She was already there, standing at the rear of the shop reading. She raised her head as he entered, a smile filled her face; she replaced the book on the shelf and walked towards him. She was dressed all in black except for turquoise loops in her ears. She was still smiling when she reached him.
‘The colour of your eyes,’ he said, pointing at her earrings.
He had chosen a neighbourhood trattoria, a place with good food and an alcove set apart from the main dining space. He had booked a table in this area; quiet and private, it was as if they were alone on their own small island. They talked through two courses and a bottle of wine. He was about to order a second bottle when she said she never drank more than a glass or two, she was what they call in Australia a two-pot screamer. He decided against another bottle and instead ordered a single glass of the house burgundy, forcing himself to sip slowly as she talked about her family, her sister, Nina, now in London, her music, her work as a teacher, and a childhood friend currently in New York, a pianist who was apparently among the best. Elliot decided to check out the concert program in the city over the next couple of months, find a Ramsay Blake performance and surprise her with tickets.
With the drink finished and an urge for another he decided it was time for his gift. He handed the book to her, saw her surprise and, when she opened it, her pleasure. She looked across at him; her gaze, so steady and intense, held him fast. Such a thoughtful gift, she said, a beautiful gift.
She leafed through the book; she knew most of the poets, but nearly all the poems were new to her. ‘New York in a folder. It’s wonderful.’
‘Poetry for Zoe.’ He tried to introduce a lightness to his voice, but he stumbled on her name.
‘Read me one of your favourites.’
He took the book and turned the pages to Nikki Giovanni’s ‘Just a New York Poem’. His hands were shaking, blood was thrashing in his ears, his legs wouldn’t support him if he were to stand. He had given lectures to audiences of several hundred, but he had never been so nervous as he was now. He hardly heard himself say the title or the poet’s name, and then suddenly the jittering dropped away and he and Zoe truly were on their own small island.
i wanted to take
your hand and run with you
together toward
ourselves down the street to your street
i wanted to laugh aloud
and skip the notes past
the marquee advertising “women
in love” past the record
shop with “The Spirit
In The Dark” past the smoke shop
past the park and no
parking today signs
past the people watching me in
my blue velvet and i don’t remember
what you wore but only that i didn’t want
anything to be wearing you
i wanted to give
myself to the cyclone that is
your arms
and let you in the eye of my hurricane and know
the calm before
and some fall evening
after the cocktails
and the very expensive and very bad
steak served with day-old baked potatoes
and the second cup of coffee taken
while listening to the rejected
violin player
maybe some fall evening
when the taxis have passed you by
and that light sort of rain
that occasionally falls
in new york begins
you’ll take a thought
and laugh aloud
the notes carrying all the way over
to me and we’ll run again
together
toward each other
yes?
He could not say at what point in the poem she put her hand over his, but it was there when he finished reading, and so it remained for the rest of the evening.
The next three-and-a-half weeks passed in talk and laughter, private poetry readings and love-making. They would go to one of the local eateries and it felt new, the neighbourhood shops were new, the streets and parks he had criss-crossed for twelve years were new, conversation was new, poetry engraved on him as only memorising can do was new. He read to her, she read to him, they read together.
‘Reading poetry like this,’ she said, ‘is like musicians playing duets.’
And the sex was unlike anything he had ever experienced. He had always held that sex was a purely physical activity, supplying much the same sort of satisfaction as a good meal or a run in the park. He used to deride the expression ‘to make love’: to convert sex to an emotional state, he had long believed, was oxymoronic. But with Zoe he changed his mind. She kissed him after their second date and again at the end of their third – both lunches. The fourth date was another dinner. He walked her home, and instead of the expected kiss in the lobby, she invited him up to the apartment. That night and again in the morning he made love for the first time in his life. He made love nearly every day for the next three weeks. To touch her was to show he loved her, to be touched by her fuelled his love. She was a strong and vigorous lover, yet she could be slow and gentle and almost unbearably arousing as well. Zoe Jameson ran love’s repertoire of emotions.
And then she went away.
He could not believe she would leave, and once she was gone he was terrified she wouldn’t return. She was visiting a friend, she said, a school friend from Australia on holiday in San Francisco. And even when she explained that this had been her very best friend at school, it made no difference. Elliot did not want to be away from her, not for a week, not for a single day.
‘Your friend might persuade you to return to Australia.’
Elliot knew he sounded pitiful but he couldn’t stop himself. And when Zoe explained she could not possibly leave New York for who would look after the cockatiels, it was not the response he wanted. Who would look after him? Desperate to maintain any connection with her, he offered to look after the birds, but she had already arranged for her pianist friend to do that. This Ramsay Blake could go to her apartment whenever he liked, wander her space, sit in her chair, drink her coffee, stare out her window. Her old friend, Ramsay, could spend the entire week in her apartment; while he, her new lover, was severed completely.
Zoe left for a holiday with one old friend, leaving another in charge of her New York life, and Elliot slumped. It would have helped if he could telephone but she said she did not know where she would be staying. She would call him, she said. But – and her voice was firm – it was only a week. A lost week as it turned out. It coincided with the Thanksgiving break. He had thought she would be in New York so he had told his parents he’d not be spending the holiday with them; by the time she revealed her plans it was impossible to get a flight. And besides, he didn’t want to be with his family in Peoria. If he couldn’t be with Zoe, he wanted to be alone and miserable in New York.
He had his first drink contemporaneous with her flight taking off. There followed the bender to beat all benders. He bought the day’s booze in the morning and returned to the apartment. He didn’t leave until the next morning when he went again to the liquor store. He drank bourbon, he drank vodka, and he kept a supply of the white wine Zoe favoured and drank a bottle of that each day too. He didn’t bother with running off the damage, he didn’t go to the gym. There was no point. The lost weekend stretched into a week.
She called him two days before she was due home. He didn’t make it to the phone in time – and fortunate for him, as he lacked the capacity to form words much less make any sense. Her voice on the answering machine was sunny and loving; she sounded everything he was not. He replayed the message again and again. He drank faster than his usual fast and finished the day’s quota by six o’clock. He went out for more. And there in the street outside the liquor store he paced and battled. His booze-battered brain couldn’t argue, his booze-battered brain had been silenced. His body was straining towards the s
tore, but something kept him dithering on the sidewalk – afterwards he would say it was the basic human drive for survival – and eventually led him home.
It took all of two days to sober up; he remembered nothing of the time except that sobering up required every ounce of his energy. He swallowed a slug of vodka before he took a cab to La Guardia to meet her. It was Dutch courage, he told himself, and then a promise uttered aloud: my last Dutch courage.
Fall moved into winter, Zoe thrived in the icy days. She would spend hours outside, walking through wind, sleet and snow.
Elliot laughed at her. ‘The weather’s keeping all sensible people indoors –’ he was trying to rub the warmth back into her body, ‘and the mad Australian’s flirting with frostbite.’
Sense, she said, had nothing to do with it. After a lifetime of boiling Australian Januarys, New York in winter was not simply novel, it was actually exciting. As she walked the wintry streets, her face freezing, her body camouflaged in New York winter clothes, she had a sense of being inside a Woody Allen film: it was fun and it was liberating.
One day after a fall of snow, she and Elliot were walking together in Riverside Park and suddenly he went down on one knee.
‘Marry me,’ he said to her. ‘Please, Zoe Jameson, be my wife.’
There was an eagerness in his face, and love too – this man loved her – and his grip on her hand was strong, all of Elliot was strong. She looked into his shining face and everything seemed possible.
Four months after their first meeting, Elliot and Zoe were married. If she’d had her way, the wedding would have taken place early in the morning in a frosty Riverside Park. Instead they settled for a quiet civil ceremony with dinner afterwards, just a small gathering with Elliot’s parents, his sister and brother-in-law and some friends from the faculty. Zoe didn’t invite Ramsay; she could not have married Elliot or indeed anyone if he was present. But with George now arrived and the two of them in Boston that weekend, Ramsay couldn’t have come anyway. Zoe had told him a week earlier she was to be married. He’d been curious enough to ask about the groom, but showed no surprise nor, she noted, as if to drive the truth home, did he show any regret. He wished her well, and he sounded genuine. He wanted her to be happy, he said.
The evening before the wedding Zoe rang her parents in Melbourne. She had mentioned Elliot a few times in her letters but nothing to suggest the relationship was serious.
‘Are you sure?’ her mother said. And – ‘What’s the rush?’ asked her father. But given her parents had married within months of meeting each other, their questions, despite their underlying concern, carried little weight.
And she rang her sister in London. Nina was far more direct. ‘What about Ramsay?’ she said. ‘You’ve loved him your entire life. You came to New York to be with him. You’d have followed him to the ends of the earth if he’d asked you. What’s happened with Ramsay?’
Zoe pulled out her prepared response. ‘Ramsay’s married to his music,’ she said. ‘We’re each other’s best friend and that won’t change. He’s happy for me.’
‘So he and Elliot have met?’
‘Of course they’ve met,’ Zoe lied. And then lied some more. ‘Ramsay’s going to be our witness. Our best man.’
Elliot and Zoe flew to Paris for their honeymoon, ten days in the city of romance. It was during this first extended period together that Elliot learned of Zoe’s practice of slotting her life into compartments; he learned too that some of those compartments were closed to him. They would spend the morning sight-seeing, then stroll to one of the Paris gardens for a makeshift lunch of bread, cheese and fresh fruit. And then she would disappear; off by herself for a couple of hours and he had no idea where she went or what she did. Later, when he realised the situation between her and Ramsay, he guessed her time alone was actually time spent with Ramsay: in her thoughts, her daydreams, postcards, letters, even the occasional phone call. But this was much later. When she left him during those afternoons in Paris he felt hurt: this was their honeymoon, every minute in her company would not have been too much for him. He suffered but he cautioned patience: they were at the beginning of their marriage; as they grew closer, as they built their own shared life, so she would invite him into all that mattered to her. The reasoning meant he didn’t badger her but neither did it make the hours alone any easier. He’d mute his hurt with coffee and cognac, but his mind wouldn’t stay away from her, his body wouldn’t either; he wanted her, he wanted her all the time. And he needed her to want him in the same way.
Then she would return and everything was perfect again. In fact, the first two years of their marriage, the New York years, were happy. Although again, when he finally realised the situation with Ramsay, the happiness might have had less to do with himself and more to do with Ramsay’s being elsewhere. And he was at the university every day; Zoe could have her couple of hours alone, longer if she wanted, without it impinging on him. But when they were together it was as if nothing could separate them. He loved her, he believed there was nothing he did not want to know about her. And she loved him. Later he would question if she’d ever loved him, but at the time he felt her love, and in its glow he grew in his own estimation.
He published his biography of Elizabeth Bishop during their first year together and finished his article on Hannah Arendt. He gave up the idea of writing a book about the friendship between Arendt and McCarthy, and began instead his research on Djuna Barnes. He had never been so productive. And he and Zoe travelled, not only in the US, but places in Africa and Central Europe where he’d never been before. And in all that time there were no prolonged benders, although the occasional lost night – nothing to worry Zoe, nor him, for that matter – but increasing in frequency as the months passed. It was one of many reasons that made the job in Australia attractive.
Centres for biographical studies were being established in universities throughout the Western world. Tom Wolfe’s ‘me decade’ had spilled into the ‘me and you decades’: it seemed people could not get enough of other people’s lives. Specialist celebrity magazines devoted to gossip filled the newsstands, and there was a host of new TV shows that took the rather innocent Candid Camera of the sixties and seventies, tizzied it up and aimed it at the lives of anyone keen to notch up fifteen minutes of fame. Biography was booming and universities seized on this as a means of boosting dwindling enrolments in the humanities. Australia was following the trend.
In 1992 Elliot and Zoe arrived in Melbourne where Elliot had been appointed director of the newly established Centre of Biographical Studies. Zoe was pregnant and keen to be home, and Elliot was keen to be wherever she wanted to be. And it wasn’t a bad idea to put some distance between himself and his old drinking mates. Impending fatherhood, a new job and a new country would put him on the wagon and keep him there. These were his thoughts as he and Zoe settled into their new life in Melbourne. Zoe’s parents embraced him, Zoe’s friends warmed to him, his colleagues welcomed him, the future stretched ahead with neither blemish nor shadow.
Chapter 8. Cravings
1.
It is just after nine in the morning and Elliot is seated in his study. His Elizabeth Hardwick lies in a neat stack on the desk. He rests his hands on the manuscript: five years of work and at last it is finished.
Once he would have shared this milestone with Zoe. It was French champagne and oysters when his Elizabeth Bishop was finished, and a night spent at a swank hotel when the contract was signed; there was more champagne when the proofs were corrected, and a meal at New York’s finest when his advance copy arrived. With the first complete draft of his Djuna Barnes, there was a celebration to mark that too, but he ruined it – his drinking was off the rails by then. The evening had ended with Zoe grabbing the manuscript and throwing it at the wall.
‘Drink with your famous dead women,’ she had shouted. ‘They liked booze as much as you.’
By the time Djuna was finished he had stopped drinking, but he didn’t know how to celebra
te without alcohol, and besides, by then Zoe wasn’t living with him.
Hardwick wasn’t a drinker, he’d like Zoe to know, but she isn’t interested in his work these days; Zoe isn’t interested in him. And in this, as with most things, they’re poles apart. For no matter where he is, whether alone or in company, working or not, yesterday or tomorrow, and as his laptop slips into the photo library screen-saver, at this very moment, he feels the pull of his wife.
Photos float across the screen and he tightens with anticipation as images of the children, friends, colleagues, picnics, parties pass in front of him. He’s willing the photos of Zoe to appear, pictures from their early days in New York, photos taken on the honeymoon in Paris, on their various vacations, at their first house in Melbourne, Zoe with the babies, Zoe with her cello, with her students, but the Zoe pictures are mixed in with all the others and he’s too impatient for chance to produce her. He opens his photo library and selects the special Zoe folder he has made: three hundred and ninety-seven photographs and every single one of her. He sets his preferences to slide show and sits back to watch his wife.
Almost immediately one of his favourites appears, the two of them sitting together on the bench in Riverside Park where he had first seen her. There’d been a fall of snow and they are framed by the crisp white cold, the two of them swaddled in their winter coats and Zoe’s red scarf looped around both their necks; and a short time later when they resumed their walk, he’d knelt in the snow and asked her to marry him. Here’s a photo taken in Paris, a crisp spring day, the same red scarf and the two of them – newlyweds – embracing beneath the marvellous metal of the Eiffel Tower. And a lovely sequence of photos taken during an afternoon on the Chobe River, idyllic at the time but in retrospect … and he shakes off the thought: enough of retrospective wisdom, he doesn’t want to lose the happy times. That trip to Botswana was particularly special because Zoe, far more interested in cities than nature, had planned it knowing how much it would appeal to him. And it was during their cruise on the Chobe River that she’d turned to him and said how happy she was. ‘Happier than I ever thought possible.’
The Memory Trap Page 15
