by Helen Garner
I want to be with you, laugh and mooch round, travel if we can. But I’m not getting anything back, I’m running out, I need love. And if you don’t want to give it any more, will you please say so? I’m telling you, Javo! I’m lonely! Are you reading me?. . . over . . . Nora.’
I asked the I Ching, ‘What about my feeling that it is all hopeless with Javo?’
It replied, ‘Times change, and with them their demands. Changes ought to be undertaken only when there is nothing else to be done. A premature offensive will bring evil results.’
I left the letter for him, just the same.
He came in the middle of the night and read it downstairs while I dozed. He came up to my room again and sat on the end of my bed, pulling off his boots.
‘Did you read it?’
‘Yeah. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.’
‘No, that won’t do – because when I have to leave, you’ll be asleep.’
He got into bed. Before he had come in, I had been fast asleep, and comfortably warm; but when he was coming down, his awful coldness drew the warmth out of my body and left me lying in a chilly envelope of discomfort. He did talk, for an hour or so. Every few minutes he’d groan and roll over, complaining of restlessness and pain. He said,
‘One trouble is, that you like me best when I’m off dope, but I’m always happier when I’m into it.’
‘No, no, you’re quite wrong,’ I said, throwing caution to the winds. ‘The times I’m most comfortable with you – and it’s because of your own attitude to yourself – are when you’ve just started back into dope, before it gets you by the throat.’
‘Maybe I never really liked myself much,’ he said, with a faint bitterness, ‘before I found dope.’
I tried to talk about needing love.
He said, ‘Sometimes, when you’re giving out affection and love towards me, it’s . . . missing. I don’t mean absent, I mean . . .’
‘You mean not hitting the mark?’
‘Something like that.’
I didn’t understand what he meant, and, discouraged, thought better of asking. There was a long silence. He heaved a great sigh.
‘Well . . .’ I said, ‘what about going to Sydney, Javes? Will we still go?’
‘Yeah. I reckon. We both need to get out of here for a while.’
We both needed something, that was certain, but neither of us knew what it was. I wished stupidly for something steady and complete. For someone steady and complete. What’s that? No such thing, no such person.
By nine o’clock on the morning of the big departure for Sydney, Javo was still asleep. Gracie and I fidgeted, our enthusiasm waning by the minute.
‘Are we gonna be late for Sydney?’ she asked, looking up from her drawing.
‘Too right we are,’ I snarled.
I stumped furiously up the stairs, and yelled at him from the doorway of my room.
‘Come on, Javo! It’ll be fuckin’ midnight before we get to the border!’
By eleven we were out on the highway. Not a smile out of him, scarcely a word. I was kicking myself for having forgotten the lesson of Freycinet the summer before. It rained. We ate chocolate by the packet, in a vain attempt to make the situation look less pathetic. Javo dropped the papers where he stood.
‘You bludger, Javo,’ dared Gracie, smiling her evil smile. To my astonishment he burst out laughing, against his will.
A huge wheat transport picked us up as dark and cold fell just outside Holbrook. It bore down on us in the remaining light, brakes shrieking. Grace clung to my leg and screamed with fear; I stepped back in panic on to the grass verge. But Javo turned to me with a laugh of triumph.
‘Come on, Nor! It’s our ride to Sydney!’
I slept a little on the hugely vibrating sleeping-shelf, which shook my bladder and gave me indigestion by disturbing a hamburger I had eaten at Gundagai.
‘I’m going to stay awake all night, till the morning comes!’ announced Grace, sitting up like Lady Muck behind the great gear stick. Three minutes later I glanced over and saw her head droop and her eyes close.
At three o’clock in the morning the truckie dropped us at a blighted all-night cafe thirty miles out of Sydney. The girl serving us was bare-armed in a cotton dress. Two coppers stood drinking coffee in the kitchen. The fluorescent light turned us into corpses.
Gracie added up brightly at the laminex table and ate a fruito; Javo wolfed down a plate of baked beans on toast. We were not looking at each other. Outside the cafe we started walking towards Sydney. It was a bitterly cold, icily clear night, with a sky miles high and light coming from somewhere far away, the stars perhaps for there was no moon. A dog barked from a driveway. The cops stopped in a black maria and brought us to Liverpool station: in the back of the van Javo grinned at Gracie’s round eyes but pretended I wasn’t there. I was too cold to care. At the station he clowned with Gracie on the turnstiles while I crammed myself with my book into the ticket-puncher’s booth. The first train came through at 4.20. It was full of shiftworkers huddling themselves inside what was left of their body warmth from bed. We were the most wide-awake people on board.
Outside Central Station at six o’clock. Javo foul-tempered again, Gracie tired and frightened. I have to keep us together somehow. Frozen and miserable, we trudge along the colonnades looking for a taxi. Grace whinges and at last I pick her up and lug her on my hip. Javo is always twenty steps ahead of me. I can’t keep up. At 6.20 the cab drops us outside Peggy’s place in Annandale. Cold sky, dark before dawn. I tap nervously on the front window. Peggy opens up, brings us in quietly, insists that we take her big bed, and moves into the spare room. In the bed still warm from her body our limbs thaw and we fall asleep, not touching.
By the next night I was homesick. I was still tired, though I had slept all afternoon while Peggy played with Gracie. Javo was behaving as if we hardly knew each other: everything was in ruins. I began to hate him.
He came and got into bed hours after I’d gone to sleep, tired and sick in the heart. He put his arms round me. I couldn’t even swim up far enough from sleep to acknowledge, to turn over to him. We tried to talk to each other. He said it had hurt him that I seemed so little interested in his work on the play. I said I had never guessed that he cared one way or the other about my attitude towards his work: that if I’d known, I’d have been eager. I said it hurt me that he didn’t make friends with Gracie, who called him ‘Javaroo’ in her foreign accent and was just waiting for the moment, for him to open the gate and let her in. We spoke sharply, out of weary sadness.
He lifted his skinny arm and put it round me, but somehow kept his shoulder turned to me.
‘When you are cold to me,’ I said, ‘it makes me feel you think I am ugly, and stupid, and boring; and I give up, and wonder why we go on bothering.’
He said something I didn’t hear.
‘What? What did you say?’
‘It’s all right – nothing.’
‘Please tell me what you said.’
‘I said, “Maybe you’re right”.’
He went out late in the morning, to ‘visit people’. He barely said goodbye to me, didn’t kiss me as he once would have done as a pleasant matter of course. A few minutes after he had left, Gracie and I set out walking to the shops. We turned the corner of the street and I saw him a hundred yards ahead of us, the red shirt collar showing between his leather jacket and his rough head. I fell in love with his long legs, saw him getting smaller in the distance, felt him pulling one of those long strings out of my heart. Nothing to be done. I held Gracie’s hand tightly, for comfort.
It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.
But in the night he began to kiss me (I’ve got a tooth-ache,’ he warned) and I got my hands on his round belly, we fucked in the dark, I could just make out his lantern head under my eyes. When I came I was almost laughing with the ease of it.
Every day he would disappear and come back hours later, stoned, white-eyed, obsessive about washing
his clothes and cleaning up after himself. Maybe, I thought, torturing myself, he is in love with somebody, with Ruth perhaps who was here with her two children and Micky while I half-slept. I heard Javo say,
‘Want to go to the zoo tomorrow, kids?’
You bastard, you holiday uncle. You never give Gracie the time of day, at home. Must be trying to impress someone.
Too much loneliness. I got so sad.
In the night we talked about splitting up.
‘But I can’t do it,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m the one that’s in the wrong.’
How was I going to think about that?
What’s love?
I mean, what is it?
Grace and I talked in the bathroom in the morning.
‘How did you get on at the zoo with Javo?’
‘Well . . . good . . .’ she hesitated. ‘But he was a bit nervous.’
‘Nervous? What do you mean?’
‘Whenever I spoked, he’d go, “Oh, no, Gracie, you’re not going to . . .”'(turning her head in mimicry of his disgust). . .’you know, freaking like that.’
We slept together every night. No fucking, no loving.
‘I’m confused in my head, I’m anxious,’ he said. ‘I’m freaking out.’
I dared not try to comfort, scarcely dared to touch his back which was turned to me.
In the morning before it was light Gracie woke up in her floorbed and asked me for something to eat.
‘I’ll get you a piece of bread and butter,’ I said, dropping my feet out of the double bed.
‘Hey, Nor – get me one too, will you?’ called Javo.
I got them, in the dark kitchen in the sleeping house; and when I came back to the bedroom they’d both gone to sleep again. So I ate one of the slices of bread and thought a bit, and climbed back into bed and lay on my side and read Flying. And the day began.
I JUST CAN’T KEEP FROM CRYING
Grace and I went over to Balmain with Peggy. We bought flowers for Micky’s birthday and she dropped us off at his house in Darling Street. We knocked. Javo opened.
‘I woke up,’ he said, ‘and the house was empty. I thought you’d end up over here, so I came over.’
No touching, he won’t touch me, he won’t allow me his body. But, as usual when I was being of service, he cheerfully accepted an omelette and a cup of coffee when I made lunch for everyone. Mistakenly interpreting his smile, I finished cooking and threw myself on the big bed beside him. No response. I started to feel really bad, not daring to have anything to do with his body even for friendship’s sake, watching his face become animated only when he spoke to Ruth or Micky, or when he paid attention to their conversation with each other. I got off the bed, humiliated. He fell asleep. I talked with Micky in the kitchen. I heard myself yelling.
‘I’m so unhappy, it’s just ridiculous!’
I would have liked to shake the teeth out of that Javo, lying there under the rug, boots hanging off the end of the bed. There was a sickness in the air of that house: it was the awful pointless temporariness of waiting to score. Micky chirped and chattered, like old times, but his face was white with it; Ruth’s gaze was abstracted. And we infected each other: they with their loneliness in a strange town, we with our blank wall between us and our fear of speaking the truth.
Fear of being loved; fear of not being loved.
I decided to leave. Gracie came with me. We walked sadly down the hill.
‘What do you feel about Javo?’ I asked, in a kind of dull curiosity. To my surprise she had plenty to say, several theories to put forward, and some advice to give.
‘I think it’s because he’s a drunkie,’ she opined, trotting along beside me holding my hand.
‘Junkie.’
‘Yes, junkie. Well, I think you should leave him alone. Because if you talk to him nervously, he will get nervous, and won’t talk back. And if he was alone, after he’d taken a pill – ’
‘– Stuck a needle in his arm, you mean.’
‘Yeah, a needle – well, after he’d stuck a needle in his arm, he might think, if he was alone, well, I’ll try to stop, and not be a junkie any more.’
‘Do you think I talk nervously to him?’
‘No, not much. But you should talk to him nice, like he talked to me once when I was with him and Willy in the car going to the tower. And you should leave him alone.’
I thought about that.
It was a dull, grey afternoon. A grubby wind blew, and the houses in the street looked depressingly dilapidated. We walked along, keeping each other company. I thought about the patterns I make in my life: loving, loving the wrong person, loving not enough and too much and too long. What’ll I do? How much of myself will be left hanging in tatters when (if: I don’t want to end it) I wrench myself away this time? I have this crazy habit, a habit as damaging as his, of giving it all away. I remember a line of Villon, which Bette Davis quoted in The Petrified Forest:
‘. . .nor cease to serve
but serve more constantly. . .’
Serve what, serve whom?
Go on taking it, it means. No more of this ancient, courtly masochism.
I have to get free. But there is this incomprehensible bond that keeps us together. The night we talked in bed, he put his arm over his face and said,
‘Why do you put up with me?’
Giving it all away.
I talked about Javo to Peggy, and felt better. And while I was washing the dinner dishes, in walked Tom, the perfect person to save me, all light and speed, his brain sparkling with bombs and crackers. I thought I was too tired to talk, but we sat down and began, at quarter to nine, and gradually the old magic made itself felt, talking about ideas and words; our minds raced each other joyfully until one o’clock in the morning.
And yet, as my fatigue took over after midnight, I began in spite of myself to listen for footsteps at the front door, a knock, a sign that Javo had come back.
He didn’t.
He did. I heard his voice, and a woman say his name, in a laughing conversation outside the room in which I was falling asleep. I didn’t get up, but let my mind slide away. Hours later (it must have been nearly dawn) I got up to go to the dunny and found him sitting alone in the living room, writing in a small notebook. He looked up at me dully.
‘Hullo,’ I said, passing his long legs. ‘Are you coming in to sleep? Because I’ll need to move Gracie out into her bed.’
‘Yeah. I’ll be in soon.’
He came in, thumped into bed beside me, folded himself along my curled-up shape, put one arm round me, for all the world as if nothing had happened. So I talked, he talked, both of us sighing, stammering and starting again in a dogged need to say it.
‘I’m neurotic,’ he said. ‘I do this over and over. Whenever I get something good, I destroy it.’
‘But everyone has these patterns which they can’t break. I’ve got one – it’s just different from yours.’
‘Yeah?’ he said, interested.
‘I go on giving it all away.’
So sad. I get so sad.
‘I’ll go back to Melbourne in the morning,’ I said at last.
‘No. I’ll go. It’s me doing this to you. I’ll go. You stay. It’s your holiday.’
We fell away into silence, lying side by side in despair, bound to each other yet pulling away, him pulling away from me, but for a few moments in a truce . . . he took hold of my head gently, made me kiss him, brought my face close to his and looked at me for a long time. His gaze out of that bony lantern head. The light was coming faintly, dawn already, and I got his cock in my mouth and my cheek against his familiar belly, made him groan a little; he lifted me back up to his equal level and we fucked, he came and the delight of watching his face dissolve brought me to join him with no effort. Light on his skin, bones and skin under my eyes.
We fell asleep.
During the day, once the end of it all was in sight, he was as pleasant
to me as he usually was at home. We spent hours lying on the bed, his head on my hip, with a book in French about Luis Bunuel, which he toiled through, asking me to teach him.
‘Aren’t you bored with this?’ I asked, laughing at my rusty attempts to translate.
‘No – I’m learning!’
He wanted us to communicate on some intellectual level where we didn’t usually function together.
The house was full of people, and while dinner was being prepared Javo and I lay on the bed, talking and waiting for his taxi to arrive. I kept looking at those blue eyes he had, still bright blue in spite of the dope. In these last few minutes it was possible to say things crudely, in haste not to leave them unsaid.
I said, ‘I love you.’
He said, ‘I can see myself in three or four weeks, coming back to you and begging you for forgiveness . . .’
I said, ‘I don’t know how to break off sharp like this. I keep remembering things which give me hope.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like – there’s no-one I ever touch, the way we touch when we fuck.’
He said, ‘I’ll go back to Melbourne and put myself on the rack.’
The cab came. Javo thrust his mouth-harp into my hand.
‘Here. Give this to Gracie.’
He hugged me clumsily, heaving his suitcase towards the front door, but it wasn’t enough, and I went out to the car with him and we kissed properly, face to face, and held each other.
‘’Bye, Javo,’ said Gracie, who was standing quietly watching with her thumb in her mouth.
‘See you, Grace,’ he mumbled, getting into the front seat. The taxi drove away. He didn’t look back.
It was already dark outside, and cold. We went back into the house. I went into the kitchen and stood at the sink with my back to the light, ashamed to show the rush of grief I was feeling. I put my hand into the bowl where the fruit salad had been, picked at one or two passionfruit pips that stuck to the enamel sides. Peggy, working beside me at the table, said in her brisk voice,
