Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  Amanda was gaining ground in the queue. I was afraid she would see me or hear our conversation. Had it really been just a question of income differential or did my family lack certain social graces? Had my father ever been in trouble with the law? Had my father interfered with small children? Now the curious young man was letting people pass him. He said that this whole thing fascinated him. The girl’s mother sounded like a nightmare. The girl had to be very beautiful to warrant all this trouble. Which one was she, the one behind us? Was I more ambitious than my father? How does one measure these things? He agreed to give me his spot and even to leave the queue entirely on condition that he be permitted to watch from within earshot. Since I had no way of stopping him from standing wherever he liked anyway and since Amanda was, by then, only two or three places behind us, the deal was done.

  A little flustered, I continued according to plan. Please serve someone else. I’m still deciding. There she was, also looking up at the chalk menu. I could breathe her. She was wearing a tight white t-shirt, not at all grubby, and instead of felt letters spelling her name across her chest, she had those life-affirming breasts. The outline of her nipples and their brown pigmentation was clearly visible. Then I turned and spoke my first adult words to her.

  ‘Excuse me, you may not remember me but—’

  ‘Yes, I remember you,’ she said sharply and without sentiment.

  Yes I remember you could have been said a number of ways but it was only said one way, as though because of me Amanda had been sentenced to nine and a half years in her mother’s kitchen to help prepare one unconscionably long evening meal and was now cutting me off like the unpalatable end of a Lebanese cucumber. The woman serving in the wheatgerm queue, who was not Muriel and did not know me, had grown impatient, perhaps with me, perhaps with the vegetative nature of her professional life, and insisted that I order without further delay.

  Unfortunately there was a surplus of lentil burgers and when I ordered one it was ready immediately, leaving me no opportunity to discover what it was that Amanda had remembered about me that compelled her to demonstrate such an eschewal of nostalgia. Things had not gone according to plan. I had not gone through my pockets for change while waiting and now it hit me, with Amanda ordering her lunch beside me and the outraged keeper of the water-cress, her reptilian hand stretched out toward me, that I did not have the money to pay for my lunch. Amanda was leafing through her smiling purse as my penury dawned on the cold-blooded woman, who asked me with rejuvenated contempt, ‘Haven’t you got any money?’

  At this point the curious young man, having seen my distress from a distance, came to bail me out. He acted so swiftly it is hard to describe the shape of my shame. But Amanda had gone. The curious young man’s name was Paul. He bought me lunch, agreed that Amanda was worth any strategem I was clever enough to think of, and invited me to come out with him and his girlfriend Kate. She was a History major and Paul was finishing an Economics degree which, he insisted, did not define him. His major was Economic History. The two of them got me through the rest of the year, listening to bands, seeing movies and laughing the anaesthetising laugh the lonely among us need more than food.

  They had been together for some time but I don’t think Paul ever told Kate the story of Amanda and me in the wheatgerm queue. If he did she never mentioned it. And this was all it deserved because at the end of those drunken nights on the threadbare floor of their rented house, the glasses left for the morning, when they had made up the couch for me, my shoes scattered upside down like derailed toy derby cars, it was Tanya I whispered about even as they closed the door.

  CHAPTER 7

  It was in Kate and Paul’s living room, perhaps the most appropriately named room I had ever visited on a regular basis, that I opened a letter which I knew from the handwriting was from Tanya. This was the first contact in almost a year. It had arrived that day but, unable to read it on my own, I drove it over to their place early that evening to read it there. Paul was still at the library and Kate was working on a tutorial paper which she thought she might one day turn into a book. It was really the tentative title of her paper that had so taken her—The Good and the Hurt: Irish Catholics in Australia.

  When I told her about the letter she gave me a beer and put the kettle on. After her tea Kate suggested I read the letter alone. She would be in the next room with Archbishop Mannix, Mary McKillop and B.A. Santamaria, when I was ready to discuss it.

  Dear Eddie,

  It’s trite to ask how someone is in the second line of a letter or to express a hope that they’re well but I do wonder how you are and I do hope that you are well. It feels a little strange writing to you like this but it would probably feel even stranger talking to you. I often wonder what you are doing. Sometimes I think I have seen you see me at a distance on campus and turn away. I never thought that would happen.

  My main purpose in writing to you is to offer my commiserations on the passing of Ian Curtis. I am sure you have been deeply affected by it. I would have written sooner but I only found out about it recently. Nobody told me. Gerard doesn’t really have his finger on the pulse of the Manchester music scene although I know now it’s gone beyond Manchester. It would be naive to ask why Curtis did it. He was a poet and, you’ll see, we’ll still be talking about him ten and twenty years hence. I am truly sorry.

  Every best wish,

  Tanya.

  P.S. We’re putting on a production of Antigone by that old Greek hack. Of course, I’ll be playing Hamlet!

  With the help of Kate and later Paul, and after a few readings, I managed to construe from her letter everything I needed to nurture the fragile buds of an old hunger. But whereas Kate said I should respond, Paul counselled me to date other women. The letter, or at least my favoured interpretation of it, an interpretation I would still maintain Tanya had left open, acted as a tonic of sorts and I did find it within myself to approach my degree with renewed vigour and to ask out other women.

  I was catholic in my tastes, seeking the company of both the good and the hurt, the educated, the uneducated, the post-educated freshly unemployed and the barely educated yet never been out-of-work fair and happy milkmaids. For a time it was the last of these I enjoyed the most. As long ago as the seventeenth century Sir Thomas Overbury spoke of that type of woman. She knows a fair look is but a dumb orator to commend virtue, therefore minds it not. All her excellencies stand in her so silently, as if they had stolen upon her without her knowledge. But after a while you get tired of that.

  Then there were the pseuds; the pseudo-intelligent, pseudo-fashionable female equivalents of Gerard. This was the type of person who would say, ‘Tell me what your house is like and I’ll tell you who you are.’ My house was exactly, to the atom, like my parents’ house. I was still living with my parents and I suppose this did bespeak something of who I was. It was getting close to a time when I was going to have to make some decisions about my future. But one way or another I was going to be alright. After all, I was going to be a chemical engineer. I talked to a career guidance counsellor who advised that a master’s degree would not be wasted. Counsellors really have the best jobs, no care and no responsibility.

  My parents had begun to talk of retiring and of moving to south-east Queensland, a great place to rehearse for death. But I could not yet see them as old, trading in all their shoes for just one pair each of the white silent kind, the type specifically designed to minimise the wearer’s perception of reality as he strolls across his patio holding a glass of chardonnay. Is this what they had been dreaming of, is this what they had worked for all their lives? They didn’t know either.

  Reviews of books and films that Tanya had written started appearing in the real world’s newspapers, the ones where the weight of the editorial is leavened by the insubstantiality of the advertising. Paul said she was ‘one to watch’ but he knew that I had known this since I was seventeen. I generally agreed with her reviews so I took to only reading the books or seeing the films she tho
ught were exceptional. She would be dismissive of her success, I knew, and it would not be entirely false modesty. She had her own idea of success, an idea of which I had a far from perfect emotional grasp. It enabled her, still an undergraduate, to deal confidently with editors while I was still unable fully to comprehend the concept of being or not being on the advice-dispensing side of a desk.

  What the hell was I going to do with my life? How was it that I found myself on the way to devoting the least tentative of my daylight hours to the design and operation of large-scale chemical plants, mining operations and oil refineries? Contrary to a conceit among educators, most students do not have a passion for the careers they choose. Once I had been led away from the powerful side of a desk, keeping options open and avoiding embarrassment were all that mattered. Chemical engineering was preferable to the other branches of engineering because it drew more heavily on chemistry than on physics and mathematics, which I wasn’t good at. I saw it as the cutting edge of the industrial revolution, albeit the first, not the second, with which I was ill at ease. It had given Amanda’s family a standard of living high enough to exclude me from her life.

  I was essentially just an egocentric pseudo-intellectual slob motivated only by facile romantic notions that were contrary to the very world-view upon which my future profession was predicated, but it would take two words to say what I did for a living.

  The nights and days of eating, sleeping, dating, laughing with Kate and Paul, of attaining a required narrow technical understanding of things narrow and technical and a general understanding of things general, meant that I had eventually to become the plaintiff and Gerard the defendant. With Kate’s encouragement and Paul’s lack of discouragement, I finally responded to Tanya’s letter.

  On the telephone she sounded older at first and for the initial minutes of the call I wished I’d never met her. We circled around each other, sniffing, trying out different inflections in ways we could not entirely control. How were we? Fine thanks and you? The studies? Not bad, we supposed. Family? Pretty much the same. (Her father was still dead.) A book? Haven’t read it. Really? You should. Okay, I will. Liked your reviews, well done. Thanks. You’re welcome.

  It was not till a second conversation that I enquired after my successor and all that he was doing for her. He had already self-administered the noose and I just had to let them play it out. I could sense it. Coffee? Yeah, okay. When was a good time?

  She looked as sullenly quixotic as ever, dressed partially in black but with a magenta scarf and a hint of caprice. She was, coming out of it, adorable.

  ‘Like the purple scarf,’ I volunteered.

  ‘Thanks. Fuchsia, actually.’

  ‘Where’d you pick that up?’

  ‘What, the scarf?’

  ‘No, “Fuchsia, actually”.’

  By the time of our next meeting, Gerard had been dispatched to another era. After that he and all his muscle tone were spoken about disparagingly from a languid horizontal position without my having to say a word in a scene out of French new wave cinema: crumpled sheets, wine and a half-open window in the blue light of night.

  ‘He didn’t read. When he thought I’d made a good point he’d tell me that I’d hit the snail right on the head. He thought the Tallis Scholars were experts in Jewish prayer shawls. He’s very bad with abstract concepts. And words. Abstract concepts and words, that’s all. And logic and history. And irony. That’s all. I had to convince him that it was no coincidence that the only Australian prime minister ever to drown in office had a major municipal swimming pool named after him. We went there not long before we broke up. In fact it might’ve hastened it.’

  ‘Really, what happened?’

  ‘I told him he belonged in the shallow end.’

  ‘That’s really cruel, Tanya.’

  ‘I know. Do you think I’m a bad person? I hadn’t expected him to get it.’

  ‘Yes, I must say he always struck me as a strictly single entendre sort of guy.’

  Gerard had really been of tremendous service to me, not merely (or perhaps I should say not even) in the Nietzschean sense of whatever does not kill me makes me stronger, because I do not believe that. Experience tends to suggest that whatever does not kill you is simply acting in concert with whatever does. We live in an age where all the utopias can be found on top of each other in the bargain basement bin of ideas and the last we heard of Superman he was trying to settle out of court.

  But at the time of the renaissance of our relationship there seemed to be so many things to be thankful for and Gerard was one of them. Where would I have been had his genes and environment been kinder to him? Even so it was hard not to feel puny some nights beside my own memory of his physique let alone all that Tanya had to remember. Gerard was one of the first people I knew to deify cardiovascular fitness and make regular sacrifices at the altar end of the bench press. He was not in need of athletics or sport of any kind to change or make his life. His parents had plenty of money and had sent him to all the right schools, again and again. He just couldn’t remember why.

  It must have seemed strange for Tanya to meet Kate and Paul and find them such an important part of my life when, pre-Gerard, they had not existed. I had expected a certain reticence, perhaps more between Tanya and Kate than between her and Paul. Men love meeting their friends’ new girlfriends. They can dance around them for a while, breathe them in and try to impress the girl but everybody knows it doesn’t really matter much and that this is just a free introductory offer of charm on each of their parts. But while Kate and Tanya hit it off immediately, Paul was slower off the mark, playing just a fraction hard to get. And I liked this. He was a good friend.

  He knew how much she had meant to me and how much her sampling and discarding of things had hurt me. That I had done it too and that it was necessary for both of us he also understood which is partly why he did not hold out for very long. Tanya is difficult not to like and I don’t think Paul ever actively disliked her. By the time Tanya and I moved in together both Kate and Paul were ringing up to speak specifically to her. But for a time, the time it takes a leaf to hit the ground, or the time for which a small child can hold its breath, he was just marginally reserved. Like the best of friends he did not just want the best for me. He also lived a little through me. And of course, he had seen Amanda.

  CHAPTER 8

  Neither of us had ever lived with anyone before, not anyone with whom we were more significantly connected than through DNA and with whom we were by virtue of that connection entitled, required, to do our worst to and in front of. Living with a partner is more fraught than you might imagine if you have never tried. Whenever I had idly thought about it, which was not very often, it had seemed to me that all possible problems could be resolved merely by negotiation and accommodation. Some people squeezed the toothpaste tube from the middle, some squeezed from the bottom. If you love someone enough surely you can meet halfway? And if you can, your children will not be able to blame you for their instability and you can regard yourself as a success, at least in your personal life.

  But the naivety of this is breathtaking. The scope for misunderstanding, at which you gape open-mouthed after dinner and before bed whilst the tiniest food particle is already irretrievably breaking down and turning your breath into an irreconcilable difference between you, is astronomical. In the morning, every word you speak and every kiss you bestow cannot help but be putrid. If you had any inkling of how offensive your breath had become you would agree with the only conclusion that could be drawn from your partner’s behaviour, namely, that you are the world’s greatest misfortune and should be taken out the back and hurriedly put down.

  It’s not just oral hygiene, there’s the rest of your body. In the days when you lived apart you often knew in advance when you were likely to have to perform acts of the utmost intimacy and you could prepare accordingly. Living together, however, there is often no warning. If you do not have confidence in every orifice and protuberance it can aff
ect your sexual performance and that, in turn, can affect everything else in the world.

  From your body, moving outwards in the direction of other people, there are your clothes. How do you wash them, how often, what time of day, in hot or cold water? Do you mix whites and colours, ever, by accident or by design? What happens if you inadvertently destroy the favourite garment of the person who shares the bed with you every night, the person whose percussive nocturnal respiratory habits might or might not rival your sulphurous breath at times when you are ill and she knows it first. If you destroy the Taj Mahal of blouses, and she asks you how you could be so stupid, where is the answer? You really do not know how you could be so stupid. You are part-way through a Master’s degree. You tutor bright young first-year students. If only you could answer. But you cannot think, so sleep-deprived are you, having not slept since before the Ice Age because the rhythm section of a tiny reggae band has sublet the space between your lover’s Eustachian tubes and her throat so that it can rehearse between the hours of one and six each morning without disturbing the sleep of someone who matters, namely her.

  In the mornings, particularly in winter, we had got into the practice of waking early and holding onto each other for dear life. Falling in and out of consciousness, snatches of dreams whispered themselves in the dark like hallucinated newsflashes, repressed and unasked for, somnambulant. Occasionally reality reported in, coming in the form of the raw material needed for a later dream about rent or the gas bill. Still only firmly in our twenties, we suspected that we had begun to live the rest of our lives. There was nothing wrong with our lives, no present fear or horrible imagining which we were unable to shake off by lunch at our respective places of work. I had completed my Master’s and was working for the Federal Department of Environment. Tanya was tutoring in the Politics Department where various academics were courting her by inviting her to write a Master’s thesis in their particular area; ‘one to watch’, as Paul had said all those years ago.