Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘I don’t think I could eat lunch.’

  ‘Nor I. We could go to my house . . .’

  They looked at each other. She pictured the marital bedroom, the atmosphere of the departed wife. For trysts between respectable, known people, hotels were not an easy possibility in this city. She was told that some people went for their trysts to the nearby town of Queanbeyan, where, she thought, there would be even more chance of being observed, but less of being recognised.

  She said, ‘I can’t invite you to my house – I have daily help today.’ She should have put Emily off.

  The waiter now appeared and stood with a pad.

  Richard looked at her and then at the waiter, and said, ‘We shan’t be eating. I’ll sign a chit for the drinks.’

  The waiter said, ‘Very well, sir.’

  When the waiter had gone, she said, ‘How would that feel – for you – going to your house?’

  ‘As insensitive as it may sound, I don’t think it really matters. Maybe she would be happy for me. And the dead are blind.’

  She looked at him, testing his resolve, and said, ‘Let’s go now.’

  In the very feminine pink and grey bedroom – chintz and lace coverlets, and lace-edged pillow covers – there was absolute domestic order, which shattered as they moved onto the bed together and embraced, kissing, murmuring. She sensed that he had not slept in the bed since his wife had died, that he had been sleeping elsewhere, that this room had not been used since her death, and all thought then dissolved.

  It had been a long time since she had kissed so passionately and giddily. Her shoes dropped from her feet to the floor.

  Her dress was up and her stocking tops and suspenders were exposed, and in seamless, easy movements, she reached down and released her stockings. She rolled them off and pushed her corsette and her silk and lace pants down. She kicked them off, all so easily and so readily, and she made herself look down at his penis, so plump and stiff and wide and long. As if in the one same easy movement he entered her deeply and she felt its wideness inside her, filling her. She made a gasping cry.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said, as if losing his mind, as if in overwhelming pain, which she knew he was not.

  And she too gasped involuntarily and held to him, pushing herself to him to allow the deepest possible entry, so desperately wanting him in her. How elemental this act of penetration was. How it changed her sense of her body and drowned her mind.

  He was pure male; it had been so long. She came out of the daze of it and thought, Oh, so different from Ambrose’s cupid cock, which, in all honour, had countless times also given its own true pleasures. But never like this.

  Again and again, his penis went in and then back, almost out of her. Fleetingly, she thought of the movement of the rocking horse, and for a flash she saw him making love to his wife, which only further charged her lechery.

  And she then saw vibrantly the existential centrality of the penis and of the vagina in all their maleness and femaleness – the inescapable relationship of these to procreation and the unique sexual charge of it. Of course, there were many other sensual pleasures of the body when conception was not possible, but this one of penetration was imbued with this inescapable centrality, and the brief, passing consciousness of this existential commonplace thrilled and roused her.

  In the living room, he poured Scotches for them, adding soda. She wrapped herself in one of his wife’s silk kimonos, which she had taken from the wardrobe. It was an unhesitating desecration of whatever propriety still remained. She felt that the perversity of it would destroy all restraints, which might assert themselves from either of their lives or from this house and its history. He was in his bathrobe, as he would have been had she been his wife. Perhaps it was his own act of thoughtless desecration. As was coming to the house for their tryst, to the undisturbed marital bedroom, now a lustful mess scented with wisps of their smells.

  As they drank, they held hands and snuggled in the large armchair, like young people.

  They were very pleased with themselves and kept smiling. She had put her silk and lace pants back on and was running with his semen, which was staining through onto the wife’s kimono. She had drawn all that he had, twice.

  She had not given a thought to the pointless diaphragm in her handbag, but had fantasised that, by some freak, indulgent forgiveness of nature, she had fallen pregnant to him. She had never felt that yearning until now.

  ‘That kimono has enchantingly become you,’ he said. He seemed guiltlessly entranced by their irreverent sexual play, her violation of his dead wife’s clothing. Everything they did entranced them; they were omnipotent.

  She saw a children’s toy truck in the corner of the room and looked at it dispassionately, untroubled.

  It reminded her of the rocking horse. Interestingly, her feelings about the horse in her life with Ambrose were also untroubling – passion had its own indifferent conscience.

  In the fading light of the afternoon, he once more penetrated her deeply, there on the lounge floor. She again drew his semen from him, and this time heard herself say, impulsively, ‘Give me a child,’ as if a line from a play. As soon as she had said it, she had felt him, with a forceful thrust, spurt uncontrollably, and he gave out a huge, affirming cry. She fully climaxed and collapsed into his arms, breathing rapidly. And for the first time she said his name and he said hers, in that worshipful way of lovers.

  As they lay there recovering, neither of them mentioned what she had said about having a child – it belonged in the playlet of their intercourse. Every sexual intercourse was a playlet.

  She had never been pregnant.

  She saw that Ambrose’s infertility – and his sexual nature – had in some small way realigned the sex she’d had with him; removed it from its inherent connection with procreation. She had never spoken those words, and now they had been spoken too late in her life, but not too late for her to experience the unique charge of saying it.

  Later, in the dim afternoon, without putting on the lights, he used the telephone to talk to his children at their bedtime – something she had never observed before. She lounged in the armchair, her damp pants and breasts exposed, aroused and faintly, pleasingly sore, as he talked to them and watched her. While talking to the children he blew her a kiss. Another desecration.

  She knew she was not returning to Arthur Circle that night and had to call Ambrose. When Richard had finished his call, she went to him and took the phone. ‘I may as well get this over with.’ He asked if she wanted him to leave the room and she shook her head, pointing to the armchair.

  She told Ambrose that she would not be back at Arthur Circle that evening.

  ‘Not coming home?’

  ‘I am with a man.’ The sexuality of the day made her feel so powerful and merciless, but merciless without malice.

  A silence.

  Then he said, ‘I see.’

  ‘The knee-touching man.’ She smiled across at Richard.

  ‘Oh. Has he surfaced, then?’

  She looked at the man seated in the sofa with his Scotch, his carelessly draped robe, his hairy legs. ‘He has surfaced.’ Her eyes roved observantly around the furniture and decoration of the house as she spoke, all of it unacceptable to her taste, knowing that, apart from this brief time, it would have no place in her life. She again saw the toy truck. They had wilfully desecrated all this.

  ‘This is not for one night,’ she said.

  ‘How can you know?’

  ‘I know.’ As she said it she knew this to be a bold, reckless assertion to throw at the world. One that said, Dare to contradict us.

  ‘I see.’

  Silence. Ambrose and she had some time in the past spoken of rules for this sort of thing. It had been accepted that it could happen, and it had happened on his side – he had been the first one to stray – and on hers in Vienna, in that strange regulation-free time of victory after the war. She thought the rule was to be home before morning. But this, she knew, was going to
be different. The rules no longer applied. Passion tore up all rules. After their love-making during the afternoon there had been no sense of fading, no urge to be gone. None of the relief of casual encounters, where there was a shared knowing that each was now sated and they would part, perhaps never to meet again, and that it would never matter.

  Her man with hairy legs did not look at her, although she knew he was listening to her half of the conversation.

  Ambrose said, ‘Had enough of this old nancy-boy?’

  ‘No. Not like that.’

  ‘Wait. See how this turns out with the man-who-touches-women-on-their-knees-at-dinner-parties. We should wait on the turn of events, should we not?’

  She sensed Ambrose was banking on it being a fling.

  ‘I know how it will turn out.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘How do I know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘One knows.’

  She then saw that, realistically, the affair was not at this point in time proper in any way, shape or form, no matter how proper this man might be. A proper man required a proper woman. Would she be confident with a proper man? There was a proper woman who walked a crooked mile, and smiled a crooked smile . . . No, she was not a crooked woman; she would be able now to show that. She wanted a life with a proper man.

  She put her hand into the pocket of the robe and her fingers encountered a bracelet. She took it out while holding the phone receiver, and listened to Ambrose’s controlled comments and to his silences. She looked at the bracelet, observed it – silver, expensively made – and then slipped it on, squeezing it over her hand.

  She pulled up the robe sleeve and looked at it on her arm, phone away from her ear.

  Taken off by his dead wife at some time, perhaps while washing dishes. Or polishing.

  Prurience danced through her; she was warm with it. She should not like this prurience; she should feel something for this dead woman, this dead wife.

  She didn’t feel a thing for the dead wife.

  Her arm was tired from holding the phone and she switched hands, tired of talking to him when she wanted to be elsewhere.

  He said, ‘Await your return, then. Titillation can sometimes lead us to stray too far. Worth doing, though. I applaud.’

  She changed ears. The phone hit her earring and she realised that she still had them on, that she’d had them on throughout all the lovemaking. ‘Upsets the applecart, somewhat.’

  She felt abstractly sorry, but did not feel any of the pain that she was inflicting. Her feelings were irrepressibly wild and perverse. Her attention was almost fully ingested in the stomach of her new love, as a bird in the belly of a snake.

  She said, ‘I’ll go now. Try to be stout about it.’

  ‘I shall be insouciant,’ he said, ‘rather than stout.’

  Oh, so much his word. A true pain of their love-past went through her heart, but it did so quickly and was gone.

  ‘Try for insouciance.’ If only all this ending business could be bypassed, flown over quickly. It could never be bypassed.

  He then said, ‘Have you consulted the Book of Crossroads?’

  This touched her, although she saw it was an attempt by Ambrose to confound her, to break her out of this course of action, to keep her attached to him by invoking the lore of their love. She realised that was exactly what she had done – had consulted the Book of Crossroads and this was the answer.

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked back at the man in the chair. Perhaps, she was misreading this situation; perhaps, it was simply sexual solace that this man wanted, a form of grieving. He smiled at her, and by the smile she knew that he was as entangled as she.

  Someone had to hurt. ‘I am going now,’ she said. ‘We will talk more about everything.’

  ‘Yes, go now. We do not have to talk about it. If you so wish.’

  She held the receiver, waiting for him to put it down at his end, but he didn’t. Biting her lip for decisiveness, she gently put it down.

  Wearing the bracelet of the dead wife, she went then to the man in the armchair, allowing the kimono to fall open to show her lace pants and her breasts, feeling the dampness of her pants. She was proud that her breasts had not dropped.

  She could again feel lewd, and she thought, Oh, I love it so. Even if someone, a dear one, had to hurt.

  ‘How did he take it?’

  She made a movement with her mouth, her shoulder, and gave a resigned smile. She knew Ambrose was frightened and hurting and that no insouciance could deal with that special fear of rejection.

  The man held his arms to her and she saw he was erect, and she pulled apart his robe, going onto him in the chair. She knelt on him, lowering herself onto his penis, which slipped up into her wetness, and she felt youthfully lithe. As she wrapped her arms around his head, the bracelet bit into his neck and her wrist. She had the strange physical sensation that the penis was hers.

  The next two days unfolded in a fog of lasciviousness and they did not go to their places of work.

  She did not contact Ambrose.

  She observed how ready she had been for something to envelope her like this, to arouse her to her full dormant womanhood, to engulf her, to smash up what had been her private life, which she saw now in all its aberrance and which, since returning to Australia, had become edged now and then with the fear of being exposed.

  Although she was now in one sense being aberrant in another way, she felt unthreatened by her recklessness and she delighted in it.

  They ate eggs in all their ways, and tinned food on toast, and they drank alcohol and played music, but did not seem to become very drunk and nor did they have hangovers.

  They talked science, uranium, the attempted banning of the communists. They even discussed the Kinsey reports on male sexual behaviour and on female behaviour, which, of course, no one had really read apart from the conclusions. She mentioned to Richard that she had combed the report on male behaviour and found no reference to cross-dressing. She said she did not know what to make of this omission. Was cross-dressing beyond the pale, even for Kinsey? She had raised this as a sophisticated and objective observation, but had watched him to see what he might say or do, to perhaps see if she had not ended up catching the same sort of fish. He said nothing, made no joke. Richard had been at the Legacy concert and remembered Ambrose’s act. His only comment was, ‘He was very good, very convincing.’ Not that the act had, for most people, anything to do with Ambrose’s personal life.

  He was something of a free-thinker, but inclined more towards the bonds of life, and a life woven around kinship and public service. He liked the customs and unfolding intricacies of being a father and of having children growing around him. He was not a bohemian. He was not another Robert, who had pretended to the bohemian life but had turned out to be something else. A poseur. He always talked to win, never to learn. This was not like her marriage with Robert at all.

  She told him of the problem of her brother, the communist, and he said that it did not matter; there would be no trouble as long as political good sense was maintained. He would manage all that. He spoke with the voice of a giant, promising her everything she desired and needed, and she smiled. She believed he was a giant and she believed she was a giantess, too. She felt powerful again, as if she could ask and get what she wanted from the world. For herself, for them.

  For her, this would include a family. It was a thought that had arrived and introduced itself. The children were metaphorically playing in the wings of their passion. It appealed to her mightily.

  ‘There will have to be a decent time pass before anything formal or public about us can occur,’ he said. ‘It’s a bugger.’

  He wanted to parade her, yet he was also perhaps glad of the legal obstacle, giving them both a time to cool off.

  ‘I understand that. I know that divorce takes time.’

  She had said the word. He didn’t flinch.

  ‘Quite a few de facto relationships around the town. Ev
en in the public service. Modern times. Menzies has Barwick looking at making divorce easier. But it’s about the children, the loss of their mother – time will have to pass. ’

  She nodded. ‘Of course.’

  He said, ‘There’ll have to be a time before I introduce you to the kids.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Everything will go well. They’ll love you.’

  ‘We’ll take it slowly.’ She did not want to take it slowly, but she saw that it would have to be a slow thing.

  ‘You will go back to your house?’ he asked.

  Of course, this would make Richard uneasy. Ambrose would go on as if nothing was to change permanently.

  The big empty house. Ambrose and she had never filled it; they had never occupied it. They had rattled around in it. They never wore their house, in the Greek sense of a house being a frame for oneself; a stage on which we are supposed to act out the eternal drama of intimacy and procreation. Life and death.

  He said, ‘When the time is right, I would rather we moved there. Would that be too hard for you?’

  This surprised her. She had supposed that they would find a new house, a place of their own, although that was still nigh impossible in the city. A clean start.

  ‘Will the children wish to leave their home?’

  ‘Children take what comes. They have no comparisons, no measure.’

  ‘The HC pays for the house at Arthur Circle at present, but I think that it is registered in my name at Interior. A bureaucratic hiccup.’

  The giant spoke. ‘I can fix all that.’

  She knew she could not live in his house. She could desecrate it, but could not live in it. But she thought they could truly occupy Arthur Circle.

  She was breathless at how they had moved from their errant lovemaking in such a short space of life, to talk on such an ultimate scale; how the unorthodox had so easily found itself the shapes and costumes of convention.

  Back at Arthur Circle alone – Ambrose was at his office – she opened the window and looked over the street and the gardens and saw everything anew. Canberra in its silver December afternoon light. Her life had turned over; freshness had filled it. She felt great invulnerability. She had no dread at the idea of facing Ambrose and making it clear that this was not a fling. This was something far, far more serious. But she would choose the time to bring this home to him.