Reading Madame Bovary

by Amanda Lohrey

  Would it be possible, I wondered, to drift up into death?

  Every day he came to see me. Each day he would sit by my bed. Each day it seemed as if he were there a long time, though he was probably present only ten minutes, at most. Dr. Parish, or Mr. Parish, in the protocols of his profession; my heart’s rescuer. He was not handsome like Wesley-Cameron but short and plump and bald, with rimless glasses and a quality of immense stillness. He sat with me by the window and looked out. Was he with me only five minutes? It seemed like thirty … an hour … endless. He had golden, freckled hands that lay composed on his lap, and sometimes he gazed out through the glass of the hospital window, as if he had nothing better to do than sit with me. There was something of the sunlight about him, something fair, though he was in late middle-age and solid. Short, corpulent and balding. But definitely of the light. Just to see him made me feel better. Just to have him sit by me, exuding his immense, unfathomable calm. His warm serenity assured me of the inevitability of my survival.

  Just a few months after I recovered I read in the papers that his son had been murdered – lured into a park by a mystery phone call and beaten to death. He was my age. From the photograph on the front page I could see that he resembled his father. In the newspaper report, his girlfriend described him as ‘a ray of sunshine’.

  I was not a ray of sunshine and yet I had lived. What justice was there in the cosmos when the father should nurse a young woman like me back to health while his own son was taken from him? I said something along these lines to my boss, a kind woman who took an interest in my welfare and found me crying in the staff toilets. ‘You mustn’t brood on this,’ she said. ‘Some people live, and some people die. And there’s no rhyme or reason. It’s a mystery.’

  It’s a mystery, but it haunted me then and it haunts me now.

  The day after I got out of hospital I stood on the bus and trembled all the way home, aware that I was, for a time, an inhabitant of some privileged no-man’s-land; some body in transit between a receding fragility and a re-emergent strength.

  Mr. Parish, you are not forgotten. You are here in the lining of my pericardium, in this heart that is still beating, and I wish you were here now.

  Back at the zoo …

  At my desk I find that someone has left a stack of new brochures on my keyboard.

  * Genderless Negotiation Skills for Women

  * Preparing and Delivering Perfect Presentations

  * How to Handle Employees with Attitude Problems

  * How to Become Successful Taught by People Who Are

  (The Seminar of a Lifetime)

  * Empowering Your Employees to Reach Peak Performance

  * Getting Everything Done – How to Avoid and Overcome

  the ‘Top 10 Time Thieves’

  * Designing Corporate Culture – How to Convert Vicious Cycles to Virtuous Cycles. ‘Management is not about command and control but designing and managing the culture of a place. If you create a good culture you release energy that’s latent in the group. Many managers focus too much on tasks and not on the culture that would help the tasks to get done.’

  I know where these have come from. Winton has put them there. I file the brochures away under Miscellaneous.

  This is how I spend my lunch hours. I spend my lunch hours paying bills, shopping for kids’ clothes, replacing lost lunch-boxes, looking for Hallowe’en hats, collecting dry-cleaning, buying Happy Anniversary or Get Well Soon cards. Jogging – half-walking half-running – up Hunter Street in my high heels, trying to pack two hours into an hour, eating standing up at the yoghurt and fruit-salad bar in the crowded basement of Centre-point, resenting those languid men who take ten-minute lunch breaks or skip lunch altogether to beef up their flex time until they can have an afternoon windsurfing or walking their greyhounds!

  This reminds me. The pains in my chest are getting worse. I am beginning to feel a creeping panic.

  Frank says, ‘Have you got pain in the arm?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. Why?’

  ‘It’s a sign of heart trouble,’ he says. ‘Otherwise, it’s probably stress or indigestion. You do bolt your food down, Kay.’

  ‘That’s because I’m always in a hurry, or being interrupted.’

  I ring up Diana. ‘Have you found me that yoga class?’ I ask. Or perhaps I just need a night at the Russell Hotel.

  Romance offshore

  The first time.

  The first time that Frank and I sought solace in a private hotel we skipped dinner. The women’s magazines tell you that going out to a quiet, intimate dinner is an ‘opportunity to talk to your partner’. The last thing we wanted to do that night was talk to one another.

  We parked high above the Rocks on Miller’s Point, under the plane trees and beside the historic sandstone terraces. Then we walked down the steep hill and under the stone archway beside the steep bank cut out of rock. Instinctively, we walked slightly apart, as if we did not quite know one another.

  I wanted to have a cocktail in the coldly modern and impersonal harbourside Hilton, in the bland and soulless mezzanine bar full of cane chairs. There was a moment on this impersonal balcony when I thought our stratagem wouldn’t work. I looked out over the black-and-white floor tiles and the long vases filled with bird of paradise stems. Frank seemed stilted, a little awkward, a little withdrawn. I felt separate from him. I didn’t want to know his worries. To have solicited his confidences at that point would have been fatal. Empathy is fatal to sex. That kind of sex. Hotel sex.

  Next we strolled down to a rowdy wine bar, almost next door to our destination. The bar was a better class of pick-up joint. There was beer on the floor; it was noisy. Here I had a moment of restlessness, an impulse to take control, to say ‘It’s noisy here, let’s go to the hotel,’ but I resisted. I wanted to prolong the moment, to be passive, and floating, free of time. Free of my relentless schedule. It had to be a timeless moment. This is what being young is about, every moment is like every other moment, which is why sex is so good when you’re young. It’s not true to say that it gets better as you get older. For childless narcissists, maybe, for everyone else it gets tired, gets fitted in. When you’re nineteen it expands to fill the time available; it swarms over everything, a haze over every page of every book, a certain kind of humid light in your dreams, a sense of possibility. Now, in our assignation, Frank and I had to make our sense of possibility, to artificially generate that haze.

  In the bar I gazed out the window, beyond any of the bodies there. Through the red bubble-glass in the window I could see the quay, the red, bubbling water.

  At last he took my elbow in a firm grip and looked in the direction of the door. It was a look that in another context might have been risible but it was right for this moment. I left my half-drunk glass of red wine – lipstick-rimmed, inconsequential, a token – behind on the table, a glass-topped table with puddles of beer slops and flecks of dried cappuccino froth. I liked the word, froth. Froth was a word for that moment. A carnal word. It suggested a prick off the leash. His. A frivolous, unaccountable cunt. Mine.

  On another night I might have taken an interest in the waiter behind the bar – lean and dark, in an expensive white shirt and wearing that cool look of hostile distraction that young men assume behind bar counters – but not that night, that night I was looking nowhere special, looking only within my own body heat; an unfocused, erotic blindness.

  We went up a narrow staircase painted grey and yellow to a small, discreet reception desk and then into the room. It was an old room with a high ceiling in panels of ornately moulded tin. I stood beneath the whirring ceiling-fan and the light breeze caught at my hair. The walls, and almost everything else in the room, were in shades of smoky pink, an insinuating pink, the colour of tumescence, except for the brass bed, in black and gold. There was an old iron fire-grate surrounded by mosaic tiles and on the mantel two vases stuffed with masses of fake smoky pink-and-white orchids, and between them a Picasso print of a barefoot girl, her bac
k turned, stroking some weird headless animal, suggestive of a greyish-black dog, her hand resting on its phallic neck. A large cedar mirror opposite the bed, an old oak wardrobe in the French style, an armoire. A deliberate style of louche luxury.

  Outside was noise, and traffic. Drunks singing in the pub on the corner spilled out onto the footpath in the warm night air, while trains thundered past at window height, the glass rattling, shaking, vibrating in spasms, the bridge looming from a corner of the quay.

  Frank sank to his knees and groaned softly. I was taken by surprise. He’d never done this before. He hitched my skirt up and I bent at the knees, he lifted his arms to push my top up over my breasts. A second train rumbled past the window, high up, on its track towards the bridge. I saw its red lights flicker through the slatted blinds, and I knew it was going to work, it was going to be one of the good nights in our life together; sublimely intimate, sublimely impersonal.

  We arrived home at midnight, in a satiated trance. But it was a strategy, and a world, of diminishing returns, and each time the charge grew weaker. The second time, there were no rooms available at The Russell and I bit my lip in disappointment, like a child. Someone at work had suggested a small boutique hotel in Kings Cross. The room was large and painted in pale blue, pale apricot and a dull cream. There were blue floral curtains and a grey-white marble fireplace. Genteel.

  I showered, a long, hot shower on the nape of my neck, which was aching from a day at my console writing a report. I forgot to put on the packaged shower cap in the basket on the bathroom ledge and soon my hair was wet. I wrapped the inevitable white hotel towel around me and climbed onto the bed, still in my tube of towel. Frank unwrapped me, turning me over on my stomach. I curled the white pillow up under my breasts. When we had subsided we began to talk again. He said how having time to talk like this was as big a luxury as our love-making. I was thinking how different it was from last time at The Russell – less urgent, less intense. There we had hardly spoken a word to one another all night. Here we were like old friends. Laid-back, conversational, affectionate. We dressed, and drove home.

  The third time it was January, the height of the tourist season, and the only hotel we could get into at short notice was a new one behind the Rocks, in Ultimo, called The Lawson. It was a catalogue hotel designed for Malaysian and Hong Kong tourists. On the walls of our room were framed reproduction caricatures of the writer Henry Lawson. Here he was leaning on a walking cane and holding his pipe. Here was a black-and-white drawing of a drunken man splayed on the back of a frenzied galloping horse. Over the settee was a large print of the facsimile cover of On the Track with two bushmen humping their swags. Here they were, Kay and Frank, sitting up on the bed, fully clothed, except for their shoes, sipping bourbons and ice and discussing the absurd prints on the wall. It was cosy, it was anodyne, it was just like home. We decided it was only going to work at The Russell and if we couldn’t get the room we wanted we wouldn’t go at all.

  The primate in his cage

  On the morning of our conference at the zoo – this time, the real one – we all feel a bit skittish. Like kids on an outing. I have chartered a mini-bus to take us there and have my directions from the functions manager, Cecile. ‘You can’t miss the convention centre,’ she said over the phone. ‘You just follow the arrow marked Primates.’

  The conference centre is, in fact, bang in the middle of the primates section and we are booked into the Flamingo Room, a huge hexagonal space with a vaulted ceiling like a church, and three whole walls of glass so that you can look out at the animals in their dense tropical garden, their rock pool and their high enclosure of wire netting. Among all this is a three-metre bamboo wall and a fretwork of ropes for the primates to swing from.

  ‘What sort of primates have we got here?’ asks Martin jocularly. Even he is in a good mood.

  Winton peers at the plaque beside the glass wall and reads aloud. ‘Black Gibbon: Hylobates concolor,’ he reads. ‘A small arboreal ape known for its suspensory behaviour.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means … hang on … it means that the black gibbon throws itself from tree to tree over gaps of ten metres or more using its arms.’ He squints and reads on, half muttering to himself, ‘… adult black male is around 6.3 kilograms … the pelage of the male is black with white whiskers …’

  We leave him to it and look for coffee. Winton always has to be across the detail. Eventually he joins us at the urn. ‘I hope this isn’t going to be too distracting,’ he says. ‘The pool is nice, and the rainforest, but I’m not sure about the arboreal apes.’

  There are two tables in the room and the first decision is this. Will we sit at the round table or the oblong? We decide on the round, ‘for equality’. There’s some discreet shuffling so that almost everyone is skewed to one side and can look directly out onto the black gibbons who have begun, languidly, to cavort among the trees. Two adults and their children. The female is a kind of albino, a light yellow colour, but it’s not she who is the show-off in the group. It’s her old man who is hell-bent on impressing us and he now begins his warm-up. It’s as if he knows he has an audience. We’ve been warned not to go out onto the terrace and look at them, or wave, or talk to them, because, said Cecile, they are very territorial and they make a shrieking noise to warn people off.

  We settle into our chairs and our agenda papers and get down to drafting our vision statement. The first hour is long. At some point I hear a terrific racket and look up. Lisa has defied the guidelines and gone out onto the terrace to look at the black gibbons, has slipped out through the glass doors on her way back from the loo. The gibbons have begun to shriek.

  Christina fumes. ‘Tell Lisa, for God’s sake, to come inside and stop provoking the beasts!’

  Kelvin gets up and joins Lisa, who has retreated to the inside of the window, from where she continues to look out onto the cage, and they are both giggling. After a minute or so they begin to wave their arms in imitation of the gibbons, as if they are doing some dumb tribal dance.

  Winton sighs. ‘People, can we stay in our seats here?’

  Lisa and Kelvin are called back to their places at the table.

  During the lunch-break we stroll around the narrow paths of the primates area. We have bundled the sandwiches provided by the caterers into some paper napkins and carried them outside to eat in the sun. Winton is pensive as he walks beside me. ‘You know, Kay, this isn’t easy for me either, and it doesn’t help to be working with a group of piss-takers.’ He looks so childlike that, as usual, I feel the need to console him.

  ‘They’re just tired,’ I say. ‘The re-structuring has been hard on them. That’s why I suggested we get out of the office. It will all come together this afternoon, you wait and see.’

  But when we resume our seats the troops seem not restless but over-relaxed. Some are dozy, others have cast off their work mode altogether and are frisky. Instead of taking our ape friends for granted they are even more distracted by them and look up admiringly at the male, who is ready to perform for us once more. With manic energy he swings, and swings again, from his immensely long, furry arms, hurtling himself almost in free fall from one side of his luxurious cage to the other, like a trapeze artist on speed.

  ‘It’s hard not to watch,’ says Kelvin, lazing back in his chair with his arms folded behind his head. ‘To ignore him would be like you were sitting behind a great artist but not bothering to look at the canvas.’ I’m impressed by this: it’s the most empathetic thing I’ve heard our programmer say. Winton just sighs.

  But by mid-afternoon, in the tea-break, we are all drawn to the window, even Winton.

  ‘Hylobates concolor has psyched us out,’ I say, and Winton gives his resigned little smile, and gazes across to that agile black ape who is flinging himself into space with a driven, rhythmic leaping that is utterly mesmerising, from bare tree limb to bare tree limb. So we stand and gawp, poised with cups in hand. There is no sign now of the mother and th
e young ones, who appear to have taken their rest in the dense foliage, leaving the big black male to strut his stuff, to uphold the honour of the species before these tired and jaded humans down below. He is the supreme acrobat, flying above the carefully planted rainforest, grinning all the while. Occasionally he pauses for one second, but always at an unexpected moment, as if moving to some unpredictable syncopation. How daring he looks, yet how insouciant. His flying self, his flinging arms, seem too sudden, too unthinking and uncalculated to be sure of reaching his mark, and as he approaches the intricate wire-netting wall at what looks like all the wrong angles, and at reckless speed, you think that this time he won’t make it. Your breath catches. This time he’ll fall. But no, he hits the wire netting lightly, at an impossible angle, full on, like a limp carcass, a sugar bag thrown against a wall that doesn’t ricochet off but adheres, and he looks up and around, but only for a moment, still grinning. See, he says, I can do this, this is nothing, but I’m not trying to impress you, who are you? What do I care? And he’s off again. On and on and on, barely pausing, each swing twice as far, twice as wide as you anticipate. You calculate, in a blink, the width of his swing, and each time it’s far wider than common sense would think possible. Absurdly, recklessly wide: out of all proportion, you think.

  ‘Bravo!’ cries Winton. ‘Bravo! Encore!’

  And suddenly we are moved, moved by this inexhaustible display of poise to break into a round of spontaneous applause. Here he is, in his cage, locked in, a mere beast, and yet he is the epitome of transcendental élan. He makes our vision statement seem lame.

  In future we will refer to this conference as Black Gibbon Day. Winton will refer to the vision statement as the Black Gibbon vision statement. It’s the only honour we have to bestow on him.

  The mystery

  There is a mystery at the heart of my day, a mystery at the heart of the mundane. Take yesterday. It was one of those days when I woke up in a fog of negativity. One of those days when everything seems repetitive and dull. My job is stale: I am going nowhere. The heavens are vast and I am a small, insignificant speck of dust. What is the point of all this, you think? If it were not for the children, why would anyone bother to get out of bed? I tell Frank I have a headache and he will have to organise the children and I stay in my fog beneath the blankets until the house is empty. When I drag myself out of bed I am late for work. And yet, mysteriously, without even my noticing it, once I settle at my desk, my work goes well for the day, almost as if I am not in charge of it and someone else is doing it for me. That evening, without planning or forethought, I cook a particularly good meal. Somewhere in the course of my day a current of animal well-being has risen in me, like a sap. In the morning I was ready to abandon hope, to succumb to ennui, and by evening I am an artist in the kitchen. How does this witless transformation occur? When it happens it seems independent of my thoughts, independent of my will. It just is. But what is this ‘it’ and where does it come from? Is it the same current that animates the black gibbon, that keeps him swinging extravagantly about his luxurious cage?