‘Do you think these people have jobs?’ Sean asked, when Nina returned to the table.
She laughed. ‘That’s the sort of question I’d expect from a man in a suit.’
Her comment opened up yet another kitbag of worries, this time about the middle-aged values he seemed to have picked up. ‘They look so happy. Carefree.’
‘When did you last feel that way?’ Nina asked.
‘When did you?’ he replied.
‘A question in response to a question? I’m not so easily put off, Sean. Though I will answer: when I was married.’ She grimaced. ‘Actually I’m still married, so, to be more accurate, I was happy and carefree when I was living with Daniel. What about you?’
He considered lying, but what would be the point? ‘A long time ago,’ he said. ‘I was happy when we were children.’
‘When you and Ramsay were close.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘What is it about you and Zoe?’
‘It’s the wrong question.’ He spoke quickly, he wanted it to be the wrong question.
‘So tell me, what’s the right question?’
He was reluctant to feed this conversation, and desperate for a drink.
‘What is the right question?’ she said again.
His stomach was heaving, he felt quite ill, but he knew Nina wasn’t about to let him off the hook. He took a deep breath to settle his nerves. ‘What is it about Ramsay that keeps us attached? That’s what you should be asking.’
Nina looked doubtful, as indeed she should, but nonetheless she decided to go along with him. ‘All right then: what is it about Ramsay?’
Perhaps it was the purity of first love. Perhaps it was simple habit. Perhaps nostalgia. Perhaps he possessed some self-destructive germ that locked him into a lifetime of dissatisfaction. He shuffled through the possibilities; all of the most convincing ones pointed not to Ramsay, but to a blindness in him.
‘I don’t know,’ he said finally.
‘And communism? Not a prominent interest of yours as far as I know.’
He’d had the Central European desk when Soviet communism collapsed, so he was far from disinterested. Although this was not its current attraction. ‘Communism as it was meant to be,’ he said. ‘Egalitarianism, co-operative endeavour, freedom for all.’
‘And a benevolent authoritarian state to make decisions for you?’
She was probably right: he wanted to be happy and he wanted someone to make decisions for him. What was wrong with him?
‘There’s a monument in Prague,’ Nina said apropos of nothing that he could determine. ‘It’s a memorial to victims of communism. The structure comprises six or eight identical life-sized bronze figures walking down a flight of concrete steps. The figure in the front is complete, but each of the figures behind is increasingly eroded, an arm missing, a face, the torso, until the last figure has only half a body.’
He felt himself relax. How much better to be talking about monuments rather than his limping life. ‘What’s the attraction of monuments?’ he said.
She smiled. ‘That’s exactly the point of my story. Monuments make you stop. They make you think. At least the good ones do.’ Her smile broadened. ‘My TIF group, impossible as their project is, made much of this point. Monuments make you ask questions you might never have thought about, and they can force you to consider issues that previously you’ve shoved aside.’
The nausea returned. He could see where she was heading, and he didn’t want to go there. But it was too late.
‘The Prague monument shows how communism ate away individuality, it destroyed thought, it killed and maimed, it made people disappear. Deeply rooted values and beliefs are called into question. To stop in front of this monument, to look at it, to think about it, is to jolt the most ardent believer.’ She reached across the table, laced her fingers with his. ‘When have you ever stopped, Sean? When are you going to stop? And what would make you stop?’
He didn’t know what to say, would prefer not to speak at all, just wanted her to leave him alone. He was used to his constant movement – she’d call it escape – but he was used to it. And it wasn’t so bad or else Tom wouldn’t have stayed around.
As if she could read his thoughts, she added, ‘Doesn’t Tom deserve a more actively involved partner?’
‘He’s not complaining.’
‘Whether he complains or not is immaterial. Doesn’t he deserve better?’
At which point Sean couldn’t take any more. He excused himself and went to the toilet. He needed to settle himself, attend to his bruises, coat the raw bits with his usual bravado. Nina knew it was Ramsay, he knew it was Ramsay, it was always Ramsay he was running from. What sort of middle-aged man still suffers a loss inflicted on his fifteen-year-old self?
He stayed in the bathroom until he heard a gentle knock and Nina’s voice. She wrapped her arms around him as soon as he opened the door. ‘It’s because I’m worried about you,’ she said.
‘You’ve always worried about me.’
‘I’m particularly worried now. You’re not twenty any more, and you’ve already given up too much of your life to Ramsay.’ He heard her snort, it may even have been a sob. ‘I said the same thing to Zoe just the other day.’
They stood in each other’s arms in the doorway of the bathroom until a man appeared, wanting to use the toilet. When they returned to the café Nina immediately rolled out a stream of innocuous chatter – Tom and his ties, the beigeness of serviced apartments, a trip she and Sean had made to Las Vegas, and soon harmony was restored. He was about to suggest that with the serious talk over it was time for a bottle of wine, when she looked at her watch and said she had to dash. She was meeting up with her old university supervisor later in the week and she needed to buy something eye-catching to wear.
‘You’re surely not planning to restart things with old Felix, are you?’ Sean retained an image of a man impossibly old and revoltingly lecherous. He never understood what Nina saw in him. But then heterosexuality had never been his forte.
She shook her head and laughed. ‘But I am curious to see him, and I need to look my best – this is an old flame after all. I’d ask you to join me, but I know how you hate shopping. Tom would be a far better prospect.’
She kissed him goodbye, one cheek then the other. ‘You know I love you,’ she said.
As soon as she was gone he ordered a glass of wine and a bowl of fries. It didn’t make him feel any better, and it didn’t silence unwanted thoughts. He toyed with a newspaper, turning pages but not reading. The wine was quickly finished and he ordered another – he should have bought a half bottle – and sipped more slowly. Gradually he became aware of a man seated at a nearby table. This man was in even worse physical shape than he was and at least ten years older. This man was eyeing him off.
His communism project had collapsed, he had lost interest in South America, and a fat old queen was leering hopefully at him. He had no idea what to do for the rest of the day much less the rest of his life, and for a moment he was tempted, anything to kill some time. He met the man’s gaze, then quickly looked away, swallowed the rest of his wine, gave the man a ‘Sorry’ shrug, paid at the counter and headed into the heat.
The crowds surged around him, the voices and laughter were loud in the hot still air. He wished he was twenty years younger, he wished he was twenty kilos lighter, he wished he was anywhere but here. Damp with sweat and breathing heavily, he caught a tram to the city. Ten minutes later he disembarked and headed for the nearest cinema complex. An action movie was about to begin. He bought a large popcorn and an ice-cream and sat alone in the dark, eating junk and watching athletic guys leaping across the big screen.
Chapter 9. Against the Grain
Life is a capricious business. For months, a year, you limp through the days, then one morning you wake up and you know even before you leave the bed that you feel different. There’s no identifiable explanation, no event or unexpected meeting, you just know the smog has lifted. Nina awoke on the
day of her second meeting with the TIF group and she felt – the word actually burst from her mouth – brilliant.
A cool change had blown in overnight and a breeze from the west wafted in through the window. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, and in the plane trees beyond her balcony a flock of rainbow lorikeets was raucous in the fresh morning air. Shortly there would be breakfast with Felix Hovnanian, followed by her meeting with the TIF group, then an afternoon to do whatever she fancied, and finally dinner with Zoe.
Well-intentioned friends had tried to console her with platitudes. Time heals all wounds, they said, eventually she’d recover from Daniel’s desertion. Such comforts had always struck her as nonsense: time alone did nothing for your pains, you had to work the time, fill it, make changes – it was these that produced the healing. But the fact remained that inexplicably, on this late January morning she awoke feeling like her old self. It wasn’t Felix, she expected nothing from him other than a pleasant couple of hours reminiscing and catching up. As for the TIF meeting, the uneasiness she had experienced when first she met the group had not diminished. There was no obvious reason for her change of mood, and in the end she stopped searching for one. Just be grateful, she told herself, that finally you’ve moved on.
She settled at the table with her computer and coffee, scrolled through her essay on recent memorialising trends, made a few insignificant changes, and wondered why she felt so unsure about a document she circulated to prospective clients as a matter of course. While the TIF monument had a different focus from her other projects, the result the committee wanted – an enduring structure emerging from current interests, designed to impart information and understanding to contemporary populations – was the same. She had promised to send the document before the meeting, now she decided against it – for no good reason she could determine, just a vague sense of not wanting to restrict or influence the proceedings, vague and illogical, given her job was all about influencing and shaping proceedings. The fact remained that the project was impossible and she was uneasy, but there was something about the TIF undertaking, or perhaps it was the committee itself, that nudged at her. A week after a meeting that had been unequivocally negative, rather than withdrawing from the project as she’d intended, she was actually looking forward to seeing these people again.
She gathered her things and left the flat. After weeks of heat, the fresh breeze was blissful; she soaked up the cool air as she strode to the shops. It was peak hour at the South Yarra eateries; tables were full, people clustered at counters waiting for takeaway coffee, and as she passed the open doors she was rushed with conversation, the wheeze of espresso machines, a jangle of music. Outside and clogging the footpaths were more tables and chairs. Here sat business people and school kids, parents with babies, and plenty of tight-skinned, blonde-haired, lycra-clad women who looked as if they’d been turned out by the same factory.
She found the café where she was to meet Felix and chose an outdoor table; it would be hot again by the afternoon and she was determined not to miss a moment of the heavenly respite. She pulled the table into dappled shade, had scarcely settled herself when she saw him. Unmistakably Felix. His walk and carriage hadn’t changed, twenty-plus years appeared to have left him unscathed. Although as he drew closer she noticed the lines on his face and the thinning hair, and the hands he stretched towards her were mottled with age. And when they embraced, the skin was loose beneath the fine material of his shirt, and she smelled that must of age that no amount of cologne can entirely hide.
‘Let me look at you,’ he said, holding her hands and stepping back.
They took each other in. Lines and thinning hair notwithstanding, Felix still looked a good ten years younger than the seventy-something he must now be.
‘You’re as gorgeous as ever,’ he said.
His facial expression – unambiguous appreciation – was as familiar as if she had seen it yesterday. In fact, being with him, being with him now, it was as if the intervening time had collapsed.
She hugged him again. ‘And you look so good I’m suspecting a pact with the devil.’
He laughed. ‘A pact with a personal trainer is more like it,’ he said. ‘And a new woman in my life.’
‘How old is she?’ The question just slipped out. She saw the sudden shift in his expression.
‘You always knew where to land a punch.’ It was not a compliment.
‘That’s what my husband says.’ She noticed her use of the present tense and decided against retreat. ‘He likes it, considers it one of my finer qualities. So? What’s her age?’
Mandy was thirty-one and a mature-age student. Not so mature, Nina thought, but kept that to herself. In fact, realising that Felix’s Mandy and Daniel’s Sally were of a similar age she decided to slot Mandy into a no-go folder as she once used to do with Felix’s wife. She should pop Sally in there as well. As for her present-tense husband, it surprised her that he came more easily to her lips than the ex who had so heartlessly dumped her.
A waiter arrived to take their orders and effectively closed the topic. Felix chose a yoghurt-based health drink and a bowl of fresh berries. She decided on French toast and a large cappuccino. Felix looked aghast, but she didn’t care, she felt like indulging herself. Every Sunday morning when she was growing up, her father would cook French toast for the family, often for the Blakes as well; it was not simply his speciality, it was the only meal apart from barbecues he ever cooked. When Daniel heard the story he decided to take over the role of French toast specialist. He appointed Nina chief taster and after some dedicated experimentation arrived at the perfect recipe. Thereafter, every couple of weeks he would make his French toast for their Sunday breakfast. This past year the mere thought of French toast had made her want to vomit, but today that too had changed. And when the food arrived she lavished it with maple syrup under the disapproving gaze of Felix.
That gaze of his, it was different. Something about the eyes she had once so admired, no longer heavy-lidded with the world-weary dark rings, they were smoother and smaller, the lids tighter and the orbit paler. And the chin looked different as well, far too chiselled for the sagging neck. Surely not cosmetic surgery? Yet how else to explain his appearance? Felix was entering old age with a thirty year old, even a man with less vanity would be tempted by surgery. And Felix had always been vain – she wasn’t the first student he’d slept with and clearly, given young Mandy, she wasn’t the last. His luckless wife ( Janet? Jill? June?), what a lot she’d had to contend with. And now she inquired after her, how the poor woman was faring with this rupture so late in life.
Felix said her sympathy was unwarranted. ‘The divorce was mutual.’ He hesitated, then he shrugged, ‘What the hell – I’m past caring. Julie was two-timing me. She’d had someone else for years. A girlfriend.’ He spat the word out as if it were mouldy food. ‘My wife has decided she’s a lesbian.’
Nina burst out laughing. ‘It serves you right.’
‘She’d been cheating on me for fifteen years.’
‘With just the one woman?’
‘Of course there was only one woman.’
But Nina could see by his troubled expression that it had never before occurred to him that his wife might have been a serial adulterer, just like him.
‘Fifteen years,’ he continued. ‘Although it would have been far worse if she’d been cheating with a man. In fact,’ and now he was smiling, ‘I saw no reason why we shouldn’t continue: she could have her girlfriend and I could have mine.’ He dipped his voice to a confidential low. ‘I imagined some rather tantalising possibilities. But Julie had other plans. She and the girlfriend are hiking somewhere in South America as we speak.’
From his wife, ‘the ex-wife’ he corrected, the conversation moved to his honorary work at the university, then an itemising of recent lectures and consultancies, accounts of his sons (both married, both successful lawyers), to political and social issues. And all the time she was feeding him questions he did not
ask her a single thing. Although he did offer the information that he’d noticed she had failed in her bid to manage a memorial project to the Armenian Genocide. ‘I think it was somewhere in America,’ he said, and she didn’t bother to correct him.
They differed on what to do about global warming, they differed on the troubles in East Africa; he wanted to export democracy everywhere, she wanted to make the case for other forms of political organisation; he supported the lesser evil approach to troublesome regimes, she did not. They argued about the future of memory in an age of on-tap information, they disagreed on the new directions in university education. There was not a single issue on which they agreed.
He said she’d acquired a certain hardness. ‘You used to be such a sweet girl,’ he said.
But it was not hardness, rather she no longer hung on his every word.
Their breakfast lasted less than an hour. There was no warm spontaneous embrace when he left, just a peck to her cheek before he hurried off.
Nina lingered at the café for another coffee. Perhaps if this meeting had occurred earlier in her visit she would be feeling sad and disappointed, but on this nova vita day – that’s truly how it felt – she was greatly amused, and satisfied too: one of the best means of confirming you’ve not wasted the years is to revisit an old lover. The affair with Felix had come at the right time but, more importantly, she had moved on at the right time.
A few minutes later, after settling the bill (Felix had paid only for his share), she made her way back to the apartment. There she prepared herself for the TIF meeting, including a jacket and proper shoes rather than sandals. She felt protected by the clothes, and then wondered why on earth she should feel exposed in the first place.
She had not checked her email earlier and with plenty of time to spare she opened her laptop. Later she would tell Sean it was as if she expected the email, for there was no shock when his name appeared in her inbox.
The Memory Trap Page 17
