‘Great flat, cheaptart,’ she called back to him.
It comforted him to hear her moving through the rooms after she had showered. To know she was naked in his bedroom, drying herself on his towel, surrounded by his things. He had wine poured and candles lit when she returned in a clean singlet and sarong. Dusk had turned to night.
Sylvia shook out her wet hair. ‘It’s gorgeous being in a house full of books.’
‘You don’t have any?’
‘Yeah, but most of them are in my office.’
‘My mother’s coming out of hospital tomorrow.’
‘Great. How is she?’
‘Not so great.’
‘I’m sorry. Are you picking her up?’
‘No, Leon will.’ Clark placed the pappadams before her. ‘I’ve kept the weekend for us.’
‘Good. So have I. Yuuuum.’
He felt her watching him as she ate; he felt like a god in his shorts and t-shirt, crossing the worn lino to the refrigerator. ‘Did you have a good week?’
‘Oh, the usual.’
‘Do you actually like your job?’
‘Am I being a whinging academic?’
‘Not necessarily. I’m curious.’
‘Well, yeah, I like my job. I choose to do it. I’m lucky, really.’ She took another pappadam. ‘But sometimes I think I’ve become a boring old fart. You know, teaching north shore brats How to Steal Legally.’
‘I thought you taught Law Reform.’
‘And other lofty subjects like Contracts.’ She looked around the room. ‘You’re so neat. You’d go mad living with me. I’m a total slob.’
‘I didn’t clean especially for you.’
Sylvia hugged him while he continued his chopping. ‘You’re so sweet. What are you making?’
‘Fish steamed in banana leaves.’
‘Have you been chopping up chilli?’ She pulled up her singlet and placed his fingertips on her nipples.
Clark immediately moved one hand down, into her knickers. ‘Do you miss your old job?’
Sylvia slapped him away playfully. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes, I guess.’ She walked back into the living room. ‘You always go back to that one, don’t you, y’bloody perv.’
Clark grinned at the chopping board. ‘How long’s it been? Since you married Franco?’
‘Pretty much.’ She was out of sight, crunching on a pappadam. He heard her sifting through his music. ‘Can I put something on?’
‘Please.’
‘I love you, you know that?’ She said it almost absent-mindedly. Then Tom Waits strode out of the speaker.
‘Orphans,’ Clark exclaimed. ‘Perfect!’
‘I’ve never heard it.’
Clark brought the food out and pulled back a chair for her. She placed her hands on the back of his neck and kissed him on the lips. ‘I trust you, you know. Why’s that?’
‘Because I trust you.’
‘Okay then, so I have done a couple of jobs since I got married. A few years ago an old client rang me. He’d just been diagnosed with cancer and wanted to have a good time before starting treatment.’ Sylvia ate while she talked. ‘This is delicious.’
‘I admire his taste,’ Clark said judiciously, fighting a flash of jealousy. ‘Gives new meaning to the phrase mercy fuck.’
‘I wasn’t being kind. He was offering me a lot. Franco and I were going overseas and I was sick of always having less money than him so I agreed to see this guy. I really liked him, you know. He was one of my best regulars. A real gentleman and a generous tipper.’
‘And how was it?’
‘It was a hoot.’ Sylvia’s face lit up. ‘We had room service, French champagne, and he had a dominatrix come in on it.’
‘Really? Did she whip him?’
‘Nooo. She supervised me scrubbing him down in the spa. She was amazing, all in latex. I was like the fluffer. We were in hysterics the whole time. She fucked him with a strap-on. It was like Satyricon meets Benny Hill.’
Clark groaned. ‘Not for me, thanks.’
Sylvia said nothing.
‘Obviously his cancer didn’t get in the way.’
Sylvia concentrated on unwrapping her second piece of fish, hooking her little fingers out of the way. ‘It was melanoma. He was in a bit of pain. I think it was spreading.’
‘Did he recover?’
‘I don’t know. I never heard from him again.’ Sylvia looked uncomfortable. ‘Sorry, Clark. This isn’t really the best topic of conversation right now, is it?’
‘Did you tell Franco?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
Sylvia looked up sharply. ‘I just wanted to do something for myself. Anyway, I’m telling you now. Look at us sitting here eating dinner in our underwear. Don’t you love hot nights? I wear nothing at home in summer.’
Clark rued the judgement in his voice. Impulses and feelings speared from him like darts, too fast to rein in. He wanted to bless and curse Sylvia at the same time. ‘If my life was cut short, I’d pay every last cent just to have one night with you.’
‘It’s not the same, sweetheart.’
Why couldn’t he say anything right? Eyes vague, Sylvia shook her head as though trying to rid herself of something. Clark saw this gesture increasingly often and it made him uneasy. She had eaten everything on her plate and when he served her more, calmly took up her cutlery again. ‘I love your appetite,’ he said.
‘I love your food.’ Tom began half singing half talking about his first kiss in a gravelly voice. Sylvia wrinkled her nose. ‘This is getting boring.’
‘I’m going to the toilet. You can change it if you like.’
The sight of the seat down warmed him. Out the window a crescent moon had risen behind the she-oak, a dense black scribble on Prussian blue. Clark flicked the seat up, sank his chin to his chest and let the piss flow from his body. Sometimes when Sylvia spoke about clients with her pragmatic compassion, he was filled with admiration in the same way he was for field workers with the disadvantaged. He focused on this feeling, but the insecurity began to leak again.
He could smell tobacco and, when he returned to the living room, found Sylvia hunched in a corner of the couch, cigarette in hand. ‘You started me smoking again,’ he said with good-natured accusation, filching one of her Stuyvesants.
‘More like the other way around.’
‘No, it wasn’t.’
‘It was! You had a packet with you the last two times we saw each other.’
‘Yeah, but you had them before then. And I never have them in the house.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘You do in mine.’ Clark inhaled deeply. ‘Does —’
Sylvia looked at him expectantly.
He was going to ask her if Franco smoked but stopped himself in time. He blew a plume over her head and said huskily, ‘Nicotine’s an intellectual stimulant.’
She lit another cigarette and blew the smoke straight in his face. The photo on the packet showed yellow and black rotting teeth and the sentence SMOKING CAUSES CANCER. ‘We’ll have to get them to change their picture,’ she said. ‘Clark in the library.’
Sylvia never spoke about her husband, and Clark took this as evidence of her inevitable move towards him. By blocking Franco, Clark also kept a portion of Sylvia’s feelings at bay. Yet looking at her now, returning to her inward preoccupations as she smoked greedily, he remembered that she was a married woman with a full-time job under enormous emotional strain. He sat sideways and embraced her with all four limbs, like a crab. He saw his watch over her shoulder. Ten past ten. He had forgotten to check Blanche’s links of places for his mother. Worse, he had forgotten to ring his mother. What a selfish cunt he was. The truth was he was terrified of hospitals, and to imagine his mother in that sterile blue light was to imagine a sort of static decay, like an old daguerreotype eaten by silverfis
h. He felt sick just thinking about it. He cinched his arms around Sylvia’s wracked form. ‘We’ll be okay, cheaptart. We’ll be fine.’
Here she was at last in his bed, her total nakedness. He stretched against her, wanting every millimetre of her skin to imprint his. With the whole night ahead they still fucked like thieves, quietly and quickly, muffling each other’s orgasms. Afterwards, she curled into him and Clark drew the room tight around them like a pouch. ‘Isn’t it incredible, sweetheart? This moment?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Our bodies, our health. Isn’t it?’ He squeezed an affirmative sound out of her. ‘I feel so safe with you. My body feels happy, like it’s losing its old fears.’
‘Safety,’ she mused. ‘We long for it. Then it suffocates us.’
He woke with her clinging to him. Moving his arm from beneath her, he saw she was awake. The clock on the dresser said one a.m. ‘Why don’t we just drive off a cliff together?’ he said.
‘I’ve thought of that. It would make things a lot easier.’
He watched the blink of her eyelashes. ‘What do you get from him?’ He felt as though he had just removed his shoes on a bitumen road in forty-five-degree heat.
Sylvia thought for a while. ‘A good home. Franco’s practical. I like that because I’m not. He’s a good cook, knows how to run things. I’m hopeless at all that stuff, Clark.’
‘I can cook.’
‘You’re a great cook.’
‘But you’d have to help with the shopping.’
‘Okay.’
‘And cleaning.’
‘I’ll hire someone.’
‘What else?’
‘What?’
‘Keeps you in the marriage.’
Sylvia took his face in her hands. ‘I hate talking about this, Clark. I hate hurting you.’
‘We have to face this.’
‘Franco champions me in my career. He’s unwavering in his commitment.’
‘Are you?’
‘Obviously not,’ she almost snapped.
‘Sorry.’ In the flat adjacent, a door creaked. There was the pad of footsteps then a tap turned on. ‘Do you want to have children?’
Sylvia paused for so long that Clark thought she was falling back to sleep. ‘Yes, I think so. I know I’ve left it ridiculously late but I’m really healthy and I have a friend who had a beautiful baby at forty-two. We’ve been together for ten years.’
It was himself he had envisioned in the role of father, not fucking Franco. Every word she spoke cut a little slice from his heart. ‘He’s wealthy, isn’t he.’
‘I know I’ve been spoilt.’
‘Do you love him?’
‘I love my life with him, we get on really well, hardly even fight. But when I’m having dinner with him, I’m talking to you in my head. And when I’m in bed with him, it’s you my body wants. Just you.’
Sylvia’s breathing deepened.
‘Do you like Nell?’
‘I love Nell. And I love how you are with her. Seeing you two together. It’s gorgeous.’
She shifted onto her side and looped an arm back to take Clark’s hand. He watched her fall asleep then walked the long snaking corridors of his mind. He saw Sylvia in a room with his mother, a little party by her sickbed except Marie didn’t seem sick, just tired and enjoying the attention. Sylvia was elegant and capable, delighting the whole family. He saw her in this bed beside him in the morning; he saw her pregnant, his ear pressed to her swollen belly, Nell cooing. He lifted Sylvia’s hair and kissed her nape. He saw her in fishnets and a miniskirt, strolling through the foyer of a ritzy hotel, men’s eyes following her. Then an Albert Tucker tart was leering from a painterly alleyway, Blanche muttering whore under her breath, and Clark was protesting righteously: Don’t you dare call her that! Sylvia sauntered on, conferring with some bitch in high heels brandishing a bullwhip ... I wanted to do something for myself.
How could he stop that? It was a perfectly sound doctrine when looked at objectively (and god knows provided him with rich fodder for masturbation). It also made him want to pluck out his hair strand by strand. Why wouldn’t she go behind his back as well, and what could he offer her in recompense? He had the detritus of a failed marriage behind him, his income was negligible, he had no career, and by the time he had finished his PhD the university system would probably be so diminished that an academic path would have closed off as well. Besides which, did he really want to teach? As for the party by the sickbed, get real, Clark. His family was a total disaster zone.
Meanwhile his mother was lying in hospital battling cancer while he lay here gazing at his navel, thinking about his dick. He looked at the clock. Twenty-five past two.
The tick of each second swelled and filled the room so that time seemed to be a mass of mercury, slowly pulsing. He had not a shred of hope left that his mother would go into remission. Thinking of the inheritance and the house it would buy — and the holiday it would give him and his daughter — opened a light inside Clark as though he were walking into that actual house, sinking his full weight into an actual couch. He could buy Sylvia perfume. He could pay for the cleaner.
He couldn’t sleep. It was possible he didn’t want to, that he wanted to remember this entire night with Sylvia. In the dimness her back was like a cello, rising and falling with breath. He stroked her, moved the sheet to reveal the curve of hip, moved his body closer. He ran his finger down the cleft of her arse, found her cunt still warm and moist from sex. He could slide right into her from here, he had never fucked her from behind. His cock thickened as he thought of the dominatrix and the client. He wanted to spread Sylvia’s arse cheeks and plunge inside her. They always used condoms but it felt so good to rest the head of his cock in her crack like this, drooling on her. He imagined spraying cum inside her. He’d never found a woman who’d let him fuck her up the arse. Sylvia would surely: she had been, in her own words, such a good whore. He clenched his teeth, wanting to laugh and bite her at the same time. He imagined her groaning, pinned beneath him, opening to his thrusts. He pushed against her sphincter and she twitched and made an irritable noise. Fuck you, bitch, I’m gonna fuck you right up your arse; he pushed again, harder, she twisted away. He heard her mutter something like ... you doing? She squeezed his hand then her hand flopped straight back to sleep. Clark lay back mortified. What was he doing? Jesus! He gripped his treacherous erection so hard it hurt. He lifted the sheet gently back over Sylvia. The desire to fuck, hard and angry, churned through him, along with self-hatred.
It was past three, and in twenty-four hours Sylvia would be lying in her bed and he would be here alone. He wasn’t sure whether Franco was coming home early Monday morning or Sunday night, but the mere fact that she would be in bed with another man soon struck him as outrageous. He had put up with this for two months now. How would she feel if she was in his shoes? He hadn’t so much as shed a tear over it in front of her. Sure, he had told her he loved her, but that was kind of the opposite, wasn’t it? God, if it was her, there’d probably be weeping and wailing every night. Sylvia had said she’d never had so much as a one-night stand before, but since her anecdote tonight, Clark decided he couldn’t trust her. He remembered what Leon had said in their mother’s kitchen. He had dismissed it at the time, but now it occurred to him that he was being used, and this made him angry. No wonder he’d nearly raped her a minute ago. Not that it was exactly rape. No need to exaggerate. Tension flickered through his body like an electrical current.
He stretched his limbs. He’d found Franco on Google. He was an executive at Sony, generic wog-looking, smug businessman. Handsome, Clark supposed, but he couldn’t tell with men. The possibility that Franco had a bigger dick than him brought another tidal wave of insecurity over him. Yeah, Sylvia was insensitive about his position. That casual mention of her summer nakedness. Who did she think was there to see? Franco, of course. Nice work if you can get it. It was all ver
y well to act as though Franco didn’t exist, it made for more peaceful loving, but it was really him who didn’t exist: Clark was the bit on the side. Maybe he was no threat to Franco. God knows, Sylvia never mentioned the elephant in the room.
Hadn’t he known this all along?
On the other hand, once he had prodded Sylvia with all the subtlety of a red-hot poker, she had offered some pretty devastating information about Franco. About them.
Them, them, there was always them.
Well, you just wait, Franco. I’ll come in guns blazing, and you won’t know what’s hit you. Cuckold, Franco, I’m fucking your wife, and she loves me! How big is it, Franco? Pistols at dawn.
Clark honed in, and Franco shrivelled in the oven of his mind. When it boiled down to it, Franco was an unknown quantity, but what Clark did know was this woman beside him and for all he knew she was going to leave him and he was just another one of those things she needed to do for herself. He would have to learn how to unlove her. The clock said five to four.
Her mouth was too small, her breasts as well. She flirted with waiters. She burped out loud, followed by a pathetic Excuse me. She buried her tampons in pot plants. She spat in the gutter, casually, like a man, while Clark stiffened in outrage beside her. She never had any qualms about giving her opinion or pulling him up on things — come to think of it, she could be a real shrew. She couldn’t cook and sounded proud she couldn’t like it was some grand feminist statement or something, like saying she was a slob. She’d left her wet towel on his bed tonight and the sheets were still damp. He looked at her in the pre-dawn light. She was actually snoring faintly. He lay along the far side of the bed. And woke with her above him, leaning on one elbow, drinking water, smiling down. ‘Hallo, lover.’ He parted his lips to receive the cool liquid, then her kisses. ‘I want you inside me.’ She ran her fingers down the cleft of his arse and he came alive. The night burnt to ash behind him. Where am I? he thought as she climbed on top of him. Who are you, who are you?
Marie was dressed and sitting on the verandah when Blanche arrived. She was waiting to say goodbye to Brian. She had glimpsed him that morning through his door, sleeping the dead, unnerving sleep of the very ill. He didn’t appear on the verandah and, after leaving a note for him, Marie walked to the lift on her daughter’s arm. A wardsman wheeled a gurney past them, the patient’s face blending into the pillows. Marie was relieved to be departing, the hospital now irrevocably a place of sickness not cure, the past days an eternity. But she fretted about Brian and didn’t want to leave him. Blanche’s body beside her felt so young and firm.
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