The Guest of Honour — Scanlon, not his Tigerpup — was present. His borrowed tie had vanished; his shirt had reverted to normal dishevelled status. He began tearing open the hot bread rolls the moment he was seated, even before the saying of grace. A few surprised glances were exchanged around that long table, but Scanlon was the star, he could do no wrong. This was axiomatic. Mary-Beth Schultz, the perfect hostess, tore open her own bread roll immediately, bit off a mouthful, then glanced up:
‘In all the excitement I forgot grace,’ she said; and proceeded to murmur one of the shorter set pieces in her repertoire.
I doubt if Scanlon noticed this courtesy. If he had spilled his wine, Mary-Beth would surely have spilled hers, and still he wouldn’t have noticed. He chomped at his roll, unembarrassed. As always, there seemed no pleasure in his eating; he ate as if his taste buds had been destroyed; he ate functionally, supplying himself with the necessary sugars and amino acids and daily requirements of essential vitamins with a minimum of time and fuss. And manners.
Each course had some vaguely tigerish theme, or motif. The pumpkin soup was striped across its firm, orange surface with delicate lines of cream. The rainbow trout was bound by small strips of bacon. The steak was griddle-charred, etched with deep, dark streaks. All of which was very clever, even twee, but wasted on Scanlon.
Mary-Beth, mock peeved, drew his attention to it.
‘Looks more like grilled zebra,’ he pronounced, poking at the meat with his knife.
Several diners laughed, Hollis Schultz among them.
‘Grilled adidas track shoe,’ Scanlon continued, never one for heeding the bounds of taste.
Even rudeness was permitted tonight. Mary-Beth pouted, but she was only pretending to be miffed. Not that she had cooked any of this striated food, but the ideas were clearly hers. The ‘concepts’, as her husband put it, proudly.
The tiger-trimmed coat she had worn earlier in the day had been shed, and the orange silk beneath it.
It was not a fun night; pleasant, but nothing more. The day had been long, all things that needed saying had been said earlier in the day, through a microphone. Whatever praise needed to be given had been given. Mary-Beth tried hard, or perhaps wasn’t even trying, perhaps continuous patter came naturally to her. Habitual goodness. The replies from her guests had a forced feel to them: the replies of those, me among them, who saw attendance as a duty. Scanlon in particular seemed distracted. Having eaten his fill — having overeaten — he no longer had any use for the gathering. Its social purposes were beyond him. He sat across the table, playing with his sweets: a wedge of layered cake, alternating light and dark bands. It looked like a giant liquorice allsort.
‘You seem quiet,’ I murmured. ‘Anticlimax?’
He looked at me, directly: ‘Getting there is the fun, isn’t it? The journey, not the arrival.’
‘So where to from here?’
‘I’m working on a few things.’
‘Mammoth? Tyrannosaurus rex?’
Hollis Schultz, ostensibly listening to his neighbour Grossman, further down the table, seemed to have an ear cocked our way. Scanlon also seemed aware of this: he sipped his wine, watching me.
‘Top secret?’ I prompted.
‘You’ll be among the first to know,’ he said. ‘If and when. It’s early stages yet. Nothing concrete.’
Schultz smiled, goodhumouredly: ‘Professor Fox, can’t we let the man rest on his laurels for a few minutes?’
Things fizzled out at eleven; Schultz, pleading tiredness, overruled his wife and dismissed the gathering. I left at the same time as Scanlon; we walked slowly downhill to the residential terraces together, a little closer physically than necessary, perhaps. Our shoulders bumped together from time to time, our arms clumsily collided. I felt an odd tingle each time this happened: would he attempt to grab me again? The anticipation was not unpleasant.
‘Can I offer you a nightcap?’ he said.
The words sounded foreign to him; a phrase borrowed from a movie perhaps. Was he teaching himself more subtle approaches?
‘Coffee would be nice.’
It was the first time I had entered his home. There was little evidence of housekeeping. The moment the door opened I could smell Scanlon: the smell of an animal, magnified, in its own lair.
The furnishings were minimal: mismatched chairs, tables covered with paperwork and unwashed mugs and plates. A single, wrinkled orange sat in the middle of a large fruit bowl wearing a coat of blue fur as thick as mink.
Scanlon disappeared into the kitchen; I inspected my surroundings more carefully. Basketball posters were taped to the walls: portraits of giant airborne black men, mostly, with names, or nicknames, like Doctor or Magic or Swisher. A small bookshelf stood in one corner; I stepped closer, curious. Science-fiction paperbacks filled the shelves, lurid covers and equally lurid titles: Planet Auschwitz, Martian Nymphomaniacs. Scattered among the pulp novels were a few basketball books: biographies, it seemed, of the same black, spidery giants who featured on the wall-posters.
Scanlon re-entered the room with a tray of coffee things: broken-handled mugs, instant coffee, a spoon encrusted with hardened sugar. He passed the milk carton; it felt oddly heavy, its contents resistant, sluggish. More solid than liquid, I suspected. I returned it to the tray.
‘Black — remember?’
He didn’t. He sat on the couch, a short white man surrounded by posters of giant blacks, watching me. He had a way of holding my gaze that might have been simple curiosity — a child’s innocent stare, ignorant of meaning — but which always disturbed me.
My mouth was dry, I had nothing to say.
‘You think men and women can be friends before the age of seventy, Mara?’
I found this disconcerting: ‘I don’t follow.’
‘Can we be friends while we still have functioning balls?’
This was not a line he had learnt from watching movies, this was a blunt original. I averted my gaze, and sipped from my chipped mug. The coffee was cold, or lukewarm at best; I suspected he had filled the mugs from the hot-water tap.
I tried to joke my way free: ‘I had no testicles last time I looked.’
‘Ovaries. Whichever. Same principle. Hormone factories.’
‘Different hormones.’
‘Of course. Vive la différence. Otherwise we would all act the same.’
Our conversation in his laboratory some weeks before came back to me, the first time I had sensed that his words might mean something else, something nonliteral. There seemed similar footnotes — invisible footnotes — to each word here. The discussion might have been an abstract intellectual dispute between colleagues. Or it might have been the awkward mating dance of that odd bird, Homo sapiens scientificus.
I tried to keep it abstract. ‘You think gender differences can be explained by chemical differences?’
‘You don’t?’
‘It’s a little simplistic.’
‘I thought you read the journals, Mara. This is old work. Ancient history.’
‘How ancient?’
‘Ten years. Twenty. You must have read Geshwind on testosterone and brain development. Or Doreen Kimura. The same hormone that puts hair on chests retards language skills. Men are naturally strong and silent. Inarticulate.’
‘Really? You surprise me.’
He laughed: ‘Some men.’
He had edged a little closer on the sofa. I tried to keep him talking: ‘How else are we different?’
His hand was behind me: ‘You and me personally?’
Suddenly the conversation was heading back towards its hidden agenda.
‘Men and women,’ I generalised, hastily.
‘Men have the greater sex drive,’ he said.
I laughed, scornfully: ‘Don’t confuse sex and aggression.’
‘I’m only speaking generally,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t mean anything for an individual. You may want me as much as I want you.’
Finally, he had said it. Utte
red the words. A strange courtship, certainly: a lot of wing flapping and intellectual stork stepping. Perhaps this roundabout route was his only way of arriving. Perhaps, to use his own words, getting there was most of the fun. Or perhaps the failure of the direct approach — the hands-on approach — some weeks before had forced him to this.
He moved closer; I realised he planned to kiss me. Our mouths met, our teeth clunked clumsily together. I pulled free, and rose from the sofa.
‘I don’t know that I’m ready for this.’
‘When will you know?’
I watched him from a safer distance. I was surprisingly clearheaded. And the words were much easier to find: ‘I don’t think I want to do it here. I don’t feel … comfortable.’
He was equally frank: ‘Your place, then.’
‘I don’t know. This is very sudden. And what about Tad?’
‘Tad will be in Brisbane,’ he said.
I glanced at him, surprised. He had never asked about my living arrangements with Tad. And I had volunteered nothing. Did he know everything about us?
‘I’ll come in half an hour,’ he insisted. ‘Leave the door open.’
At the age of forty-eight, finally, it had come to this: the Milestone. The First Time. I knew a lot about sex, textbook sex — Physiology, Clinical Stages — but had never been close to the act. I had never even masturbated, despite prescribing the practice for my frigid patients as a way of loosening up, of discovering their sexuality.
Do as I say, not as I do.
Perhaps those occasional teenage dreams were the closest I’d been, the closest I’d come: woken by a glow which I could never reliably localise. In hindsight I must have been aroused, but I was too ignorant, too innocent, to acknowledge the origin, the geographical site of those feelings. I wouldn’t have dreamt of touching myself in my teens, of discovering the sources of arousal. Later I read the medical textbooks, and understood.
At home I undressed slowly. I carefully folded my clothes, trying to steady my thoughts and pulse. I wanted to impose some sort of method, or ritual, on to the Unknown. I unwrapped a new cake of soap — a small scented boutique soap from some long-forgotten Christmas Day — and stepped into the shower. My forty-eight-year-old heart was beating like a schoolgirl’s, thumping at my chest wall as I soaped my breasts. I stepped out of the shower, slipped my glasses back on, and inspected the rest of that forty-eight-year-old body in the steamy mirror. The signs of age etched into the face, the pinched mouth, the prim expression, seemed to cease at the neck. The body was a virgin’s body, a childless body; on the bony side perhaps, and not particularly shapely, but firmer in the breasts than most I’d seen. And the skin was good.
I turned, startled, to find Scanlon watching from the door.
‘The shower’s free,’ I said, avoiding his gaze. ‘If you want to use it.’
‘Maybe afterwards.’
I squeezed past without touching him — not an easy feat — turned off the bedroom lights and climbed into bed. He rapidly stripped and climbed in beside me. I could smell him more than I could see him: stale sweat. Feral fox. We lay alongside each other, naked, awkward, not knowing what to say. We spoke simultaneously, then neither of us spoke, then we spoke simultaneously. Our teeth clumsily collided again when we tried to kiss. His hand moved between my thighs; I squirmed.
‘Don’t touch me there. It’s ticklish.’
I sensed that he was relieved to be excused from whatever he had read in books, or seen in movies, on the subject of foreplay. Or was I projecting my own timidity on to him? It seemed mutual: the professors making love like a pair of odd extinct animals, trying to remember long lost instincts, modelling their mating behaviour more on things learnt than on things that came naturally.
Perhaps we were merely like teenagers, for the first time.
I’m not going to say it was blissful, it wasn’t. It was awkward, and painful, and then too surprising, too queerly weird to be enjoyable.
And then, when I might have grown to enjoy it, too quick. Scanlon made love in the same manner that he ate food: appeasing his appetite as quickly and efficiently as possible. Bolting it.
It was a moderate adventure, and it ended well. For me, the pleasure came after: not so much knowing that I’d done it, that the Milestone was past, as lying in bed with Scanlon sleeping beside me, a man I might not lust after, yet, but trusted. And even — was it possible? — loved.
He was snoring lightly: rumble, purr, rumble, purr. I disentangled myself from the bedsheets, lifted his jeans from the floor and folded them over the back of a chair. I carried his shirt into the laundry — a small, compact room at the back of the terrace filled with gleaming white goods — rinsed it beneath the tap, sprinkled gritty washing powder on to the collar, cuffs and armpits, and began to scrub the various grimy surfaces together. Housework, the various events of the Modern Women’s Pentathlon had never appealed to me; but there was a genuine satisfaction in this. I hadn’t particularly enjoyed the sexual act. I had enjoyed the knowledge that I was doing it, at last, I had enjoyed the warm feelings between us, but I think this satisfied me most: Scanlon sleeping in my bed, me in the laundry washing those concentric sweat rings from his shirt, washing away the accumulated days, the various deposits of the past, his separate history and mine.
Washing the slate clean.
Preoccupied, I didn’t hear the pad of bare feet behind me. His arms enfolded me, startling me.
‘I’m going to be away for a few days,’ he said. ‘A publicity tour for the new baby. I can’t get out of it.’
He pressed his mouth into the nape of my neck, his words were muffled: ‘Maybe we could do this again when I get back.’
I was not yet lost to rationality: ‘I’d have to check my diary.’
He nuzzled a little deeper.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he mumbled, tritely. It was the most absurd lie I had ever believed in my life.
8
One lie that I had never believed was my mother’s favourite lie: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This consolation was aimed more at herself, the Ugly Duckling’s mother, I sensed, than at me. I pretended to agree — at first. Later I bent my lack of belief into intellectual arguments. What was female beauty, what were its essences? Was it a mere convention, as I argued to her? An arbitrary fashion? If so, was there an era in the past, or some lost tribe in the present where even my appearance would meet the criteria of beauty? Where my bony proportions might define the criteria? Tribes could be found to prove anything — where was mine? In what lost valley?
I teased her without mercy. In private I feared it was more simple, more absolute, than this. Surely the notion of beauty was nothing more than a form of nostalgia, a harking after the perfections and proportions of girlhood. The perfect, unwrinkled skin. The lush hair. The anatomical proportions, the doll proportions, the soft-toy proportions that all mammal young seem to share: big head, big possum eyes, small thimble nose.
If so, what exactly was Scanlon beholding that night? Clearly he wasn’t seeking someone younger, some doll or soft-toy simulacrum: he was seeking someone older.
My orphan theory came back to me: was he looking for his mother?
Perhaps. But here was the measure of my new serenity: so what? It made the events of the previous night no less real. I’d come to believe over the years that all human love was pathological in a sense: born of different types of insecurity. Why should ours be different?
I cleared away our shared breakfast things — coffeepot, toast, cereal bowls — after he had left, still musing. I remembered a case from the Assault Clinic Roster, years before: an eighty-year-old widow raped by a teenage boy. Afterwards the boy had sat down at the kitchen table and asked his victim for a glass of milk. And Weet-bix. He had also asked — innocently, it seemed — if he could visit again.
To have been a fly on the wall! Not watching the cruel act itself, but the aftermath. The sudden adjustments. To have watched that little-boy face, to have attempt
ed to read the confusion of thoughts beneath. Or the absence of thoughts. And to have watched her, to have overheard the replies of this cool-headed widow, surprisingly unruffled.
I had dawdled over my slides and smears as she dressed after the examination, wanting to know more.
‘So what did you do?’
She was pulling on her clothes with care. The usual damage had been magnified by age: human skin becomes parchment-like, easily torn and bruised, with age.
‘What did I do when, dear?’
‘When the … rapist asked for breakfast. What did you do? If you don’t mind me asking.’
Such questions were not my business. Anything beyond actual rape mechanics, beyond photographing the bruises and suturing the lacerations and preparing the forensic specimens, was not my business.
Her reply was sane, and matter-of-fact: ‘I poured out a glass of milk, dear. And as the boy sat there in the kitchen drinking his milk I rang the police.’
‘He stayed while you rang?’
‘He seemed to feel at home. Safe. And I was finding him someplace to go.’
I snorted: ‘Jail?’
‘I felt sorry for him, dear. I think he just wanted to be told what to do. Police, lawyers, I don’t think it mattered deep down. He sat there talking to me until the police arrived as if he had known me for years.’
‘About what?’
But I could guess. The Orphanage. The Broken Home. The Abuse. The Poverty. Pick a cliché’, any cliché’.
Excuses, excuses? Or ameliorating conditions, mitigating circumstances? Are we all innocent, until proven guilty? No: innocent, until proven innocent? As terrible as that rape was, I couldn’t at the time see how the relationship this milk-drinking boy was trying to build with his victim was more pathological than many of the marriages I knew. Sour grapes? My colleagues’ marriages mostly seemed glued together by blood, sweat and tears, by semen and pain; a faulty weld forced on couples by chemical forces and psychological imperatives beyond their control.
Or else they were business arrangements. Child-rearing arrangements, dead in the heart.
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