The Americans, Baby

by Frank Moorhouse

  He’d not been flattering her. It was her sexuality and her luxuriant charm which had led him to take her to dinner and had led him now to her flat. He did not want his image of her fractured by self-attack and depression.

  ‘I’m becoming bored by your attacks on yourself.’ He smiled.

  She turned from the window. ‘I’m sorry – I am becoming a bore.’ The remark had obviously pinched her. ‘A lady can be a cheat, a liar; a bitch must never be a bore.’

  She kissed him. He took her hands.

  He felt the situation, decided it was right, and said, ‘Let’s go to bed.’

  ‘Yes, why not?’

  He caught the heavy ‘Why not’ with both mental hands.

  ‘Do I detect a lack of enthusiasm?’

  ‘No – don’t take it personally – you’re a darling and superbly handsome and terribly attractive.’ She smiled apologetically. ‘I’m just moody.’

  She put her head against him. ‘I keep telling you,’ she said, ‘I’m defeated.’

  He kissed her on the lips. She did not have full lips and the kiss was a thin kiss. Her mouth did not open freely but not as though from resistance – more from indifference. It was not a forced kiss and she held to him and held the kiss.

  They undressed separately and quietly. She gave him a coat hanger. In his more passionate days, he thought, his clothes would have been left on the floor where they had fallen. The days of headlong rushes to bed must have passed. But his experience in recent years was meagre – his marriage had been enough. It was two years or nearly three since he’d been with another woman. Now Louise, and certainly no headlong rush to bed.

  Undressed, her body was firm. He stood naked, she pulled on a housecoat.

  ‘Get into bed,’ she said, ‘I’ll take off my make-up.’

  ‘OK.’ He got into the clean, tightly made bed. She left the room and he heard her in the kitchen pouring drinks. She brought him a drink.

  ‘Drink this while you wait.’

  ‘This waiting is tantalising.’

  ‘I’m glad – for me it’s a bore.’

  She turned on a bedside light and turned out the main light. She sat at the dressing table. ‘You’ll see the real disintegrating me,’ she said. At least she was joking about it now. He watched her using Kleenex and cleansing cream and then the astringent – like his wife. Sipping her drink as she did it.

  ‘That word again,’ he said. ‘You run a bad press for yourself.’

  She brushed her hair.

  Then she rose from the dressing table and smiled wanly. The make-up was gone and had taken away the highlights of her face and left it placid. Its natural colourings and structure were soft.

  She took off her housecoat and came to bed beside him, entering his embrace.

  She was tense.

  Even after alcohol. Even at their age – her age – she was tense. Her kiss pushed with a forced enthusiasm.

  As their bodies became aware of each other for their full length he realised that her body was clammy. His fingers moved down the body but met a clammy resistance. He stopped and left his hand at her waist, feeling himself grow tense.

  Her skin was lifeless.

  He lay still, frozen in the half-light of the bedroom. The refrigerator beat came from the kitchen. Her skin was like that of a frog, he thought, a frog. Lifeless skin. It gave off stale perfume which attempted to give the body some artificial attractiveness. He had not felt that sort of skin before. She now gave away the forced enthusiasm and collapsed to a sort of sexual apathy and was lying still in his arms. She moved under him and whispered, ‘Be quick,’ and added, ‘I’m tired.’

  He was relieved she wanted it that way. It gave him little pleasure. After they finished, he tried to stay away from her. He resented the situation. They lay unspeaking, his hand obligatorily in hers. His legs could feel the lifeless flesh of her thigh. His nose tried to close itself to the perfume. She could be dead, he thought.

  In five years time he would be as old as she.

  Throughout the drive home the thought stayed with him – shooting up like flak. He wanted to talk to his wife about the lifeless flesh and whether it came with age. He wanted to be reassured. But he knew he couldn’t talk to her about that.

  He showered and then went to bed. His wife’s skin was warm and alive and he soothed himself with it. With the living warmth of it.

  He lay there thinking of the lifeless skin and of disintegrating Louise. He believed Louise now about that.

  The incident of the young girl in the rose garden

  He had wandered into the back garden after feeling bombarded by the party. Too many conversations in too short a time. Too many switches of subject matter and too many people, all requiring an artillery of response.

  The garden covered an acre or more and was professionally tended, although he knew that Julien and Frederick liked to think they did most of it. They did at least plan it.

  He’d reached the roses when he saw the girl sprawled on a garden seat, a drink on the seat beside her. Her arms spread along the back of the seat. Her head was back. The moonlight lit an unhappy face.

  She was a girl who had had an expensive upbringing. Professionally tended. Good diet, good dentistry, strict hygiene, deportment training – all showed in her skin, hair, teeth and sprawl. And her clothes showed taste more than fashion. Her prettiness depended heavily on her careful tending.

  ‘You don’t appear to be in the party mood,’ he said, standing before her.

  She looked up at him and shook her head.

  ‘I’m not sure whether I am myself,’ he said, wondering about it.

  ‘Join the club,’ she said.

  He moved her glass and sat down.

  ‘Why so dejected?’

  She shrugged, went to say something, and gave up. Then she said, ‘I’m just being neurotic.’

  She was young to be recognising herself as neurotic, probably meant depressed.

  ‘How old are you?’ she asked abruptly.

  He was instantly defensive, realising distantly that he was conscious of his age. He decided to be frank. ‘Thirty-three.’

  ‘How do you bear it?’ she said, without a smile.

  He laughed, ‘For Godsake.’

  He guessed she was about twenty-one or two. With a private flexing of his leg muscles he affirmed his fitness.

  ‘I look into the mirror every day and say I’m dying,’ she said, ‘and I’m only just twenty.’

  ‘A little morbid,’ he said, irritated.

  ‘What do you see when you look into the mirror?’

  He knew the answer. Not that it worried him much.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, yes, I sometimes think – ‘I’m dying’ – but I think it … academically,’ he drank, ‘of course.’

  She looked at him sceptically. ‘I see death in my face,’ she said, ‘and in my hands and in my breasts.’

  She made a desperate gesture with her mouth and drank from her glass.

  He smiled at the histrionics.

  He felt obliged, though, to say something … in defence of life. He laboured to find something.

  ‘I suppose ideally one should lead a life that doesn’t give time for morbidity,’ he said, ‘a strong argument for burning the candle at both ends.’

  ‘But I’ve only to see someone like you and I become aware of death.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, almost offended.

  ‘I didn’t mean to be rude,’ she said looking at his face and touching his hand.

  In reflex he took her hand. But he wanted to cancel it as soon as it happened.

  Her hand was warm and alive. He touched her arm, feeling the light, healthy hairs and the solid girl tenderness of her flesh.

  ‘There are a lot of kicks in life,’ he said.

  He thought what Hemingway had said about life only having taste or meaning when death was in the wings. No that was wrong, when danger was in the wings. Or which was it?

  ‘Of co
urse, he was referring to danger and not to dying,’ he said.

  She looked at him, puzzled.

  ‘It’s all right, I was thinking aloud,’ he said, embarrassed, ‘I was thinking about what Hemingway said about danger giving life a meaning,’ he added, scrabbling for sense.

  ‘But I’m not talking about – danger – sudden death – I’m talking about the excruciating process of dying,’ she said.

  She seemed more detached about the subject now.

  ‘Actually, danger – death through dangerous living – is a way of escaping it all. Instead of being a victim of inevitability.’

  ‘Could be.’ He was surprised, even a little diminished by her insight.

  ‘I don’t want to live past twenty-five,’ she said, ‘I’ll kill myself. That’s why I like fast cars.’

  He smiled. He’d said it at twenty-five, then thirty, and sometimes he said forty.

  He told her that.

  ‘Yes, I guess we have a pretty frantic grip on life,’ she said, ‘no matter how ugly.’

  ‘I wouldn’t equate ageing with ugliness,’ he said. ‘Change, perhaps, but not ugliness.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ she said strongly. ‘People do just become ugly and their personalities change, become ugly, you know – dogmatic – oh – inflexible – and all that. Little funny things grow into ugly big warts.’

  ‘Sitting out here bitching isn’t going to stop it,’ he said.

  That was avoiding the issue. Perhaps that was all that one could do – about ageing.

  ‘Going in there,’ she said, taking her hand away and gesturing to the party, ‘is not going to help me forget it.’ The withdrawn hand released him from the implication of it.

  ‘Life is not a continually pleasant thing,’ he said, ‘but it has things to offer – love, the mastering of something. Making beautiful things. And, if you like, fast cars.’

  ‘But take the idea of mastering something – you only get really good at it when you’re old and ready to die.’

  ‘They say the mastering is the best part,’ he said. But this drummed hollow. ‘I mean that there are stages which give the pleasure.’ This drummed less hollow but still sounded empty. He thought how fleeting these pleasures were compared with some of the groaning hours.

  He was nervously agitated in the stomach. It was caused by the girl being stronger in her arguments than he was. She was bringing home to him things he had not thought for some time. In her mouth they seemed freshly and cruelly correct. And too many of the things he was saying seemed downright untrue. He needed to prove his wisdom. For his vanity as well as for the girl. But why was he finding it so bloody difficult?

  ‘Love’s a good thing,’ he said, ‘and the making of beautiful things.’

  ‘I’ve never been in love,’ she said. ‘Perhaps love is dead.’

  ‘Come, now, you’re only twenty.’

  He was thinking though of the doubts you suffered both in love and in the making of beautiful things. You doubted whether the things you made or did were beautiful and you doubted whether you were loved and whether you really loved.

  He told her that, ‘But there are short periods when you do. It’s pretty good then.’ He was thinking, strangely, about his cooking, which was about the only time he made anything that could be called beautiful.

  ‘But what if we’re incapable of either,’ she persisted.

  ‘You don’t know yet.’

  She took his hand and kissed it, then sighed. ‘No … love is dead. Art is dead. Everything an artist spent a lifetime striving for any old hippie can do with two hundred milligrammes of LSD.’

  ‘Then there is LSD,’ he said, smiling. Glad of even the simple response of a kiss on the hand. He wanted now to pull out of the conversation and its disturbance. ‘The pleasures of drugs and grog,’ he laughed, drinking a toast. Although he had never tried drugs.

  ‘Alcohol is a bore and pot and LSD are affectations,’ she said; she could have been serious.

  ‘The new sophistication. The unhappy princess of the mid-twentieth century,’ he said tightly.

  She looked at him, a little surprised by his tone.

  ‘I guess that was a little sarcastic,’ he said.

  In a sudden change of mood unrelated to anything he’d said, she said, ‘I’m ready to go to the party now.’

  She pulled him into a run across the lawn.

  As they entered the party she said, ‘You’re a very attractive man for your age,’ and laughed.

  ‘Wait until I’m fifty – and I’ll really have a distinguished sexuality,’ he said, grinning artificially, conscious of the sham humour groaning under sham optimism.

  He went over to his wife.

  ‘I’ve just saved a young woman from despair and futility.’ And he made this and another genial remark and as he did he felt sick to the stomach.

  ‘Must try your line on me some time,’ she said.

  Standing there, for an instant he felt a fear of the darkness of death and felt himself also cringing back from the incandescence which burnt out from the party around him. His wife bent forward to avoid dripping the juice from the rollmop she was eating. The young girl, laughing, was talking to a young man and her gloom seemed to have passed.

  ‘Let’s go home soon,’ he said to his wife, ‘I’m tired.’

  She gave him a slightly exasperated glance. ‘Soon,’ she said, leaving him suspended in it all.

  The incident of the suspended exercises

  The alarm had buzzed only twice before his hand slapped it off. It buzzed the time to rise and study the American Civil War, do some work on the sand-trays, and do his exercises. He rose, went to the bathroom, ran the tap until the water became warm, and then sloshed it on his face. His wife slept on, her arm fallen from him on to his vacant place.

  He was sour. His body struggled to get away and back to bed.

  In his study, with a sand-tray regiment of Confederate soldiers watching, he commenced exercise one – feet astride, arms upward, touch the floor outside left foot between feet, press once …

  He began the propaganda. About him being an attractive man in his thirties, because of exercise. And not having a beer gut. He didn’t lose his breath on stairs. His body said, ‘So what?’

  His body was straining as he sat down for exercise two – back lying, legs straight, feet together, arms straight overhead … hardly any of his acquaintances did exercises … sit up and touch toes … he was, though, more disciplined than his friends … keep the arms straight … always had been … hadn’t done him much good … keep arms in contact with the sides of the head … perhaps a little healthier, front lying, hands and arms stretched sideways … was he?… and what good did it do him?… lift the shoulders and arms … so he’d be the fittest man in the North Shore crematorium … his wife didn’t exercise … keep legs straight, raise chest and both thighs completely off the floor … why didn’t he just accept it … he was growing old … why fight it … you couldn’t fight it … you probably wore the body out faster fighting it … approximately one from the ears directly to the side of the head … the fact that exercises distressed the body … that couldn’t be good … that must mean something was wrong with exercising … straighten arms to lift the body … it was all too unpleasant … chest must touch the floor for each completed movement … it was the boredom too … most boring eleven minutes … no matter how short one told oneself it was … it was crazy … straighten up … lunatic … lift knees waist high …

  He stopped in the middle of the last exercise.

  Bugger it. No more. Bugger it.

  He stood panting in his study. In surrender before a regiment of impassive Confederate soldiers. The sun was just beginning and the birds were moving.

  Bugger it. He wiped his forehead with a towel, and returned to the bedroom. He undressed and got back into bed.

  Bugger the exercises. He’d go on with the Civil War. Not the exercises.

  His wife stirred. ‘You finished?’ she
murmured.

  ‘No, I’ve taken the day off from exercises.’

  Seeming not to comprehend, she kissed him, put her arm across him and went back to sleep.

  He didn’t sleep. He wondered why he hadn’t told her. Because he felt guilty, that was why. He felt he’d broken a contract. With himself more than her. He put his hands under his head. He felt he owed it to her to keep fit. As well as for vanity.

  He would have to find another way. Isometric exercises – what the hell were they? He couldn’t face a sport. He had enough obligations at work, without having to worry about a team and competitions.

  He realised he felt the same way about stopping exercises as he had about contact lenses. He’d suffered smarting eyes and the whole dreadful business because he didn’t want to admit publicly that his eyesight was failing.

  He thought about Louise. That was almost enough to get him up. But there must be more to lifeless flesh than age. Attitude to life perhaps.

  He drowsed on a nervous stomach, woken sharply now and then by anxiety.

  On the fourth day his wife said, ‘Have you stopped exercising?’

  ‘I’m having a holiday,’ he said.

  He continued to argue the problem for the next two weeks and once even tried to resume but found his body even more refractory.

  ‘You haven’t done your exercises now for weeks,’ she commented with slight curiosity.

  ‘They’re a bore,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I can be bothered.’

  He watched her.

  ‘Don’t blame you,’ she said, fixing coffee, ‘I never could understand how you did them day after day.’ She passed him the stewed fruit. ‘Actually it impressed me when we were first married.’

  He felt a bind. But she’d said it casually. There didn’t seem to be a reference in it to ‘the contract’.

  ‘They’re an agony,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mind them that much for the first few years. But recently they’ve become an agony.’

  ‘I hadn’t realised,’ she said, unrolling the newspaper. ‘Why did you bother?’