Reunion
Page 37
He contacted the Literature Council but unless he was a publisher or the author of the work he could not apply for an editing grant. He was about to put the novel aside until he had sufficient funds to pay for the editing himself when Harry emailed requesting a meeting with him. They had not spoken since Jack’s NOGA fellowship ended and with nothing left in common except Ava, at last Jack had reason to hope.
Harry named a fashionable Japanese restaurant more notable for its flair than its food, but with the possibility of Ava’s work back on the agenda Jack was not about to argue. The restaurant was empty at six o’clock but gearing up for a busy Friday night. Jack settled at a table and was about to order a glass of wine when Harry arrived.
Harry appeared to have discarded most of what was previously Harry. He wore a black three-quarter-length coat with the sleeves turned back to reveal an exquisite, pale green satin lining. His shirt was white with hidden buttons and a small mandarin collar, the slacks were black and smooth, the shoes were slip-ons. The moustache had disappeared as had the clammy stippled skin. Chemical peel? Cosmetics? Plastic surgery? Jack supposed anything was possible given the radical turn of his transformation.
Jack stood up to greet him. ‘You look great.’
‘Never felt better.’
Harry chose the wine and as the waiter poured, Jack asked about NOGA. The Harry of old had liked nothing better than to talk about himself and in this he had not changed. He began with the fellowship program; not only had he rescued it, it was proving to be the rich repository of information and connections he had always foreseen. Among the current fellows were an economist, a coal and gas expert and a Sinologist. ‘A solid, untemperamental lot,’ Harry said.
NOGA had surpassed all his hopes. ‘We’re a think-tank, a lobby group, an information hub for research. We’re linked into business and government agencies internationally. Where there’s influence, you can be sure we’re connected.’ Harry looked so satisfied. ‘Not too many major decisions happen in this country without our involvement.’
Harry had moved out of the house next door to Minnie months ago. ‘I’ve bought an apartment. St Kilda Road. Twelfth floor. Magnificent views.’
Harry’s new apartment sounded like the NOGA offices with its ‘swathes of space’, floor-to-ceiling glass and minimalist furnishings. Ava and Harry had always preferred bolt holes – cubby-houses for grown-ups was the way Ava described their serial rentals. And the houses they chose were always old; Ava said she and Harry liked to be surrounded by other people’s history.
Ava had been dead less than a year, but time enough for her husband to reinvent himself. And the woman to complete the picture was exactly as Jack would have expected, if it had occurred to him there would be a woman. He and Harry were settling into their second glass when she joined them. Her name was Victoria. She was short and slender and like Harry she was dressed in slacks and a three-quarter-length black coat. Nothing about her bore any resemblance to Ava.
Harry and Victoria sat on one side of the table and Jack on the other. A waiter distributed menus and Harry suggested they leave the ordering to Victoria. Without consulting the menu she reeled off half a dozen dishes. With the meal organised she moved closer to Harry and put her hand on top of his. Jack watched with fascination as Harry twisted his hand so it was now palm to palm with hers, and then neatly flipped the hands over so his was on top.
At last Harry was ready for business.
‘As you can see, Jack, I’ve moved on. But there remains the matter of the Bryant literary estate.’
‘You mean Ava’s work.’
Harry shrugged. ‘Call it what you like. As her executor I’m inundated with inquiries and I simply don’t have time to deal with them.’ There was a movement alongside him and he added, ‘Nor do I have the inclination. But if people want to use her work, or if there are to be films of the novels, or new editions –’ Jack sat forward. ‘If,’ Harry continued, ‘there are to be new Bryant projects, as literary executor I’ll always need to have some involvement but I want it to be minimal.’ He saw Jack was about to interrupt and held up his hand. ‘I’ll be reasonable about any proposals, but the less I have to do with her work the better.
‘And here’s where you come in, Jack. I need someone to handle the day-to-day requests and inquiries as well as monitor the various projects that receive the go-ahead. I need someone who will manage her affairs and keep them away from me.’ He paused, there was a superior smile playing across his face. ‘Now’s your chance, Jack. You can have her at last.’
‘You want me to do the work of an executor?’
Harry nodded. ‘Of course you’ll be paid and we can negotiate that. Just keep me informed – email will be fine. You’ll have free rein except that I’ll retain right of veto, and of course I’ll remain the only signatory.’
He looked so satisfied. His new lady looked so satisfied. If it were not so important to gather as much information as possible Jack would have left immediately. Instead he sat through the entrée of sashimi – his stomach churning, the raw fish impossible – and picked his way through the main course.
‘What about the royalties from her work?’ Jack asked, once the food was cleared away.
‘They’ll continue to come to me as Ava wanted.’
Ava had wanted a lot more than that, Jack was thinking, including Harry’s happiness – Harry and Victoria planned to marry in the new year – but not at the expense of her own memory. As for the royalties, of course Harry would want them. Ava’s death had sparked new interest in her work. Most of the novels had gone into new printings under the terms of existing contracts. Harry had made a packet out of Ava’s work in the time since she had died, and he stood to make a good deal more in the years to come.
Jack did not stay for coffee. He said he would consider Harry’s proposal and contact him in a few days.
Friday-night revellers fill the streets. The lights of the restaurants flash and flicker. Jack hurries down to the tram stop, and then on a whim turns in the other direction towards the university district. A few blocks further on and the footpaths are crowded with students. How familiar they look with their shaggy hair and tight jeans. All these young people in a paradise that once belonged to him. Him, Connie, Ava and Helen.
Everything, it seems, comes full circle.
The day he met Ava the future opened up as an endless brilliance. They travelled together through the days and years; even when oceans separated them Jack would reach out convinced it was Ava he touched. He will never understand what happened to Harry who truly had Ava in reach. There wasn’t someone else. Ava was sick, she was dying. An affair was no more likely than the break-up of her marriage.
He makes his way along the footpath, past outdoor tables packed with laughing drinking youths; so much noise and bustle that Harry’s presence soon loosens and fades. He strolls into Readings bookstore. It is crowded here too, but there’s the hush of books and people reading, and in the background a recording of a woman singing in a worn and weary alto. Jack walks the length of the shop to the philosophy section. He finds several copies of Connie’s most recent book and two of his signature God and the Webmaster. Across in history and ideas there are two copies of his own The Reinvention of Islam, to be joined soon, he hopes, by his new book of essays. And last to fiction, and an entire shelf of Ava’s novels, a shelf of Ava Bryant. The books and the author have merged – and not mere semantic convention. For when he reads her novels, he finds percolating through them her beliefs and ideas, her pleasures and peccadillos, her yearnings and losses – all, of course, couched in fiction. But then Ava always said there was no better vehicle for the truth.
He stands back to allow two young women access to the Ava Bryants.
‘Start with her first novel,’ the taller woman says, taking Rock Father from the shelf. ‘It’s one of my favourites.’
Her friend flips through. ‘I wonder who these people are,’ she says, pointing to the dedication to Jack, Helen and Conrad.
The Ava Bryant devotee doesn’t know. ‘But I envy them, whoever they are.’
Jack leaves the women with Ava’s books and soon after he exits the bookshop. He walks to the corner where he turns and makes his way towards the university. The footpaths are less crowded here; students are strolling arm in arm, three and four across, heading down to the main action. They don’t move aside for him, and twice he is forced to step off the pavement into the gutter.
He, Ava, Helen and Connie used to talk as if they would change the world. Perhaps all young people do. They felt bound by the wonder of having found one another, and the wonder of what was possible – not just singly but together. Not surprising that during the period they were reunited back in Melbourne the friendships had felt so strange.
Helen is changing the world but not in the way she planned. And if she has any moral qualms about her work, she is now keeping them to herself. Occasionally she mentions Möller, and Jack will hear in her voice the excitement and, yes, the wonder of working with him. She does, however, talk frequently about Ava. Jack will be eating his breakfast, or working, or preparing for bed and the phone will ring and it will be Helen in Boston or Washington or Atlanta or Dallas, Helen with a few minutes to spare and a sudden memory of Ava. And she will regale Jack with the trip to Sydney and her first taste of mango, or the breakfasts with the night workers after she and Ava had been studying all night, phone call after phone call filled with her rich store of exploits. As for those difficult months prior to Ava’s death when Ava figured so low in her priorities, Helen appears to have buried them.
Helen will be in Melbourne within the month, a quick visit to see Luke. She says she wants a ceremony for Ava, what she calls ‘a remembrance’. She doesn’t yet know what form it will take but she promises to work out the details before she arrives. ‘Just you, me and Luke – and the Ava we know.’
Jack finds the whole idea abhorrent and he is sure Ava would too, but where once he would have tried to persuade Helen to change her mind, he won’t bother now. Friendship is no longer the complete and coherent package it once was; both more clear-sighted and more browned about the edges it requires far greater understanding than its youthful progenitor.
Come and visit me, Jack, Connie had written in a recent email.
Poor Connie, every moment’s genius until the inevitable future seized him by the neck and began to squeeze.
I miss you, I miss us as a group. And: When did our friendship become old times?
Connie wrote of a gap where Ava used to be. I’m aware of it even more than I was aware of her presence. This was not lost opportunity, he insisted, but lost possibilities. Jack detected a flatness in these communications, a resignation, but Connie was adamant: he had made the right choice in returning to his family.
How different they all had been at the reunion. Jack can still feel the texture of that evening: the terror of seeing Ava mingled with his desire, her easy duet with Harry, the carefree conversation of his oldest friends, and a sense of being locked in a scene in which he had no role. Looking back on that night and all the nights preceding it, it was as if, for him, love and friendship were a one-way ticket not to the next stop, nor even the next suburb, but right to the end of the line.
He had always assumed he loved Ava best. Loved her better than did Connie or Helen, loved her better than Harry. But he had just loved her more exclusively.
He crosses the road and enters the grounds of the university, the place of their beginning. What now? he wonders. What now with Ava? After decades of wanting nothing other than to devote himself to her, the answer to Harry’s proposal is no longer so clear. He has read about the strange neurological tricks of a damaged brain that cause people to know that one side of their body is paralysed but have no real sense of the existence of that side. It is how he feels about Ava. He knows she is dead but he cannot quite believe it. When the bewilderment overwhelms, he reaches for her fictions, but then he has always felt more at home in her work than he ever felt with her — until those last months when finally he shaped his love to something she truly wanted. He came to their friendship too late. But there are the books. The only life remaining.
He has no photographs of those last days. None of them do. Yet he pictures her easily: Ava perched on the verandah of her house, Ava stretched on the couch in all her lovely lushness, Ava in her courtyard, Ava strolling through the cemetery, Ava listening while he played his guitar. And Ava asking whether he could help a loved one end their life. Did he let her down? Jack has posed the question so many times and still he is not convinced that if she wanted to die (and, unlike Minnie, he will never be sure she did), she understood why he could not help her. Although he knows she valued his visits those last months, that they gave her life when the rest of life was wearing thin.
It is quiet here in the grounds of the university. The library is lit up and through the glass he sees the night students at work. There are people walking the paths, shadowy figures and solitary like him. The wind has freshened, life itself rushes into his face. He picks up his speed, he begins to run. He feels his heart racing, the knots fall away. He passes familiar buildings, he moves swiftly through this landscape of his past.
And now he leaves the campus, a lone man in his middle years streaming through the streets, back to the city centre, across the river and into St Kilda Road. He passes the Botanic Gardens where he spent so much time with Ava; he is skimming the asphalt, like skating or flying. He runs and runs, pulling away from the past. Finally he slows down, finally he stops. He waits at a tram stop outside a block of flats he has never before noticed, a tatty oddity amongst the glassy towers. His head is so clear he sees everything tonight.
The tram picks him up and carries him through the darkness to the terminus. He disembarks and walks the short distance home. The flat is still warm after a day of sunshine. He switches on lamps and shuts the blinds, then he collects Ava’s novels and settles on the couch. He has no regrets. He rests one hand outstretched on her books, and the other curls in that vulnerable human hollow above the heart. Early friendships are cemented with the hardest glue, Ava used to say. But time has the hardest grip of all. Jack closes his eyes and sees himself as he once saw Ava, one hand grasped to the rail of a speeding train as it hurtles into the future.
ENDNOTE
My partner, Dorothy Porter, died on 10 December 2008 after a brief illness. She was healthy all through the writing of Reunion, she was healthy when the novel went into production in late 2007. We looked forward to celebrating together the publication of Reunion in 2009.
Both Dorothy and I believe in the power of fiction to take one into the hearts and minds of characters who owe their existence to the author’s imagination. Reunion is a work of fiction. None of the happenings in the novel are drawn from my own personal loss of late 2008.
About the Author
Andrea Goldsmith originally trained as a speech pathologist and was a pioneer in the development of communication aids for people unable to speak.
Her first novel, Gracious Living, was published in 1989. This was followed by Modern Interiors, then Facing the Music, Under the Knife and The Prosperous Thief, which was shortlisted for the 2003 Miles Franklin Award.
Her literary essays have appeared in Heat, Meanjin, Australian Book Review, Best Australian Essays and numerous anthologies. She has taught creative writing throughout Australia, and has mentored several new writers. She edited an anthology written by The Burnt Fingers Collective, a group of people with gambling problems.
She lives in inner Melbourne.
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2009
This edition published in 2011
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
www.harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Andrea Goldsmith 2009
The right of Andrea Golds
mith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Goldsmith, Andrea, 1950 –.
Reunion/Andrea Goldsmith
ISBN: 978-0-7322-8784-9 (pbk.)
ISBN: 978-0-7304-5088-7 (epub)
Interpersonal relations – Fiction.
Reunions – Fiction.
A823.3
Cover design by Nada Backovic Designs
Cover images: woman by esthalto/Matthieu Spohn; group of friends by Supernova/Getty Images; frame by Adam Radosavljevic/iStockphoto
Photograph of Andrea Goldsmith © Alden Ford
Epigraph from Open Closed Open by Yehuda Amichai © Georges Borchardt, Inc., New York; quote in “Chapter 6: Universal Fool” from ‘This Be the Verse’ from High Windows by Philip Larkin © Faber and Faber, London; quote in “Chapter 6: Universal Fool” from ‘Lazarus Not Raised’ in Selected Poems, 1950–1975 by Thom Gunn © Faber and Faber, London; quote in “Chapter 6: Universal Fool” from ‘Heptonstall’ in Three Books: Remains of Elmet, Cave Birds, River by Ted Hughes © Faber and Faber, London; quote in “Chapter 6: Universal Fool” from ‘Letters to Live Poets, XXI’ in New and Selected Poems, 1960–1990 by Bruce Beaver © UQP; quote in “Chapter 6: Universal Fool” from ‘Dust to Dust’ in Selected Poems by Gwen Harwood © Collins/Angus & Robertson; quote in “Chapter 6: Universal Fool” from ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ in The Penguin Poets. Selected by the Author © W.H. Auden; quote in “Chapter 7: Bondage” from Errata: an examined life by George Steiner © Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.