Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 2, Issue 5

by Venero Armanno

  She wore a sleeveless golden tan dress to the knee that looked both classy and retro, something modelled on the Carnaby Street days of the sixties. He couldn’t help wondering if she would even be aware of the era. On her wrists were thin golden chains, and a pearl or its imitation in twisted gold showed at each very fine ear lobe. She’d done her eyes with a heavy mascara and her lips were red, but she didn’t seem to be wearing any other makeup. What spoke most of a new side to this young woman, however, was all contained in her attitude. There was a certain scornfulness to the way she stood there, the way she looked at him, and even in the way she spoke.

  ‘Would you play one of those records of yours?’ she said, tilting her chin toward the collection she regularly dusted for him. ‘Anything but country.’

  Duvall contemplated playing her something to match her Swinging London dress. Not early Rolling Stones or The Kinks or The Beatles, these would hardly match a Friday night mood, but maybe Nancy Sinatra’s record with Lee Hazelwood, or an old collection by Sandy Denny, Marianne Faithful or Dusty Springfield. Still, he reflected, this was all too literal. Instead he chose a special rarity, an album he liked by Cesária Évora, the Morna and Coladeira singer from Capo Verde, nicknamed the ‘the barefoot diva’ because of her penchant for performing without wearing shoes. He enjoyed the mood of all ‘Cise’s’ records, and Duvall reflected that it hadn’t been all that long since Évora had died. She’d been just two years older than he was now. As he was bringing the diamond stylus down onto the opening track of her 1988 debut, La Diva Aux Pieds Nus, Sandy spoke behind him.

  ‘Can I help myself?’

  Duvall turned. She had the bottle of Tullamore Dew in one hand.

  ‘Do you like it neat?’

  ‘I’d prefer some soda.’

  ‘There’s a bottle in the fridge.’ He was about to go get it and mix her a drink, but he picked up the cover of Évora’s album and pretended to study it. Something in Sandy’s attitude was unsettling, and he didn’t want to give in to its call. ‘Do help yourself.’

  She soon came over to where he was standing. Perhaps her scorn had softened, for Sandy had mixed him a similar drink. She passed it into his right hand. They didn’t clink glasses.

  ‘I like the music,’ she told him, ‘very earthy voice,’ and at this proximity he caught himself looking at how soft her lips seemed to be, even in their deep red. It was hard to reconcile this young woman with the person who’d been coming to clean for him. Sandy would never be out-and-out pretty, but Duvall thought that she had conjured more than enough allure to attract any male she might want. Add her ironic and rather moody gaze into the equation, and you had someone special.

  Duvall drank. It was his fourth or fifth of the evening, but now he didn’t feel drunk. They remained standing by the record turntable and vinyl collection, which stretched to over a thousand long players. Though he didn’t really want to know, he needed to make conversation, so asked, ‘Well, where have you come from, what have you been doing tonight?’

  ‘Drinks with someone,’ she replied, and didn’t elaborate. A thought was in her mind, Duvall could see that. Then he saw the colour rise into her cheeks, even as she lowered her eyes. ‘Mr Duvall,’ she started, now not meeting his gaze, ‘what do we do?’

  He said, truthfully, ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  Sandy drank. She contemplated the carpet and rug and furniture that she cleaned, even the curtains that she dusted.

  ‘I want someone to help me,’ she spoke.

  Duvall was sure she had rehearsed a special speech, something, some approach, but he wasn’t certain that she felt it was coming out right. The colour in her cheeks intensified.

  ‘I was hoping… that you might. You did pass me some extra money, that was very much appreciated. And I didn’t have to ask very hard…’

  ‘What exactly is it that you want help with? Is it your mother? Is the insurance not covering—’

  ‘No, all that’s fine. I mean, it’s as fine as it can be.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It’s nothing much. I took a few loans the last couple of years, just from my sisters, my mother. It’d be good to pay them back. I travelled a little too long… India mostly. When I ran out of cash I settled in Goa, hardly spent a cent. Now there’s university. And general costs,’ she shrugged. Now that she’d started her story, it was as if it needed to come out. ‘I’ve been a waitress since the age of sixteen. Nice places, dumps, everything. An assistant nurse too, since nineteen. I’ve had old people step on me and spit on me and swear at me, and in nursing homes I’ve had people shit on me too… I’ve had to clean up residents who died, give them a shave, use wads of tissues…’ Sandy closed her eyes. When she opened them she said, ‘And I’ve done everything as well as I’ve known how. But I’ve sort of had enough.’ She tried to smile at him. ‘I’ve even been a housecleaner.’

  ‘I’m so bad?’

  Her eyes showed how much she appreciated his small attempt at self-deprecation, at lightening the mood.

  ‘When people can’t take any more of one sort of thing, they make arrangements for something else. Something that suits them better… that maybe they can live with more easily…’ Sandy let out a sigh and seemed disappointed in herself. ‘Now I’m babbling.’

  ‘It’s fine, just go ahead.’

  ‘All right… I’ve found out as much as I can about something different. It—’ Sandy took a long sip from her glass. ‘Do you want me tell you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can we sit?’

  They moved to the sofa. Sandy slipped off her flat shoes and tucked her feet beneath her, sitting sideways so that she could look at him.

  ‘I’ve seen sites set up for arrangements between men and women. There are women who want looking-after and help, and there are men who feel safer, or more secure, or whatever, with a relationship clearly based on needs and fulfilling them without fuss. Very, very few strings attached, if any.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I mean, these are financial arrangements.’

  ‘Oh,’ Duvall said, absorbing her meaning. ‘You mean men who pay women a weekly wage or something? And in return they receive the woman’s favours? That’s prostitution, isn’t it?’

  ‘One man, one woman, in a mutually satisfactory negotiation,’ Sandy said with a shake of her head. ‘It’s got nothing to do with prostitution. If it did, then that’s what everyone does every day of their lives.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t I prostitute myself to come here and clean for you, to make you pay me for my time, my personal time and effort that is spent to your benefit? Do you see?’

  ‘Well—it’s not my place to belittle whatever people arrange between themselves to be happy.’

  A certain confusion had clouded Duvall’s thoughts. Was it what she was saying, how she was going about saying it, or the simple fact of her presence and proximity? He couldn’t tell, and drank some more. Sandy took the opportunity to freshen their glasses.

  When she returned he said, ‘But how do you know about these… sites? You’re talking about Internet web sites, am I following you?’

  ‘I joined one. I gave myself a name. I asked for help with studies. I posted what I would be willing to give and what I wanted in return.’

  ‘An extra hundred or two per week.’

  ‘At that stage I was asking for more.’

  ‘More. And in return?’

  ‘Me.’ Sandy paused. ‘On something of a mutually agreeable timetable.’

  Duvall had to think. Words failed to form in his mind. This was overwhelming. The purity of her idea, of what he took to be her offer—for why else would she be here, why else would she be telling him all this?—stunned him. He’d been content to pussyfoot around with notions of conversation and companionship, just look at those ridiculous games he’d put out. Could he really imagine Sandy sitting at his formal dining table moving chess pieces or creating triple-word plays while sipping Muscat? Here she was giving it to h
im straight. Straight as straight could be. Quiet in her tone, but unapologetic, speaking with a sort of take-it-or-leave-it attitude; Duvall found himself admiring her all the more.

  ‘Did you have any success?’

  Sandy’s grey-green eyes looked at him levelly. ‘There’ll always be plenty of takers. Plenty of suggestions. Great ideas. ‘Why don’t I book us a penthouse suite for the weekend, I’ll drown you in champagne and film you on your knees’; ‘Come over and strip, my best friend and me will give you a party you’ll never forget’; ‘Let me open my trousers while I drive, you can get your head down there and work.’’

  Duvall cleared his throat. ‘The tenor of the times,’ he said, trying to sound worldly even though he was shocked to his core. Just imagine saying any of those things to a young woman; imagine this young woman actually telling him about it.

  ‘What else should I have expected, right?’

  ‘So you changed your mind.’

  ‘I decided that route wasn’t for me. Maybe a change of approach.’ She gave him more of her plain and straight gaze. ‘I… I think I’ve known for a long time what you’ve wanted, Mr Duvall…’

  ‘… oh no, not at all…’

  ‘You follow me.’

  ‘Sandy… please… you have to remember, I’m getting to be a very old man…’

  ‘And you watch me.’

  Now he didn’t reply.

  ‘I feel safe with you, Mr Duvall.’

  He still couldn’t say anything.

  ‘I don’t feel safe with anyone else… I mean, not in this sort of a situation.’

  Duvall tried to muster some response, find a way to muddle through. Things were going so fast he couldn’t quite understand his own reactions. A part of him was titillated, true, but a far greater part was in terror. A healthy and vital young woman like Sandy could not dream of the type of problems a man his age might, and most likely would, experience. It was almost laughable.

  ‘Then… perhaps… best to keep it that way…’

  ‘I know you won’t hurt me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t. I—’ Duvall shook his head. ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘That’s what I want. Someone who won’t hurt me, no matter what,’ Sandy spoke more softly.

  When she was certain he wasn’t going to say anything else, she waited a few moments more and quietly finished her drink.

  ‘This is the longest conversation we’ve had, and I think it’s enough now. I—I’m going to go in there.’ She indicated the subtly-lit corridor, but he knew she meant his bedroom at the end of it. This was a room he always made sure to tidy before she came in with her own cleaning to do. ‘Tonight I drank a lot of vodka, and I need to lie down. I’m not drunk, I don’t do that. But what I am going to do is close my eyes. Close my eyes and relax. If I’m alone, I hope you won’t mind, but I’ll go to sleep. If I’m not alone, then—then I won’t sleep.’

  Sandy put her hand to the side of his face. He couldn’t believe it. This young woman whom he’d desired week after week, who’d even begun to inhabit his dreams, actually put her soft hand, with what he saw to be lightly sunburned—or should he say sun-burnished—skin, against his cheek. There was no pity in her gaze, not even an appeal, but most shockingly of all Sandy then slipped her arm around his neck and her face was against his and she kissed him once, hard and on the lips, then she was gone and her footsteps went lightly down the corridor.

  Duvall sat where he was.

  The side of the record finished and for long moments the needle squelched softly against the empty vinyl. Duvall forced himself to stand and turn it over. The needle came down on the start of side two and Cise’s voice, so earthy, yes, as Sandy had found it, filled the room with a lovely Morna ballad. But it was his own face that now caught his attention, reflected in one of the windows where the curtain was sashed back, and in that softening glass he wasn’t a man of sixty-eight but someone younger, perhaps in his early fifties. Well, that seemed young to him. What he would have given, tonight, for just this one night, to lose two decades of deadening. To heed a siren song sent out—just this once—to him.

  Évora had the voice of someone who had lived. He’d read that even though poor health had made her need to end her career prematurely, right up until the end she’d continued smoking her favourite cigars and cigarettes, and drinking her favourite alcohol, and had received friends and guests in the Cape Verde home she never kept locked. The woman had lived.

  And what of him, Duvall?

  He found his drink where he’d left it, and swallowed the cold remainder. Then Cise’s voice followed him down the corridor to the half-open door.

  Three

  * * *

  Duvall had the most curious dream. Or the most curious extension to his dream, because he was on the breezy hill overlooking those meadows and woodlands once again, and his dogs were beside him, pushing against his calves. No one else was present, and when he looked down he first saw that there was an immense drop into empty space, and, second, that there were no dogs with him at all. As for Sandy, or some beautiful reinterpretation of her—no. He had this countryside to himself and this countryside had him to itself. Nothing and no one was going to intrude, and he wasn’t a boy, he was simply Duvall, as he saw himself reflected in his mirror every morning while shaving and every evening while cleaning his teeth before bed.

  Then he fell into that vast abyss, but it wasn’t falling, and it wasn’t fast either. The dead-drop beneath him had once again become the more familiar decline of a wildly overgrown hillside, nothing more. There was no chance of a plummet into oblivion. On the contrary, Duvall found that if he filled his lungs with sweet clean country air, and stretched himself out nice and straight, he could float down the side of that hill and follow its gradient at a gentle pace. This wasn’t some sort of tremendously impossible act of flying, of soaring off into the sky. Instead it felt natural and perfectly in tune with his abilities. Duvall glided. He was aware of long stalks of grass brushing his cheeks, against his throat, his chest through his shirt and his legs through his trousers. He sensed a wind rising and moving through the distant forests, then it arrived to cool his forehead and face in the bright sunlight of this summer’s day. I’m really doing this, he told himself, it’s really happening—and a feeling of happiness and fulfilment the likes of which he hadn’t experienced in decades went through him, something like those good strong shots of Irish whiskey burning in his belly and warming him all the way down his legs.

  It’s lifting me, he thought, lifting me, and for long moments he felt the old, long-forgotten stirrings inside, the very juice of him.

  * * *

  Duvall awoke with the morning light streaming into the bedroom, falling across his face. With everything that had happened the night before he’d neglected to draw closed the curtains for sleep. He couldn’t see the bedside clock, and with the weight of the girl’s head and arm on his chest, he didn’t want to make her stir or wake. This time of year, with that sort of light, he knew it must be somewhere between 4.30 and 5 in the morning.

  Duvall’s dream was already fading, though the sensation of I’m really doing this lingered. Far more pressing was the fact of Sandy beside him; across him, actually. Extraordinary. He was on the cusp of becoming a septuagenarian. She was so young. He wanted to ask her what she was doing here; he had a second more inane question that he’d forgotten to ask earlier in the evening: What is ‘WEG’ supposed to mean?

  He marvelled at what he could see of her long, smooth body. Golden-brown where the sun had warmed it, a hint of white at the curve of her hips. Young beauty, he thought, no wonder I’ve stared at her so. At least he hadn’t allowed himself to go to fat, but his skin was looser, of course, and his chest was matted with grey and white hair. His waist hadn’t thickened very much, though below that, well, the kindest he could say was that he had chicken legs the bane of most older men. A weekly tennis game with a revolving list of acquaintances, and twenty-five laps of the Olympic-sized public pool se
veral streets away, performed three times a week, come rain, hail, or shine, did well to keep him in trim. But he’d given up riding the expensive Italian mountain bicycle he’d once been so proud of after a silly tumble in a public park had dislocated a shoulder; after that, he’d become a little too worried about broken bones. Still, he maintained a good diet, and was judicious with his intake of alcohol—yet time will have its way, this is a given.

  So, Duvall wondered, what must it have been like for this poor girl to be so intimate with his decaying body; how would she recoil when she remembered what she’d done, when in the light of day she would see him all too clearly?

  Duvall tried not to allow these thoughts to intrude, to spoil his mood. For he felt surprisingly good and clear-headed, somehow strong too. He had no idea how the many vodkas Sandy had said she’d drunk last night, and the large whiskey and soda nightcaps, would leave her this morning—but for himself, well, today seemed to be a good day indeed.

  I’m not soaring, but I am floating, he found himself thinking.

  The most surprising turn of all, Duvall reflected, which was even more surprising than Sandy’s naked body splayed against his, was that last night’s lovemaking had actually happened at all. Fear, anxiety, the sheer inertia of an old body that hadn’t even attempted such a thing in a decade—all of it had promised embarrassment on his part and resentment on hers. Instead, Sandy had been gentle and practical in her approach. And it had been her approach indeed, because she’d done everything, everything and anything to stir and coax him, and he’d been a lamb, easy and passive, shy, only willing to follow her firm lead. He couldn’t recall how long it had taken, but to Sandy that hadn’t seemed to be a problem. She’d done a good interpretation of enjoying the process. Either the girl was one of the finest actresses he could imagine, or—as he most suspected—her generation’s sexual life was so utterly foreign and incomprehensible that he ought to stop trying to divine its source and reach and simply enjoy its consequences.