‘Although it’s human to make mistakes,’ she used to say.
‘Bad breath is human too,’ Jack would reply, ‘but that doesn’t make me want it.’
Ava insisted that mistakes were a necessary corollary to taking risks. ‘Life’s an adventure. You never know what’s around the next corner. And besides, who would want to?’
Throughout their friendship she had derided his desire for perfection. Perfection is just a form of control, she once wrote to him, a means of reducing life in all its diversity to a few manageable absolutes.
Ideals of perfection provided standards for behaviour, he wrote back. Far from exercising control, they undergirded a dynamic and progressive life. Perfection, he had argued, was justice without human jealousies, the oasis without the desert. But now he was having doubts. If he were to approach the issue differently, he could see that an overriding belief in perfection provided an immutable authority, which was – such a reluctant concession – characteristic of all types of fundamentalism. He left his chair and paced the room, eventually returning to his desk and beneath the phrase FUNDAMENTALIST IN LOVE he wrote BELIEF IN PERFECTION PROVIDES OBDURATE AUTHORITY. He folded the sheet of paper and shoved it in his ideas’ folder.
An ATM receipt fell out of the bulging file. Across the top in red ink he had written a line from George Steiner’s Errata: ‘Fundamentalism, that blind lunge towards simplification’. Even chance, it seemed, was forcing him to think this idea through. He withdrew his sheet of paper from the folder, added the Steiner line to it, and left the page spread on his desk.
FUNDAMENTALIST IN LOVE.
BELIEF IN PERFECTION PROVIDES OBDURATE AUTHORITY.
FUNDAMENTALISM, THAT BLIND LUNGE TOWARDS SIMPLIFICATION.
Ava was an avid reader of biographies. Rather than absolutes, she searched for meaning in the often messy lives of writers and other artists. Creative people tend to behave badly, she said, they break boundaries both in their life and their work. It was how she lived herself, as Jack knew better than most, and yet there was a coherence to her existence, Helen’s too, which he seemed to lack. Ava was compelled to write fiction (he had once heard her say she was ‘helpless before fiction’), and in a similar fashion Helen was compelled to do science. As for him, he was compelled to love Ava Bryant. But when a great love is a compulsion, can it still be a great love? Compulsion in the emotional realm seemed to fit better with revenge and hatred and patriotism and religious fervour – not love, unless one were to include obsession. And obsession itself: just a nudge away from fanaticism.
Work. The imagination. Reality. Experience. All such distinct, even mutually exclusive categories for him, but not for Ava. He and Ava had discovered together Yeats’s poem ‘The Choice’: ‘The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work.’ They both regarded it as a false dichotomy but for very different reasons: Ava because life and art were inseparable, and Jack because it was a nonsense to compare two essentially different things.
‘The dichotomy was dispelled by Yeats himself,’ Ava said. ‘He was involved in politics and the theatre, he had numerous friends and acquaintances, he loved well and he loved foolishly. Less life and there probably would have been less art.’
Perhaps life writ large was the mark of a true artist; if so, where did that leave him? His passion for Ava had become so deeply entrenched it had acquired the same sense of inevitability as God has for a believer, a taken-for-granted existence with its own rules and logic, its own raîson d’être. His love for Ava, not Ava herself was, he realised, the most authoritative element in his life and his sole allegiance was to it. Like any form of fundamentalism.
What sort of life is driven by a single desire? Of yearning always for what one lacks. Never to be satisfied. What sort of life is this? Again he picked up his pen and wrote: PASSION AS DICTATOR.
He read through the odd list before switching off the desk lamp and crossing to the windows. There he gazed out at the strings of street lights, the towers of lights, the smoothly moving headlights, the illuminated boxes of trams, the flashing buy buy buy neon signs. And the patches of blackness: gardens, buildings, markets – places shut down until morning. As he stared through the glass, a strange night city rose out of the familiar day view, like those magic-eye drawings that separate from an easy-to-see pattern. And through the night and the lights, through all the years of forgetting, he thought he could discern the black patch of beachside parkland where he played cricket and football as a boy. And the St Kilda reserve where he had listened to the Salvos playing on Saturday mornings. And the black snake of the Elwood Canal where he had crouched in a putrid alcove to escape the neighbourhood bullies. And the cemetery on Alma Road where he had trespassed with friends and they’d deserted him as night was falling, leaving him to climb the gates and make his way home alone.
A whole forgotten life buried beneath his remembered life, and he found himself thinking how there is an exclusiveness to rehearsed memories and a literalness to a remembered past. He had always been wary of people who chained themselves to habit and routine, but memories were susceptible to habit too. Memories like a catechism carved into mind, the same memories revisited as days pass into months and years, the same regularly recalled scenes and events comprising an individual’s personal history. And all the while the treasury of forgetting grows fuller – not seen, not noticed and certainly not questioned until someone produces a contradictory memory or one’s own mind relaxes, and all of a sudden the habitual view is sabotaged.
Jack crossed to his desk and switched the lamp back on. He made a couple more notes, wavered over his computer, left it untouched. Again he found himself thinking of authority, not just its restrictions and demands but the safety it brings, whether it be the authority of a dictator, a god, of history, of memory, or one unquestionably perfect love. All those yearnings he had cut and polished so they shone like diamonds amid the unruly tumult of daily life. Grand passions make a pretence of shunning all restrictions but the passion itself is a restriction, for nothing must ever challenge it. And while you’re flying fast and high on your grand passion, you don’t realise you are confined to a single tight orbit and the rest of life is gathering dust. Not surprising his work had suffered.
Perhaps it was time for a new version of Jack Adelson. And immediately he registered a chill. To excise Ava from his life would render him a stranger to himself. Although something needed to change. He gazed around at the flash and glamour that was NOGA. He was not his parents’ son for nothing, he knew that acronyms could camouflage a hornet’s nest of intentions and practices, and that nothing ever came for free. NOGA was not the place for a scholar; but then neither was the university any more.
It was after ten. He unplugged his laptop, slipped it into his satchel, stood by his desk not moving. Fundamentalism, authority, love, memory, creativity: the concepts wanted to come together. He stood by his desk for another minute, then he pulled his computer from the bag and picked up his page of jottings. Slowly he walked towards the windows, slowly he settled in his chair: if ever he needed to take a risk it was now. Love, authority, fundamentalism, creativity, memory. This business of all-consuming desires and passions, that in his love for Ava he may have been as restricted as any fundamentalist. That in his singular focus, extending even to his storehouse of memories, he had relinquished his creative gaze.
He opens his computer, he creates a new document, he begins to write.
He writes a meditation on fundamentalism. He writes that where fundamentalist ideas, beliefs, attitudes or passions exist there can be no ambiguity, and where there is no ambiguity there is no impetus for original thought. That in a long and obsessive love, the lover is cut off from reason in much the same way as a religious fundamentalist, and both are locked in a world of fixed desires and singular passions where the imagination is either slaughtered or put in chains. That because of the authority accorded to certain ideas and beliefs, misguided lovers, like fundamentalists, fee
l entirely justified in their life’s course and have no need to question it.
He writes that the appeal of absolutes today is their ability to supply bedrock at a time which is quite literally explosive; that absolutes – whether a belief in God or a perfect love or even the ultimate value of money – delude one into thinking one has some control over the events of one’s life. And reason is the first casualty – after all, absolutes are absolutes, there are no shadings or gradings, no flaws or ambiguities – and an engagement with reality is another. Perfect love – fundamentalist love – immerses the lover in a cloud of agnosia in much the same way that religious fundamentalism renders its followers insensitive to everything outside the creed.
He writes through the night. Four and a half hours later he is finished. Nearly three thousand words. A whole essay. He is afraid to read it, has to force himself to stand by the printer as the pages slip into the tray. And when the job is complete he takes the stack still warm from the machine, fans the pages, his pages, the first for such a long time, and lets them cool against his chest.
He puts his essay on the side-table and turns off the lamp. He settles into his chair and falls asleep.
‘BONDAGE. Musings on love, fundamentalism and authority’ was published a week later in the online journal WEBster. In keeping with the journal’s policy it appeared anonymously. Neither WEBster nor Jack’s essay dominated conversation in universities or government offices nor indeed on the floor occupied by NOGA high above the city of Melbourne, but the essay was noticed. Conservatives saw it as an attack on smug liberals who were caught within the mould of old and inflexible ideologies, and liberals saw it as an attack on conservatives who had lost themselves to social extremism. Artists of all persuasions welcomed it as providing much-needed support for creative work.
Jack emailed Helen about it. My first publication this millennium, he wrote. A short time later she telephoned: it was worth the wait, she said.
Connie was so impressed he wished he’d written it himself.
By the time Jack contacted Ava, she had already read the piece and guessed he had written it – his old punchy style, the vocabulary familiar from his letters. Although the thoughts were new. ‘It has the flavour of those articles you used to write back in Oxford,’ she said in a phone call to him. And invited him for lunch.
She sounded tentative, but perhaps not surprising given he had knocked back so many of her invitations. Or perhaps it was Fleur and she was embarrassed at the rekindling of an affair she had insisted was over. But flush with energy and already toying with an idea for a second essay, he accepted her invitation. It was only when he was in the car and driving to her place that he realised something was amiss. He was not rehearsing the meeting which was about to take place, he was not nervous, he was not racked with yearning. He was excited to be seeing her, but his other usual responses were quiet.
3.
They settled in the courtyard with coffee, not green tea Jack was pleased to note, and talked in a way they had not for a long time, stepping off from his essay on to broader issues of political authority and control.
‘How desperate we must be for security to relinquish so much in the way of responsibility and decision-making,’ Ava said. ‘It’s not surprising politicians get away with blatant lies.’
‘And blatant neglect of human rights,’ Jack added.
Ava was thoughtful, often stopping to find just the right word. In fact, uncharacteristically she talked at his pace, which he found rather touching. Touching and nothing else, certainly not evidence that finally she was loving him.
They talked across a swathe of topics. But after an hour she seemed to be picking her way through the arguments with extra care.
‘Are you all right?’ Jack asked.
She blushed as if caught out.
But whatever had embarrassed her it was not Fleur. Ava spoke freely about Fleur’s visit to Melbourne, about that vacant space when love has gone, her sense of incredulity that she had loved this woman for years and years, had suffered over her and made others suffer. She could still see Fleur’s attractions, she said, but her flaws were now visible as well.
‘Her self-concern, her vanity, her carelessness with people.’ There was a long pause, almost as if she were redrafting the relationship as she talked. ‘Even though I suffered as a result of these qualities, I never really saw them before. I expect I didn’t want to.’
Might he have deluded himself in similar fashion? Jack wondered. After all – and it took an effort to acknowledge it – most of what had occurred between him and Ava had been produced in his own imagination.
It seemed that the protection, the deception, of years was shedding fast and there was nothing, nothing whatsoever he could do about it. Delusion? He had suffered it in bucketfuls. Worse still, he had tethered his imagination to his love for Ava, and the imagination, knowing its master, had always placed him at the centre of its conceits. Not only deluded but narcissistic as well. Perhaps all romantic love is.
He looked at her, the love of his life. She sat slumped and pale against the red canvas of her chair – clearly the contact with Fleur had exacted a heavy toll. And for the first time he noticed the lines around her eyes and a faint staining of the skin on her cheeks. Her shirt in the gossamer material she had always favoured clung to her body; she looked as if she had lost weight. He was aware of feeling protective of her, as a parent might for a child.
She sighed. ‘If only all days could be like this.’
And habit kicked in: they can, he wanted to say, I’m available, always available to you. And reason pulled him back. She’s weary, she’s relaxed, her statement has nothing to do with you.
He leaned back in his chair and he, too, relaxed.
‘Could you kill someone you loved?’
The question so startled him he wondered if he had heard correctly.
‘What I mean is: could you help someone end their life?’
Ava indicated a newspaper lying on the ground. There was a photograph of an elderly man flanked by police officers. The headline read, ‘Husband to stand trial for wife’s murder’. Ava related the story: a loving marriage of forty years; wife diagnosed with cancer; years of treatment; no hope; much pain; husband helps to end her life.
‘Could you help someone you love die?’ she asked again.
Jack looked at her, this woman he had loved all his adult life, and slowly shook his head. ‘I don’t believe so.’
She reached forward and took his hand. ‘I thought as much.’
Jack had planned to put in an appearance at NOGA after leaving Ava’s place, but instead he went home. He let himself into the flat and walked slowly through the rooms. This place, so full of memories, suddenly struck him as anonymous; with the exception of his old bedroom, a shrine to his eighteen-year-old self, he might not be living here at all.
Lytton Strachey in a letter to his brother James had referred to ‘a one-place-at-a-table-laid-for-six life’. It described Jack’s to perfection. Could he pick up his life now? Could he direct it differently? Or would he be like an alcoholic who remains an alcoholic even after he has stopped drinking? Would he always be addicted to Ava?
He had been flirting with a second essay. He planned to call it ‘Starving for certainty’. It would connect the collapse of communism with the rise of religious fundamentalism in the developing world, and an increasing social fundamentalism with the collapse of liberalism in the West. The essay united the major points of his own past – his parents’ beliefs and the values of his formative years as a student – as well as thrusting him deep into the contemporary world.
He made himself a coffee and went into his study. It took just a couple of minutes to remove the ancient flyers and posters from the walls. He wavered in front of the rubbish bin, then folded them in a neat pile and shoved them at the back of the filing cabinet. Before starting his new essay he sent an email to Ava, thanking her for a lovely day.
CHAPTER 8: Devotions
> 1.
Waiting, flying, more waiting, flying again, food, films, announcements, computer battery threateningly low and the man in the next seat threateningly large. The journey from Melbourne to Atlanta dragged on and on.
Helen tried to work but her mind ran on a different track. Might this be her last meeting? Might she be forced out of science? And how would she live if she were? The same questions plundered the endless hours. And when she did manage to sleep, it was a pseudo-sleep fractured by a series of microbe-related disasters. It began with the delivery of anthrax into a football stadium, with two sleeping Helens debating how many aerosol squirts of the bug would be required to infect all the spectators. She woke up long enough to drink a bottle of water and then was thrown into the thick of an APEC meeting brought to a halt by watermelon injected with contaminated water. It would be the work of an insider and easily traced, said one sleeping Helen, not so easily traced, argued another, given the army of personnel required to run the show. The APEC incident segued into an outbreak of food poisoning among the troops in Iraq – a disaster which had, in fact, already occurred, with one Helen arguing sabotage against the other’s case for carelessness. From Melbourne to Los Angeles to Atlanta one terror scenario merged into another. When the aircraft finally touched down her brain had jammed.
She limped into the terminal. And then, to her relief, there was a shift in momentum. Her bag was the first to appear on the luggage carousel, security nodded her through, a driver was waiting to whisk her into the city. At the hotel she was welcomed as a returning guest and registered without delay. Her room was comfortable, the shower was vigorous, she changed into fresh clothes and went down to the hotel bar. Her colleagues were expecting her – Josh, originally from Israel but for many years at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Sam from the UK, Takeshi the shigella man from Japan, and Jeanne from Belgium, attending her first international meeting.
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