The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘No – no, it’s OK. I’ll hold onto it.’

  Trinh looked as though she wanted to argue.

  I spoke instead. ‘So, this person Richard Evans. What was the story there?’

  She thought for a moment, a cautious look in her eyes. ‘Ingrid was very … attractive,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, waiting.

  ‘Richard and she were good friends,’ she said reluctantly. ‘But that’s it.’

  It made sense with what I’d seen of him.

  ‘He’s taken it all very hard. Have you seen him again?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But he didn’t want to talk about Ingrid.’

  Trinh nodded thoughtfully. Then she looked up over my head and smiled. I turned around. Jones stood behind me, his hand resting on the edge of the booth. He was holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He slid in beside me and touched his glass to Trinh’s, then to mine, and drank.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said. He drew on his cigarette and looked at me briefly. ‘Good to see you getting along so well.’ He leaned back in his seat.

  Trinh gave him a smile that was friendly and knowing and somehow ironic. ‘To your good health,’ she said, ‘and to our departed friends.’

  I raised my glass to my mouth.

  Jones’s hand strayed down to my leg now and again. I stayed still, giving nothing away.

  Trinh checked her watch at some point around ten.

  ‘Working?’ Jones asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘Where do you work?’ I asked, imagining her behind a bar.

  She looked back and forth for a second or two between me and Jones.

  ‘I work downtown, not that far from here. Basically – how should I put this – I tell people what to do.’

  ‘So you’re some kind of manager?’

  ‘No, not exactly.’

  Jones watched her silently.

  ‘People pay me to tell them what to do.’

  I waited. She held her glass. Consultant, I thought; instructor?

  ‘I’m, like, a dominatrix, I suppose you call it.’

  Jones gave a small smile and lifted his glass to drink.

  ‘It’s not sex,’ she said. ‘Some of that goes on at the place I work at – not much – but it’s mainly, you know, discipline and so on. It’s all about power.’

  ‘Like bondage? S & M?’ I asked, feeling slow and ignorant.

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘And you’re the one brandishing the whip?’

  ‘Exactly.’ She smiled. ‘And issuing instructions. It’s great money and great benefits. It’s putting me through school. Usually I tell people that I teach dance.’

  She pulled out a card and handed it to me. Salon Réage, it said, with a design of a wheel in the centre, five spokes, and a phone number, and the name Verity.

  ‘It’s better to be the one holding the whip than on the other end, in terms of which end you work. There’s much more work on the other side of things for the Asian girls, you know, but I do OK. The girls who work as bottoms at our place work hard. Make a lot of money but for me it wasn’t worth it.’

  I didn’t like what I was imagining. It was easier to think of Trinh holding a whip than being struck by one.

  ‘Some students in the department do that medical testing stuff to make money – you know, where they pay you to take an experimental drug or get a piece cut out of your mouth, see how it heals.’ She grimaced. ‘It’s too gross. The pay can be really good. But this is a lot better. For me at least.’

  ‘What are the guys like?’ I asked. ‘Is it all guys?’

  ‘Oh, it’s all guys. Lawyers. They are our best clientele. And politicians. A judge or two. No surprise. It’s expensive.’

  ‘Trinh has a sixth sense for this,’ Jones said. ‘She can tell – in much the same way some people guess your star sign – she’ll know whether you’re the S or the M, the top or the bottom. Some people surprise you.’ He looked at Trinh admiringly.

  ‘So which one am I?’ I asked her.

  She laughed. ‘You’re too easy.’ She drank her drink. ‘Ask him – his sense is as good as mine. And by the way, you’re a Gemini.’

  She eased her way out from behind the table and stood. ‘I’m off to dominate for a few hours. Have fun, kids.’ She squeezed Jones’s hand for a second before she left.

  He looked at me. ‘Can I buy you that drink?’

  We walked later up Sixth Avenue, past the shops with windows full of sex toys and bongs. I stopped outside one with a display of handcuffs and looked at Jones, raised my eyebrows.

  ‘Not for me,’ he said, with a barely perceptible shake of his head. ‘So literal.’

  We kept on walking, back to the apartment.

  There was something about this air of detachment he had, the way part of him remained dispassionate and contained even while his whole body was engaged in sex, that both enraged and excited me; the cooler he was, the more furiously I wanted to see him lose control, studying him intently to make sure I caught the moment when it might happen, listening for his breathing to change, his voice to collapse. Even when it seemed that the moment would never arrive, I chased it more and more helplessly, like an animal throwing itself against the bars of a cage. He seemed to know it, and not to care, and let me wear myself out. And so I gave up, and had forgotten to keep watch for it when it finally came, not with his eyes shut as I would have expected, but with them open and distantly unfocused, suddenly vulnerable. It didn’t last long. His eyes closed and he was intact again. I lowered my body to his and turned my face away, buried it in his chest, and felt not triumphant as I had thought I would, but uncertain and drained.

  The sheets were cold when I woke in the early hours of the morning, alone in the bed, driven awake by a dream. There had been rows of drawers, like the sliding cabinets in a morgue wall, or specimen drawers, some shallow and some deep. They were all made of wood, filled with tablets and papers and other, more disturbing artifacts. I didn’t want to look. Ingrid opened them expertly one by one and turned to me, her face close and troubled. Her hand rested on a drawer’s handle at hip height. She was talking about those destroyed tablets kept in the wrong kind of case. ‘Even lead decays,’ she told me. ‘The drawings,’ she said, or was it ‘drawers’? ‘The case was wrong.’ I thought she was talking about Latin grammatical cases, and laughed; in this dream world I imagined them as capacious, invisible containers, cases, for meaning. ‘There were problems with transcription,’ she insisted urgently. ‘Transcription.’

  The room was dark. An argument was happening down on the street below, a long, wheedling voice against an angry shout. The clock showed its bright red digital numbers and I pushed it away. The darkness started to lift and lighten. The sheets were no longer as cold. The voices outside grew more distant. I willed the drawers shut in my mind and fell back asleep.

  Jones talked about Ingrid just one time, a week or two after that night. We were in his office. I’d picked a book off the shelf, his most recent one, an edited collection. There it was on the title page – Philip R. Jones, the hated first name. Opening the book dislodged a piece of notepaper inside with Ingrid’s writing on it – the title of an article, a reference she had copied out from his bibliography. Page numbers. A word below, crossed over so it was illegible.

  Jones took the book out of my hands almost roughly and looked at it for a minute. ‘She borrowed it,’ he said, and handed it back to me, keeping hold of the note. He folded the piece of paper in half and held it, as though not sure what to do with it, and sat there on the edge of his desk. There were several copies of his book on the shelf on the wall, and he looked at them without seeming to really see them.

  ‘I didn’t see much of Ingrid in the six months, year, before that September,’ he said eventually. This was becoming a common refrain among the people she had known. ‘I’ve been sorry about that. You know, I was on the admissions committee the year she applied. So I knew her from the
start of her time here. From before the start of it. She changed so much in that time.’ He seemed to be looking for how to describe it. ‘It was subtle. Her work was excellent but she had a lot of trouble choosing a topic. She seemed to lose faith in her own ideas about things, to have trouble maintaining her confidence about her work. And, of course, she was very unhappy, after the first six months or so. But you know that.’ He gave a small, bitter smile.

  I remembered how Ed had seen Ingrid here once in that time, in New York, a few months after she had come to Sydney for those few days to visit Ralph. It had been a business trip of some kind for him. I had met him for a drink with Ralph after he got back. He was drinking a lot that night and when he spoke about Ingrid he was furious. At first she hadn’t agreed to see him at all, and then she did, and they went out to eat. ‘She looked just the same,’ he said, ‘but it wasn’t her at all. You wouldn’t know her.’ Ed had blamed Grey, said that he was trying to run her life and had to know where she was every minute of the day. ‘She’s just pretending,’ he said. ‘It’s all an act. Very careful. It’s like he’s replaced her with a robot. A good robot.’

  Ralph had said something in reply about Grey being like Pygmalion, taking Ingrid and shaping her according to his own desires. I mentioned that to Jones, and he thought for a moment then he shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Pygmalion started out with a statue – he made one himself – and the gods turned it into a living woman. Grey is something like the opposite of that. He started with a living woman and turned her into …’ He paused. I waited for him to finish. He shook his head again.

  I thought I understood.

  He nodded towards the book in my hands. ‘It’s yours,’ he said. ‘Take it. There are ten copies here. It’s embarrassing.’

  I hesitated.

  ‘If you don’t want it …’ he started. ‘Some of the pieces are quite good. But it might not be your kind of thing.’ He held out his hand, ready to take it back.

  I held on to it. ‘You’re giving it to me?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Jones said, becoming impatient. He pulled the book out of my hands and opened it to the title page, Perspectives on Tribute in the Late Roman Empire, took a pen out of his shirt pocket. His hand hovered over the page, preparing to write an inscription. He seemed to almost change his mind, clicked the top of the pen up and down, then wrote quickly for a second. He smiled apologetically, closed the book and handed it to me again. I took it, uncertain, and thanked him.

  20.

  At my first visit to her studio, Fleur had invited me to a party there, two weeks from the day. I had asked if there was a special occasion. She had looked confused and thought for a second, and said, ‘It’s Theo’s birthday,’ but that seemed like a statement of fact and not the reason for the party.

  When I got there the place was filled with people, everywhere from Fleur’s age to my own and older, a few heads of greying hair, everyone in black and denim punctuated with spots of metallic sparkle. Sheets of coloured gel had been placed over the standing lamps so that the space was dimly lit in red. Candles dripped wax onto the floor from a tall, branched candelabrum in one corner. As I watched it, a teenage boy took a candle that had almost burnt down and tilted it so that a drop of wax fell onto his hand, impressing the girl sitting next to him. He held it over her hand and another drop fell onto her skin. She giggled, and he held the candle there, smiling at her.

  Fleur saw me and pulled me into a huddle of people in the small kitchen area. The air was thick with smoke. Someone put a clear plastic cup in my hand and said, ‘Punch,’ into my ear over the loud music. It tasted like red cordial and bourbon. A piece of fruit floated in the pinkish-brown liquid. Fleur was wearing a silver, sleeveless shirt with her hair down, pushed back behind her ears. There was glitter on her cheekbones. Her eyes were paler than ever under black and silver make-up.

  I found my way out of the crowded area. The corner of the room that was used as a video set was closed off by a tall folding screen of wood and paper. I stepped behind it. The music sounded softer in this corner, as though the screen had a greater power as a sound barrier than it ought to. There was a work table against the far wall, papers and plastic pages full of slides strewn across it, two drawers underneath. There wasn’t much light. The drawers opened easily. They were full of pens and paperclips, snapshots, postcards, rolls of tape, coins. In a small stack of photographs at the back of the second drawer there was one of Ingrid, taken outside somewhere on a sunny day. It looked relatively recent. She was smiling at the camera. I saw that much when there was a noise behind me and I quickly slipped it into my back pocket.

  I looked around and saw Richard Evans standing there with a beer in his hand.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. He looked over at the desk. I had shut the drawers. My cup of punch was leaving a wet puddle on the white laminate surface. ‘Sleuthing?’ he asked.

  The photograph of Fleur and Ingrid with her back turned was on the wall between us, and both our gazes drifted towards it silently. I had the feeling that he had come here to the screened-off corner to see it.

  ‘I’m off,’ he said, glancing towards the screen. ‘Just passing through.’ He flattened down a piece of his dark, straight hair with the heel of his hand.

  ‘Don’t go,’ I said. ‘You’re the only person I know here apart from Fleur.’

  He glanced towards the screen and then to me, hesitating. ‘I don’t have to go right away.’

  Neither of us looked back at the photograph. He settled himself on the floor, against the wall. Cynthia sat in her alcove above him. I stayed in the flimsy chair at the desk.

  ‘What’s in your drink?’ he asked.

  I grimaced. ‘Punch. Would you like to try it? It tasted terrible at first but it grows on you.’

  He shook his head and drank from his bottle. ‘It’s quieter here,’ he said. I nodded.

  His face was clean-shaven and the light glinted here and there off his glasses. The piece of hair he had tried to smooth wouldn’t stay down. His features were very average-looking but his eyes gave something more special to his face. They were iron-blue, serious, scrutinising. We stayed there like that, not talking much, for a little while. Soon my drink was finished, thin slice of strawberry stuck to the side of the cup. Just as I was about to suggest that we go together to find me another drink he stood up and stretched his legs, stiff from sitting. Suddenly it was hard to make the suggestion; I felt shy, and when it became clear that he was leaving I was disappointed. We went around the screen to the main room together.

  ‘See you later then,’ he said, and smiled.

  ‘That would be nice,’ I said.

  His smile turned into a questioning look; it was tentative but not uninterested. My heel caught on something, a hole in the floor; I looked down. He went over to a group of people talking and spoke to one of them, a man I recognised as the artist from the opening at Maeve’s gallery the previous week, wearing the same brown and green argyle vest as he had before. They put their heads together for a moment and then said their goodbyes to the others. Richard skimmed the room quickly before they left. His eyes met Fleur’s briefly as she happened to turn towards the door and looked away without any sign of recognition. I went to look for more punch.

  Jones and I were leaving the building one evening a few days later and went past a man in a brown jacket outside Mrs Bee’s door, waiting for her to answer. The look of recognition between the man and Jones was unmistakeable; they finished it with a nod. We pushed through the front set of doors and left him standing there for a moment, until I looked back and saw her door open. The man smiled tenderly at her and passed through whatever it was he had to deliver.

  There could have been a small smile at the edge of Jones’s mouth, or not; he was playing the straight face for me. A strong breeze came up. Gum wrappers skittered across the footpath and he did a quick one-two to avoid them. A paper bag slapped into my leg and I shook it off. I didn’t want to ask; it annoyed me th
at he wouldn’t say. The breeze was cold around my ankles. I tried to let the question drop from my mind but it stayed there, banging around like the garbage on the windy street. Quite how Mrs Bee’s sphere of acquaintance might cross with Jones’s was unclear but in New York any connection seemed possible.

  In the end it was Jones who raised it. The pleasure of withholding information must have become outweighed by the enjoyment of revelation.

  ‘Your Mrs Bee is a dark horse,’ he said, apparently addressing his whisky, looking at the meniscus as it tilted, fingers rocking the glass. His eyes were liquid bright. His fingers distracted me, long and evenly shaped, the cleanest of nails. He set the glass down.

  I tried to play that straight face of his, but I got impatient. ‘So who was that guy earlier?’

  ‘He’s a delivery guy,’ he answered, with a knowing smile.

  ‘Yeah. I guessed that.’

  ‘You guessed what?’

  By then I was sick of the conversation, and my glass was nearly empty. Jones stood. ‘Sad face. I’ll get you another. Sam, the delivery guy, he delivers, you know, drugs.’ He said the last word in a secretive, ironic whisper in my ear, leaning down over me as he passed.

  He walked away to the bar with a slow, lazy stride.

  Back again, he set the drinks on the table. He had bought me a martini.

  ‘Classy,’ I said.

  ‘I guessed you for a twist rather than olive,’ he said, and took a substantial sip from the glass. ‘Not bad.’

  The gin smelled sharp against my nose.

  He leaned towards me, elbows on the table. ‘So I guess your Mrs Bee is one of those upscale William Burroughs-style junkies – live forever on the good stuff as long as they find holes in their arms.’

  Why not, I thought. But it was hard to put the idea of heroin addiction together with Mrs Bee. I decided that he was probably delivering other kinds of drugs, something she used to induce psychic visions.

  ‘Drink up, baby,’ he told me.