that night on the beach which began their month-long affair, but for his having fallen in love with her in the first place. And blaming herself she had tried to dissuade him. She had sent him books about the Bloomsburies and the Beats – Friends like us, minus the hot-housing and the drugs. She made sure he knew about her lovers, about Fleur above all; she shielded him from none of her faults. And Harry, she tried to make Jack understand why she loved her husband and why he was beyond any doubt the right man for her. Ava did everything she could to persuade Jack out of his love until the week she received not one but two thick letters from him – interesting and entertaining as were all his letters but each more than four thousand words long. Two letters in a week which added up to ten per cent of an average novel. And finally it dawned on her that not only did Jack want to keep his love for her, his grip on it was welded tight. As for that night on the beach, he was already in love with her; the consummation, she came to realise, made no difference. Jack was proof that memory is a safer country than any other.

  Yet she knew why she had succumbed. Jack was all attraction in those first days, and what flaws were apparent, like his shyness and his fastidiousness, she ascribed to sensitivity. He loved poetry, all her own favourites – Rilke, Baudelaire, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Auden, as well as Yeats, Coleridge and Keats – and history, they shared his ancient and her European and a swag of other worlds in between. And his parents were unlike any parents she had ever met, not just their foreignness and their activism, but the way they loved their son – they called him darling – and that they welcomed his friends to their home. And he was so good-looking, the lapis blue eyes, the thick black curls, the slight, well-proportioned body, and he was her own age. And he talked like other people wrote, in beautiful sequences of cut and polished words, the first person she had ever known to do this. Soon after they met she asked if English was his first language. It was, he said, before adding that he had read rather a lot, and indeed there were the occasional mispronunciations common to people whose greatest exposure to words was on the page. And he played the guitar, not the numbed strumming over a handful of chords typical of most eighteen-year-olds, but like a proper musician.

  The night on the beach that had begun their month together, he had played his guitar especially for her. It was three o’clock in the morning and the beach was deserted. A group of them had spent the evening at a folk club where Jack had been performing, and how it happened that she had ended up alone with him on the sand she could no longer recall. But his music she would never forget. He had played the blues, swaying with the music and humming along in an odd rumbling beneath the melody. And she who knew nothing of music was gathered up by those broken rhythms in an experience that went beyond words (she would come to know the same sort of brimming emotion with Rothko’s paintings). Jack played his guitar, the waves shuffled to and fro on the shore, there was the gentle rush of late-night cars on the road behind, and it seemed absolutely right to move into his arms. By the time the sun rose and the traffic had begun in earnest, the moment of perfect harmony had passed. But never for Jack.

  Connie stopped for applause. Jack did not move and, not wanting to embarrass him, Ava, too, remained still. The applause subsided and Connie began again. Knowledge used to command authority, he was saying. But in our era, it’s been overtaken by information. Connie leaned in towards the audience, his face overwritten with excitement, his hands beating the emphasis. And it was not simply his being a compelling speaker, he was passionate about these ideas and wanted to share his passion. But then Connie exuded passion in most things. Ava would never forget her first philosophy class when he appeared in the doorway of
the lecture theatre, his hair wild with heat, face tanned, brown sinewy arms shown off by the sleeveless T-shirt, walked to the lectern, laid out his papers, looked out at the students and told them that the only life worth living was the examined one (she had assumed he was the author of the aphorism until Stephen set her straight) and it was his intention to introduce them to the tools for such an examination.

  For a first-year student in 1978, Dr Conrad Lyall, with talent to match his ambition and already well on his way, was exactly the right man to sleep with. Jack, who neither then nor now knew how to look after himself, was not. So six months into her first year of university Ava made a choice. She would always regret starting the affair with Jack, and regretted even more the way she finished it, but without an act both incontrovertible and reprehensible she believed Jack would not stop wanting her. As it happened, the attempt proved futile. Your infatuation was a god-finder, Ted Hughes wrote about Sylvia Plath. Perhaps all infatuations are.

  A murmur ran through the audience. Ava had not heard what Connie said and neither it seemed had Jack. They continued to sit motionless, their arms hard up against each other while the people around them again broke into applause. Jack had utterly stilled. He had heard none of Connie’s lecture. He was back on that beach with Ava, he was in her arms, he was making love, and afterwards the gift of his history stones, a dozen stones collected from different locations across Europe, fragments of the old world brought to the new by his grandparents, who had passed them on to his father, who had passed them on to him. After the night on the beach he had wanted to give her something special and enduring. His history stones were his most precious possession.

  He had placed them in a Petri dish lined with cotton wool. ‘A history of the world in the palm of your hand,’ he had said.

  Then followed those four weeks of whitely flying, as if all of him, and not just his earthly feelings, had sprouted wings.