Tremble

by Tobsha Learner

  It’s no longer raining, but I can hear the water dripping off the gutter and onto the path below. It’s cozy in here. I’m wrapped up in the duvet and I think I can feel a tickle in my ovaries. Conception. At least I hope so.

  I suppose I reached some kind of decision driving home in that shocking rain. I like my car. Revise that: I love my fucking car. It is my metal skin, the extension of my own body heat teased out and stretched across its perfect steel chassis. You know why I love my car? Because I can climb in, switch it on, ride it hard, and it doesn’t ask any fucking questions. Which is why I fell in love with Madeleine in the first place, because she never asked any questions. Blind trust: there’s no greater turn-on. I mean, she really believed in me. She’d look up at me with those big blue eyes, pure adulation shining out of them. It used to give me an instant erection. Used to.

  You’ve got to understand: my wife is an intellectual. Yep, I married an intellectual with a rich daddy, because I could and because…well, in truth, I suppose I thought some of it would rub off on me. Knock the rough edges off, take the country out of the boy and replace it with Hunters Hill. Fat fucking chance. If anything, despite The Economist, The Guardian Weekly, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra subscription, I find myself becoming even more ocker, in reaction. I reckon it’s Georgina’s fault. Then again, it could be the influence of our wonderful prime minister Johnnie Howard. Since he got in, every redneck north of Cairns suddenly embodies the Great Australia we all know and love and—the radical minority anyway—escaped. I was that redneck predeconstruction. The big sullen oaf who hitched down from Tully around 1972, hit the Cross and the happenings at the Mandala Cinema and the boozy all-nighters at the Manzil Room, then one stoned night talked his way into being a roadie for Tamam Shud. That was my first break. The rest is history.

  By the time I met Georgina I was managing three internationally successful bands and had my own office with fifteen employees. But secretly, between you and me, I still didn’t feel legitimate. What I didn’t realize then is that you never do. When I met this sophisticated ice queen with the degree in European Film, who’d lived in Paris, who had actually turned Mick Jagger down and was the first chick who didn’t want to go to bed with me and hated rock music, I thought that if I could seduce her it would be the last piece of the puzzle. The final legitimacy. The finishing touch to this identity I had constructed for myself: Robert Tetherhook, head of Pear Records with an international reputation for all things cultural and discerning. In those days I really thought those things mattered. So I pursued and wooed with my rough-trade charm, and, much to my amazement, Georgina married me.

  I remember when I first fell in love with my wife. No, I didn’t love her when I married her—in fact I spent most of the wedding fantasizing about her sixteen-year-old niece who was one of the bridesmaids—but I did fall eventually. I recall it vividly. Georgina had been decorating our spanking new terrace in Paddington herself. It was about 1980 and she was wearing these really high shoes that were fashionable then. She was walking across the polished wooden floorboards carrying a vase of tulips when she slipped and fell, twisting her ankle. Glass, water, and petals flew everywhere. Georgina lay in the center of it in shocked silence, her legs splayed out, her skirt flung up exposing her little-girl knickers she liked to wear back then. All her neatness, her control, eradicated. Then, in this trembling vulnerable tone I’d never heard before, she calls out my name and I rush over. It was in that moment, in the sounding of her need for me, that I fell. Yep, every rational defense melted; it was like a flame-thrower shooting through permafrost. It was the first time I felt like her husband: needed, wanted, desired. Put the lead straight back into my pencil seeing her lying there. Fuck, things have changed since then. I’ve changed since then.

  Now all she does is make me feel small, dickless, as if I don’t earn enough, as if I haven’t given her every bloody dream a chick could want, as if I haven’t proven myself professionally. Like when I was awarded the Aria for best record producer in 2003—only the highest accolade in the country for a man in my position. I’ve even got the silver pyramid sitting on my desk at home to prove it. You know what she said when I told her? “Does this mean the Americans are finally going to start returning your calls?” In that bitch-butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-your-arse voice of hers. As if she was terminally disappointed with me. Terminally.

  Actually, at the time many things felt like they were terminal. You know that sensation when you’ve been running really hard for so long that you don’t even notice the pace anymore? It’s only when you stop, your knees buckling, your head hanging down, your chest heaving for air as you retch with the effort, that you realize how fast you’ve been running—or living your life. Well, that’s me, from the age of twenty-three through to now. Forty-fucking-seven.

  This morning while I was shaving I found myself wondering what the point of it all is. There’s that window of opportunity in shaving. You blokes would know what I’m talking about—when you wash the scrapings off with cold water and catch sight of yourself in the mirror. Nine times out of ten you barely register your own reflection, but there’s that sneaking tenth time when, for a flash, you really see yourself—your creeping grayness, your aging—and you find yourself thinking: who the fuck is that old codger and what’s he doing in my bathroom?

  Sorry, I always get morbid after sex. Post-coital depression, sort of a male PMS. Maybe it’s the spilled seed factor. Always thought I didn’t want children, and then when we found out Georgina’s tubes were damaged the decision not to have them seemed easy. Don’t get me wrong, I love children. I am, after all, a dedicated uncle, especially after my brother disappeared. When he went it was like a whole section of my childhood was torn out from inside me. Strange, because we never spoke much. But we were connected.

  He’s dead, I know it. I’m not religious but I can tell you the moment his soul left his body, because he visited me. It was in February, one of those stinking hot nights when you know it’s a waste of time trying to sleep because the sheets stick to your body and the humidity sits on your chest like an outraged child. My recording company, Pear, is housed in this converted warehouse in Darlinghurst and I had all the windows wide open. There was this slight breeze that brought the smell of frangipani in from the street. It was past ten and the street below was alive with a flotsam of youth and energy. I remember leaning out, stretching my arms toward the shadowy limbs of the Moreton Bay fig, and breathing in the air as if the perfume of all that life could erase my own aching cynicism. It was then that the fax machine suddenly kicked into action behind me. I remember thinking, that’s weird, it’s after hours, and I wasn’t expecting anything from overseas. Expecting some illicit note from a lovesick kid to one of my trainees, I walked over. There, staring up at me in full color, was my brother’s face.

  I nearly had a heart attack. I tore it off and walked over to the light. There he was: Gavin; more aged and worn than I’d ever seen him, with this smile—half-sardonic, half-triumphant—playing across his lips. As if he were saying, fuck you, fuck you all, I got away and I’m happy. Then, as I stared, the strangest thing happened. The photograph literally began to fade, these weird greenish patches bubbling up until nothing was left but his eyes staring out at me, then in an instant they disappeared too and I was left holding a blank piece of paper wondering if I’d imagined it all.

  After that I started flying my nephews and niece down to Sydney for the occasional weekend. Maybe it was so I wouldn’t feel so much of a prick for having lost contact with Gav the last few years of his life, or maybe it was about genetic continuity. I don’t really know. Nowadays I try not to analyze things too much.

  What about the girlfriend, you’re thinking. Is he ever going to take moral responsibility for that? My friend, I’m a man, and we men have a distinct advantage over women. We stay desirable as we get older—shoot me down for saying it. But let’s look at the plain facts. We’re all animals when it comes to behavior. You can impose as m
uch cultural trappings, as much fancy psychology, economic reform, whatever you like on top, but when it gets down to the biological reality: we all think with our genitals. As simple as that. How do you think I sell records? What’s a hit song consist of? Easy; it’s either a chick singing about how she wants her lover’s penis to stay in her for the rest of her life, or it’s a guy singing about how he wants to stick his penis in as many chicks as he can for the rest of his life. Excuse me for being so crude, but that’s the way the world goes around. Georgina is past, Madeleine is future. When I’m with Georgina I am constantly reminded of my failings as a man. But with Madeleine I forget everything—work pressures, the fact that I’ll need to get my teeth capped in the next year—and, most importantly, when I hold her smooth fleshy body I am suddenly back where she is in her life, with my future laid out in front of me, all the different pathways stretching forth like a myriad of golden opportunities. I’m an unabashed time vampire. She makes me young. Does that answer your question?

  I can hear his car pulling into the garage. It’s still comforting to me, the roar of confirmation that punctuates my day. The husband has returned. The ironic thing is that Robert would have no idea that I listen out for him, that I am secretly riddled with anxiety until I hear that familiar soft rumble as the BMW turns the corner into our street. I can’t relax until I’ve heard it. There have been nights—we wives know them well—when I’ve lain there in our bed, pretending to myself and the rest of the world that I’m sleeping, when really I’m tottering on the edge of a half-dream, waiting for him to return. And as soon as the BMW drives around that bend, all the tension dissolves from my muscles like dew evaporating from the glistening threads of a spider’s web in summer. Robert would laugh if I told him any of this. That bitter self-deprecating chortle of his, the one that says, I’d love to believe you, baby, but I know what you really think of me.

  Yesterday I actually spent about twenty minutes trying to pinpoint the exact moment we stopped being emotionally honest with each other. I think it must have been sometime around the mideighties when I finally confessed that I’d known for about two years I was infertile but had failed to tell him. Or perhaps I’d merely failed to face up to the fact until then. But just because you stop being emotionally honest with someone doesn’t mean you stop loving them. In my case, it has been the contrary. The longer the silence stretches between us, the more enigmatic Robert becomes and the more I want him. Some kind of perverse human psychology…the fatal inaccessibility of desire.

  The tragedy is that he thinks I think he was never good enough for me. I don’t. I never have. He’s always been good enough for me. I recognized all that turbulent shimmering potential the moment I met him; understood his fear and how it powered him, how it would propel him much farther than the preppy private-school boys who were drifting through my life at the time. Why do you think I married him? But does Robert know how I feel? No. Because that isn’t our way. Our way has become an intricate game of poker, of never letting the other know the true emotional stakes. This is what keeps us burning.

  I’m sitting at my desk right now, staring down at this painting by Vermeer, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. Did I forget to tell you? I’m a mature-age student doing a late-age Masters in seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Ridiculous really, but I have this dream of becoming a curator in my fifties. This painting will be the one I base my dissertation on. It’s of a pregnant woman standing at a table entirely absorbed by a letter. There is a map of the Netherlands on the wall behind her and we can assume that her husband, the father of her unborn child, is away on travels. Her mouth is slightly open and her eyes are downcast. It is as if nothing exists for her in that room but the letter. A string of pearls sits on the table. You can only see part of the strand, but it fascinates me. Has she taken it out to fondle to remember him? Is she thinking of perhaps selling it? Does the letter contain some terrible news that she is just on the brink of responding to? We will never know.

  I have a string of pearls. Robert gave them to me recently for our sixteenth wedding anniversary. An uncharacteristically beautiful choice for him. I suspect someone else helped him. No, not her. She wouldn’t have the taste or the class.

  Oh, I know. I’ve known from the beginning. From the moment he came back into this house with a lovebite on his neck. I’ve seen her from a distance, through the office windows, walking back and forth, sitting at her desk. A silly young creature with absolutely no physical grace whatsoever. I know why he chose her. There are two distinct reasons: she is the exact opposite of me and she will never challenge him on anything. The very same reasons he will never leave me for her.

  I saw it at the laundromat pinned to one of those community boards—you know, one of those eclectic collections of diverse cards from Vegan lesbian seeks like-minded soul mate to Christian Help groups. I’d got bored waiting for the machine to stop spinning and I was scanning for possible band names—noticeboards are good for that—when this pink card with what looked like Russian lettering at the top caught my eye. In English underneath ran the phrase: Old Wise Woman can spin something from nothing—knitwear is God. I think “God” was probably meant to read “Good” but there was something about the lettering that made me stare at it for a full five minutes. I didn’t bother writing down the number, I just pulled the card off the wall and slipped it into my handbag.

  Later at work I had a big fight with Robert over our latest act, Play 306, a teen boy band put together by an advertising company for Pepsi. I talked Robert into taking them on. Originally he’d been against it, calling the whole thing an exercise in crass commercialism and saying there was no way he was going to promote a bunch of wannabe talentless male fashion models. But when their first song became a hit—thanks to one of them impregnating a soap star and ending up on the front page of the Daily Telegraph under the immortal headline: UNDERAGE BOY TOY GETS OUR STACY UP THE DUFF—Robert suddenly lost his principles, and the next thing I know I’m at a photography shoot trying to talk the boys into dropping their undies and posing entirely naked except for fluffy toy rabbits covering their crotches. Robert’s idea. He wants their new album to be titled Bunny. Over my dead body. I reckon we’ll lose the grungier straight male demographic by being too teenage girly and fluffy. I want Rabbit or better still Hare-Gives-Lip, which has a sexier edge, right? Whatever.

  We fought for an hour over it, in front of the whole office, including the new intern who’s way too attractive for my liking. It was really humiliating. In the end Robert pulled rank and that was when I rushed to the toilets. I was crying in one of the cubicles when the card with the Russian writing fell out of my pocket. It lay there staring up at me as if to say call me, call me.

  The address was in one of those housing commission blocks—you know, the grimy sixties, a brick block with a few struggling trees bending exhausted over a concrete excuse for a playground. One windswept child on a swing screamed as she swung higher and higher in the sky. That was me once, I thought as I walked past.

  The elevator smelled of piss and marijuana while the corridor was an international but nauseating smorgasbord of curry, stew, and frying fish.

  The door was painted bright orange with a miniature Russian flag pinned above the knocker. I rapped tentatively. Immediately it was flung open by a woman not more than five foot tall, well over the age of eighty, and dressed in a leather miniskirt and ill-fitting blond wig.

  “Vhat do you vant?” she asked in a heavy Russian accent. In lieu of a reply I held out the shopping bag full of Robert’s hair. She peered in, sniffed, then sneezed.

  “Your man? Or maybe he belong to somevon else?” she muttered as she led me into the crowded lounge room.

  Next to a garishly ornate three-piece suite covered in embroidered brocade stood a spinning wheel. It looked as if it had been teleported from another time. A state-of-the-art home movie unit with a seven-foot screen filled one wall. Perched on top of the screen were a dozen or so statuettes of various deities, from Bu
ddha to Jesus to a lurid papiermâché rendering of the goddess Kali.

  “I am Madame Blonski, I am spinner. Vhat is your design?” Madame Blonski clutched at my arm.

  Inwardly cursing myself for being such a gullible idiot, I reached into my handbag. The woman was obviously a fraud and the sight of a crystal ball sitting on top of the microwave beside a samovar did not increase my confidence.

  “It’s Ralph Lauren, you know, the Polo label. I think there’s enough hair there,” I ventured, tentatively holding out the photo of a woollen shirt I’d torn out of a GQ magazine.

  Madame Blonski glanced at it then peered dubiously at the hair. I waited nervously. Suddenly it seemed incredibly important that she confirmed there was enough there to knit the shirt to destroy the house that Robert built. With the nursery rhyme jangling around my head the three minutes she took to decide stretched into an eternity in which Robert left me, my publicity campaign failed entirely, and I was without lover and job by the end of the month. Finally she put me out of my misery.

  “Okay. I can make this. For you, fifty dollar.”

  I nodded my head, incredulous at the instant relief that flooded my body. The old woman took the bag of hair and stuffed it unceremoniously under the couch; there were about a dozen other bags already shoved under there. Grabbing my arm she marched me back to the front door. She was so fragile she made me feel like a giantess, awkward in my suddenly massive ugh boots.

  “Come back in a veek, Madeleine. Oh and I only take cash,” she announced.

  She slammed the front door and left me standing on the doorstep wondering whether I’d imagined it all. It was only when I was in the elevator that I realized she’d used my name without me telling her what it was.