Forty-Seventeen

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘I mean, man, that she wrote poetry.’

  He and Madden had once been really close and now it was nearly all animal antipathy.

  ‘Robyn wrote poetry?’

  ‘She had poems in magazines. Yes.’

  He was surprised by this and resented Madden knowing and his not knowing.

  Privately he still felt his relationship to Robyn to be superior to whatever she’d had with Madden, but he was finding it impossibly disorienting to believe that this self-important, unnaturally fit, tomato-juice-drinking chemist in the tartan check trousers and black jacket could have been a lover of a girl he had once been married to and shared innocence with. He noted alcoholically that he was now released from his secret vow to her in the home-town church. Not that the vow had carried any obligations but it had from time to time invaded his consciousness in an ill-defined way, suggesting obligations which he could not discover.

  Nor could he match this guy Madden with the guitar-playing gentle American youth he’d known in those years before. It seemed wasteful of nature to have put all that growing into that guitar-playing youth only for it to come out as the NEA chemist, Madden.

  ‘When was it that you had an affair with her?’ He thought he might as well drop niceties and delve into matters he’d always left unexamined. Or maybe it was information he’d once had and which his mind had not held.

  ‘Robyn and I did not have an “affair”.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to demean it.’

  He did wish to demean it.

  ‘As you know, it was after you two had split. I had two periods of loving Robyn – in New York years ago, in the old peace movement days with SANE and then again much later in Lisbon, when she was stringing for the Herald-Tribune. We were very close then in Lisbon.’

  We-were-very-close-then-in-Lisbon.

  ‘And I became very fond of your daughter Chris.’

  ‘She hardly qualifies as my daughter.’

  ‘Hell, man – face up to yourself – she’s your daughter. She’s living with some guy old enough to be her father – if you’re in anyways interested – out in the mid-west somewhere.’

  ‘Robyn said she was OK.’ He didn’t want to know about the child. People shouldn’t tell him about the child. He could not afford to know about the child.

  ‘Hell she is.’

  They sat there in their own silences.

  He tried to remain sociable. He had no bond with his biological daughter. They’d had nothing to do with each other since her birth. He maybe would come to regret this but now he felt nothing for her state, no inclination to try to make a bond with her. Impossible. Would she come seeking her ‘real’ father one day and go away bewildered and disappointed that he was not a mythical father but simply a crumbling, solitary international civil servant who’d failed to become a writer, who drank too much? A man of too little feeling. That wasn’t true. He wept weekly. But for what did he weep? He was perhaps, though, someone who did not know how to live properly, he would tell her.

  ‘I told her to try everything – she said she’d given up chemotherapy. I told her to have conventional therapy and alternative therapy at the same time.’

  ‘That was bad advice, friend. She wanted faith not smartarsed advice. The last thing she needed was to be steered back to invasive therapy.’

  He should have known that Madden would be that sort of person. He did hope though that he had strengthened Robyn’s will. Or was that wrong? Should he have instead argued more strongly against the hocuspocus? Maybe that was his true offence against her. Not challenging her irrationality strongly enough.

  Madden went on, ‘She had to go for it, health and disease, the whole caboodle. Wasn’t it Mann who said that disease is simply love transformed? She had to turn the disease back into love.’

  ‘I thought that maybe self-help was the disease disguised. Disease disguised as therapy. Neurosis pretending to be the doctor.’

  ‘She was trying self-love – I don’t see that as disease.’

  ‘Well we know now she was either on the wrong therapy or she didn’t have enough self-love.’

  ‘Or she began too late after being screwed about with Cobalt 60.’

  ‘I thought you were a man of science.’

  ‘I am a scientist and that’s why I’m open to new strategies. I know we don’t know it all, Sean.’

  Madden was one of the few people in his life who still called him Sean. A leftover part of their former intimacy. Madden had forgotten that Sean was not the name he went by.

  ‘Did you encourage her to try the other therapies?’

  ‘Yes, I did. I put her onto the Simonton technique.’

  ‘You filled her full of crap, in other words.’

  ‘Don’t call it crap when you know fuck-all about it.’

  ‘It is crap and she’s dead to prove it.’

  Alcohol was making him reckless.

  ‘I take strong exception to that remark.’

  ‘Do what you bloody well like with it.’

  Again they lapsed into their own silences, but both with increased pulse rates and broken breathing.

  He then recalled something from his marriage and felt sickened by the recall. He had not thought about it since that time. It had not come to him during their reunion in the home town.

  It was in the collapsing days of the marriage, or just before when they had been trying to restore its zest. Or maybe he’d really given up and hadn’t cared what happened. He’d intimidated or inveigled her into sexual games, including an episode with a whip. Now that he looked back on it, knowing also more about himself, he had wanted to be the whipped one but had in fact whipped her. She’d gone along with it all and responded to it as sex play, but it hadn’t helped the relationship. Probably because they’d got it back to front – that is, if she really had any such inclinations residing in her personality and had wanted to whip him. She was happier though with things closer to the orthodox. He wasn’t sure how much the games had been created out of frustration, rage, about their blocked and dulled relationship. But the thought which pushed itself into his mind now there in the UN bar in Vienna was a remark she’d made after one of those nights. She’d said apologetically that she wished she were ‘better at it’, but that she’d been frightened of being whipped on the breasts because she feared that it could give her cancer. He’d denied this possibility – on no knowledge whatsoever. He now knew that a blow can cause cancer. Not that they’d been exchanging ‘blows’ or really striking each other with any force. At the time he’d laughed at her for equating sexual deviance with sickness and cancer as the punishment for dabbling in evil. He wished he’d sought her forgiveness about this before she died.

  ‘God I loved that woman,’ Madden said, with an even more emphatic American sincerity, fuelled probably by the tequila that he was now drinking, having switched from tomato juice. Having drunk down the tequila and ordered another immediately, as if the speed of his drinking publicly proved his grief. Then he said, ‘And she was damned bright – one of the brightest women I’ve met.’ This was said in an affirmative way, as if Madden was ‘pulling’ himself up out of the grief.

  He wished Madden would piss off and leave him free to dwell on her death in his own maudlin way. And he didn’t want to be in the UN bar. It was too brightly lit, too much a bar of publicly acceptable behaviour, a bar to be in after work not after after-work. Madden was the wrong person to be with.

  ‘Oh come on, Madden, she was many good things but she wasn’t bright in that sense. She was a very good journalist but she was not intellectual. At times I found her painfully banal.’

  ‘You callous bastard – I ought to sock you.’

  Sock you. High school language.

  Sock you.

  He wouldn’t mind a fist fight with Madden there in the ‘school’ bar. Turbulence and disorder would discharge his frustrated urge to be maudlin.

  But no, the institutionalised setting had them both in its command.

&nbs
p; He stood up, grunted a goodbye to Madden, put down a pocketful of schillings and left to go back into Vienna. To an old bar. To the grand bar of the Imperial where he might be grandly maudlin. As he walked out in the night air to the train station he said to Robyn out there in the cosmos, ‘You were a bright burning flame of a girl, Robyn, and you were for a time my passion, but oh why did you go with guys like Madden?’

  Or guys like him. But she hadn’t gone with him when he was a ‘guy’, she had gone with him when he was a boy.

  The train took him across the Danube.

  He had another thought: ‘She went with guys like Madden therefore I am a guy like Madden.’

  Ah, the time of self-laceration. If he couldn’t be maudlin he could be self-lacerating.

  No, she would not have been involved with him if she’d met him as an adult. Or would she? What was the difference between Madden and him – both solitary men adrift in an international community? Community?

  He’d had great personal power as a youth in that small town, a student prince in his imitation of flamboyance, his curious, neurotic energy. Now he was something of a drunk, a failed writer, a ‘co-ordinator’ of reports.

  At the first drink in the Imperial he observed that he was not a ‘guy like Madden’. He was a guy who could perceive the possibility that he was a guy like Madden and fear it. He was therefore not a guy like Madden. Madden was not sitting in the UN bar fearing that he was like him. Madden had no doubts about his nature.

  Sometime during the evening, back at his hotel, he tried to call his lost girlfriend in London but a rough male street-voice, maybe West Indian, answered and hung up. That relationship was hopelessly corrupted by fantasy and beyond his comprehension for the time. He rang Belle back in Australia but she was not able to participate in his maudlin mourning for his ex-wife and suggested that he should go to sleep.

  He went back to bed wishing that he had never known his ex-wife, only his wife. No. He wished he’d known only the hockey-playing girl who was to become his wife.

  Rambling Boy

  He came over to me, parting the bushes of the party to reach me.

  ‘I met your wife,’ he said. ‘I met her in New York with SANE.’

  His American voice was like fingertips on my face. But my wife. Robyn. My wife? Why did the word still pinch me? Now. She was not my wife except in law but perhaps it was the alcohol and perhaps I am sick and perhaps Lawrence was right and she will for always be my wife. For another man she can be only his woman. Even if she married she would not be his first wife nor his first love. What’s intrinsically inferior about second?

  ‘… after a committee meeting.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t listening. You met Robyn. And how is she? And Chris, my little girl, did you see her?’

  ‘My holy God – the noise of these parties and what-all. No, I didn’t see your little girl. I met Robyn after a SANE committee meeting. She’s fine. She’s a lovable person. I know that you don’t communicate, but she said to look you up.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’m Mark. Mark Madden. I’m a bum.’

  ‘What sort of a bum?’

  ‘The worst sort – a folk-singing bum. I’m afraid I’m not singing for anything tonight. I’m eating and drinking but not singing a note – freeloading.’

  ‘You’ll sing some other time. Have a drink. Drink is communal. In theory, anyhow.’

  ‘Have a drink! That’s all you Aussies ever say. These parties! I’ve got to hand it to you – you fellows can drink.’

  I watched his face and heard his voice.

  ‘Have you a place to live?’

  ‘No, not as yet.’

  ‘Stay with me.’

  He had a sleeping bag and he slept in that on a settee and I lay in my own double bed. A bed which I was aware was half-empty even when a girl stayed there for a stray hungry night. I wormed naked into the warm zone of the bed and thought of Mark. I had liked his eyes and his voice and his words. Now I thought of his body. And then I wondered about what was happening to me. I put my cheek against a thought which I have never touched. And I slept.

  ‘I feel lost from the world, Sean. I am a wanderer. I am a singer of other people’s songs. I walk in other people’s lands. I usually sleep in other people’s beds. There’s no me. There’s only other people.’

  ‘But what about Oregon and your home?’

  ‘It’s ten years since I was there. For godsake it was never home. It was a man called my father and some woman called my mother. And shit-house brawls. I left as soon as I could walk alone after dark. I was afraid of going but I was afraid to stay. I’m afraid now. But Jesus, we are all afraid.’

  We looked at our beers and I thought about being afraid. I was more afraid at times when I cared about things and events. I felt afraid now of a feeling. And I remembered the things I was afraid of now and then when I cared and I said: ‘There’s a lot to be afraid of. Political things like bombs and being forced to go to war and psychological things like fucked-up sex and being crippled with things like cancer and car accidents. There’s neurotic unreality – a thing that can happen to you and you don’t realise it until you fall down somewhere and are dragged away screaming.’

  ‘You know, Sean, you feel the world the way I feel the world. But I take no risk and no responsibility. At least you take risks – your marriage and your child was a risk – at least you took it. God knows I’ve never tried. Peace and war. At least you speak on the public platform as a chemist. All I’ve done was to go to one meeting of the Banners sub-committee – and then only because of some girl. So I sing a few protest songs in some out-of-the-way coffee shops. But that’s just by drift – not by decision. Drift and drift. That’s me.’

  ‘We all drift most of the time. I try now and then, I suppose I try.’

  There in the alcove of the pub our hands gripped. Mine partly the grip of a mate and partly the grip of a lover. Mark’s? How did Mark’s hand grip? And then a blush. And then a laugh. And another beer so that we could go normally on. Why did we hold to grim normality?

  ‘My Jesus! This harbour – and these ferries. They’re wild. This mid-morning fog and the city, a ghost over there, grey and the ships, ghosts, grey. I’m moved by it, Sean.’

  ‘People who work on boats are different in the way they work – temperament. They talk to people as if they are people. They’re not eroded and suspicious and hostile. These people are refreshed by the sea.’

  ‘I believe it.’

  ‘Play something.’

  ‘I suppose no one would mind. There’s hardly anyone on the damn ferry.’

  The certain strumming. The tuning. The listening ear. The tuning fingers.

  So here’s to you, my rambling boy.

  May all your rambling bring you joy.

  So here’s to you my rambling boy.

  Some people make you see the world. They make buildings and streets and manhole covers reach out their actuality. The water and the sky touch you. And your footsteps are each important and your breathing.

  We heard Beethoven played in the dark as we lay on the carpet and looked through the window at the dark harbour, spotted by moving lights, on a spring night. I wanted to touch him but there are ten miles between two men. And there was Louise he was sleeping with now and then, and there was Cindy I said I loved and who I knew would come back to me one day. I cried then. Hoping he’d hear.

  ‘Why do you cry?’

  ‘The music. Wine and my life and its mess and its good times. And for you. And being twenty-nine and the way more dense and confused.’

  I felt the music joined us and I was touching him through it.

  ‘Why do you cry for me?’

  ‘You mean something to me. You’re a close mate.’ Meaning I feel love for you.

  ‘We’re close. We’re mates and it’s good.’

  But do you feel love, Mark? You once said I feel the world the way you feel the world. Do you feel me the way I feel you?

  ‘Do
you remember, Mark, the time we gripped each other’s hand?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I remember.’

  ‘I was thinking then about that.’

  I looked to the back of his neck and his long proud hair and wanted to reach and touch him, but I couldn’t.

  ‘I shouldn’t but I am.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m a restless cunt. I’m a bum. I’ve always been restless. I know I won’t find peace or whatever it is, if I stay. I can find it only for a time. It has always been like this.’

  ‘But we’ve found a pretty good time.’

  ‘But it will go if I stay. I want to go before it goes.’

  ‘How do you know it will go?’

  ‘I know. Because all situations destroy themselves. I know.’

  ‘Will you come back?’

  ‘Yes. That will be a new situation, then.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I’ll go back through Oregon for God knows what reason. And I’ll go to Alaska where I haven’t been. Out of this summer into cool snow.’

  ‘What do you want, Mark?’

  ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. I don’t know if I’m searching or avoiding. Kids? A wife who will understand me and bear with my restlessness or dispel it? An end to being restless? Or to be always restless?’

  ‘Play – play something.’

  He touched the strings. He smiled at me.

  So here’s to you, my rambling boy.

  May all your rambles bring you joy.

  Remember you played that on the ferry that foggy morning?’

  ‘I remember, Sean, I remember everything we’ve done.’

  He sang the song about himself because I couldn’t sing it to him. And I felt tight because I could never touch him.

  That quay was blown with wind. It had wheat spilled its splintering length. It had fifteen lights, each not reaching far into the resisting night. At the end of the fifteen lights lay a German tramp steamer with a name I could not pronounce and have not remembered. Mark had his duffle bag and wore his duffle coat. I walked with my hands in my pockets.