Forty-Seventeen

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘She’s a slut,’ Belle said, cautioning.

  The woman’s face was hardened by the Australian sun. Her long blonde hair was trained around her face to reduce the visible skin, to conceal the sun-damaged skin. But she used her hair tantalisingly like a veil so that it became an invitation to her suggested charms. The woman’s eyes slyly roved them, almost molesting them, as they approached. He saw immediately what Belle meant.

  ‘She’s a beach slut,’ Belle said, sotto voce, ‘it’s not only the way she uses her hair but sunbathing makes people very aware of their skin. Beach sluts move differently inside their skin. And she’s aware of us – two other sluts. Like a dog she doesn’t have to look closely, she senses us.’

  Belle’s voice had dropped to a hush and she touched his arm in warning. ‘Avoid making eye contact with her or the three of us will end up rutting right here and now in the gutter.’

  They kept their eyes averted and passed by.

  When they were clear, Belle said, ‘It would have happened in a flash if our eyes had met, we would not have known how it happened, it would have been a conflagration of souls. But I’m not up to conflagration of souls today.’

  ‘I believe you,’ he said, feeling that he had passed by an invitation of unspeakable consequence.

  ‘You’d better believe me,’ Belle said.

  Belle and he stopped and peered into the run-down, vandalised lobby of a former guest house of the twenties.

  Flaps hung off the mail boxes, human turds littered the floor, and the place had the odour of human urine.

  A disused office with a frosted glass door with the word ‘concierge’ and wall lights behind picket panels of pink and green pastel glass – mostly missing – were reminders of the guest house’s time of grandeur. Declined grandeur in old buildings gave him a delightful apprehension. ‘It’s a door to the past which I feel I can almost squeeze through. Certain buildings and their contents should be designated to be left as they were, completely untouched.’

  ‘These old “guest houses” are of course a metaphor for this great-grandmother who has so bewitched you,’ Belle said.

  She looked at him then, seductively, there in the lobby of the vandalised guest house amid the urine and excreta smells.

  ‘Let me embody that metaphor.’ She raised her skirt.

  Leaning against the door they had sex, and after she wiped herself with a tissue and threw it into the lobby.

  ‘In Egypt,’ he said, as they walked back out into the street of depressed curio shops and closed-up spas, clattering with his great-grandmother’s carriage and the last days of laughing tour parties, ‘I was carefully keeping my rubbish inside the car – in those Hertz rubbish bags – and I kept all my empty beer bottles and Evian water bottles inside the car. One day I stopped at what appeared to be a splendid Mediterranean beach but when I went onto the beach I found it totally littered. I looked around the countryside for the first time and realised that the whole of Egypt was a rubbish tip many thousands of years old. It is a completely littered country. I then took the rubbish from my Hertz bags and my empty bottles and dumped them out in the desert with all the other rubbish. It gave me a liberating pleasure to be untidy.’

  ‘I taught you the joy of throwing beer cans from car windows,’ Belle said, ‘I taught you that it was not only rule-breaking but also a simple expressive physical act of exuberant disorder. It’s physical haiku which says “we pass this way but once and to hell with it”.’

  ‘But we do pass that way again, usually,’ he said.

  ‘Oh don’t be wet,’ Belle said. But a little later added, ‘It must be done with a feeling of exuberance. Not habitually. If you feel no exuberance, don’t do it.’

  Belle told him that she had known he was a slut from the moment she had looked into his face.

  ‘I knew you were too,’ he said.

  ‘That did not require masterly powers of observation,’ she said, ‘women sluts have many more ways of displaying it. You have to be a master-slut to pick men sluts. Since puberty – before puberty! – men have been able to look at me and tell – and I knew myself from an early age. Always look for a puffy, bruised look around the eyes or lips – it’s a sort of tumescence – embouchement – an almost permanent tumescence of the labia which transfers itself to around the eyes and mouth. The pout. Do you know what the pout is? The pout is the face’s way of mimicking the tumescent vagina. Deportment. See how I sit? That’s the way a slut sits.’

  ‘And choice of jewellery,’ he said, ‘there is a slut aesthetic.’

  ‘No,’ Belle said, pedantically, ‘before that – I’m talking of school kids – you’ll find all the signs at that age. Admittedly girl sluts are the first into jewellery. But I could go along a line of boys and girls and pick out the sluts.’

  ‘And hence from photographs also.’

  ‘Yes, from all those photographs of your great-grandmother and her clients at the caves, I could tell. Oh yes, I could tell.’

  Belle said that people were wrong if they thought all whores were sluts. Some whores were sluts, some sluts were whores. But sluts used sexuality to extinguish self, which could only happen when you crossed the lines into the dark country where the rules were either unknown or always reversible.

  ‘Sluttishness is a sexual insurrection of considerable degree.’

  ‘What about Severine in Belle de Jour?’ he asked. ‘Was she a slut or just a whore or what?’

  ‘Thrill-seeking is a sufficient justification.’

  ‘You are capable of most sluttish things,’ Belle said, ‘but you can never experience the rich.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘It is because you came from a wealthy background – your great-grandmother’s money – you cannot get the plummeting frisson of debasing yourself before the rich. You are denied the having of sex in the shadow of fear and bewilderment. The upper-class rich can intimidate me in a way that you will never know. But I am a collector and a connoisseur of intimidation and its application to sensuality. Thus the upper-class rich serve me.’

  They discussed the ‘banishment of the intellect’ which has to occur in sluttishness.

  ‘One of the greatest joys of sluttishness,’ said Belle with shining eyes, ‘is to be intimidated and used sexually by one’s intellectual inferiors, to defile one’s intellect by choice of sexual company.’

  A still photograph of Marlon Brando from The Wild One caught his eyes and he thought, ‘Oh, oh – there’s a slut all right. I must show this to Belle.’

  In an article not in any way related to the photograph, on the same day, he came across the words, ‘Brando’s heavy-lidded slut in The Wild One lusted after furtively by Lee Marvin and explicitly quoted in the erotic fantasies of Anger’s Scorpio Rising …’

  He and Belle had been looking for uses of the word ‘slut’ applied to males.

  Belle was very pleased and rewarded him.

  ‘It is not only the making of oneself sexually available to virtually anyone from an early age, it has to become the ability to pick the appropriate partner from among strangers on any given occasion for a given sexual sortie.’

  ‘But sexual invitation is sometimes deceitful,’ he argued, ‘one can rarely be sure of what lies behind the invitation. Sometimes they want you to read their poems.’

  ‘A slut never uses a sexual invitation as a way of beginning quote a full relationship unquote or as a way of having one’s poems read. A slut would use the mind to seek a fully rounded relationship, not sexuality.’

  Belle said that this did not mean that when a slut was rejected by a lover he or she would not behave badly. ‘They are just as likely to burn your car or put a severed dog’s head in your bed. But the motive would be deprivation not jealousy.’

  Belle introduced her friend Renée as a ‘trainee slut’ to the visiting American poet, Mark Strand.

  Belle’s favourite character in history was, of course, Messalina. They were looking at Beardsley’s illustration of Juvenal’s
Sixth Satire which Elwyn Lynn described as, ‘Evil … energetically attractive or repulsive, elegant or lurching, brutally like Messalina …’

  Belle objected, in a letter to Elwyn Lynn, about the introduction of the word ‘brutally’ into the description of Messalina. She said brutalisation occurred when motives other than sensual pleasure interfered with the activity.

  Messalina, Belle explained, as the wife of Claudius worked in a brothel while Claudius slept, just like Severine, and was reputed not to have taken a break during her shift, always being the last to leave.

  He told Belle that he’d found out that his great-grandmother sometimes took part in mock marriages with gold miners who had struck gold. They would dress in formal clothing, hold a lavish reception, a mock religious marriage service, and then the consummation in the church in front of the guests. It was a high form of whore-theatre, desecrating marriage.

  ‘I like it, I like it,’ Belle said, smiling. ‘Without a doubt I am part of your ancestral theatre, I come from a line which stretches back through your great-grandmother to Messalina. ‘Your seeking of your great-grandmother, your seeking of psychic traces, is a sluttish thing to do too. What I can’t understand is why you can’t just have a whore mother fixation, why do you have to have a whore great-grandmother?’

  Among her many theories, Belle believed that we are parcel of our ancestors and that our friends and lovers are the projections of long-dead ancestors.

  At the Katoomba cemetery, Belle posed at the grave of his great-grandmother.

  ‘Is this the way you want me?’ Belle asked. ‘Is my sweater pulled tight enough over my nipples? Is my leotard tight into my crotch? Are my legs apart just enough to suggest unresisting submission? Are my lips pouting teasingly? Is my pelvis thrust forward enough as an invitation to enter me?’

  She was not acting and her sluttish pose was no parody. He took her photograph against the gravestone which had his great-grandmother’s name, the dates and the inscription, ‘Not changed but glorified’.

  She then came to him there in the cemetery saying, ‘Let me be your great-grandmother who at seventeen whored in this old resort town and for whom you’re searching.’

  As he embraced her there in the cemetery he realised why he’d taken her into the heartlands on his fortieth birthday and that even if she wasn’t the full story, she was maybe a replica. Whatever she was for him felt all right.

  From a Bush Log Book 1

  That Christmas he went into the Budawang Ranges with Belle.

  They had debauched in motel rooms and restaurants along the coast while he turned forty, bed sheets drenched with champagne and with all the smells and fluids that two bodies could be made to offer up in such dark love-making as, in their curious way, he and Belle were drawn into. But the conversations in the restaurants had become unproductively sadistic as they exhausted amicable conversation.

  He’d gone increasingly into interior conversation with himself about ‘turning forty’ because she was too young to have empathy with his turning forty. And he was trying to salve the loss of his young girlfriend who was overseas and ‘in love’.

  He also had some home-yearnings which came on at Christmas. His family was not in town for this Christmas, but anyhow his home-yearnings had been displaced over the years away from his family in the town to the bush about fifty kilometres away from, but behind, the coastal town where he had grown up – the Sassafras bush in the Budawang Ranges.

  He’d put camping gear in the car when they’d left the city and they drove as deep into the bush as the road permitted and then left the car and backpacked their way.

  As they walked deeper into the bush he kept glancing at Belle to see if she was being affected by the dull warm day and the bush. He knew the creeping hysteria and dread which the Australian bush could bring about.

  She saw him looking back at her and said, ‘I’m coping. Stop looking back at me all the time.’

  They walked for an hour or so and came to what is called Mitchell Lookout.

  ‘This is called Mitchell Lookout,’ he said, ‘but as you can see it is not a lookout in the Rotary sense.’

  It was a shelf of rock with a limited view of the gorge.

  ‘Lookouts are an eighteenth-century European act of nature worship which Rotary clubs have carried on. The growth is too thick – you can’t see the river down there. You’ll have to take my word for it.’

  ‘I can see that the growth is too thick.’

  ‘Laughably, the only thing you can see clearly from Mitchell Lookout is directly across the gorge – they could have another lookout which looked across at Mitchell Lookout.’

  He saw her look across at the other side and back again. She made a small movement of her mouth to show that she didn’t think it was particularly ‘laughable’.

  ‘I don’t go into the bush for views,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me – what do you go into the bush for?’

  ‘I go into the bush to be swallowed whole. I don’t go into the bush to look at curious natural formations – I don’t marvel at God’s handiwork.’

  For reasons he could not explain and did not record in his log book, he decided to put the tent on the rock ledge overlooking the gorge.

  ‘You’ll find sleeping on the rock is OK,’ he said, ‘it is really much better than you imagine.’

  ‘If you say so,’ she said, dumping her backpack.

  ‘I go into the bush for raw unanalysed sensory experience,’ he said, ‘I don’t go in for naming things geologically or birds and so on.’

  ‘You don’t have to apologise for not knowing the names of the birds and the stones.’

  He cut some bracken fern to lie on, more as a gesture towards the idea of what made for comfort.

  ‘That’ll do a fat amount of good,’ Belle said.

  ‘It’s a gesture.’

  He put up the tent, pinning each corner from inside with rocks and tying the guy ropes to rocks.

  ‘I’ve even used rocks as pillows,’ he said.

  She sat, one leg crossed over the other, cleaning dirt from her painted fingernails with a nail file.

  He instantly doubted whether she had ever used a rock for a pillow and whether sleeping on rock was in fact OK.

  ‘There,’ he said, ‘the tent is up.’

  She looked across at it, got up, went over and looked inside the tent but did not go in.

  ‘How about a drink?’ he said.

  ‘Sure, it’s the happy hour. Any hour can be a happy hour.’ She laughed at this to herself.

  He went about getting the drink.

  ‘I’ll cook the Christmas dinner. That’ll be my contribution,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s OK, I’m used to cooking on camp fires.’

  ‘Look – you may be fourth-generation Australian but you’re not the only one who can cook on a camp fire, for godsake.’

  ‘All right, all right.’

  As they had their bourbons he doubted whether she could cook on campfires. He thought about what they could salvage to eat.

  ‘I came through the Australian experience too,’ she said.

  ‘Do you know what to do if you get lost in the bush?’ he asked her.

  ‘No, I didn’t mean to invite a test, but you tell me, what do I do if I get lost in the bush?’

  ‘You stay where you are, mix a dry martini and within minutes someone will be there telling you that you’re doing it wrong.’

  ‘Ha ha. Wouldn’t mind a martini now this very minute.’

  He had never seen her cook a meal. It was always restaurants and luxury hotels, that was their relationship.

  ‘But it was my idea to come out here in the bush – let me cook it.’

  ‘I’ll cook it.’

  ‘OK – if you feel happy about it.’

  ‘I feel quite happy about it, Hemingway.’

  She made a low, slow fire, just right, and rested the pannikins and camp cooking dishes on the coals. It wasn’t quite the way he
would have done it but he didn’t say anything.

  Wood coals look stable until things tilt and spill as the wood burns away.

  She squatted there at the fire. She first put potatoes on the coals. She put on the rabbit pieces – which they had not themselves hunted, he hadn’t brought the guns – after smearing them with mustard and muttered to herself ‘lapin moutarde’, laughing to herself. She wrapped the rabbit in tin foil and wormed the pieces down into the coals with a flat stick. Then she crossed herself. She put the corn cobs on to boil, candied the carrots with sugar sachets from the motel, put on the beans. She then heated the lobster bisque, throwing in a dash of her bloody mary, again saying something to herself that he didn’t catch.

  Maybe a gypsy incantation.

  She put the plum pudding on to be warmed and mixed a careful custard.

  She squatted there at the smoking fire, stirring and moving the pots as needed, throwing on a piece of wood at the back at the right time for some quick heat, all with what he thought was primitive control. He swigged bourbon from a First World War officer’s flask and passed it to her from time to time. He liked to think that the flask had belonged to one of his great-grandmother’s lovers. She squatted there in silence, full of attention for what she was doing.

  He swigged the bourbon and, from time to time, became a First World War officer. She had slipped into a posture which belonged to the primitive way of doing things – what? – a few thousand years ago when the race cooked on camp fires. Or more recently, back to Settlement.

  He sat off on a rock and took some bearings using his Swiss compass and Department of Mapping 1:25 000 topographic maps, trying to identify some of the distant peaks.

  ‘Shrouded God’s Mountain,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ she said, not looking up.

  He kept glancing at her, enjoying her postures.

  He opened a bottle of 1968 Coonawarra Cabernet Shiraz.

  ‘It’s ready,’ she said, muttering something.