Whiskey & Charlie

by Annabel Smith

  “Don’t flatter yourself, mate,” Marco had said. “You’re not my type.”

  “Why?” Charlie asked indignantly. “What’s wrong with me?”

  Marco looked at him critically. “You’re not exactly what I’d call buff.”

  “What do you call that then?” Charlie flexed his biceps.

  Marco snorted. “It’s a good thing you’re not gay. You’d never get lucky.”

  “That’s bullshit, and you know it,” Charlie said. By then he’d occasionally been to gay clubs with Marco and had attracted a great deal more attention than he ever had from women.

  “Want to chow down on my big fat one?” a perfect stranger had said once, standing next to him at the bar. Charlie had choked on his drink.

  x x x

  Once they had left school, Marco’s sexuality didn’t seem to matter anywhere near as much. There was no longer any doubt about it in Charlie’s mind, but by then he’d had time to get used to the idea, had gotten over his own issues about it, which in hindsight, he could see had been pretty pathetic to begin with. Over the next few years, there were times—admittedly, usually when Charlie was drunk—when he thought about asking Marco about it, forcing him to confess. But after a while it hadn’t seemed important.

  As Charlie found out later, Marco was waiting for his dad to die before he came out. He was twenty-two when his dad was diagnosed with cancer. That Christmas, his youngest sister, Rosemary, had taken him aside after lunch.

  “I don’t know if you’re planning on telling anyone or not,” she had said, “but if Dad finds out you’re gay, it will finish him off.”

  Marco’s other siblings were practically a different generation; they’d all been married for years, living in the suburbs with their kids. It wouldn’t have even crossed their minds that Marco wouldn’t go down the exact same path they had. But Rosemary was only a few years older than Marco, had friends with younger brothers and sisters who’d gone to school with Marco and Charlie. That must have been how she found out.

  At first, Marco told Charlie, he had resented Rosemary for what she said, but a part of him had known she was right. Marco was the youngest of seven children; when he was born, his father was already forty. He was from a different culture, a different era, and the idea of men being with other men was beyond his comprehension. Marco didn’t want to be estranged from his father when he died. So he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t tell his mother, his brothers, his other sisters, his friends. Three years it took his dad to die, and in all that time, Marco never told a soul.

  After his father died, he became what he himself described as a raving poofter, picking up men three or four nights a week. Once he had gotten that out of his system, he became like all the other people Charlie knew. He had flings; he had one-night stands; he had boyfriends from time to time. Then he met Guy. Guy was a historian who had spent six years writing and researching an epic five-hundred-thousand-word text on the Second Fleet.

  “The Second Fleet?” Charlie had asked when he first met him.

  Guy had laughed. “That’s what everyone says. ‘Who could care less about the Second Fleet?’”

  Guy was in his early forties, quietly spoken with a surprisingly hearty laugh. He was well read, well traveled, well adjusted. He had a penchant for shaker furniture and cello concertos. He adored Marco. After they had been together for six months, Marco moved in with Guy and his spoiled cat Marmaduke.

  Marco had always been particularly sarcastic toward people who were overly gushing about their significant others, but after he met Guy, Charlie began to hear him use phrases like everything I’ve been looking for and eventually the love of my life. And Guy, it appeared, felt the same. There was only one thing that marred their happiness, Marco told Charlie over one of their lunches at the Windsor: they couldn’t get married.

  “It’s so unfair,” Marco had said. “Guy and I love each other. We want to spend our lives together. We’re not hurting anyone else. How can that be wrong? It’s no different from any man and woman who want to get married. Imagine if you weren’t allowed to marry Juliet. Imagine if it was all you wanted, and you couldn’t do it.”

  Charlie had found such a situation impossible to imagine. He found himself in the opposite position, in which everyone wanted him and Juliet to get married, except Charlie himself.

  x x x

  Three or four times a year, Juliet received a magazine called Fideliter in the mail, a glossy, full-color publication detailing the latest developments and achievements at her old school. “Fideliter was the school motto—the Latin word for faithfully,” Juliet explained. The school depicted in Fideliter bore no relation to Charlie’s own experience of school. According to a letter from the principal in one edition, Fintona Girls’ School was a school where students were “nurtured and encouraged to explore their talents.” If they didn’t know what their talents were, they had every opportunity to find out. For the artistically inclined, there was music, drama, and dance. For those who excelled at languages, there were trips to France, Germany, and Japan. There were debating and mock trials, the Duke of Edinburgh Awards Scheme, excursions in a bus with the school logo on the side. As well as hockey, athletics, netball, and basketball, the girls could play soccer and Aussie Rules Football.

  “I wish they’d show photos of them in footy shorts,” Charlie had said to Juliet when he read that.

  In eleventh and twelfth grades, you could also do archery or kickboxing, sailing, ice skating, or tenpin bowling. Every time Charlie read the magazine, they seemed to be celebrating the opening of a state-of-the-art facility—a theater, a technology center, a science wing.

  Charlie could not have imagined a school where every one of the students was dressed identically, but the photos were there to prove it. From ages five to eighteen, all the girls wore the same blazers and straw boaters, the same tunics and cardigans, the same shirts and ties and socks and shoes. Juliet had told Charlie there were even regulation underpants available at the uniform shop, although after sixth grade, no one bought those.

  Charlie was fascinated by Fideliter. Often he read it from cover to cover, which was more than Juliet did. What he liked most about it was the opportunity to imagine Juliet as she had been when she was still at school. He could picture her, in the pages of Fideliter, with ankle socks and a high ponytail. He could imagine her in the school play, overly dramatic and wearing too much makeup. He could see her cheering for her friends in the athletics carnival. He felt sentimental about Juliet in a way he never had about his other girlfriends. He wished he had known her as a teenager.

  The last two pages of Fideliter were devoted to Old Girls’ News, and these were the pages Juliet paid the most attention to. Some of the news was spectacular. There were ex-students doing postgraduate courses at Oxford, Harvard, and the Sorbonne, a girl who had become a lawyer for the United Nations. But most of the news was ordinary—this girl had gotten married, that one had had a baby, the class of 1983 had enjoyed their twenty-year reunion.

  “I can’t believe Fiona Warren got married,” Juliet would say. “Everyone thought she was a lesbian.”

  One day, long before Whiskey’s accident, when life was still simple, Charlie had come home from indoor soccer to find Juliet crying over her latest issue of Fideliter.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, thinking she must have read some bad news about an old friend. But Juliet wasn’t even looking at the Old Girls’ News. The heading on the page she had open said Tenth Grade Drama Camp.

  “They’re so young,” Juliet said, pointing at the photos.

  Charlie looked closer, read the caption: “A dramatic moment in A Streetcar Named Desire.” He felt confused. “Too young to understand Streetcar, do you think?”

  Juliet sniffed. “I remember tenth grade drama camp,” she said. “We had such a good time. It seems so long ago. I wish I could go back to school.”

  “
What do you mean, Jules? What’s really the matter?”

  Juliet had turned to the back page and jabbed her finger at a photo of a bridal party. “Everyone’s getting married,” she said miserably. “I must be the only one left.”

  x x x

  Charlie did not know how to explain his feelings about marriage to Juliet. He could hardly understand them himself. When Whiskey told Charlie Juliet was the most beautiful girl he’d ever meet, he had been right. She still looked as beautiful to Charlie as she had the night he met her. Charlie thought he would never grow tired of looking at her. When she closed her eyes on the pillow at night, her face wore an expression of great concentration, as though falling asleep was something you had to focus on to achieve, like winning a race or passing an exam. But once she was asleep, she looked perfectly calm. She did not drool or snore or gurgle or twitch. She barely moved. Charlie loved to watch her sleep.

  She was graceful. She had good posture, flawless skin. She looked as good to Charlie in jeans and an old T-shirt as she did in a cocktail dress. In public, men always looked twice. She was gracious when she rejected the men who offered to buy her drinks or asked for her phone number. She was thoughtful. She remembered birthdays, including Charlie’s mother’s, which he did not remember himself. She had passions for things, obsessions: a particular brand of rollerball pens with purple ink, which she bought in boxes of twelve; an oval eraser, like a rubber pebble, which she never used, because she didn’t want to spoil its perfect shape.

  She had discovered a website called Future Me, which allowed you to compose emails to be sent to yourself in the future. She wrote emails that would be returned to her in a month, a year, five years. When she received them, she printed them out and stuck them up on her pin-up board.

  Dear Future Me, one of them said. It’s two years today since you met Charlie. I hope you’re not taking him for granted. Don’t ever forget how lucky you are to have met someone like him. If you’re ever in doubt, think about how desperate you felt with Ryan, always worrying about what he was going to do next; remember how you cried every day during that last year with Nathan. Charlie’s everything you wished for. Be good to him.

  Certainly, there were things about Juliet that Charlie was not mad about. She had, for example, more than forty pairs of shoes, which she insisted on storing in their original boxes and which consequently took up more than one third of their wardrobe. Though she had great enthusiasm for planting new herbs and flowers, it was Charlie who ended up watering them. She had unbearable PMS, for which she claimed the only cure was for Charlie to drive her across town to her favorite Thai restaurant in North Brunswick, a place with plastic chairs and tables, cutlery with a Lufthansa logo on the handles, which must have been bought in a fire sale; a place with bad service and no ambience whatsoever, but which happened to serve what Juliet described as the world’s greatest chicken satay. She hated the news and would turn off the radio whenever it came on. Some of these things annoyed Charlie. Sometimes they even argued about them, as all couples do. But none of them were reasons not to marry her.

  So what were the reasons? It wasn’t that Charlie could think of someone else he would rather spend the rest of his life with. But that was exactly the problem. He didn’t think he would spend the rest of his life with Juliet either. He still lived in fear that Juliet was going to leave him, and so he couldn’t marry her. Because if break-ups were bad, divorces were ten times worse.

  And yet, Charlie had sensed Juliet was getting impatient. He had begun to feel that if he didn’t propose to Juliet soon, she would grow tired of waiting and end their relationship. And there was the conundrum. She would leave him if he didn’t marry her, and she would probably leave him anyway, even if he did. It had gone round and round in Charlie’s head, and though he knew Juliet was waiting, he could not bring himself to ask her.

  x x x

  A few months before Whiskey’s accident, Charlie had arrived home from work one day, and Juliet had taken him outside to show him the hanging baskets in which the geraniums she had planted had started to bloom.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said, and Charlie thought she was going to say something about the garden: the agave might need repotting, what do you think about moving the camellia into that corner, is it still too early to plant some basil?

  “How do you feel about getting married?” is what she actually said.

  x x x

  Afterward, Charlie had found another one of her emails, composed two years before. Dear Future Me, this one said. Are you married yet? Engaged, at least? If Charlie hasn’t asked you by now, he probably never will, so why don’t you go and ask him yourself? Now’s as good a time as any—don’t worry about the roses and violins, you know Charlie wouldn’t be into that anyway. PS Don’t be upset if he says no—he’s probably just scared.

  Charlie felt wretched when he read the email. It hurt him to think she’d already wanted to get married, two years ago, when she wrote the email, that she’d waited all this time, knowing he probably wouldn’t ask her, and then she’d asked him herself, knowing he would probably say no.

  x x x

  It had been Marco’s boyfriend, Guy, who started the Romeo and Juliet jokes.

  “‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’” he had quoted, bowing low when he and Juliet were first introduced.

  Juliet had curtsied, thrilled, and offered her hand to be kissed. “And this must be your Romeo,” Guy said, shaking hands with Charlie.

  “He’s no Romeo,” Marco said.

  “Why not?” Charlie asked, indignant. “I could be a Romeo.”

  “You’re not exactly renowned for your romantic gestures, mate.”

  “I’m romantic, aren’t I, Jules?” Charlie said uncertainly, looking at her for confirmation.

  “Has he ever climbed up to your balcony to declare his undying love?” Guy asked her.

  “I don’t have a balcony.”

  “What about drinking poison?” Marco asked.

  “It’s Juliet who drinks the poison,” Guy said. “Romeo stabs himself.”

  “Would you stab yourself for Juliet?” Marco demanded.

  “Would you stab yourself for Guy?” Charlie retorted.

  “He asked you first,” Juliet said.

  Charlie pretended to consider the question. “Maybe if the sword was extremely sharp and I knew it would be over in a flash.”

  Charlie’s romantic ineptitude had become something of a running joke for the four of them. Juliet had always laughed along. Now Charlie wondered if she had ever really thought it funny, if all this time she had been secretly hoping for Charlie to surprise her, to prove Marco wrong. He knew she wasn’t asking for much. He wasn’t required to risk his life, renounce his family. He felt sick when he thought about what he’d said to her in the garden. I need to think about it.

  Sierra

  Five years on, Charlie still regretted dropping out of his Diploma of Education because of a personality conflict with one of his tutors. When she failed his major essay, he could have applied for a reexamination; instead, he went to her office and called her names, resulting in a disciplinary letter from the dean of the school. He was too ashamed to appeal the mark and too proud to resubmit the essay, so instead of becoming a qualified teacher, he had had to be content working as a teacher’s aide.

  After Juliet’s marriage proposal, Charlie felt pressure to make some changes in his life that would demonstrate he was growing up, making progress, moving in the right direction. He gave up his job at the primary school to take a “real job,” a full-time position with all the trimmings: a salary, paid sick leave and holidays (a privilege Charlie had never yet been afforded in his string of casual jobs), an esoteric title (content development officer), and a box of business cards with his name printed beneath a company logo.

  The first surprise of Charlie’s new life was that the phrase working
nine to five was inaccurate, that, in fact, his working hours were from 8:30 to 5:30, not to mention the hour it took him by tram and by train to reach the office and the hour home again. No more walking to work, coming home to have lunch with Juliet. Charlie had joined the drones, standing on a platform at Flinders Street Station at 8:00 a.m. with a glazed look in his eyes.

  Charlie’s employer was Sierra Education Incorporated, the brand-new Australian arm of a hugely successful European company that developed and distributed learning aids for geography and social studies. Charlie’s job involved developing questions for computer-generated quizzes around key learning areas from the primary school social studies curriculum. It sounded good on paper. And according to the recruitment consultant who found Charlie the position, Sierra Education was geared for success, and Charlie was going to make an integral contribution to a rate of growth previously unheard of in Australia.

  So confident was the company in their growth that they took out a lease on an office designed for a hundred employees. When Charlie started, however, there were only ten employees, including himself, and their workstations were lost in the vast, bland space, like tiny islands floating in an unnamed ocean. Charlie had never had a workstation before. The partitions were arranged so when he was sitting at his desk, he couldn’t see another soul. He was walled in on three sides, the only opening at his back, so whenever someone came to speak to him, they always took him by surprise. Occasionally people stood up from their ergonomic desk chairs (quality secondhand) to peer over their partitions, like meerkats emerging from their burrows.

  Initially Charlie found it depressing to be cut off from the other people in the office, but once he got to know them, he discovered it to be a blessing. The graphic designer, who was the father of six children and called himself a Christian, told racist jokes and commented frequently on the number of Vietmanese [sic] moving into his area, driving decent Aussie families out. There was an obese IT consultant whose diet consisted solely of Coke, pot noodles, and fun-size chocolate bars, which he ate a bag at a time. Charlie’s supervisor was a sexist ultracapitalist named Ray who was studying for his MBA, a qualification he described as a passport to success—by which he meant wealth. The only topic on which Charlie and Ray saw eye to eye was the utter ineptitude of the office manager, Elliott. After less than three weeks in the job, Charlie found himself at a team meeting making a mental list of all the things he found intolerable about his new boss: