by Cate Kennedy
‘You have to come,’ her friend Emily had insisted. ‘This is the first big event I’ve organised.’
‘I’m so tired Em. The heat, the sleepless nights…’
Emily didn’t have a baby. She didn’t know how a baby blurred the world, till everything seemed formless, even your sense of self.
‘You’re coming. Brush your hair and put on a dress.’
And so there was Mallory at the Family Folk Festival, among people baking bread, playing the dulcimer and spinning wool on the grass reserve. And there he was, Karl, playing the guitar and singing to his wife, and she was singing back to him; and they formed such a tender picture that Mallory paused to watch.
She was not yet obsessed. She merely expressed surprise to Emily that someone so unromantic looking with that hawkish nose, and narrow eyes set so deeply under the bench of his forehead, could sing so beautifully. Later, she longed to return to the calmness of this observation, the calmness of the calm woman she was before Karl.
She’d tried once to talk to this man at a party and he said so little she imagined he was bored; and yet, like many others, she admired him, for three reasons.
He was the director of an organisation that helped the needy.
He was very tall.
His opinion was precious and not easily given.
She and Emily spread the picnic rug under a shady tree.
‘Where’s Rick?’ asked Emily.
‘Oh—he and the guys have gone to some car race.’
‘A speed-freak. I would never have picked him for you.’
‘Yeah, sometimes I wonder at it myself,’ replied Mallory, lifting Daphne from her pram to feed her. ‘He’s a good person.’
‘Bit young. Is it nine years, the gap between you?’
Karl and his wife were singing ‘Scarborough Fair,’ laying out impossible courtship tasks for each other. Mallory had heard of the cambric shirt without any stitch or needlework but not about ploughing a field with a ram’s horn, or shearing the field— presumably the same one—with a sickle of leather. Poor baby Daphne was hot. She pressed the baby’s silken mouth onto her cracked nipple, feeding her baby with milk and the tiniest bit of blood.
‘Let’s buy Daphne a hand woven Moses basket,’ said Emily.
‘You’ve done a great job organizing all this, Em.’
‘Thanks. There’s even a lace-maker stall. You could get a bit for your wedding dress.’
Two tall children were threading their way through the crowd to sit at the front. Emily said they were Karl’s and Mallory saw they shared the pale hair and severe features of their parents, overlaid with the softening loveliness of childhood.
‘Poor things,’ remarked Emily, getting to her feet.
‘Why? Is he strict?’
‘I doubt it—excuse me darl, the town crier’s beckoning me.’
The dance took place toward evening. Daphne was asleep in her pram and Mallory wanted to walk home before she got too tired, but Emily, again, insisted.
‘I’ll watch her,’ she said. ‘The first one’s a Scottish folk dance. Very easy.’
Mallory lined up with the others on the expanse of frayed yellow grass, under a sombre smoke haze drifting from distant bushfires. The heat wave had been intolerable. She saw Karl; beside him stood his wife with a fiddle, along with two cellists. Karl gave Mallory a nod. She nodded back, making herself smile. She saw he was about to show how the dance was done, and wanted to flee. She was too hot and grumpy and lumpy to dance.
And then Karl stepped toward her, and took her hand, and she was twirling, and he was spinning her toward him with conviction. Everything he did was definite and with purpose. Without being asked, she was to help him demonstrate. She understood, and let his will direct her. She could do nothing else. Her body followed his, her feet followed his, three steps forward, three steps back and waltz…
She laughed. To waltz, on this day, in this field, at this moment in history, was so unlikely! The laugh bubbled up from some sweet cauldron between her heart and belly, spontaneous and sudden. Karl looked into her eyes, a sharp look, filled with curiosity. Wonder, perhaps tinged with disdain. And it seemed to her that they should know each other better than they did.
It was not this look of Karl’s that started the madness— though she was surprised by its candour—it was the firm pressure of his hand just above her hip, guiding her away from him and toward him as the dance demanded.
Forward two three, back two three. The other couples followed suit. Over Karl’s shoulder, Mallory watched his wife playing, smiling, concentrating, tapping her foot. How competent she was, and how like Karl himself. A perfect couple.
Rick called by to see Mallory later that evening, smelling of petrol, and telling her about some car he was thinking of buying. He kissed her hand. They didn’t live together yet. When Daphne cried, he picked her up gingerly and handed her over, and Mallory noticed that he’d chewed his fingernails to stubs. Rick went on talking, and fetched her a glass of water while she fed the baby, and when he realized that sex wasn’t on offer, he went home. She lay on the couch, and the madness began. She was dancing with Karl. She was leading him out of the field, to the place where the grass was long…
No. Think about your fiancé. Rick. Handsome and funny and also very tall. Perhaps she had some pathological interest in height? And young. She was thirty-six and Rick was twenty-seven and the baby was an accident. He was doing the right thing. She loved him for it.
Oh no, here was Karl again, as powerful in her mind as he was in person, and she was pushing Karl down into the straw, his long, strong body falling willingly to the ground. The chief executive like a youth, limp and biddable beneath her, and she took his hands and placed them on the yielding flesh above her hips. ‘Hold me there,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t let go.’
And so it was, for weeks. When she tracked down Karl’s address and parked her car a little way up the street to watch him leave for work, she knew things were getting out of control. Yet there was this urgent need to see him.
‘I’m like a stalker,’ she said aloud, and shook her head. ‘This can’t go on.’
But it did go on. She watched him, in his crisp navy suit, his thinning hair catching the early light, getting into—of all vehicles—a ute. Or she’d walk past with the pram at night, and look through the windows into happy domestic scenes of him reading to his children, or chatting to his wife. On Sundays he tended his vegetable patch with his children, orderly rows of green bordered with sunflowers.
‘What is it? It can’t be only lust. Or is it?’
This was a shocking thought. She turned it over in herself, carefully, considering it from every angle. First, there was desire, the weird and unexpected yen for this handsome-ugly man. Why? Really, he was almost dour. Like Sam the Eagle from the television show, The Muppets. He wore eccentric side whiskers, practically mutton-chops! As powerful and physical as it was, her craving was also ludicrous—the man’s Freudian resemblance to her old high school principal was frightening. She tried hard to laugh at it, to belittle it, and perhaps she would have succeeded if it weren’t for something else.
She wanted to befriend him, talk to him, tell him things and have his opinion. She wanted to present herself to him, lay herself bare, and know that she was to his liking in every way possible.
In the antique shop she found some Victorian Valentine’s Day cards, replete with their mood of innocence, and their docile colours of aqua, gold, pink and parchment. A few had fine, almost illegible scrolls of inky handwriting on the reverse side, addressed to people like ‘Roland,’ and ‘Walter,’ and ‘Nett’. One had Cupid running along gold telephone wires, holding up a sign saying To My Sweetheart, in lettering that still gleamed after a century. This cupid looked cheekily over his shoulder at the viewer. In Shakespeare’s time he’d be wearing a blindfold. How did it go again? Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind; and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
‘Look what I bought fo
r Rick,’ Mallory said to Emily, spreading out the postcards on the kitchen table.
‘Not sure about this disembodied hand,’ said Emily, referring to a card which depicted a hand holding roses. She brushed her thumb over the red velvet heart cut into the bouquet. ‘Bit corny, really.’
‘They were made by different people to us. The Victorians were sweeter people. Purer.’
‘More hypocritical. Put skirts on pianos so you couldn’t see their legs.’
Emily was nostalgic for folk crafts, not sentimental love tokens. Mallory poured her friend a cool drink. Emily placed the hand woven Moses basket on the table beside the cards, and together they admired it.
‘Thanks for bringing over the basket. It’s really something special. What do I owe you?’
‘Nothing, darl. It’s a gift for Daphne. So. How are things?’
‘I have discovered that the skin above my hips is an erogenous zone,’ she announced. ‘Touch me there, and I’ll fall in love with you.’
‘Right,’ said Emily.
She watched Karl on his evening run. In minutes he had sped out of sight, the faint glow of his legs vanishing into the shadows. With the baby asleep in her arms she strolled in his wake, passing through the wet forest scent he left behind, and entered the park where he was doing chin ups on the climbing frame across the oval. She slipped behind a tree. Pressing her lips to Daphne’s soft head, she slid to the ground and waited for the ineffable solace of darkness.
This mania for Karl had to stop. Mallory knew it. She must find a way to deflate it, to empty its absolutely overwhelming power over her. It simply would not do. Here they both were, deep in the skins of their relationships and families. What did she want, anyway? For him to leave his lovely wife? Abandon his children, the family he’d built up? Of course not. The reality would be awful. She wished to show him her life. Perhaps what she needed was to show her life to someone who could really see it. And that person was not Rick.
On this realisation, her eyes filled with tears more stinging and poisonous than she’d ever felt, the manifestation of disappointment as deep as bile. So what, she told herself. If she could not show her life to anyone, she would show it to herself. And that would be enough. She would make it be enough.
A poem was not what she expected. It came upon her in a rush, and she scribbled it down. Later she fussed over it, patting it into ten syllable lines, and though it refused to rhyme she felt she’d found something better in herself.
Striding over the grass, leaving behind
your polished old ute, ukulele slung
loosely over one arm, in the other
a picnic basket, a warm blanket rolled.
We’ve some hours here at midlife, no more, no
tomorrow together, nor yesterday.
Through smoke-light passing over the mountain,
I skip like I’m a carefree child again,
bringing some humble, half transformed objects,
for you to test, to bite like a jeweller,
to find a measure of truth, and if not
a wholesome rebuke and a guiding word.
But first, I’ll listen to your homemade songs
my head on the ground, my eyes toward sky
while your fingers pick keen melodies from string;
each note sawing the air, the earth, our selves.
By now your hands have cradled babies, built
houses, turned soil for sowing and seeking;
fossils and seedlings, worms and foundations
as you remake earth so the earth shapes you,
training your gist to more tender beauty.
Your life crosses mine for this brief moment.
Although we are barely more than strangers,
let me tell you: you’re fighting the good fight.
Seeing your eyes softly battered by time,
baby wrinkles cupping each, like the feet
of hummingbirds, unbidden affection
rises in me like a bread loaf baking.
What kinship have we? What is this rising?
Who mixed the dough and who set it to bake?
Who eats from it, and whom does it nourish?
Speak here with me and rest, till violet
ends our tryst with her motionless shadow.
Breaking the bread of this incarnation,
we’ll eat, commend ourselves to God, and part.
No cambric shirt for Karl, seamless and mystical. Just this imagined meeting where the unsayable could be said, and farewelled. She pecked out a clean copy on the old typewriter, read it over, and sealed it in an envelope marked ‘Karl.’ She would drop it in a red post box, and never think of him again.
And so it might have been, if it hadn’t been for a crisis in the bridal shop.
‘Your heart’s just not in this,’ accused Emily, as Mallory stood in the feathery, corseted gown, sweat filming the nape of her neck, staring at her hollow-eyed reflection. ‘You should be excited. Happy.’
‘I feel lumpy, that’s all.’
‘Why are you even marrying him?’
‘Because he’s nice.’ She thought of Rick’s brown curls, his laughing green eyes, his stubby fingernails. ‘Because he’s the father of my daughter. Because when he asked me, I thought, I might as well marry him as marry anybody.’
‘They are not good reasons, if you ask me,’ said the shop assistant, though nobody had.
‘Has something changed?’ asked Emily.
Mallory hesitated. Should she tell her? The poem in its envelope lay in her handbag, a white corner sticking out; in fact, if the bag fell open another inch or two, the bold capital letters spelling KARL would give the game away.
‘I just—began to imagine what it might be to be in love.’
‘That’s not a good reason either,’ said the assistant, tweaking a feather on Mallory’s gown. ‘Love is what’s left when being in love is burned away. I read that somewhere.’
‘Very nice,’ sighed Emily, with a barely disguised eye-roll.
Mallory retreated to the dressing room to divest herself of the boned dress. As it came away, she felt herself peeled free. She could never wear a dress like that. When she emerged, she was almost weeping.
‘I can’t do it, can I?’
‘No. You have to tell him.’
‘Not tonight. Not on Valentine’s Day.’
‘What rot,’ scoffed Emily. ‘It’s just a commercialized load of nonsense.’
‘Still, I don’t want him to associate our breakup with this date forever.’
‘So—cancel tonight. Tell him tomorrow.’
That evening, in the fading warmth, she took one last walk past Karl’s house, the house that Emily said he’d built. Pushing Daphne in the pram she looked in, on her way to the public post box. No-one was visible in the windows. His wife’s car wasn’t there. She heard a guitar strumming and children’s laughter, and guessed they were in the back yard. And she thought, what harm would it do to put the poem in his letterbox? Immediately the answer came back: untold harm. But a typed letter? This was all she’d ever ask of Karl. To read something from her, to know he’d been thought of in this way… He would never know who it was from. He may not even show his wife. Of course he wouldn’t!
The madness reared like a little tongue of flame, and she drove her hand into her bag, withdrew the letter, posted it and walked away, fast.
As soon as she had reached the safety of the shadows, she was possessed of an equal need to get the letter back. What utter stupidity! She turned around and marched back again, determined to retrieve her self-betrayal, and had to stop. There was Karl, walking through his front garden. She pulled the pram backward. Don’t see me, don’t see me!
He wasn’t getting the mail. Surely not. People don’t get their mail so late? But he was. He was opening the letterbox, lifting the little pile of envelopes, glancing at them, pausing. Oh no, he’s seen it. Mallory lifted a hand to her mouth. You idiot, she cursed herself. You absolute idiot. K
arl sat on the swinging chair on the veranda and opened her envelope. He drew out the note. Read it.
Mallory chewed on a knuckle, watching. It was too dusky to make out any reaction. She watched him fold up the letter and put it back in the envelope, very neat and precise. He tucked it into his shirt pocket. At least she knew his wife wouldn’t see it. But what was he thinking? What was he thinking?
Autumn grew bitter fast and the people longed for summer again, forgetting the fires that burned houses and bush, forgetting the bright claws of heat that held them back from sleep. Daphne learned to sit up. Mallory stopped stalking Karl, and forbade herself from looking at his picture on the internet. Their paths would not cross again if she could help it; this was the only way she could make up for the wrong she had done to his wife in leaving that poem.
Rick was more upset about breaking up than she’d expected. After some difficult meetings however, the rightness of the decision grew obvious even to him. They drew up a document about Daphne’s care and signed it; and they agreed to stay friends. On that afternoon, she kissed him goodbye on the cheek and said:
‘You’ve been decent every step of the way, Rick. You’ll make someone a really great husband.’ And Rick rubbed his cheek and shrugged, and she knew things would be okay between them.
Winter came and most people paid little attention to the shortest night. A few gathered at Emily’s to eat roasted peppers, salted olives and delicious white cheeses, and drink mulled wine, and play music. When Emily rang to invite her, Mallory asked if Karl and his wife were coming. She didn’t want to reawaken her obsession. She was feeling clean and clear. Hours passed where she didn’t think of him.
‘What do you mean, Karl’s wife?’ asked Emily. ‘She died nearly five years ago.’
‘What? Could you—run that by me again?’
‘Car accident, poor things. Everyone knows that. That’s why everyone admires him.’
