by Peter Carey
'Perhaps, yes.'
There was a pause and Joel thought: not a damn fool here knows I am fucking her.
('Your meal was enjoyable?')
When, of course, they all knew.
('Yes, thank you.')
They had watched it for months. They had her dull eyes glisten. They had heard her throaty laughter become a fraction shriller They had not talked about the curious ménage à trois at the corner table, merely absorbed its possible implications so that later, when everything became obvious, they would realize they had known all the time.
Aldo, strangely irritated, passed around the tables, making his way towards an inept food-writer who had also been sent to haunt him.
Bettina said: 'He's a cretin.' She was being unfair, but she was sick of being patronized by idiots who couldn't tie up shoe-laces. She wanted power success, not through a lover or a husband, but directly, for herself alone. Joel, at least, accepted this in her, and in this respect at least she felt equal with him. There was some perverse honesty she shared with him. She no longer had to pretend to be generous and kind and loving. She didn't want to be good, she wanted to be successful. She explored the border territories of pain and pleasure with him. Smeared with shit and semen she felt herself to be standing at new doorways with new possibilities.
All her were clean pink tablecloths.
Harry Joy was suckled on those long lost days in the little weatherboard house on the edge of town. The world he was born in had been fresh and green. Dew drops full of visions hung from morning grass and old Clydesdales stood silently in the paddock above the creek. Crickets sang songs and everything had meanings.
The sky was full of Gods and Indians and people smiled at him, touched him, stroked him, and brought him extraordinary gifts from the world outside where there were, he knew, exotic bazaars filled with people in gowns, strange fruits piled high, the air redolent with spices, and Jesus Christ, and the Good Samaritan, always dressed in his dusty grey robe with its one red patch on the left sleeve, and the soldier offering the dripping wet sponge of wine to Jesus, and there were small boiled sweets and white sheets and the smell of bread, and floor polish and, far away, New York, its glass towers trembling in an ecstasy of magic which was to become, his father said, one day, after the next flood, a splendid book read by all mankind with wonder.
His father came and went three times, the first to sire him, the second to drain the swamp, the third to see his son with vaguely disappointed eyes.
His father had lain in bed while the Shire Engineer had knocked on the door. He remembered his mother giggling and how happy it made him feel, those sounds like drops of water suspended in sunlight, and how his father, pulling on his tall boots had come to the door laughing, to admit the tight-faced engineer.
'You'll be dead a long time, Brophy,' his father told the engineer. His father was tall and had a big moustache. He had been born in New York State and had travelled the world. When Harry and his mother went to church, his father stayed in bed.
'I can talk to God from here,' he told the child, who never doubted that his father had a special relationship the Almighty. He would have rather stayed in the warm bed beside his father than venture out to the little wooden church with its gothic texts written on the arch above the nave, a cold austere place where people left to drink communion wine and returned with solemn faces and a slightly frightening smell. The church was always nearly empty and only his mother's soft contralto rose like a bird and warmed its empty spaces with its trembling wings.
Here he heard about Heaven and Hell and the tortures of Jesus. He sat aghast at such terrible cruelty and more than once wept in sympathy for the tortured God or fear for what the God might do to him.
He preferred the stories of his father.
'How I met your mother,' his father said, 'is a story you should know, but first you must give me blue bread or a sapphire.'
'I haven't got any,' the boy wailed. 'Tell me the story.'
'Don't tease him, Vance,' his mother said.
'Don't tease me,' the boy said petulantly.
'You must always give something for a story,' his father said. 'Either blue bread made from cedar ash, or a sapphire. That is something I learned from the Hopi. All stories come from the Holy People and you must give something for them.'
'What is a sapphire?'
'A stone.'
The boy ran outside and found a stone, a small brown stone with a white vein in it. He gave it to his father who accepted it solemnly.
'Thank you, now we will sit on the floor.'
'No, Vance, not the floor.'
But they sat on the floor, the father and son, the boy folding his legs the way his father showed him. Occasionally his father would stop the story to feed the wood stove.
'This,' said his father, 'is the story of the Vision Splendid. It had been dry for eight weeks and the whole of the air was full of dust, bright dust that settled on everything. Nobody thought it would ever rain again. And then one afternoon we saw the storm clouds coming from the south and we prayed for it to rain. Your mother, who I didn't know, went to the church and she prayed. And I prayed too, but not in the church. '
'Did it rain?'
'Did it rain? When your mother asks God for rain...'
'Vance,' his mother said, but she giggled.
'Did it rain? The rain poured down. It rained so heavily you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. It rained like all the air was a river and the drains in the main street filled up and then the water, red water, the same colour as the dust, crept out across the main street until there was just a white line going down the centre and red water all around it, and then there wasn't even the white line and the main street was a river three feet deep.'
'Captain's Creek flooded and I went down there with some other fellows to help the shopkeepers. We had old Malachy's clinker boat, half-gone with dry-rot, and when we got to the Co-op it sank on its mooring (we tied it to the verandah post). We were shifting the flour and grain up on top of the counter, away from the water, and I just looked out the door, just glancing up, and that was when I saw the Vision Splendid.'
'What was it?' asked the boy. 'What was the Vision Splendid?'
'It was your mother, lad, her long black hair blacker than coal, standing in the front of a boat which was piled high with all the things from the church vestry. She was standing in front of the boat holding the cross and her eyes, her eyes, my boy. Ah ... ' he stopped. 'All that red water and such luminous eyes.'
It was only a small house and when the February winds blew it rocked on its wooden stumps and it is a measure of their sense of their own specialness that they did not envy their neighbours' larger houses but found theirs in every way superior. To walk into that little cottage was to feel something that was available nowhere else in town: old oiled timbers, mellow lights, curious old rugs, and chipped plates with pretty patterns, which visitors would fondly imagine were the remnants of a misplaced fortune. Where everybody else bought glossy white paint and threw out their kitchen dressers; the Joys were seen removing the last vestiges of paint and fossicking out at the tip for their neighbours' rejected furniture.
They should have been hated, or at least ridiculed, but they weren't. Seen fossicking at the tip they were granted the right to eccentricity normally given only to aristocrats, and there were rumours that they were, in some not very clear way, almost aristocratic. Perhaps Vance Joy's English middle-class accent gave them this idea, or at least provided a core on which other layers of fantasy could be coated, creamy layer on creamy layer. Yet at the heart of it all was this: Vance Joy was a big expansive man with a generous spirit whom it was impossible to dislike; he would never say no to anyone who asked for help; he could, if need be, drink like a fish and, most important of all, knock any man down. Patricia Joy was at once very beautiful and very modest; she was well educated but never displayed it; she taught piano on Thursdays and Saturdays and once did a water-colour copy of 'The Last Supper'
for the Sunday School, a work of art so highly valued that a departing clergyman had forever muddied his reputation by taking it with him when he left the town.
As everyone would say, as if expecting the contrary: 'They're hard-up, but not stuck-up.'
The Joys, charming, beautiful, educated, eccentric, played a part in this little game and in ways too subtle for anyone (themselves least of all) to notice, they encouraged it. They did feel themselves to be aristocrats of a sort: free-spirits, moralists, artists, bon vivants; and one must acknowledge, at least, the strength of character required to live their very slightly bohemian life in such a small and often intolerant community and, what is more, to get away with it.
When Harry thought of that house afterwards it would always be night and the wood stove crackled and made dull thumps and hisses and it shifted its burning innards make itself more comfortable. A soft yellow kerosene threw benevolent shadows across the room and his father (who lived in the house for a total of four years and two months) would always be there, telling a story in a languid way, stuffing a pipe with tobacco, feeding a stove, or cooking some unappetizing peasant porridge that he had taken a liking to in India or South America or Oregon.
And stories, always stories: Wood Spirits, lightning, the death of Kings, and New York, New York, New York.
'In New York there are towers of glass. It is the most beau-tiful and terrible city on earth. All good, all evil exist there.' He could say the word 'evil' so you felt it, a cold sinuous thing that could come in under a locked door and push up into your bowels. 'If you know where to look, you can find the devil. That is where he lives. If you keep your eyes peeled you can see him drive down 42nd Street in a Cadillac with darkened windows. He lives in Park Avenue, surrounded by his servants. But New York is full of saints, they ...'
'Vance!'
'My darling Patricia, you know it's true.'
'He believes everything you tell him, stop it.' She was sitting at the table, darning socks. She brushed her dark hair from her eyes and smiled.
'When God makes the next flood,' his father said, 'he will leave New York as a lesson to those who survive. Every other thing on earth will be destroyed except the buildings in New York. It will be a bible of buildings, a much better bible, a holy place which only the very learned will know how to read.'
'One day,' Harry said sleepily, 'I will go to New York.'
'You will too,' his father said, and read his palm to prove it to him.
He grew into a tall thin boy who had been at first what children (or at least the children in that town) called 'Gooby,' by which they meant someone who is a little slow and intro-verted and is likely to stand at odd places with his mouth open staring at things that no one would look at twice. But later, fed by the deep wells of his own self-regard, he became much liked. His height was a positive advantage in the type of football they played, and that too all worked in his favour. He was a deadly accurate kick and scored many goals; which was nothing less than what he had expected of himself, for he had been raised to expect excellence, and he did not, even for an instant, think it ridiculous, when confronted with some problem, to ask himself: what would Jesus have done? In fact he did it all the time. He sometimes had quiet dreams of martyrdom for some greater good.
They had wanted him to be Van Gogh, Jesus Christ and Zapata all rolled into one.
But somewhere there was something lacking, and as he grew older he came to show too great a regard for his father’s maxims about not working yourself to death. His mother took him to a city specialist to see if he had a problem with his thyroid gland, so lethargic did he begin to appear. He was like a wonderful racing car with a severely underpowered engine, and whether it was his father's final departure, or simply the onset of puberty, his idealistic concern for goodness seemed to have fallen away. He did not ask himself what Jesus would have done since he had been faced with prospect of Jeanette Grandell's wonderful fourteen-year-old breasts.
But although it would be a long long time before he concerned himself with goodness again, it did fall into the sediment of his character, and at times over the years he found himself wondering would like him to do.
But now he was a man of thirty-nine lying in a hospital bed and contemplating death. He could not allow himself to know that he was sickened with his life. He was like someone who has lain in bed too long eating rich food: within his soul there was suddenly a yearning for tougher, stronger things, for ecstasies, for the thrill of goodness perfectly achieved, to see butterflies in doorways in Belize, to be part of the lightning dance, to quiver in terror before the cyclone.
But it was too late for all those things, far too late. He stared out at the sunlit garden and listened to a banana leaf flap against the rainwater spout on verandah. In the garden, an old woman with swollen arms picked roses. Beside his bed a man with a striped suit and eyes like weak tea dropped, for the third time, the card that contained the details of Harry's medical condition. The man picked up the card with thick sausage fingers and yet it was not the surgeon's clumsiness that convinced Joy he was about to die, nor was it the admission that the operation entailed something like a 5 per cent risk. In fact he was less worried about dying than where he would go after he died.
He watched the surgeon’s unnaturally red lips move and could not bring himself to talk about the lingering taste of heaven and hell, explain that hell was like chrome-yellow flowers, that there were worlds in the afterlife layer after layer of filo pastry, that he, Harry Joy, lay now at the crossroads, that he had been warned.
What happened to him now, what he thought, what he decided, would determine whether he entered Heaven or Hell.
Vance Joy's stories had drifted like groundsel seeds and taken root in the most unlikely places. They had rarely grown in the way he would have imagined, in that perfect green landscape of his imagination, intersected with streams and redolent of orange blossom.
In certain climates they became like weeds, uncontrollable, not always beautiful, a blaze of rage or desire from horizon to horizon.
All these Harry had carried innocently, passing them on to his wife, his son, his daughter. Not having understood them, he transmitted them imperfectly and they came to mean quite different things. Vance Joy's stories of New York contained apocalyptic visions and conflicts between Good and Evil, but to Harry they were merely stories to be told, and to Bettina they were something else again.
New York was her antidote for the town she hated. She hated its wide colonial verandahs, its slow muddy river, its sleepy streets, its small-town pretensions. She loathed the perpetual Sunday afternoons, the ugly people, the inelegant bars and frumpy little frocks. Here, marooned on the edge of the Empire, she had spent ten years waiting for Harry's promise that they would go to New York.
'How could you?' she had asked (how many years ago?).
'Easy,' he said.
'How?'
'Sell up the business and go there.'
'When?'
'One day.'
He hadn't not-meant it, but he hadn't really meant it either. His business was a grand, slightly decrepit, old boat drifting with the current down a slow muddy river and every now and then he would get out and, with a long pole, push it away from the bank. Sitting back in the wheelhouse he could afford to dream about New York, but the thought of really competing in that turbulent water filled him with fatigue.
Bettina did not give up her dreams so easily. She spoke of New York to no one. She secretly married it to another dream, rolled the two together, harboured them within her and let them grow. She cultivated Americans and read their magazines. She saved money and put it in a special account. She did exercises to preserve her body for that time of arrival. And there had been times – how could she deny it to herself – when she had imagined, dreamed, the easiest solution to her problem would be if Harry would quietly die in his sleep. And sometimes, sitting in the kitchen at Palm Avenue, waiting for him to arrive from some late conference, she had watched the clock-hand
edge its way sideways around the dial and she'd thought – of course she was drunk – he's dead. And there was such lightness in the thought, such relief.
Ah, she was not a nice person. It was obvious. Nice people were usually boring, always boring.
She was drunk, and hated the town. She hated Harry's Fiat: it was ten years old and full of cigarette butts and old newspapers and, for some reason she could never understand, he was proud of it. He bought a Jaguar and gave it to her, but he kept that Fiat for himself as if it were somehow vulgar to display any wealth.
'But why? Why? For Christsakes, why?'
'I like it.' And you could see that he didn't even know why he liked it, but that he clung to it like an old teddy bear, some piece of damn rubbish Crazy Vance or Silly Patricia had scrounged from the tip.
But the Jaguar was (again) in the garage having its cooling system fixed (the cretins) and she had to drive this little joke car.
She grated the gears going into the hospital. She saw no charm in the old building, smothered in bougainvillaea and surrounded by big old flame trees, frangipanis and mangoes. It was only Americans who found it charming and when they did she suspected them of being patronizing, just as now, parking beside a particularly large and rather gross Ford, she thought she detected a certain superiority, a certain condescension directed towards her by its owner.
Fuck you. If I'd arrived in the Jaguar you'd have known who I was.
The woman left the Ford and minced towards the hospital. (Look at the mutant in her black Crimplene pant suit!)
Bettina stood beside the Fiat and picked cigarette butts off her white linen jacket. She was late. As she hurried across behind the Crimplene pant suit, she remembered that she had a pussy full of semen. It was only held in by a Kleenex and a pair of panty-hose. He would smell it. He would know. She wondered whether she should go home but hurried forward, catching her five-inch heel in a metal grating and falling heavily.
'Fuck it.' She had grazed her leg.
The Crimplene pant suit, summoned by the urgency of her obscenity, had hurried back.
