Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  She was in another queue, the one with wheatgerm and I was not certain that it was her. When I reached the head of my queue I was still unsure. An older woman on the other side of the counter, whose name was Muriel, asked me what I wanted. She knew me by name because I went out with Tanya and everyone knew Tanya.

  ‘Where’s that girl of yours, Eddie?’

  Where was that girl of mine, no longer with me in the long grass behind the beach houses, nor at Old Man Williamson’s Cards and Music. Nor was she in her bedroom, at her mother’s house, with a gentle breeze wafting sleepily through her chiffon curtain. How young I was to mourn the loss of Eden and if it had been lost why hadn’t the fall announced itself with thunder and lightning or at least the discovery of infidelity? But then there had been thunder and lightning just the week before. It was the violent weather that had made the blossom’s arrival so stark, now that it had finally arrived. With the hayfever. I had never noticed the arrival of blossom before. What did I want? It looked like Amanda but how could she just turn up towards the end of the year like this? Surely I would have come across her before now? People do not just materialise unless, of course, we don’t want them to.

  ‘Eddie?’

  ‘Sorry, Muriel,’ I said, still thinking.

  ‘Do you know what you want?’

  ‘It’s between the baked potato and the hot turkey roll.’

  ‘What’s Tanya having? Buy them both and share with her.’

  I had not thought of sharing. There was an idea. Sharing was always being promoted to children as the ideal method of problem resolution. But then any liberties I could take she could take too, and the prospect of someone else with Tanya was too painful to contemplate. Was she already thinking of me in part as a brother?

  ‘She’s at a meeting, Women’s Business or Drama. I can’t remember. What’s today?’

  ‘Looks like you’re on your own for this one, Eddie.’

  I knew that whatever choice I made I would regret it. I left Muriel after opting for a baked potato. The woman who might have been Amanda was no longer in the wheatgerm queue. I sat at a table with my potato and started reading a copy of the student newspaper.

  All the articles had been written by Tanya’s new friends. And in all of them the authors quickly demonstrated their profound inability to think and write. These were the elites of tomorrow. I bemoaned fallen educational standards knowing that none of her friends would agree with me because they were the products of it and stood to benefit from an across-the-board decline in erudition.

  Was I any better than them, flirting as I was with the prospect of failing second year? How could that have been Amanda in the wheatgerm queue? I would have seen her before. Why? Why did I have to have seen her before? If something were not a cliché it had every chance of escaping my attention. I hated myself. How many neurons did I have to waste, how many did I have spare, that I could afford to devote so many of them to Ian Curtis and Joy Division? Old Man Williamson had the right idea, file everything under ‘T’ and don’t ever tell anyone why. Where was that girl of mine? Idle hands make the devil’s work. Or is it idol hands, or ideal hands? Where was that apparition, the hypostasis of Amanda? I hated clichés. I should’ve had the turkey. A bird in the hand was worth the whole wheatgerm queue.

  When I met Tanya in the pub later that afternoon she was in organisational mode. I could see it immediately. Something had incensed her but she had already gone beyond being angry and was attempting to channel her outrage into the promotion of some new cause and it was only a matter for me to identify the cause and come down firmly on its side.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘Hi, Eddie,’ she replied, a little distracted.

  We no longer greeted each other with a kiss, not even in private. To kiss hello was too bourgeois. To kiss goodbye was too sentimental. To kiss during sex was time-consuming and also required having sex. I wondered if she’d noticed these little things. The old Tanya would have. She would have noticed them before I had. But now she was distracted by everything. I was pleased not to have to kiss her. There was a charge in the atmosphere that I could not help but inhale. It was as though we both knew that we were on the verge of some event or conversation which would, with distillation and in the context of some greater cosmological design, ultimately become an anecdote, perhaps one I could tell Amanda.

  The showman chooses well his place and if this were to be my show I was not going to offer a kiss, to have Tanya turn away to one side, briefly favouring one vista of the Nottinghill Hotel over another. Besides, in the preparation of my baked potato, Muriel, it seemed, had substituted spring onions for chives.

  ‘Has something happened? You don’t seem yourself.’

  In fact she seemed someone else, several people, and had seemed them for a while.

  ‘You’ve just arrived. Are you already able to discern how I seem?’

  ‘You’ve just confirmed it.’

  ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. I think there’s a storm brewing,’ she said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here, on campus, and I’m in the middle of it.’

  ‘What kind of storm? How are you involved?’ I asked.

  ‘Because of my involvement both with the student theatre and with the Women’s Executive Committee. I am probably best placed to draw attention to it.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘Hamlet.’

  ‘Hamlet? Is there a storm brewing over Hamlet?’

  ‘As you know, we’re putting on a production of Hamlet.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Well, we’re putting on Hamlet and the auditions are meant to have started already,’ Tanya continued.

  ‘And you’ve fallen behind schedule?’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not the problem. It’s the director.’

  ‘Isn’t he any good?’

  ‘How did you know it was a him?’

  ‘Well you said your membership of the Women’s Executive Committee had something to do with it so I just assumed that a difficult director was probably a male. Who is he?’

  ‘Anatol Lerner.’

  ‘Anatol Lerner? I thought you said Anatol Lerner was a catch, a find, a dream?’

  ‘Yeah, well I thought he was.’

  ‘So, what happened?’

  ‘Well, he’s got some really worrying old-fashioned and patriarchal ideas about Hamlet. They are already evident at the audition stage.’

  ‘Really, like what?’

  ‘He wants Hamlet to be a man.’

  I sat up straight.

  ‘Surely you jest!’

  ‘Eddie, I knew you wouldn’t take this seriously.’

  ‘Tanya, for four hundred years Hamlet has been a man.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, since when has tradition ever been a justification for anything?’

  ‘Traditionally, always. Listen Tanya, Shakespeare wrote him as a man, a young man, with all the attendant oedipal hang-ups that young men keep somewhere between the head and the heart, to the side of the dashboard, often in the glove compartment.’

  ‘Young women have oedipal hang-ups too. Anyway, I would play him as a man.’

  ‘You would?’

  ‘I thought I’d audition. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘I didn’t know you wanted to act.’

  ‘Well, some of the others have been very encouraging. They say I should have more than just a behind-the-scenes involvement.’

  ‘Really? Who?’

  ‘Some of the others. Why are you so surprised?’

  ‘Tanya, who’s been encouraging you to try out for Hamlet?’

  ‘No one. It was my idea to try for the role of Hamlet in particular. I like the role. Why do you think it has to be someone else’s idea? I don’t need someone to put ideas into my head.’

  ‘No, certainly not Shakespeare.’

  ‘They’ve been encouraging me to act and I was attracted to the role of Hamlet.’

  ‘But who is they?’

>   ‘You mean who are they?’

  ‘That’s only what I mean if there is more than one.’

  ‘Oh, now I see. Your questions betray your own insecurity,’ Tanya shot back.

  ‘I fear she doth protest too much.’

  ‘Eddie, don’t let your balls get in the way of the issue.’

  ‘By that do you mean either strength or courage, because if you mean it literally then, with the exception of the possessive pronoun, that is the issue.’

  ‘Look how you seek to objectify everything.’

  ‘Hamlet is a man, Tanya.’

  ‘But there is nothing to say he couldn’t be played by a woman, if she did it well enough.’

  ‘She would have to do it better than a man.’

  ‘Yes, I accept that.’

  ‘Why should we assume that a woman would do it better than a man?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s my point, Eddie. We shouldn’t assume anything. If everyone was free to audition then Anatol Lerner could choose the best Hamlet we’ve got.’

  ‘Who might be a man?’

  ‘Who might be a man, right. But Lerner refuses to let any of the women audition.’

  ‘How many women want to play Hamlet?’

  ‘Well, just me at the moment, but once the floodgates have been opened—’

  ‘Everything will be all wet,’ I interrupted.

  ‘I should have expected an attitude like this from you, Eddie.’

  ‘I know, because I’m a man.’

  ‘No, because you’re so you, not because you’re a man. Don’t look for the easy way out.’

  ‘Whose looking for a way out? I wasn’t going anywhere. Is there support for your bid to play Hamlet?’

  ‘The issue isn’t whether I get to play Hamlet. This isn’t about me and, yes, I do have support.’

  ‘All from women, I’ll bet.’

  ‘No, not only women.’

  ‘Name the man.’

  ‘Eddie, now you’re being ridiculous, childish.’

  ‘Can you name him?’

  ‘Is this because you think I’m lying about having the support of men on this issue or because you’re asking an entirely different question, a paranoid question?’

  ‘Why do you question the motive behind my question when neither of the putative motives extinguishes the enquiry?’

  ‘I refuse to be cross-examined.’

  ‘It’s too late.’

  ‘Then I refuse to be cross-examined further.’

  ‘I want names.’

  ‘Eddie, listen to yourself.’

  She was right, I was being pathetic. When routine bites hard and ambitions are low. And resentment rides high and emotions won’t grow. Then we’re changing our ways. Taking different roads, Then love, love will tear us apart again. Ian Curtis understood how it happens. I was getting up to get a beer when she finally gave me that which I had not wanted and had half expected for some time.

  ‘Gerard supports me.’

  Harder or softer, in the course of a normal day I would gulp a number of times. Could she not have left this as something almost said? I didn’t make a practice of talking to her about engineering. The practice of any one of civil, electrical, mechanical, mining and chemical engineering has had an immeasurable impact on civilisation throughout this entire century but none of these were topics I felt would bring Tanya any closer to an endorphin-release kind of euphoria, so she was never burdened with their contemplation on my account. But my consciousness was to be assaulted by the addition of a Gerard, a Gerard whose facial hair was a perpetual parody of some cult film-inspired retro fashion, a Gerard who was no doubt found not far into infancy under a park bench beside some discarded indeterminate citrus peel and faulty prophylactic, clothed, washed a couple of times, spoon-fed the leanest venison of pretension and packed off to university to torment me.

  ‘Gerard supports you. I see.’

  ‘Yes. He can’t see why women should be excluded.’

  ‘Let me understand Gerard’s point, Tanya. Gerard cannot see why women should be excluded from playing the part of Hamlet in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.’

  ‘No. In fact he thinks I would make a very good Hamlet.’

  ‘And although he might have been a chance for the role himself, he would, in a Walter Raleigh-like act of chivalry, bow to your greater thespian inclination, no pun intended?’

  ‘None received.’

  ‘I understand it now. He accepts your right to be Hamlet so long as he might be your Ophelia.’

  For some time we had been losing heat. My attempt to supply it directly through the agency of a none-too-fine mist of stifling, ill-concealed jealousy was unfortunately not a calculated one and if it had been it would have been a miscalculation. To be or not to be Hamlet was clearly not the question here. As it is with elections in the body politic so it is with lovers that the challenger always holds the promise of everything the incumbent has failed to deliver. Tanya allowed no decent time to elapse between me and Gerard. She did not get to play Hamlet, but with the looming threat of a general strike amongst the troupe, Anatol Lerner allowed her to audition.

  It was a shame that she did not play Hamlet because she would have made a great Hamlet, being at the time unaffectedly crazy and one of the great auto-eavesdroppers of my small acquaintance, right up there with me. We were always hampered in our progress, separately and together, by the irresistibility of cupping our ears to the walls of our own mind. It was always less ‘what was I saying?’ than ‘what was I thinking while I was saying it?’

  CHAPTER 5

  A knock at the door came one weekday afternoon in spring while I was at home, nominally studying. The last time someone chose to knock in preference to ringing the doorbell it had been Neville Byard. I got up from my desk to answer the door expecting anyone. Almost anyone.

  I had not expected her and it was so clearly her, even after all those years, that her mere appearance on the other side of the front door sent me into a child’s panic which I found difficult to hide. There was no time to consider my position vis-à-vis her, no time to adopt a policy. She had not changed, not enough.

  ‘Hello, Eddie,’ she said somewhat coyly as I opened the door. ‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’

  My aunt, my uncle’s widow and a major contributor to his death, as the story had gone, stood before me looking barely a day older than the woman I remembered, the woman George had seen from his verandah. Though I had changed from a young boy into a young boy in a young man’s body, Peggy had remained as she had been then, a woman to whom attention had to be paid.

  ‘Look at you, Eddie Harnovey! What a man you’ve become.’

  I invited her in and offered her a cup of tea. She followed me into the kitchen and made us both a gin and tonic while the kettle boiled.

  ‘Any lemon, hon?’ she asked.

  She promised to tell me everything but not till we were seated comfortably with a drink. But even with a drink I was not comfortable. She sat opposite me in the lounge room. By then nearly forty, her hair was still long and the colour of wheat. The long skirt she wore had a split up the side which, unlike me, gaped unashamedly. I was meant to be studying and she was meant to be anywhere else but here. Unsure of how I ought to relate to her, I toyed with the idea of asking her to leave. But that was not really an option. As George had known too well, she had a way of capturing you. She was still fascinating.

  ‘I’m your aunt. Isn’t that funny? Do I seem like an aunt to you?’

  George had told my father that she had wanted to be an actress. In many respects she was an actress. Even her lost opportunities cried twice as loud as those of other people; once for what could have been and once for your attention.

  ‘Actually, Eddie … I’m glad you’re the only one home. I didn’t know what to expect. I wasn’t sure I’d have the courage to come here till I’d knocked on the door. I didn’t see much of your parents after George … died. I thought maybe your parents … I don’t know … connected his de
ath to me since he died so soon after we’d split up. But there were two sides to that story, you know. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, especially not George. I’m not sure how much your parents knew about him … I mean how much they really knew or what … they … thought of me.’

  Looking at her closely I saw that her hair had threads of grey amongst the wheat and that the shadows on her face remained there whenever she turned her head.

  ‘I’m not at all surprised to find you turned out such a handsome man,’ she said sitting beside me and taking my hand in hers. ‘Or that you’re at university. What are you studying?’

  ‘Engineering.’

  ‘Engineering! You were such a clever little boy, always making those model aeroplanes … remember?… And reading, all the time reading books … And how’s Kirsten now?’

  ‘She’s engaged.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s great. Little Kirsten’s engaged. I can’t believe it … I remarried, you know.’

  ‘Yes, we’d heard.’

  ‘Didn’t work out.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Aren’t you sweet. No, I haven’t had all that much luck, not as far as men are concerned. Perhaps I bring it on myself. I don’t know. Sometimes I look for patterns in what I’ve done but there aren’t any, not really. Or if there are I can’t see them …

  ‘Engineering, that’s great, Eddie. Isn’t it?’ She squeezed my hand.

  It seemed incredible to me that this woman who had been my late uncle’s wife was sitting beside me, holding my hand. She was still so young while he, an ambassador of the Great Depression, had been already dead for half my life. She’d had more than one husband since George and she would tell me about them. I wondered if she had found occasion to visit their nephews, to hold their hands and surreptitiously edit their memories of the deserted or the dead.

  She had not had children and tried unsuccessfully to disguise a sadness in the telling of this. I realised how little I knew of her. She was a near mythical character to me, part of the story of my uncle’s demise. I knew nothing of her past, her childhood, adolescence. Did she have any siblings? How alone was she? Wasn’t she from somewhere else, from the country? We were meant to blame her and then feel good about ourselves for overcoming it, for approximating forgiveness. But that is much easier when she inhabits only the past or else some realm of myth. She was never meant to reappear in the flesh, looking much younger than forty, and sitting next to me, with a split up her skirt, sipping alternately tea and a gin and tonic.