by Thea Astley
Pay me down baby,
Never say maybe,
I’ve got the want you blues.
There they would be. The old folks at home. They would call “Keith”, then “Keith” again, with interest and increasing urgency, and while Bernard looked hopelessly at the smooth bed Iris would pick up the receiver and start dialling.
He kicked the chrome legs of the stool and nodded sadly to the music beat . . .
Lay me down baby,
Pay me down baby,
I’ve got the want you blues . . .
Sometimes in spring Iris Leverson, who normally lived her life in the contrived activity of organized theatre groups, diet charts, weekly “sets”, and shopping at what her circle was pleased to call the “village”, had thought it might be pleasant to take a lover. All pipe and tweeds, she imagined, influenced by some replays of old films on the telly where engineers ran off with girls who simply had to play Rachmaninoff concertos at Carnegie Hall, forgetting that thereby she would more or less duplicate Bernard. When this first adulterous thought tipped her with tentative finger, she sought back for what might have been the incitement and saw only that last holiday, that last season, the snoozing beach town with its skirt of bitter blue surf, the dangerous green river and beat-up stores with sharks’ teeth for sale and last year’s hats like hollyhocks or everlastings growing out of magazine mulch and views of the town. There had been long evenings, lavender-stippled air floating over the sea and beach in that terrible nostalgia that comes with sundown and the porpoise shoals cruising and curving fifty yards out in the cold threatening desert of water. And in this romantic ambience, Bernard’s mild voice saying amusedly, “You know, Iris, after twenty years of marriage you feel as if you’re the same sex.”
Her initial reaction was laughter, standing there seeing the mellow gold cliffs reflecting some reluctant glory in the west and everywhere else bottle-green and silver and weed-purple darkness of the sea, the headlands and beach that rhymed with a hundred other eastern coves gobbled out by wind and surf. That was her initial reaction, and she clutched his elbow, laughing boisterously, and told him he was a funny old thing and then, as she leant against him with her well-cared-for hand tucking itself under the warm flabbiness of his arm, she was conscious of terrible shock and thought. Yes, indeedie, we’re standing here like a couple of middle-aged ladies, comfortable enough together, with nothing much at all to say to each other. She removed her hand, but Bernard did not notice and continued smoking and gazing out to sea. So, with the finicky calculation she might have given to the intention to have a permanent, or a tooth jacket-crowned, she made her decision, just as carefully, as deliberately, though moral implications did not come into those matters certainly. Nor did she imagine for the moment that infidelity would be hard to achieve.
She took vague mirrored stock of her forty-one, forty-two years. Fair—but not tartily so. Thickened, of course, but reasonably shapely. There were one or two lines she didn’t like about her eyes, but the general effect was youthful with straight bob and blond-brown skin pulled tight over her cheek-bones. She peered at herself in half-lights, by shaded bed-lamps, and in late spring evening rooms before the lights were on—and she felt sufficiently confident. She would justify her casuistry! I’ll be working in lights like this, she told herself, and with cool-cookie brazenness, some of her resentment of Bernard evaporated. I am a courtesan at heart, she hoped as she bought herself unfrockery of a frivolous kind with the attention one might give to preparation for an exam. Was it not? Yet she was not yet certain she might sit for this one. There had to be an examiner. Who? Who?
Bernard was so spaniel kind she was half tempted flippantly to ask him as she mentally listed the possibilities of approach. It would have been quicker and cleaner, she knew, had she gone to the city and simply picked up a stranger marooned on the desert isle of an espresso stool, but would-be arty Iris, who was as conventional as they come, even in sinning, selected instead the one possible out of their social group, a man who had once flirted unsensationally with her the Christmas party before last.
It took Gerald Seabrook by surprise, too.
Nevertheless, elderly Gerald and calculating Iris did eventually achieve rather unspectacular adultery in a tizzy motel on the Sandgate Road, and, once the first cliché had been accepted, they settled into a humdrum routine of deceiving their partners, not out of love but from boredom.
“You’re getting to be a habit you make me feel so young I’m in love, I’m in love . . .” carolled Iris, flogging it along, as, hair in dust scarf, Hoover in hand, she set her house in order, in some aspects at least. Gerald was conscious first of obligation, then of tenderness and pity, and then a tenderness and pity that became emotional enough to make him feel susceptibly guilty when he met Bernard and accepted a cigarette from a flipped pack, hopeless when he was with his own wife whom he loved but had been with too constantly, and eager when he was with Iris to placate her self-deception. Too fleshy and pale to be the field and stream man of her dream but tweedy enough in self-shaped sports-coat with leather elbow patches, he was, however, downily bald, the pleasant dome of his head fuzzed over with a reticent whitish growth. He had two chins and a very pleasant mouth which Iris had to recall in those moments when passion sputtered like a bulb nearing the end of its lifetime, for at her dangerous age sentiment achieved more than lust.
Perhaps if Bernard had known at the beginning there might have been the impetus of her guilt. It was not until the affair was trailing through longueurs like some creeper which has outlasted the fertility of the soil that he discovered she was deceiving him, easy as smiles.
Feeling sad for Gerald and tinnily amused, his initial concern was only that Keith should not uncover the situation and suffer further the domestic punches that winded his ego daily; for he was convinced of the boy’s peculiar pain in growing. He nodded and nodded over examination papers and said indeed go darling it will do you good why don’t you get someone to go with you being a bit of a bastard as he said that but not too much.
“That’s what I loathe most about him,” sour Iris complained to Gerald, who was not actually listening. “He’s completely unconcerned about me. I could be going out to pick up a sailor or squat in a park and all he does is rush home to baby-sit so I can get out to do it.”
When the conversation reached this stage Gerald knew he was expected to say that Bernard failed to appreciate her and comfort and fertilize the sparse vine that trailed all over his days, hungry tendrils finding him out in the office, sneaking into domestic crevices. But he could only squeeze her hand as if it were a moist little hanky, grubby with tears, and hope to God his own wife did not know.
This, Bernard told himself, told his strumming fingers that, enraptured with technique, dissipated the faintest annoyance in a musical work-out, will peter out by Christmas and probably do Iris a lot of good. His tolerance produced fruit bulbs of self-congratulation for both of them to munch. And he was surprised, as well, that he didn’t care more.
“I’ll never forget,” Iris said to Gerald, straining to remember, “the time Bernard saw us out together.”
He had been away examining on the north coast, but an unexpected mumps outbreak in a country town had halved the number of his examinees and he was able to get away twelve hours earlier than he expected, crawling in on the Sunshine line in a mixed goods that took eight hours to pick its way through the Wollum flats and cuttings, shunting like a tic douloureux in and out of sidings. At one stage they forgot the guard and had to pull back half a mile to pick him up, waving him out of the local pub still with his schooner clutched in his hand. If this slowness had endured only two hours more, perhaps Bernard might have been spared the knowledge that his wife was unfaithful; but just outside Eagle Junction the engine picked up amazingly and Bernard crawled out at Brunswick Street, soot outlined and exhausted, in time to catch a bus from the Valley corner, a gay jouncing bus on to which, as he focused his bloodshot four-o’clock eye, he saw Gerald S
eabrook, running late, propel his leaping, panting wife, who collapsed four seats in front of him with giggles of thanksgiving a shade too gay.
He was not surprised. They lived two streets apart. But he was too tired to force out the soggy phrases he knew they would expect; so he shrank behind a summer hat and watched the glass reflection of his own concern. Unnecessarily—for they had not spied him, the lurker, and he returned to good-natured prying, shaping in his mind a genial Clementi sonatina whose first movement had been played indifferently by twenty-five girls and six boys in the last three days. He hummed softly under the bus vibrations and inspected the glossy back of his wife’s bright hair with the impersonal evaluation he might have for a stranger. There she is, he thought, and we have known each other in romantic, disgusting, and boring attitudes for twenty years and it is only now that my special lenses are penetrating the image—the nose a little too thick at the tip, the chin a shade too recessive. Profiled towards Gerald, she was talking with that extra animation she reserved for parties, and, without actually seeing it, Bernard sensed her tucking a naked brown arm in Gerald’s and squeezing some dregs of affection out. What have we? inquired Bernard’s quickening mind, and was answered by a swift loving wing-brush imposition of wifely cheek to Gerald’s jaw-line. So swift, a shadow, a not-seen-at-all.
For the first time in years his interest was piqued.
He lit a curious cigarette and settled back into the bleachers, noting the expression on Iris’s face equate itself with that hostessly one which accompanied her set dinner of chicken and almonds and the unnatural green of frozen peas.
Even this joy would trickle away like an inland river, the water-holes, the sand-patches, the lost artesian seas where his own marriage pumped a weak current.
“Good luck, old girl!” Bernard pronounced, the benedictus of the only too willing, and half a stop before Gerald was due to alight, rocked, seat-clinging along the corridor between the drip-dry and the synthetics, and clapped a hearty hand on Gerald’s shoulder.
His guilt bounced three inches.
Smackety-smack—adultery’s trampoline, Bernard mused, now gay as lollipops with a need to celebrate the severing of habit and boredom that had bound him to Iris through twenty Christmases whose green-treed candles shone less and less brightly.
They had all said oh and where did you get on and how is it you’re back so soon. All the usual things. And Iris said he looked tired, darling, said it with that phoney sympathy which could only mean a concerned attempt to conceal for herself, and just for the metronomic spasm of a second he knew mad Othello glaring from his eyes.
“Some plague of childhood,” he said vaguely. “Convents stricken all along the coast. Come back with us for a drink, Gerald, and celebrate.”
“Celebrate what?” Gerald asked, too sharply, too acidly.
“Oh, I don’t know. My sudden release perhaps.” Bernard smiled disarmingly, making his eyes twinkle behind his glasses that flashed no warnings.
Iris pretended to pick at a thread that nevertheless eluded, for anxiety tightened her clothing in the sunny afternoon of worn bus leather and crumpled tickets. So imagining a world of disaster she searched upwards and discovered only charity on Bernard’s square red face which turned an exact and similar gentleness upon Gerald. Cleverly brazen, she tucked a now innocent pally arm again into Gerald’s and prodded his unwilling body.
“It won’t be water,” said knowing Bernard jocularly, and they went home together. Which one was blind? really blind? Bernard asked mentally as he poured beer. A good question, student, a good question.
II
LEO VARGA STRETCHED, flexed his shortish ape-shape in front of a wall mirror and watched muscular vee-clad Mr Universe flex back, while, with uncompromising candour, lumbar muscles were inspected, as he winked awkwardly over one shoulder. He rubbed a little more olive oil into his shoulders and tensed.
“You’re a bitta orl right,” he assured himself nasally and humorously. “Woo!”
On his own he was almost likable, the vulgar charm of his honesty diminishing customary egotism. He did a few body-presses and leg-pedallings and then lay back, panting slightly, on the rattan-covered floor. Around him the walls closed in. There were just sufficient facile abstracts to establish his intelligence and skill; a dubious set of nudes whom he would claim to have known in the most realistic way, and an even stranger set of male studies about which he said nothing at all. Nothing at all except at the right time and in the right company. Doctor Varga, he called himself in the thick of the coaching-college junk sales. (“Late Hiroshima!” Bernard growled when he heard.) But he collected pupils scattered from all over the place and farmed them out to a few pass-degree students and hungry teachers who could push them through matriculation while he hunched in his cubicle office adding the receipts up and then down to try to make them come out more. They never did. But he was adequately profitable.
Playing it casual, he stepped into houndstooth shorts and pulled a second-skin sweat shirt over his head. Although he was ugly within reason, his belief in his fascination was an article of faith, a dogma pronounced ex cathedra, despite or because of the fleshy nose, scrubbing-brush beard and brilliant eyes that he could use masterfully, nailing his victim with a charm dart. He played a rhythmic but not harmonically interesting type of tea-room music while looking like a bruiser whose deep cultured voice had all the greater impact—effete taste complemented by muscle-bulge as he casually tossed off a flamenco song with own guitar accompaniment when the party became more informal, thereby establishing a quite delicious delicacy if the performance was achieved in his Tyrolean outfit.
He made coffee and watched Saturday morning slide across towards Surfers, lounging on his back lanai where he could see the long-haired cuties and the sand-boys amble north to the town and the clip joints. Too yellow, too blue. The coast was all of that. He’d just about had enough of its extremes. Too hot, too salt, too dear. Pranging a bottled oyster on a plastic pick, he dipped it into a sauce bowl and worried it for a while, almost failing to hear the questioning knock at the western door.
Entering new towns, establishing himself, answering telephones, opening doors had always for him inexplicable excitation.
He pulled it back and some reward smiled tentatively.
“I almost missed the bus,” Keith was explaining. “They wanted me to say where I was going.” (Come in conspirator, said the shrewdie. Be in it. Get trapped.) “And I had rather a job not.” He smiled, diffident as goldfish with fins pocketed for support.
Leo observed this. He put on his crooked engaging smile and pushed the door wider.
“The chief difficulty at your age, Keith,” he said, “is to grow up without offending those whose sole aim seems to be to prevent it. I know. I had all that. Painful biz—but more so for parents than for me. Ultimately we were divorced without fuss and I gave them reasonable access!”
He went back to the kitchen nook and set out another coffee cup, put salt pretzels on a dish, leant a confident hand on the redwood oiled bench he had made, and tendered Keith a look combining careful insolence and affection that he had found successful before.
“Oh, come in,” he ordered benignly, as Keith remained awkward at the doorway. “Come in and relax. Of course I’m glad you could make it. I’ve just banished three startlingly seductive women to make room for you and your sensibilities. Don’t get lost in your own adolescence, for God’s sake.”
Keith came over, took a pretzel and nibbled it slowly, bringing his front incisors together with a thoughtful tapping.
“There were two fairies coming down in the bus,” he said reflectively, not looking at Varga. “One was a guy dressed up. Lush as could be. All lipstick and eye-stuff. None of us could take our eyes off them.”
“How about that,” Mr Varga said non-committally. “Coffee?”
“Please.”
“And—?”
“Nothing, thanks. Nothing. I just wondered how the dressed-up one felt. When he f
irst discovered he wanted to go on like that, I mean. Was it watching his big sister or some minute in the wings done up for the school play? Or would it just whack him suddenly as he came in on a wave? I mean, how would you discover?”
“Who knows?” Mr Varga said. “Perhaps the spring had seduced him. He knew he’d look prettiest in pink. Boys, my dear Keith, should most definitely be boys.” He patted the lad’s shoulder in a father confessor way. “Come and have an oyster. They’re marvellously self-contained, you know . . . you didn’t know? My dear lad!”
“Like an old married couple. Like Mr and Mrs Leverson.”
“Perhaps.”
Leo was a bottomless man. When he turned away to get more biscuits from a shelf his rear was a teeny bit pathetic. Even in Mr Universe leopard-skin he would still not have got away with it.
“Your father asked about you, you know, last night at the party.”
“I knew.”
“How, may I ask?”
“I saw your face go tight and dad’s go bland. You know, it’s easy when you’ve lived with him for years.”
“He’s not a bad old boy really,” Mr Varga mused. He held out the plate. “I like him.”
“He embarrasses me,” Keith explained, forgetting to take another. “He seems like a silly old fool alongside most of the fellows’ fathers. Never says a thing unless it’s about music. And long-hair stuff at that. But the worst thing of all. . . .”
“Yes?” prompted Leo, delicately looking away.
“Well, the worst thing of all is the way he lets Iris shove him around. In front of people, too. Only looks amused. It makes me want to curl up.”
“Yes, he does that rather,” agreed malicious Leo. “Did you know—?” He stopped.
