The Americans, Baby

by Frank Moorhouse

  Sometime about December will be vacation time for both of us (if, God forbid, you’re not in jail) and maybe we can go off to the bush someplace crazy and do something spectacular. It wasn’t flattery when I talked about your amazing ability to stimulate me to thought and progressive action. I want to spend as much time as possible alone in your company. All I can say is that was mainly what I was driving at before, when I said our relationship was unique for me.

  You talk later in your letter (when you had cooled off) about the fantasies you have had of our ‘warm hungry hands’. It is so true that I fear it leads at times to a kind of either/or relationship between lovers in the physical sense. The ecstasy of nude bodies is so much easier to obtain than the ecstasy of bare minds (you may quote me). Both, I stress, again, I consider (and I feel you do too) are expressions of the warmth of human affinity. Perhaps I am just carried away by my own off-beat, odd-ball sort of mind. But I see a tremendous similarity in hitting off some mutual thing and going to bed together.

  Even if it is only in rare moments when I am with you when we strip our souls and bodies naked in the pure joy, the compensations are enough to counteract days and weeks of hellish drabness and routine reporting. I want you to know, if you haven’t already realised, that all the political talk is getting through to me too. I may not yet be a committed ‘left-winger’ but I am understanding you. Remember that stream-of-consciousness tape we made together and the night we spent together after it – I consider that can of tape a monument to ‘bare minds’ and the night that followed in bed a monument to ‘nude bodies’. It is one of the most beautiful things I have done in my otherwise achievementless life. Corny to say, but we married our souls on that tape.

  On the plane I met a fellow American and I will report him to you to feed your contempt for Americans (there’s a masochistic act for you). Of course, he spouted about how America was so technologically far ahead of everywhere and how the war was a Crusade for Freedom. But I got him going on ideal wives (which all seemed rather remote when I had just left you) and he said wives should primarily know how to amuse and relax you; they shouldn’t be intellectual companions in the sense of discussing philosophy and professional issues with you. They should be able to appreciate your work without attempting to undermine you by incessantly haggling over deep issues. He maintained that the only really happy marriage must be schizophrenic – two worlds utterly separated. I think this is a widely held view but my first reaction was that if this is what a male-female marriage must be like I want nothing of it. Perhaps though one needs a woman for children and to fulfil this role. I have certainly always wanted marriage and children. But for me the only worthwhile and important relationship is a spiritual one (with physical expression). Perhaps the only truly spiritual relationship must be between those of the same sex.

  If I can be permitted to make a few remarks about Sylvia (I don’t really want to take sides) I can’t accept that she meant that much to you – it’s true you went to school together and were close – but the way I see it is that she found out something honest and true about you – something key to your personality – and couldn’t accept it – further, seems to have spurned you for it. I feel this disqualifies her as a human worthy of you. But you have said you don’t worry much about it now, which is good. Am I being too tough?

  I am typing this in a beautifully air-conditioned room in uptown Kuala Lumpur. My hand is under my bathrobe and I am holding an aching erection with your face and body in mind. Please write back immediately.

  Time 2 a.m. Good night Carl. Take care and love,

  Paul

  Anti-Bureaucratisation and the Apparatchiki

  ‘Fellatio.’

  She thought he said something like, ‘Hell’s art below’. She wriggled and held her head away from him to catch it.

  ‘Sorry?’ she whispered, striving to hear.

  ‘Fellatio,’ he whispered urgently and at the same time somehow twisted her and the bed clothes.

  He was pushing her head down.

  For goshsakes. She felt close to tears, and angry as well because she didn’t know what was going on. He was so unfeeling – expecting her to know all the words. And she was angry because she’d got mixed up with someone like him.

  He stopped pushing her and moved so that his head went down. Oh no. She knew what he was after now. And the words came back to her. She remembered the lesson. For a twirling moment she didn’t know what to do. She felt his moving tongue. It tingled. But then she smelt his backside. For goshsakes, he was almost suffocating her. She couldn’t do it. His cock loomed before her eyes.

  She couldn’t. She moved her head away for air and just hung on.

  His tongue went on. She rested her head against his leg and let him. She hadn’t felt it before and it was all right. She guessed. But she wasn’t going to do what he wanted. She felt she’d be sick if she did. And what if he went on and finished … in her mouth. Oh lordy.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said, turning his head up at her, out of breath.

  She didn’t say anything. She just looked through the hairs of his legs at the wardrobe.

  ‘Don’t you like cunnilingus?’

  She just hung there.

  ‘Say something,’ he said to her, as though she’d passed out.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Me tonguing you. Don’t you like it?’

  She turned her head away and looked at the pillow instead. Not knowing where to look. ‘Yes, kind of.’

  ‘Why don’t you suck me?’

  She couldn’t say anything. She shut her eyes. Why hadn’t he said ‘sucking’ in the first place. Not that it would have made any difference. She remembered how he’d told her about the words. He thought you had to use the ‘right’ words all the time, for goshsakes. Now they were in this stupid position. And she didn’t like what he had just done to her that much. No, that was a lie – she rather wished he’d go on. But she’d go without if it meant she had to do it to him.

  ‘Why don’t you?’ he asked.

  She opened her eyes and realised he was still there. ‘I don’t want to,’ she said, tears forming, just in case she needed them. She was angry because she had a right to say no but he never let her. And furthermore there they were, upside down talking to each other. She felt ridiculous. As well as angry. And embarrassed.

  ‘But it’s beautiful.’

  Charming.

  ‘I don’t mind you doing it to me but I don’t like the idea of doing it to you. It’s selfish but it’s the living truth,’ she said, looking up his thigh at him.

  ‘You’re inhibited, that’s all,’ he said.

  She could tell he was getting ready to educate her.

  ‘No,’ she said, whatever he meant, ‘I don’t like it.’

  He squirmed around and back up, dragging off the bed clothes. She pulled them back over her. For protection. Some protection.

  ‘By “inhibited”, I mean,’ he said, ‘you think it’s dirty and wrong,’ he said patiently. Smirking because he’d found another word to push her nose in. Sometimes she wished he would just go on and be angry and get it over with instead of going on with his overwhelming sort of patience.

  ‘How am I supposed to know all the words?’ she said crankily.

  ‘I don’t expect you to “know all the words”,’ he said, with his patience coming over black like a storm. Hi ho Silver. ‘But I expect you to ask me when you don’t. Anyhow we’ve discussed fellatio and cunnilingus before.’

  ‘I didn’t remember,’ she said, ‘and it didn’t seem the right time to ask – you upside down and all.’ She could almost giggle, if he wasn’t so serious about it all. ‘And anyhow, I don’t like doing it.’

  ‘That’s because you’re inhibited – i-n-h-i-b-i-t-e-d – however, we’ll soon change that.’

  She had a picture of him putting electric shocks through her head. He was the sort who’d do something like that. Just to get her to suck his cock.

  ‘I gather you
don’t feel it’s “right” to talk while we’re fucking either?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t like that word for what we do.’ He knew that but he always used it.

  ‘It’s a good Anglo-Saxon word.’

  He always said that too.

  ‘I don’t care where it comes from. I don’t like it.’ She always said something like that. Now that was over.

  ‘All right.’ He smiled – to himself, of course, ‘“Making love” – you don’t like talking while we “make love”.’

  She twisted away from him. The bastard. She rolled away.

  ‘Now, now,’ he said, putting on his soft voice, ‘don’t get all temperamental.’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she said, moving right to the edge of the bed, looking down at the floor and its dust.

  ‘Now,’ he said, putting a hand on her. She shrugged it off.

  Why didn’t she just jump out of bed and go away? He was just a bad habit.

  He turned her around and pulled her to him. Her instincts told her he’d softened. He was best when he treated her like a poor little country girl. It was when he was ‘educating’ her that he was a bastard.

  ‘I like you to say,’ she sobbed, ‘loving things to me but not to talk about words – while we’re making love.’

  ‘All right,’ he said softly, ‘all right.’

  He was being soft with her because he hadn’t finished his sex. She knew that.

  She felt him growing hard and knew what would happen. But she was exasperated.

  He rolled on top of her and went into her. She held on while he jerked away.

  Sometimes she frantically wanted to be told and was driven to distraction when he wouldn’t. But at other times she didn’t want to hear at all and would cover her ears and made a loud blurting noise.

  She held on to him and heard him panting like it was about to finish and she panted too although she wasn’t really with it. He pulled out and she felt him coming on her stomach – sort of moaning away.

  He lay back off her. Slightly out of breath.

  She had only to rub his thighs with her feet to make him come like a shot.

  ‘You have an orgasm?’ he panted.

  She nodded. He always asked that. It made him happy for her to say yes.

  ‘Good,’ he said, like a doctor, ‘good.’

  She’d passed.

  ‘Why do you bother with a girl like me?’ she said, rolling on to her stomach to wipe off the mess and then snuggling up to him. ‘I don’t know anything.’

  ‘You’re unformed,’ he said, ‘a peasant girl, that’s why.’

  ‘You don’t love me, though,’ she said sadly, wondering how he thought it was a compliment to call her a ‘peasant girl’. Probably had something to do with him being a Trotskyist. Trotsky-snotsky.

  ‘Love has too much bourgeois content,’ he said, lying back with his eyes shut.

  Of course it would. There’d have to be something wrong with it. Lordy.

  ‘I said you didn’t have to marry me,’ she said, petulantly thinking she wouldn’t marry him in a hundred years.

  ‘We’ll have to give you a progressive morality,’ he said, eyes still shut.

  You’ll give me nothing, she thought.

  ‘I keep telling you that anything which is pleasurable is “proper”.’

  Did he ever, only about forty hundred times.

  ‘Well, I don’t like the idea of doing what you wanted me to do before.’

  ‘That’s because you feel it’s dirty – morally and hygienically.’

  ‘Well, it’s both,’ she said.

  ‘It’s no dirtier than your mouth,’ he said, chuckling, ‘probably a damn sight cleaner.’

  ‘Pooh to you,’ she said, ‘my mouth’s clean,’ and a few seconds later added, ‘I use Listerine.’

  He chuckled louder.

  ‘You’re laughing at me,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m laughing at the absurdity of our commercialised values.’

  Some joke.

  ‘I could never be angry with you,’ he said, patting her.

  That was a lie. Sometimes he went into a rage over the most simple things. But she knew he saw himself as a calm and reasonable man. Probably was to his friends. Not to his woman.

  He reached for the book on the bedside table. Yuck. She knew it was Trotsky-snotsky. He was reading a chapter to her every time she stayed at his flat. Her mind always went away somewhere else when he was reading to her. She could never answer his questions. But she reached over to her bag and got her glasses. She didn’t have to read but she felt it helped if she wore the glasses.

  He began, “‘Three days before that Stalin had announced at that same conference his readiness to live down differences with Teretelli on the basis of Zimmerwald-Kienthal – that is, on the basis of Kautskyanism. ‘I hear that in Russia there is a trend towards consolidation,’ said Lenin, ‘consolidation with the defensists – that is a betrayal of socialism.’” You see,’ he said, ‘it’s beginning to get interesting.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘simply fantastic.’ She moved in the bed to a more upright position. He read on.

  He had told her he was a Trotskyist and talked to her about progressive economics and anti-bureaucratisation. She often said ‘anti-bureaucratisation’ to herself to make sure she still remembered it. She rather liked the word. He’d given her another book, The Ecstasy of Owen Muir, which she was supposed to read at home. That was a little better.

  He stopped reading. ‘You don’t appear to be listening.’ How could he know?

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Tell me the last thing I read.’

  ‘Anti-bureaucratisation.’

  ‘What?! I didn’t even mention the word.’

  She slid down in the bed and turned away. ‘I’m not interested,’ she said.

  ‘Well you bloodywell should be,’ he said. She knew he would be glaring at her.

  ‘I know!’ she said brightly, as if remembering, ‘you were reading about the apparatchiki.’ That was another word she’d learnt because she liked it.

  ‘Bullshit,’ he said, putting aside the book, ‘you wouldn’t know a bloody thing about the apparatchiki.’

  She sat up and in a voice she believed to be cultured she said, ‘The new generation of apparatchiki is increasingly technical-minded, involved intimately in problems of production, of organisation, and …’ she became lost, she screwed up her face, ‘oh, I know, and in administration. And something else, they rise to power through the secretarial … hierarchy. And their opportunities for foreign travel are limited. God knows why.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, somewhat surprised, ‘at least you’ve learned something.’ He seemed a little dazed.

  That was from the earlier days when they’d just met. She’d learned that off by heart. But already she was forgetting it. God knew what it all meant. And he was impressed. Would you believe it?

  ‘You’ll be a good worker for the revolution yet,’ he said.

  She snuggled into him. She’d rather be made love to than read to. ‘We’ll skip the reading for today,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ she said, moving her leg over his.

  ‘Time for a shower,’ he said, rolling from the bed.

  The trouble was he put all his energies into other things, she thought.

  She lay there for a while. She really wanted just to collapse there in the bed and sleep for the rest of the morning. But he never allowed that.

  ‘Come and have a shower,’ he called from the bathroom.

  ‘No, it’s all right,’ she said, getting up. She wiped herself between the legs with a kleenex tissue. Most of it had wiped off on the sheets anyhow. He was thing about showers. He had too many. Baths had always been a chore with her. She remembered gathering wood chips and corn cobs for the chip heater in the washhouse at the back of their house at Coolamon. You had to have a bath before dark or take a torch because it had no electric light. At night possums dragged the branches of the tre
e on the corrugated iron roof. She used to wait until dark because then the kids from next door didn’t come and spy on you through the cracks. Barry was supposed to keep the box full of corn cobs and chips but by the time she came to have her bath most times the box was empty. She’d have to scratch outside in the dark. She remembered how the dirt smelled. It smelled stronger at night.

  ‘Come on,’ he yelled.

  She jumped. She’d been back out there on the Riverina plains on one of those hot nights with everything smelling hot. A big hot moon making the plains … too much. You could see clear across the plains, leaping the fences with your eyes, and you could smell the wheat, the sheep shit, and the fruit trees near the house. It would be so still, with a radio, or a voice shouting, or a dog whining somewhere. Sometimes she’d just stand there with her arms full of wood.

  ‘Come on,’ he called again, ‘you’ll stink.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘You’ll smell of fucking.’

  That word again. It reminded her of the pub. Walking past it as a little girl, say to get sugar at the shop. It would be the only place in town really lit up and sometimes she’d hear the word as she passed.