‘I thought you might come over tonight,’ she said. ‘Luke decided to visit a friend.’
‘Good of him to leave us to talk,’ Connie said.
Helen snorted in that way she had. ‘Sensible of him I would have thought.’ She peered into the refrigerator. ‘Have you eaten? I was about to prepare some food?’
He accepted crackers, lettuce and tinned sardines, and the two of them sat at the kitchen table as they had in so many kitchens around the world.
‘So what do you plan to do?’ she said.
Connie told her his thoughts about the divorce, including the benefits of Linda and the boys moving back to England. ‘The NHS can always use a top anaesthetist, and there are plenty of good schools for the children.’ He had been unhappy in the marriage for quite some time – ‘But that’s no surprise to you, and neither will it be to Linda.’
Helen attempted to interrupt, but Connie, in the process of talking himself out of his marriage, paused only for breath. Linda had known about his dalliances and was always threatening to leave with the next affair. ‘But she never has. She can’t possibly be happy,’ he said. ‘Someone has to make a move and it will never be her.’
Helen reached out and took his hand. ‘Connie,’ she said, and then more loudly, ‘Connie, there’s something you need to know.’
Linda had ended the marriage. She ended it in an email. She had sent a copy of the email to Helen. ‘My marriage might be over,’ she wrote to Helen, ‘but not my friendship with you.’
In a follow-up email to Connie a couple of days later, Linda addressed all the practical details, including some that Connie thought rather heartless. There was no necessity for them to meet, she wrote, no phone calls – she had changed her cell-phone number – and no final goodbyes. Whatever needed to be discussed could occur by email or through their lawyers; her lawyer used to be their lawyer so Connie had the contact details. She included a draft financial settlement, which he could see was entirely fair. She was happy for him to have access to the boys whenever he liked (she knew she was safe with that one), and happy for them to spend half of their school vacations with him (she knew, too, there was little chance of that). She would be staying in Boston but moving house as she had never liked the house he had chosen. There was no ‘have a good life’, no ‘thank you for our years together’, and most of all there was no explanation. He went over and over the emails looking for clues.
His wife was divorcing him, although with his reputation everyone would assume he had left her. So no humiliation, although privately his pride was on its knees. He didn’t like it, he didn’t like it at all. But best to look on the positive side: Linda had saved him a great deal of trouble.
CHAPTER 10: Light in a Vacuum
Heat wave followed heat wave. In February alone there were eighteen days of thirty-five degrees or hotter and March promised no relief. Each predicted cool front imploded before it hit Melbourne, clogging the air with steamy, suffocating disappointment. Restaurants without air-conditioning struggled to meet the bills, families flocked to local pubs for the free cooling, department stores and chilled shopping malls posted record profits. Out in the streets children moaned, stressed mothers lugged bags and babies, red-faced workers wore suits with resignation.
Jack’s office was equipped with the latest in climate control yet increasingly he worked at home. He had put aside all thoughts of a new book to concentrate on his essays, and while he knew this was not the work NOGA expected of him, he was enjoying himself as he had not for years. Like some omnipotent and omniscient headmaster, Harry seemed to be everywhere at NOGA. If Jack was at his desk, Harry would appear at the door; if he stepped into the passageway, Harry would be walking towards him; when he took coffee, so, too, did Harry. Even at the urinals he would find Harry still hard at work as he encouraged Jack to accept this speaking invitation or that consultancy. Harry took every opportunity to refer to Jack’s remarkable change of fortune, how a specialty that just a short time ago had been politically irrelevant was now of vital importance to all free-thinking people.
Jack’s time had come, Harry said, and NOGA prided itself on its association with him, ‘Our proactive association.’ His emphasis was unambiguous. ‘So don’t throw away this chance, Jack.’
It was best to avoid the office.
For the past several years it was as if the compulsion to work had been filleted out of him. And while Jack had learned to manage, much like an amputee adjusts to living without a limb, he could never forget that something vital was missing. But now, with his new essays he was thriving. Creativity feasts on creativity, he was rediscovering, and working well was the best way of continuing to work well. As he wrote and read, as he shopped and cooked, he was rushed with fresh ideas. The heat hardly bothered him at all.
There was a summer of his boyhood, another long hot summer like this one, accompanied by one of the worst droughts on record. Every few days clouds would gather, the air would bloat, and just as it seemed it was about to rain the wind would strengthen and the clouds would disperse and the never-ending blue sky would again glare down. Dams and lakes shrank to mud and then hardened to cracked clay, grass was as rare as gold; the heat sucked the marrow from every living thing. Finally when even skin was cracking with the terrible heat, it rained, real rain on a Sunday morning – Jack remembered because there was no school for him nor work for his parents, and the three of them stood on the balcony for an hour of glorious drenching. And exactly two weeks later there was more rain, clouds of it pelting down and his parents packed a picnic and the three of them drove through the rain into the country. On the wet, parched hills and along the sides of the road a green fuzz had already begun to sprout. Crimson rosellas darted between the trees and willy wagtails flapped their happy tails, and in the paddocks and on the slopes rain-soaked cows nuzzled the fresh new growth. There was even a wombat eating by the side of the road while the cars whooshed wetly past. The birds, the thirsting animals, the brown land with its spongy green fuzz and Jack remembered his mother saying how resilient was this land, how little it takes for it to repair itself. And now in this endless summer, after hours and hours of writing, Jack felt himself to be repairing, miraculously, just like the land after drought.
His parents had installed an air-conditioner in the living room of the flat, a single luxury in an existence not characterised by luxury for two Europeans who had never adjusted to the Australian heat. At the time Jack suggested they do the job properly and install a second unit in their bedroom, he even offered to pay for it; but they insisted that one unit was quite enough. Now Jack set up work on the dining table, pushing aside his papers to eat his meals, and made up a bed on the couch. On the hottest days he would douse his head with cold water; he noticed twists of grey in the black curls. And he had started playing the guitar again, his uneasy fingers becoming more familiar as he found his music again.
Thousands of people flocked to the beach during those blistering months and Jack would hear the whoops and cries long into the night. Every now and then he would go out to the balcony and watch the shadows moving across the sand, the white foam of late-night swimmers. Occasionally people strolling the street below would look up and shout a friendly greeting to him. Such rare camaraderie during those boiling days.
His second essay had been well received, and so too a third. He was now working on a new piece called ‘The End of Originality’, addressing the role of obsession in creative work. Obsession, that singular focus which holds a person at the desk, the canvas, the laboratory bench, the guitar, mindless of the leaking tap, the dirty clothes, the poor barking dog in the flat next door. Obsession, so crucial to a child’s learning about a talent in the first place, yet these days more likely to be viewed as pathology and dissolved in medication. Although in the jostle of today’s fabulous distractions, an obsession would have a hard job of getting off the blocks in the first place. So whither to originality?
Whenever he thought of originality, his mind automati
cally turned to Ava, Connie and Helen. But the obsessive drive they once had now seemed blurred, roughed up by other competing interests. For a time after the Aiken meeting Helen had been caught up in science’s white water – the most exciting ride around, as she had often said. But a couple of months on and she seemed to be stranded again.
Connie, Ava and Helen, these three with their public achievements were also his intimate friends. He saw each of them regularly, even Ava, whose company now was mellowed by his own mellowing. He carried news from one to another, linking them together when other demands kept them apart. While the cool and unsentimental gaze of the future would sort through their achievements and garner a selection for the public record, originality looks very different rumpled and tired as Ava had been recently, or railing over a messed-up experiment as Helen was last week, or sprawled on a couch unshaven and drunk as Connie had been just a couple of nights ago. Jack witnessed all the personal upheavals as they occurred, and at this time, several months after they had all returned to Melbourne, he was seeing little in the way of new work and much in the way of lives unravelling. It is a difficult business analysing your own times before time itself has settled the silt of the inconsequential. Whether the changes he was observing in his friends would in the future be seen as smallish potholes in otherwise brilliant trajectories or prove to be the start of their winding down, Jack could not predict.
So much of their intellectual lives used to overlap. In fact, when they were students there was a canon for people their age – and the only people who mattered were their age, or dead. Perhaps their world was smaller then and their lives less complex making it easier to keep in step with one another. Now Jack had a sense that the group was leaving him, as if the ligaments connecting them had grown slack with age.
The extent to which the dynamic had changed was encapsulated one Saturday lunch at Ava’s place when he overheard Ava and Connie discussing house-cleaning arrangements. The conversation must have lasted for nearly fifteen minutes, finishing only when Ava gave Connie the contact details of the person who cleaned for her and Harry. Such a conversation would have been unthinkable in the old days.
So trivial was their talk, on the rare occasions they did get together, and so biographically grounded Jack wondered if he had romanticised the old times, whether what he remembered as brilliant assaults on profound ideas were nothing more than the pompous and insubstantial rhetoric of impressionable youth. So one particularly steamy night when even the air-conditioner was straining he decided to test his memory. He unearthed his box of Laconics presentations, and seated in the direct line of the air-conditioner, he looked through the papers one by one. He could see the rooms where each had been presented, the speaker on a raised plinth, the rest of the group perched on chairs or cushions. He recalled the period when Connie sported a beard, the year Ava wore her hair in a hennaed Afro. And the changing fashions: bell-bottomed trousers, embroidered jeans, miniskirts, kaftans, long hair, short hair, sideburns or not. The seating was always uncomfortable and the room always too hot or cold, but he and the others would nonetheless turn up week after week. The formal presentation would last twenty to thirty minutes, followed by questions, discussion and argument. People would leap to their feet to drive a point home, others would insist on occupying the plinth for a more significant contribution. Always volatile and invigorating, some meetings lasted well past midnight.
He was sure his memory was correct, but to be absolutely certain he selected four papers at random: Allegiance and Ethics (Connie); Every Angel is Terrifying (Helen on microbes); The Turn of the Screw (Ava on children in the late twentieth century); and How Political was Henry James? – one of his own papers and surprising given James was a favourite of Ava’s but never one of his. How much, he wondered, had he borrowed from her?
He settled in his armchair and read all four papers in their entirety, together with the annotations he had made. His memory had not deceived, their arguments and analyses were not always correct but they never failed to provoke. He leafed through a few more papers. All of them were witty and entertaining; indeed, the more trivial the topic the greater the wit employed. They would no more have spent time talking about house-cleaning as they would talking football or crocheting. It was not that practical or personal issues were shunned, when a relationship broke up or a refrigerator broke down the others would rally with comfort and advice, but there was a shared understanding that one had to move on. They believed that Pater was right, ‘that to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life’. The days sparked with opportunity and it was their duty to exploit it. As for familiarity breeding contempt, it would have been a betrayal of the imagination to subscribe to such a view. But now it seemed the group had lost its way with nothing holding it together except that its members shared a common past. It was as if each of them was thickly swaddled in their own years apart and like fat Michelin people they simply did not fit the same space any more.
Jack piled the papers back in the box. When the box was full, a half-dozen papers still remained on the floor. For a moment he considered throwing them out in what would have been an act of punishing finality. Then he emptied the box and packed it again properly.
It was late. He gathered his pillow and sheets and was about to make up a bed on the couch when the doorbell rang. He guessed it was Connie – no one else would be visiting at this hour. And so it was, Connie unshaven and dishevelled, unsteady on his feet and stinking of alcohol.
Jack helped him into the flat. ‘I hope you didn’t drive over here.’
‘Taxi,’ he said, and flopped onto the couch. ‘Couldn’t bear the empty house.’
It was a repeat performance of a couple of nights earlier: Sara out, Connie tossing about in the empty house, the drinking, the taxi to Jack’s place.
‘Do you mind if I stay over?’ And with Jack’s ‘Not at all’ he pulled out his phone and with his surprisingly spoon-like fingers stitched together a text message to Sara.
‘I need to let her know I won’t be home,’ he explained. ‘I wouldn’t want her to worry.’
It was a courtesy she did not return.
‘Is this what you want?’ Jack asked, when the phone was put away. ‘Is she really what you want?’
And without hesitation Connie replied that she was.
Connie’s opinion was sought on topics from community ethics to cyberspace; publicly he was colouring the stratosphere. Privately, however, his life was a disaster. Linda was divorcing him, and although she was doing so in a highly civilised manner, there were still ten years to pack up and the boys to consider. And the more Jack heard about young Sara, he guessed that she, like Linda, was also going her own way.
‘I love Sara,’ Connie said out of the blue.
‘But she does nothing for you,’ Jack replied.
‘No one understands a relationship not their own.’ Connie’s words were slurred. ‘Look at Ava and Harry.’
‘All right then: Sara supplies nothing that you need.’
Slouched on the couch, the ballast emptied out of him and staring into the middle distance with a quizzical look on his face, Connie looked like a man who inexplicably finds himself on the wrong train. Jack was convinced it was not the flightiness and energy of Sara which was to blame but rather the absence of wise and competent Linda. Jack had raised the possibility of a reconciliation with Linda but Connie would not consider it. He’d been in a rut, he said. And he wasn’t in love with Linda any more but he certainly was with Sara. When Jack suggested he was behaving like a teenager, Connie replied that Jack was no expert when it came to love. Jack wanted to protest that one can be a fool when it comes to one’s own actions and wise with those of others, but decided to keep his silence.
Connie staggered to his feet and helped himself to more wine. Back on the couch he embarked on a long, convoluted account of how best to strengthen his relationship with Sara, what he could do to make her happy, how America would provide a
more congenial backdrop to their relationship than Australia.
‘I’m surprised Sara would consider leaving Australia. She’s at an age when friends carry the highest currency.’
‘You make too much of age,’ Connie said.
Jack saw the broken blood vessels across Connie’s cheeks, the skin slack on his bones, the tuft of grey hair poking out from his open-necked shirt and was in no doubt that age was relevant. Even a kinder woman than young Sara would be hard-pressed to find this Conrad Lyall attractive. Jack knew that his own credentials were suspect when it came to relationships, but nonetheless it was clear to him that Connie was struggling to make an affair into a marriage while throwing away a marriage that suited him well.
The following morning, a Saturday, after Connie had dragged himself off home, Jack walked around to Helen’s place. It was not yet ten o’clock but the temperature was already in the thirties. There was a stillness to the air, heat haze shimmered above the bitumen. It was standing room only on the beach.
Helen’s front door was open, he called out and let himself in. Her head appeared around the doorway of her bedroom.
‘I was hoping you’d visit,’ she said.
A short time later, dressed in polka-dot pants and lime-green singlet, Helen was ready to find some air-conditioning. Five minutes more and they were seated at a local café with efficient cooling.
Jack told her about Connie’s latest visit. ‘He’s throwing away his marriage.’
Helen disagreed. ‘Connie let go of the marriage a long time ago. And don’t forget Linda’s tossing him out. During the period they’ve been together, Connie’s had a swathe of girlfriends from Boston to Dubrovnik. If Linda had known about even ten per cent of them, she’d have kicked him out years ago.’
Jack was tempted to add that on those particular criteria Harry should have done the same with Ava, but ever protective of Ava he kept the thought to himself.
Reunion Page 23
