by Nikki Stern
But Paul called me a party pooper, telling me it would be fun. Eventually I relented and we combed shoe stores all over town. His feet were extraordinarily large and his demands fairly specific: high heels (no less than four inches) and sexy, not practical. Finally, he found a pair of chintzy sandals that seemed to fit the bill.
The day before the party, he announced he’d changed his mind about wearing the sandals, saying he would dress normally after all.
‘Just return the sandals,’ I said.
‘No, I’ve worn them already. Don’t worry—they’ll come in useful for something.’
I couldn’t think what and was annoyed. We had spent a large percentage of our meagre income indulging his whim. Truthfully, however, I was relieved he’d decided against a public display of his womanly charms—it seemed somehow inappropriate.
Dory had been fretting about our housing situation and had spoken to her accountant.
‘I’ve been thinking of buying a house . . . if you could pay me a nominal rent.’
I was overwhelmed by her generosity and asked her if she was sure she could afford it.
‘Well, I have some savings—enough that I can afford a full-time nurse for ten years. I don’t ever want to go into a nursing home.’
Dory was adamant that, with a baby, we couldn’t live like gypsies any more. She stipulated one condition: the house had to stay in her name. ‘If Paul ever got his hands on my money, it would be gone in a flash—he doesn’t have any self-control. Has he got a job yet?’
I told her how he had two jobs—at a magazine and a pub— omitting the fact that they were in the gay community. ‘That’s wonderful,’ she said, telling me how Francine wasn’t impressed with him at all. ‘She thought he was like a smarmy snake-oil salesman.’
I defended him, saying that it was because she didn’t know him. ‘He’s not like that at all. And besides, I love him.’
I was having the perfect pregnancy and felt positively glowing as I watched my belly expand. Paul accompanied me to all my appointments, including my ultrasound where we both watched, him in tears. He loved my new shape, often rubbing my tummy and singing Dutch lullabies to our child. Our lovemaking too had a new tenderness as he took care not to hurt the baby. He would often forgo food so that I could eat healthily and would happily make me snacks whenever I got hungry.
Meanwhile, he’d also aligned himself with the gay scene in Melbourne and was constantly being invited to parties—most of which he declined. One evening, he went to a warehouse party. In my naivety, I queried him afterwards.
‘Well, it was basically a fuck-fest. There were holes in the wall and lots of anonymous sex. Don’t worry—I didn’t fuck anyone. In fact, I told them I was married with a pregnant wife.’ That, I thought, was the end of his employment.
Sure enough, both jobs ceased. I was relieved that this charade had come to an end. It seemed deceitful for Paul to take advantage of their obvious good nature. Besides, we would now have time to search for a house.
This proved to be a time-consuming activity. I didn’t want to live in the inner city with a baby and so we looked to Melbourne’s bushy outer suburbs. I spotted an ad for a Robin Boyd house in Warrandyte and insisted we check it out. I told Paul that Robin Boyd was one of Australia’s leading architects—part of the Boyd dynasty, Australian arts royalty.
‘Where the hell is Warrandyte?’ he asked; I described it as a beautiful suburb by the Yarra River. I’d spent a lot of time there as a child. So we drove to the house, and immediately I knew I’d found my home. The large picture windows looked out on to a pool and surrounding bush. It was perfect. All that remained would be to convince Dory.
Her visit there left her undecided.
‘But it’s a Robin Boyd house,’ I said, appealing to her snobbishness. I knew she had always admired him.
‘The house is charming, but it will need a lot of maintenance, and I’m not sure if Paul is up to it . . . and Warrandyte is so far away.’ Still, she said she’d ask someone else to have a look—her friend, Inge King, was one of Australia’s leading sculptors and she too had a house designed by Boyd.
Later that week, Dory called back with her decision: she’d talked to her accountant again and Inge had inspected it. ‘I’ve decided to go ahead with it.’
I was ecstatic.
6
It was a glorious spring day in 1984—eight months since we’d been back in Australia—when we moved into our new house on Kangaroo Ground Road. The paucity of furniture necessitated sitting on the floor, but we were content—I was six months pregnant with a loving husband and we had our own home.
Paul bought an airbrush and together we created a range of T-shirts to sell at markets. Diligently, we worked on our designs as I continued to teach stained glass. I’d given up on the idea of Paul getting a job in the current year, but we talked of him studying in the near future.
Paul finally received a letter from Saskia. While not overjoyed with being a grandmother at 39, she was apparently ready to accept me as her daughter-in-law.
A visit to the gynaecologist triggered ponderings about my adoption. He’d asked about my family history and I told him my mother died in childbirth. I was concerned this could be problematic—after all, I had narrow hips. He reassured me all would be well and the birth would be induced. After producing his diary, he announced it would be on a Thursday as Friday was his golf day.
Paul stayed with me throughout the labour which, as predicted, went smoothly. I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl we called Shoshanna. Paul cried as he cut the umbilical cord. Surprisingly, she was blonde although her features were mine. This was the first time I’d seen anyone related to me by blood and I spent hours studying her tiny face.
Dory, despite her initial reaction to my pregnancy, was as proud as any grandmother could be. She came to see me daily, along with the many other visitors I received. I had asked her to process a roll of film, and she brought the sealed package to me just before I was due to be discharged.
I opened the wallet and flicked through the photos. To my horror, most were of Paul—in my clothes with his new sandals. He had borrowed my bright-red lipstick and nail polish, and tucked his genitals between his legs. The poses were of him blowing kisses—pouted lips and come-hither looks, all taken with the aid of a large mirror.
I confronted him when next he visited. ‘You were supposed to be getting the house ready for the baby and now I see what you’ve been doing.’ I banged the photos down on the hospital trolley.
He glanced at them and immediately I could see his embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry. I won’t do it again,’ he assured me; but, somehow, the words seemed empty—devoid of sincerity.
‘Jesus, if you want to dress up, just do it . . . But do you have to take photos? And use my clothes?’ I begged him to help me understand his behaviour—it was too bizarre for me. ‘I’ve just had a baby to what I thought was a normal man—but this is unfathomable weirdness.’
Paul was contrite. He told me he couldn’t explain it, but he’d decided he was finished with ‘all that’.
Confronting Paul’s transvestitism was something I had avoided. There had been that first time in Amsterdam, when he’d wanted to know how he looked as a girl; and then there was the sandal episode. I sensed something significant was behind it all; I’d stupidly been making excuses to myself.
My experience of transvestitism was limited. I recalled seeing Polanski’s The Tenant, with its sinister overtones and cross-dressing theme. I had two friends who occasionally ‘dressed up’ in public: one as an artistic expression, the other in defiance of male stereotypes. By contrast, Paul’s transvestitism seemed clandestine and somehow sordid.
After a week in hospital, it was time to leave. My joy in coming home was destroyed when I discovered that Paul had failed to perform the tasks he’d promised to do. The baby’s bassinet was still filthy and her room was a pigsty. The whole house was in chaos, but I was in no fit state to do housework.
&n
bsp; ‘You were supposed to have some food in the house and have it moderately clean. This isn’t fair—what the hell have you been doing?’ I demanded.
I noticed evidence of recent dope-smoking and could guess the answer to my rhetorical question. Paul admitted he’d gone round to Dirk’s for some grass. ‘It was an early twenty-first present. I guess I smoked a little too much of it. I’ve just been incredibly stressed.’
‘Well, you’d better get a job. We haven’t paid Dory any rent yet and I’ve had to give up my teaching.’
Paul’s 21st birthday fell just days after the birth. He wanted a big party, and seemed bitter at having to settle for a few friends visiting. He made me feel guilty for not celebrating in style.
I informed him I didn’t have a 21st party and he should just get over it. ‘You wanted to be a father and you’ve made choices accordingly . . . So stop sulking.’
‘It’s just that I’ve always had shitty birthdays,’ he said. He related how, when he was fourteen, his mother had promised him a party. He’d come home from school to find her lying comatose on the couch—drunk. He asked about the party; but she screamed hysterically that there wasn’t going to be a party, because she was going to kill herself. He spent the eve of his birthday trying to stop her throwing herself off the fifth-floor balcony. The next day, he’d gone to school with scratch marks all down his face where her fingernails gouged his skin. ‘I told everyone the dog did it.’
It was such tragic episodes, which Paul recounted with incredibly expressive emotion, that always reminded me why I loved him. I could not stay cross with someone who’d suffered as he had. He may have been exaggerating, but my sympathy for his deprived childhood made me feel guilty for criticising him.
I had often thought that perhaps a part of my love for him was bound up with my compassion for his circumstances. Maybe there was even an element of me needing to mother him by giving him what Saskia had withheld—and I suspected that he in turn took succour from my maternal offerings.
To my surprise, I loved motherhood. I was now emotionally fulfilled. I totally devoted myself to my daughter and Paul became a doting father. Immersing himself in Shoshanna’s care, he tackled baby baths, nappies and 2 a.m. feeds—with kindness and love. I was touched by his tenderness and felt vindicated in my decision not to abort. As if making amends for our shaky start to parenthood, Paul got himself a job as a salesman for a firm selling cassette language courses. Another year had passed and it seemed he was no closer to studying.
With Paul’s job came stress and hostility towards me. It was his second summer in Australia and I sensed he resented me, perhaps blaming me for stealing his youth—even though he was the architect of his own predicament. Not unsurprisingly, our sex life waned: Shoshanna was sleeping with me and Paul moved into the spare room. Tensions between us increased.
I was feeling incredibly burdened by guilt, which he played on mercilessly: I had married a young man and now, with the arrival of our child, I was denying him sex. Yet I needed to be true to myself. This was a loving marriage—or so I thought—and I needed the love and tenderness in our daily lives to translate into the bedroom.
Something emotional was definitely shifting in me, changing gears—downwards. Paul rarely respected my needs or wishes, and I was getting little from him emotionally. Despite his consistent devotion to his child, our relationship had become compromised by his selfishness and what I could only describe as his craziness. His obsessions were spiralling out of control and I found them sickening because I’d always been well balanced and rational. As I struggled with this new phase of my life, I reluctantly had to admit that some of Dory’s misgivings had been well founded.
Paul constantly made barbed comments about my lack of interest in sex, and took to masturbating with a vengeance. I would find the accoutrements—the baby oil, the magazines, the greasy tissues—in the morning. He never seemed able to dispose of his waste and I wondered whether, beyond his innate messiness, this was a way of sending me a subtle message.
Paul’s stress levels rose in inverse proportion to his sales success, until finally he was let go. What had started as a promising career resulted in a financial deficit due to the purchase of a second car for his job.
He began to talk obsessively about Francine. We learned that she’d organised a sham marriage to stay in Australia and he wanted to notify the Immigration Department. ‘You know she’s just after Dory’s money,’ he warned me. ‘That crazy old woman hates you—you’re fecund and she’s barren.’ He was convinced Dory was going to leave everything to Francine, because she was the daughter she wished she had. ‘Unfortunately adoption is like a lucky dip . . . and she got you.’
I thought he was being ridiculous—Francine was just a friend of Dory’s.
‘Well, if she doesn’t leave her money to Francine, it’ll be to the cat home or some gay dancer’s fund,’ he forecast darkly. ‘You know that she’s a fag hag. Mark my words: it’ll be anybody but you, just to spite you.’
It was true that Dory liked cats and she had a number of gay dancer friends from the Australian Ballet, but Paul’s lunatic talk was making me furious. ‘You’re crazy. Completely meshuggeneh,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be talking about this—it’s tacky. I’ve never discussed money or inheritance with Dory, and I don’t intend to start now.’
But Paul persisted, spending hours trying to calculate Dory’s net worth. He used as a starting point her comment that she had enough savings to fund a nurse for ten years. ‘So that means, if you work on a thirty-five-hour week and an annual salary of, say, $30,000 and three nurses, and a compound interest rate of . . .’
I had always thought Paul and I had similar attitudes to money, but now I was finding out that he was unbelievably greedy. He was 21, living in a renowned architect-designed house and not paying a cent in rent—all thanks to Dory’s generosity. Repeatedly I demanded he stop with his comments.
I was also starting to worry about his mental stability. His obsessions with Dory and Francine were verging on paranoia. Even though I had studied four years of psychology, this was way beyond my ken. I’d done mainly ‘rats and stats’, but this seemed like a serious behavioural problem. I told him I thought he should seek professional help.
‘The only professional I should see is a lawyer—to see if Dory can legally leave you out of her will,’ he snapped. But he refused to get help. He was spending our paltry income on buying dope and speed, and he had started growing marijuana with seeds he’d smuggled in from Holland. He became fixated on creating mutant polyploid plants using colchicine, and his quest to create a super dope plant bordered on maniacal. He applied an uncharacteristic anal compulsiveness to his experiments, documenting them with an almost-scientific rigour.
His Dory obsession, however, also continued to dominate his waking hours. He would sit around drawing; but, instead of doing cartoons, he became preoccupied with designing extravagant extensions to the house—planning what he would do with Dory’s money.
Distressing as it was, I learnt to ignore his rambling diatribes, which he seemed unable to control. I was beginning to realise he was definitely not the person I’d thought he was, although his consistent affection for Shoshanna was reassuring.
His paranoia took a final turn when he started talking of putting a contract out on Dory. ‘It would be easy to arrange for a trip-wire . . . or a hit-and-run going up Narrak Road. Dirk has some friends . . .’
I was incredulous. ‘You’re making me sick,’ I screamed. ‘You’re out of your mind.’ I had totally lost my composure. Paul, however, continued callously detailing Dory’s proposed ‘accident’, ignoring my distress. I had never encountered anyone speaking with murderous intent and hoped it was merely some bizarre attention-seeking device.
‘Anyway, you’d be a prime suspect,’ I said, smugly. ‘And I don’t believe you’re serious about Dory. If I did, I’d kick you out.’
This seemed to work and, for a while, his insane behaviour abated.
Dory had been right: we were having trouble maintaining the property. Our financial situation was dire, because my glass-art income had now reduced to a trickle. Still, I was determined to be a stay-at-home mother even though Shoshanna had recently turned one and could have been left in child care.
Unexpectedly, Paul announced that he’d seen an ad in the paper for nude models and he intended to apply. Naively, I thought he was referring to an artist’s model, with which I was familiar through life-drawing classes.
He returned from the photo session in high spirits. ‘Well, that was the easiest $100 I ever earned. All I had to do was get my gear off and pose.’ And he mentioned to me how the photographer had a woman there, too.
‘What do you mean—you posed with her?’
‘Yeah. Don’t worry—nothing happened.’ He assured me that she wasn’t very attractive and I was much better looking. The photographer had told Paul he thought he could make some money working as an extra for TV, but he would need some headshots. He had recommended a photographer—a man called Ken, who coincidentally also lived on Kangaroo Ground Road, although we had never met him.
So Paul arranged a session and, when I saw the resultant folio, I was actually impressed. He was immensely photogenic and was soon getting work as an extra on local shows such as Neighbours.
Soon after, when Shoshanna and I returned from visiting Dory one day, Paul seemed excited. Ken had rung to say he knew a psychologist couple doing a sex therapy video; they were looking for actors. ‘He asked me what my wife was like, and I told him she’s gorgeous.’ Ken had kindly offered to do a screen test with the two of us—at no charge—to show them and the producer.
