Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 6, Issue 5

by Alex Miller

  Volume 6: Issue 5

  Alex Miller & Erin Ritchie

  Imprint

  Published by Review of Australian Fiction

  “The Biographer” Copyright © 2013 by Alex Miller

  “A Mute Scream, that goes (like so)” Copyright © 2013 by Erin Ritchie

  www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com

  * * *

  This project has received financial assistance from the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.

  And support from the Queensland Writers' Centre

  The Biographer

  Alex Miller

  She realised suddenly that she was no longer listening to him. He had been talking since four in the afternoon. She was tired and anxious about things she must do before tomorrow. He was twenty years older than her but after almost six hours he was still lit up with the energy he always found whenever he was talking about himself. They had had nothing to eat but a few biscuits and cheese that he brought from the kitchen earlier. Her stomach was making noises. It was nearly ten o’clock and she could hear the thumping of the band at the Espy. He paused and she looked at him and said, ‘I should be going, David. I’ve got so much to do.’ She smiled in order to soften the wrench of abandonment he would let her know she was causing him when she left. With him it could never be a simple leave-taking between two grown-ups. Even after such a marathon session as this had been he was certain to make her feel guilty for going. His eyes were on her now. ‘Ellen,’ he said softly and he smiled and shook his head, reproving her, manipulating her as always. He can never resist. He can never be just normal and straightforward and a bit gracious. Another man might have said, Yes, of course you must go. You’re tired. I’m sorry, I’ve been going on rather tonight, haven’t I? But not David Davoser. It’s not in him to be like that. All human interaction for David takes place within a charged field of chance and mischance in which at any instant the advantage may be his. How is she to document this catlike waiting to pounce on the moment of advantage? How to make it seem not merely her own subjective judgment of the man’s behaviour but a real fact of the man himself?

  He sits there now scrunched down in his dusty old armchair, observing her, his eyelids falling almost shut, making of her a mistily pixilated presence before him, then opening his eyes wide, that suggestion of a smile blooming at the corners of his sensuous lips. A smile that may yet cease to be a smile and become a chilling glower, or again may flower warmly into a generous grin of youthful encouragement. It’s the chair that belonged to the great friend of his youth, his mentor, the old master draughtsman, Daniel Gotovtsev, Gotto to his mates, the last of his kind. David loved Gotto and now that Gotto is long dead he loves Gotto’s chair. On a warm humid night such as tonight he can smell Gotto rising from the antique fabric, and he feels encouraged.

  David’s wife, Marjorie, hates the chair. It’s a relic from the time of David’s poverty, from the time before she became part of his life. The time of his first wife and their sacred struggle with their poverty and their art. He has said to Marjorie and to anyone else who will listen to him, ‘This chair is the talisman of my authenticity.’ Marjorie is disdainful of this kind of thing and scoffs at it, mildly ridiculing him for being pompous. Marjorie believes it is her wifely duty to pull him back every so often to what she calls the realities of life. But Ellen sees there is something substantial for him in his claim. For David Davoser this smelly, battered old chair is a consecrated object with the occult power to ensure his good fortune. Nonsense of course. But much of his power as an artist has arisen from his nonsense. It is one of the unsettling peculiarities of the man that he should seriously believe something like this. It is one of the things about him that keeps many people at a wary distance from him. He doesn’t mind. Wary distance is his social mode. The chair is of the style that used to be called club. A club chair; the name makes Ellen think of the clumsy bluntness of a club foot. Thick arms, more than a (club) foot wide, and low in the seat, enveloping his large body. Upholstered in a terrible yellowish-green fabric frayed, holed through to the stuffing and faded to the colour of piss. A retro chair these days of the kind young people have in their shared houses or on their verandahs. A chair you used to see in the lobbies of shabby hotels in old black-and-white movies, a man sitting motionless, his trilby tipped over his eyes, sinister, waiting and knowing. When David finishes work in the studio for the day he hurries back to his chair like an old parrot that has lost the protection of its master returning to its perch. Once he’s safely hunkered down in his chair he turns on the television with the remote and watches Play School or the cartoons. He’s an expert on the children’s shows. He challenges their grandchild to a competition naming the characters in the different shows. He never lets the child win. ‘Come on, it’s just a bit of fun’, he says when Marjorie pleads with him to let the child win for once. But he never does. He just can’t. And when Melinda cries in despair at losing yet again to her pitiless granddad and runs to her grandmother for comfort, David wishes he were able to relent and to take her on his knees. But instead of relenting he observes Marjorie comforting the little girl, the two of them crouched together by the door, and what he sees is two figures out of a Giorgione nativity scene. There is a small regret in him on these occasions at the distance between himself and his loved ones, but he is unable to make any effort to bridge it. There is something in this separation that he savours, something cruel in it that energises him. It is not the cruelty but is the sense of being set apart, of being the medium through which emotions pass and are transmuted into art, that is his secret joy; a precious jewel given him in his childhood by the Fairy Queen. He doesn’t share this with Marjorie. She’s too rigorously modern to think it anything but stupid. For David, however, it’s a delicious conceit to be cherished privately. If he were ever to speak of it, he knows his jewel would lose its magic powers. He’s not a cold man and can be loving and tender and on several occasions has not been too ashamed to weep in front of his wife and their friends (and he still does have one or two friends these days, hangers-on too, lots of them). He doesn’t understand himself and has no desire to unravel the contradictions of his character; they, the contradictions, are the particles of the force field and swirl around his still centre, the source of his light and of his inspiration. The mystery. They are greater than he is. He is not their master. And in this there is to be found the strange humility of the man, a humility that few see or even suspect. Though he loves her and is grateful to her for her love and for the years of their marriage, there is an inner distance between himself and Marjorie that will never be bridged. One example will be enough to demonstrate this. Marjorie got their regular handyman (George Alvanas) to help her put Gotto’s old chair out on the footpath for the Council’s hard rubbish collection last Easter. David had their irregular gardener (Harry Phillips) help him cart the chair inside again. Marjorie wept when she saw the chair back in its place in her living room after she got home from the clinic that evening.

  ‘Embraced by this chair,’ David declaimed grandly, but with genuine emotion, thinking of Gotto and his love for his long departed friend, while caressing the back of the offended beast, ‘I am as much at home as I was in my mother’s womb.’ He later claimed to have said this for a joke too, but it upset Marjorie to hear him say it and made her hate the chair all the more. His mother’s womb! ‘It’s me or that fucking chair!’ she screamed (as if she was in a movie), and stormed out of the room and slammed the door so hard the glasses on the silver tray on the sideboard tinkled. Whenever he said something upsetting to other people David usually claimed he had only been joking. But he wasn’t always only jok
ing, and anyway it was too late by then as they were already offended. More often than not he really meant what he said, and was even aware that by saying it he was likely to upset the person he was speaking to, but all the same he did not resist saying it. To claim he was joking, Marjorie said (she was a psychologist) was just a sneaky way for him to try getting away with the outlandish things that came into his head and which normal polite people would, for one, not think of, and, for two, if they did think of them would refrain from saying them in case other people thought they were crazy. David listened when she came up with this explanation for his behaviour, and nodded his head as if he was convinced of the justice of what she was saying. He even said, ‘You’re probably right.’ But he did not change his behaviour.

  Ellen wouldn’t be surprised if she arrived at the house one day to find the chair ablaze in the front garden, with Marjorie dancing around it rejoicing and David crouched in the leaping shadows under a rhododendron bush with his head in his hands, a study for the Weeping Man. The chair and its associations is one of the things for which Marjorie has found it impossible to forgive her husband. Some quite trivial. Just to see him sitting there can be enough to irritate her almost to the point of violence and she is forced to leave the room, especially when she’s feeling a bit down and tired from the pressures of the clinic. A glass of wine alone in the kitchen is enough for her to deal with this level of irritation. Until she hears him laughing at the cartoons. In which case she closes the door to the passage and has a second glass of wine and murmurs certain things aloud to herself. Which she finds to be quite a therapeutic behaviour. She stands at the window over the sink and raises her second glass of wine to the big old Perpetua and Felicity rose bush that is wrestling the shed to the ground and says, ‘Here’s to you, old friend!’ Which makes no real sense except that she feels better for it and summons the energy to begin getting the dinner. A third glass of wine at this stage, however, will result in tears and screaming later. So she resists. Mostly.

  Something happened precisely four years ago that reduced Marjorie’s tolerance for David’s eccentricities and took the edge off things between them and she is not sure what it was. She hates to think what it might have been, so she does not inquire in case she discovers that that really is what it was. They still love each other. They often say they do. And they mean it. But love no longer means for them what it once meant for them. Now it is more complicated. You might say they began life together in a simple one-room cottage of love, and over the years have added new rooms, and now live in a vast, sprawling, many-storied mansion that is so large and so complex that many of its rooms are no longer visited by them, but remain dark and cold and give off a dankness that is unpleasant and which has about it an air of the inevitable decay they are facing, making them feel as if the ground is being prepared for their graves. Needless to say neither willingly visits these abandoned rooms, though sometimes their fears take them there whether they would go there willingly or not. Years ago they readily forgave each other’s small crimes and misdemeanours and after a row they always had terrific sex. These days it doesn’t take much to upset them, but the old way of forgiveness is not available to them any longer. They stopped having sex at about the same time the thing happened that reduced her tolerance. Thinking of this makes Marjorie sad. When she is alone in her bedroom after dinner she thinks about the cottage of love and has a little cry.

  The change also dates from when she and David decided to sleep in separate rooms. It seemed a reasonable thing to do, and there have been some benefits to it that she’d be reluctant to give up now. It is a decision she continues to defend to her friends. But in her deep private places, where she keeps her most intimate thoughts, Marjorie thinks of this decision as the first sign that the impeccable foundation of her thirty-year partnership with David had begun to give way. When they first met she was twenty-one and he was thirty-five and still married to the formidable Kathleen Anderson, a woman several years older than he, who was already suffering from the disease that was soon to convince her to end her own life. It was love at first sight for Marjorie and David, and for a long time the fourteen-year difference in their ages seemed vast and made her feel safe with him, as if a wide moat protected her from rivals for his affections. Even though it was obvious to her that David Davoser was a man who was very attractive to other women she never worried. But now at fifty-one the difference in their ages has shrunk almost to nothing and she’s often taken to be more or less as old as he is, which affronts her. He’s a youthful sixty-five and she has not aged well. She knows this and doesn’t want to be reminded of it. It isn’t fair and she hasn’t been able to reconcile herself to the loss of her fourteen-year advantage.

  Once they had started sleeping in separate rooms they were soon having sex less often. These days they sleep with their doors shut. She has to remind herself that he is often fond and caring in many ways and publicly still supports her completely, so that they present to the world as an amazing partnership that has always been staunch and true. Sometimes she believes this to be still the case. Especially when they are travelling together and find once again the old rhythm of their closeness. They kiss each other on the lips once again at such times and hold hands and tell each other how lucky they are to still have each other. And at these times the foundation does still hold. When they were on the night bus travelling from Veliko Tarnovo in the highlands of Bulgaria last year to Istanbul, unable to sleep for the persistent smoking of the other passengers and the television above the driver’s head blaring out a Bulgarian remake of Get Smart, their intimacy almost reached a critical mass. He whispered in her ear, ‘Maybe we should move to Bulgaria permanently?’ It was a delicious moment between them, surrounded by the strangeness and sealed away in their own private world of understanding. They snuggled up together and she eventually fell asleep against his deep chest, his strong arm around her. And he didn’t sleep. But he did enjoy the good old feeling of being her champion and he breathed the smell of her hair and thought of the twenty-one-year-old she was when he met her and he smiled tolerantly at the idiocy of the Maxwell Smart lookalike on the screen. And while the antique bus rocked and swayed and ground its way down the narrow mountain roads in the pitch dark of a Bulgarian night David was in love with his girl once again. Such moments still happened.

  It is not times such as those, but their day-to-day life, that Marjorie worries about. At home he has become more odd, more remote and difficult than he used to be. He doesn’t bother to explain himself to her any more. He doesn’t consult her about his work the way he used to. If she’s at home while he’s working he never comes out of the studio and calls her in to look at what he’s working on. She hears him talking to his ghosts, but his door remains closed. There was a time when he valued her opinion and sought it regularly. Her response to his ideas seemed to inspire him in those days, which made her feel close to the work, and even allowed her to be an active part of the creative process. Something she still finds mysterious and even threatening, a force of action that stands somewhere beyond her, almost as if it were a religious belief boiling in him, a rage, a knowledge of God or the Devil (if they are not one and the same) or some such thing; something, at any rate, that she would find absurd and arrogant in other people, but which she knows is the hazardous reality of his days. His deep puzzlement as to its source, his deep uncertainty as to its worth. The joy and the dismay it is to him. His knowledge that he can never be free of it. His private humility in the face of it. She stares at him at the breakfast table and wonders what to say to him, and decides he is not the free man he was. He is cautious now in his vigilance. More afraid. What is he thinking? What are his fears? She doesn’t know any more. She knows that she herself is less tolerant than she used to be, and she is careful to control the temptation to be sarcastic with him. She sees other wives of their acquaintance doing this to their husbands in public and it offends her. The sound of the radio or the television is often all that saves the two of them f
rom silence. He gets up from the breakfast table and goes off to the studio without saying a word to her. Whenever she is tempted to force conversation he looks at her as if he is wondering what she is doing there, his eyes staring into hers from a long way off—she fell in love with his beautiful brown eyes. He makes no concessions. She told him the other day that his eyes were no longer as big and brown as they once were. He was deeply offended and she saw how vulnerable he was. I’ve hurt him, she thought, and there was just an edge of satisfaction in feeling the power to do this. Fortunately she has her work at the clinic, which she mostly enjoys, and her daughter Pippa, and Melinda their grandchild, and the two women friends she has kept all her life since their blissful days together at school and then at university.

  Compared to her own life, she sees David’s life as unbearably isolated. When she is at work in the clinic among the bustle of patients and consultants and secretaries and phones ringing, she sometimes suddenly thinks of him penned up in the house alone with his thoughts and fancies, prowling through the rooms like a prisoner, treading his worn path between Gotto’s horrible chair and the studio out the back, where his work waits for him as if it were some kind of demon he must feed regularly or it will torture him. She sees how reluctant, how almost afraid, he is at times to go to his studio, and she wonders if he was always like this and she has only just begun to notice it, or if he has become haunted in this way only recently. It troubles her that she can’t decide which of these views is right. And of course there is no one for her to ask. No one to confer with about such things. For who else is there who knows him as she knows him? She is alone with her knowledge of him. It was at such a moment that she was prompted one morning to call Ellen Markham and suggest they meet for a coffee in Carlton or a lunch; not so that they could gossip about him (she is far too loyal to their relationship to ever gossip about him with another woman), but simply to lighten the oppressive sense of being isolated with her knowledge of him, in order simply to be with another woman who had begun to know him almost as well as she knows him herself. Pippa is too close and at the same time too distant, a daughter and a woman of another generation living a life in many ways that Marjorie cannot share or really be at ease with.