Australian Love Stories

by Cate Kennedy

  The lesbians just look awkward as usual.

  A boy with the smile of an underwear model holds a tray of blue Martinis, stares like I might really need one. ‘I don’t drink,’ I tell him. ‘I just audit the intake of others.’

  Arthur, a second Cosmo under his belt, takes on the glazed, contented buzz of the perpetually bereaved. He’s a lightweight and the second glass never makes him more attractive; it’s just the early phase of what usually ends in tears, but manifests first in a false elastic smile.

  He ushers me down the wide, vomit-coloured stairs to another level of the circling fag fest. A river of the almost attractive but not quite—the truly pretty can’t really afford this, except to occasionally hang on a robust arm.

  ‘Let’s bid on the Qantas Round the World,’ says Arthur, momentarily invigorated by my melancholy, as we swan across the black and puce to the silent auction. Dinners at Melisse and Providence. Facials.

  Arthur bids high on a cruise down the Danube.

  Sotto voce, I remark on the irony of a gay Jew on the Danube.

  ‘Oh, is it that Danube?’ he says.

  Wanker.

  But I can see it from here—a boatload of the tanned and muscled wearing lederhosen for fun, visiting the quaint Nazi villages. Next he’ll bid on some Gay Atlantis adventure. Arthur bare-bellied with Stoli in hand, pretending he belongs on a floating crystal meth gymnasium slash bathhouse, dancing all the way from Barthelona to Ibitha.

  ‘You’re a father now, Arthur,’ I whisper. ‘Remember.’

  First, he was taking the Boxster up to some park above Sunset. The Pop Luck Club. Gays in their low-cut G-Star jeans, fussing about a sandpit, blender babies whingeing in their thousand dollar carriages. Next came the photo of the foundling called Marvel from El Salvador. A little scrunched-up thing. The gaze. I wondered if it might not be a tad Downsy, the slightly hooded eyes, but I didn’t dare ask if the mother was elderly. I just envisaged the fecal alcohol syndrome. I mean foetal.

  But Arthur was adopting regardless, just to be passiveaggressive: he was already off to the airport with Ali the limousine driver, the way Arabs drive Jews to the airport in town cars. Flying to Tegucigalpa, which is in Honduras, even I know that. Apparently the bambino’s parents were refugees.

  ‘We’re all refugees,’ I told Arthur. And anyway, who would flee to Honduras?

  I didn’t go with him, just reminded him he’d already spent $80,000. ‘I could have had a baby for that,’ I told him. Adopting an unsuspecting infant as a conduit, like buying a Jack Russell to keep things alive!

  Still, I can’t pretend I don’t understand his yearning. I just know how to avoid it.

  I have Orion. He’s twenty-two. I hear what you’re thinking, but twenty-two isn’t thirteen. He’s nearly twenty-three.

  Downtown I went in Sinbad, my old Subaru, the wind in my hair, to see Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture, but I didn’t care for the likeness between ball-gown and lampshade. I ended up at the Patinette. Now that’s real art—Orion waiting tables, my dark sylph, twists and braided seventies’ headband. Give me your Jennifer Beals. On his feet all afternoon, serving and wiping, the fortitude. He smiled at me en passant, a moment that felt like a year.

  His narrow pants and those dancer’s feet, worn out tap shoes. His movement slightly uneven, which at first I found so seductive, then realized he’d lost a sole.

  I told him too soon I’m a writer, published here and there, in translation. Reeling the limping boy in.

  I should have felt guilty, I should have. Arthur’s salmon mornay left for me on the Viking, Marvel’s bedroom painted blue. Arthur on the plane south, playing fetch.

  But then Orion mentioned he was a writer too. A poet. Another money-spinner! A half-scholarship to USC. A muse.

  The shouting in my head as he shared the endurances of his island childhood—black hippie parents on a pineapple farm on Oahu. His mother once ‘in the movement’; now she’s three hundred pounds and barely moves at all. His old man (old man! My darling. Don’t say that) was once a 49er, then a Black Panther, then he played bongos for Earth, Wind & Fire.

  And now they’ve run out of pineapple money.

  I couldn’t help wonder if that’s where I might come in.

  Should I give him the tuition cheque right there and then? My heart felt embezzled already.

  Marta, my therapista, thinks I have the symptoms of a chicken hawk; a radar for boys between eighteen and twenty-three. Better than a sparrow hawk, I told her, but she always ignores my interjections, advises how grandiosity masks my low self esteem.

  ‘Have you ever read Lolita?’ she asked. A parting shot.

  I wanted to tell her she dresses like Stevie Nicks.

  ‘I don’t read Nabokov,’ I told her. ‘He disturbs me.’ I left her a cheque for eighty instead of a hundred and twenty.

  I imagine escorting Orion to this tragic affair, having him draped over my arm like a stole. I’d be the rich one then; I’d do the bidding. The signed print of Rosa Parks that everyone’s ignoring—a young bespectacled woman perched on a shiny leather bus seat. I look into her eyes behind the glasses. She’s had enough too. No one’s even bid on her.

  Only a few faces of colour in this crowd—they all go to Divas Simply Singing to see if Chaka Khan might actually show, so no one’s left here to care because Rosa isn’t Judy Garland. She didn’t drink herself to death, just changed the bloody face of history.

  Arthur herds me into the theatre with the pack of fairy penguins, threading down front to the seats with the other heavy hitters. He reaches to hold my hand and I blanch. He knows I don’t do public displays of groping, well not with him. I only do that with those I don’t know, in the shrubs near the tennis courts in Griffith Park, where I can at least feel at home. What else can I do? Arthur getting so thick about the middle, won’t go to the gym. I, myself, can’t go to the gym. It isn’t safe. I end up backstage in the showers for hours, wondering if I shouldn’t just stay there forever, have my mail forwarded.

  Anyway, why Arthur gives thousands to this business I can’t imagine. When women are being circumcised in Uganda, eleven-year-old boys in tribal armies. My own pittance sent each month to Amalia from Manila. Lagoon eyes and a slightly snotty nose. Save the Christians probably added the snot for the photo. Maybe they have a special makeup person. ‘Perhaps a little scab about her mouth. There we go. Perfect.’

  Judith Light looks like a drag queen on stage, presenting Jennifer Aniston with the Vanguard Award for service to the GLBT community. Really? Jennifer Aniston? A Vanguard? I can’t stand it.

  ‘Give it to Gore Vidal,’ I shout. I get up to push my way along the row, bumping knees. Then I remember poor bloody Gore just died.

  ‘Or at least Billie Jean King.’

  ‘She won it last year,’ says a voice from behind me.

  Glancing back, I catch sight of Arthur about to erupt from his tux, raising his bidding paddle at me as if there might be potential in that. He’ll bid on some auctioned crap onstage. Hand-scribed Sondheim lyrics in frame, poor old Barbara Cook being piped in: You said you loved me…or were you just being kind? Or…am I losing my mind?

  Yes, I’m losing my fucking mind.

  When Marta asked me about my favourite book I said The Little Prince, and she smiled too knowingly. ‘Antoine de Saint Exupéry died young,’ she said, ‘in a plane crash.’ I waited for the other shoe. ‘Yours is going down,’ she said. ‘Your plane.’

  ‘What kind of therapy is this?’

  ‘Jungian,’ she said.

  I was afraid she’d say something clever like that. She told me Saint Exupéry led a provisional life, dreaded being bound to the earth. Then the floodgates opened. ‘You have the typical disturbances, homosexuality and Don Juanism.’ She pulled out a book with underlinings, pictures of the boa constrictor digesting the elephant, the sheep in a box. ‘Such men die young.’

  ‘I don’t partake of dangerous sports,’ I said.

&
nbsp; ‘You’re intoxicated by this boy. This new wounded bird. You’re only trying to save yourself.’

  Luckily her time was up. I told her I’d given all my money to educating young Hawaiians, that I’d leave her a cheque but it would bounce. She eyed me with such cruel compassion.

  Out in the foyer, there’s air and virtually no one except the androgynous auction attendant, toupeed and silent, suspicious. Rosa Parks gazes out from her print, the yearning still in her eyes. William Winchell, that dinge queen donut heir with the donut hair, has bid $600. I want to scratch it out, but I’m spared by the sight of my lesbian writer friend Bette sneaking a smoke under the long and winding stairs.

  ‘You can go to jail for that in LA,’ I say. I take the end from her and suck on it. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Oh, I’m dating this femme top power chick,’ she explains. ‘She’s on the Board.’

  Bette’s vaguely bipolar in a subversive downtown beatnik sort of way, her hair a tangled mess. Really from some bourgie family in Santa Barbara but she’d never admit it.

  ‘Does this mean we’ve made it?’ I ask. ‘Being here?’

  ‘Guess so,’ she says, taking her cigarette back, the Santa Barbara in the squareness of her jaw.

  ‘I wish you were a guy,’ I say.

  ‘Me, too,’ she says. ‘How’s your Hawaiian project?’

  ‘Disparu,’ I say dejectedly. ‘Son of a pineapple farmer.’ We laugh, and then I stop, look into her eyes for something. ‘I think I gave him the creeps,’ I say.

  ‘Well, you are kind of creepy,’ she says.

  Outside, among the photographers, a line of dressed up people wait, wishing they were inside, wishing they were us. In the fluorescence of the valet parking bay, Bette and I plot to be elsewhere. She tells me there’s a happening downtown.

  ‘A happening?’ I ask. ‘Do people still say that?’

  ‘Irony,’ she says. ‘Remember?’ Then she tells me Rhona Kagan’s reading, just to piss me off. Rhona in her Topanga Canyon gypsy hideout, working for weeks and churning out New Yorker stories when I’ve been fritzing about down here like a circus rat.

  I get in poor Sinbad, wondering if I’m losing things, like irony or humour generally. The sensation of sinking into a swamp, but I’m actually bouncing up Highland, following Bette in her seventies purple Bug convertible, onto the litter-blown Hollywood Freeway. Foggy at night in April, the tarmac blistered like a set from Children of Men. Sinbad rattles about me valiantly; it knows it’s important for me to have my own car, to be able to change my mind. Like Bette, who lives in a wood panelled Airstream caravan parked in her girlfriend’s driveway—she can escape any time.

  Bette drives like she’s on the verge of flight, an iridescent scarf out taut and high like it might get caught on the wing of a low flying plane or do an Isadora Duncan. Then I think of Arthur alone at the post-awards dinner, how I’ve disappeared again with no excuse.

  I loved him once, back when he was young and I was younger, when we’d go to the flea markets, before he imported his chairs from Paris or Buenos Aires. The sweet, vulnerable awkwardness of him. I was the most real I’ve ever been, almost secure and on the verge of optimism. Back when I was fun.

  A small white shape, a kettle, no, a cat. Its eyes glint in the car lights, stone-still along the verge. I don’t even like cats but I don’t think it’s dead, just crouching with its tail wrapped around itself among the paper cups and rubbish. It brings on an old stricken feeling. Memories paved over like parking lots. Sadie, my border collie pup, left by my father at the feed-store. I searched for days, on my own, for nothing. It has me pulling over, losing Bette in the river of tail lights.

  A tractor-trailer whips by and makes the car shudder. I watch in the rear view mirror, wait for the cat to run out and be carnage, but all I make out is myself. Like I’m someone on board The Wreck of the Mary Deare. It’s me become feral, not just the words in my studio on the thin billfold of pages. I remember the Rhona Kagan story, the Long Island girl being driven around by her crazy mother in the night, picking up wounded animals on the dark expressway.

  I clamber over the gearstick and get out the passenger door and stare. The cat stares back as I approach. In shock, maybe, or does he think he’s invisible? Los Angeles traffic just feet from me, honking. This is what deranged people do. An echo splits the air above us. Firecrackers. Hollywood cholos in their secret world of exits and overpasses. But this cat is like a china statue. Maybe he’s deaf or hibernating in shadow. You’re too white for that, little man. I slip out of Arthur’s jacket and kneel, gingerly enfold him. A faint mewl as I wrap him; he doesn’t struggle. As if he knew I would come. I wonder if Marvel knew Arthur would come.

  Carrying the wrapped cat back to the car, I think of the feral kitten I caught as a boy that bit a hole right through my thumbnail. I hold the foundling close and wait for claws and panic, but the coat is reverberating with the low vibration of purring.

  He likes me.

  From the passenger seat he looks over, nestled in the Dries Van Noten jacket. Shedding on it. As we drift off the freeway, he searches up at me with translucent amber eyes. Fur soft and white as an astrakhan pelt. How are you so clean? So white, I want to call him Merwin, the laureate poet who lives in Hawaii with the mane of silken hair. As I reach over to stroke my purring friend, I wonder if he’s been thrown from a car. Do people actually do that? He sits like some miracle, placid as a pale fur hat; he doesn’t freak at the world outside, the passing shadows on Franklin, untrimmed palms bearded like tribesman, guarding the Scientologists in their ‘Celebrity Centre’. Harbouring wannabe Travoltas and little Tom Cruises. Worlds within weird worlds.

  The cat arches up and I notice a smudge on the top of his head, the shape of a dusty grey yarmulke.

  ‘Moses,’ I say. Because I found him. ‘You’re Moses of the Freeway.’

  The air in my studio hangs in slabs of darkness. The cat’s already lapped up all my Organic Valley chocolate milk. Now he sleeps like a babe on my daybed, white against Arthur’s coat. No one knows we’re home.

  I sit in my low, dimpled Victorian chair, watch out into the Hollywood night and try to conjure the coming out stories that my hawkeyed agent wants. I search for motes of a story behind my eyelids. Sitting here at this computer, all I want really is to type in my two favourite words and get swept up in the bowels of the cyber burrow, move back to Bareback City. Inebriate my spirit.

  Why can’t I just hold my breath, or breathe more easily, wait for the vein of my voice? Why can’t I be in love? Arthur worships me, invests in me for God’s sake. He holds me close and gives me space, he found that scary little Del Mar agent in the first place.

  I thought writing would be as advertised—like sitting up with the dying, a room you enter with dread and hold the patient’s hand. Didn’t realize I’d have to sit up with myself. Of course, Marta advised sandalwood candles and bubble baths, a page a day, a story at a time, but what does she know about that shit. Rhona’s got slain freeway dogs, their bloody-haunch stains on a ribbed Rambler seat.

  The cat yawns at me as I take my yellow pencil and my blank brown Telemundo notebook.

  I am not Australian.

  I grew up on a poultry farm outside Ventura.

  The line of words falls soft and clean across the page.

  I reinvented myself.

  For Arthur.

  The words I’ve never spoken.

  I have no slain-koala memories, just a mother with lumbago in a folding chair on a hot veranda, a father’s bags packed in the drive. A child stunned silent for what seemed like a year, home alone in a hot Ventura sandpit, an oleander hedge. A mother smoking in a fuming silence of her own. Eventually she said: ‘A rat gets caught in its own trap.’

  But she was the one stuck at the sitting room window, waiting.

  I look over at Moses and wonder. What’s wrong with me? It’s Arthur likes cats. He desperately wanted a Burmese but I wouldn’t let him. My grand aversion
to gay men with cats. They bring out my inner homophobe. Worse than that real estate couple who parade about with their pair of Miniature Pinschers.

  The silhouette of Aviva Borenstein, Arthur’s mother, emerges in the living room window. Arthur with hair in a bun. She travelled overnight on the pilgrimage Greyhound from San Antonio. Can’t fly with the oxygen tank but she’s walking with the babe held close, the extension from the tank an umbilical shadow, framed by pampas grass outside. The brilliant redorange swirls of the Jackson Pollock on the wall. So enthralled with the child she doesn’t see me. The final hours before the bris. Marvel in those unsteady arms, unaware his tiny Honduran feet will be strapped to a table for the lesbian rabbi to slide a metal ring over his weho until the circulation cuts off. As if children don’t remember.

  Marta warned me, her voice always inside my head. All you really want is to be held, but you seek it from those who need holding themselves. ‘What about Arthur?’ I asked.

  The cat stands and stretches so I go over and pick him up, scratch under his fluffed white chin. He’s still chilly, so I swaddle him back in Arthur’s coat, a pinstripe papoose. I pick him up. ‘Arthur’s not stupid,’ I tell him. He knows couples’ counselling is the beginning of all goodbyes. Arthur who does the cooking and now I wash up. I used to play the old game: ‘If you want to adopt, you have to wash up.’ But that game’s over. He’s called my bluff. He’s still keen to visit my family farm in Gippsland, the old Victorian homestead with a tiled veranda all round, and horses, views out over the Hereford cattle. Maybe he knows that history doesn’t exist.

  Moses lifts his head to look as the Boxster swerves up through the dark and parks with its lights to the garage. Moses is not deaf.

  Arthur slumps against the wheel for a moment, before he gets out. Standing there, ruddy-faced in the neon lamplight, his bow tie undone, beholding the stark shape of Aviva through the window, his child enveloped in grandmotherly arms, but he doesn’t go in. He removes a wrapped up thing, probably from the silent auction, a thanks to his nightmare of a mother.