Like Being a Wife

by Catherine Harris

  Lloyd, the waiter, delivered our French fries. Kyle smiled weakly and picked up his cheeseburger. I opened the tomato sauce and slathered the chips in red.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked patiently once Lloyd had left. ‘Didn’t we agree this way is best? You know, no matter what happens you’ll always be in my heart, Frank. Wherever you’re living. I love you so much.’

  Like this is simply a geographical issue, my moving out.

  What I see now is he’s been circling the idea for at least six months. Ever since he found me in bed with Rory. ‘Our bed,’ he kept saying. ‘Our bed.’ And it is true, it was our bed, is our bed, even if he’s been sleeping on the couch in his study pretty much ever since.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I cried, great big tears soaking the sheets, an enormous blunderbuss of grief, until eventually he lay down beside me, sorry too for the awkward dinners and cocktail parties and uptight tête-à-têtes with his academic friends who all talk a load of shit as far as I’m concerned (I mean, who gives a fuck about structural repression and the State), and said for the first time that maybe bringing me here with him was a mistake.

  Ah, the happy life of the new senior lecturer. He’s got a real office now with a nameplate and his hours pinned up on a noticeboard outside the door, but his books are still strewn all over the house – Hall, Weber, Durkheim, Marx – piled up in little towers on the floor like clunky scholastic droppings. At my old place in Bondi there wasn’t a book in the entire block of flats (not unless you count Camping Tips for Young Men and Boys, a birthday joke from Michael not that long after we split, one of the few things from him I actually kept because it really was funny, not just a Trojan horse loaded with some doubled-up crap about the problems with our relationship).

  That’s something Kyle could never understand, a bookshelf with no books. ‘You’ve got to read, Frankie, you’ve got to read. Here,’ he’d say when I’d stay at his place near Sydney uni. ‘Borrow any one you like,’ and he’d gesture to the packed shelves lining the bedroom walls, or press them on me between kisses, lovingly, like flowers.

  Because I’m morbid and everyone I love is either sick or dead – grandparents (two heart attacks, Alzheimer’s, and cancer), parents (a six-car pileup near Mount Gambier, where I was born), ex-boyfriends (AIDS and AIDS and AIDS) and pets (sweet Milly especially, my favourite cat, who somehow got feline AIDS, which is just a bitchy quip on behalf of whomever’s in charge) – I should see this coming but I don’t. There I am, one minute jerking off to the idea of Hugh Jackman, his waxed torso all baby-oiled up, prancing about our living room in his Speedos, and the next my dick’s curled up in my hand as some guy on the phone says, ‘There’s been an accident, you better get here right away.’

  They’re still at the department, waiting for the doctor. Kyle is unconscious on the secretary’s floor, blood, vomit, the whole shebang.

  ‘What happened?’ I ask, but nobody knows.

  ‘He just keeled over,’ says Meredith, a colleague.

  I’m shocked. Sure, I wanted to kill him, but I don’t actually want him hurt. I sit on the floor and hold his hand. His skin is so pasty it looks fake. He smells like rotting fruit. I can see a spot he missed shaving, right up under his left nostril.

  The doctor takes one look at him and immediately calls an ambulance. Its siren is audible as the vehicle enters the quadrangle. Kyle opens his eyes. ‘I’m dying,’ he says, a typical queeny response, but I don’t say don’t be so dramatic cos we’ve got an audience and they wouldn’t understand. Instead I say, ‘Try to relax, honey, it’ll be okay,’ and I stroke his forehead and look meaningfully into his face like I’ve seen done in the movies a million times before.

  At the hospital everyone’s buzzing around like I’m the concerned spouse and suddenly all the talk about breaking up and moving on and getting my life together separate from him seems part of another script. The doctor asks, ‘Who’s the family here?’ and I step right up. ‘Me,’ I say. ‘I am,’ high as a kite on the adrenalin of it all, anticipating the disdain, the homophobic sneer. I’ve got my speech all ready, the one about it shouldn’t matter if I’ve got a cunt or two balls, I’m still a human being who deserves to be treated with respect, but then Joannie, the social worker, enters the fray (her big chance to demonstrate her new sensitivity training) and right away I’m the one in charge.

  Kyle smiles at me ( you go boy ). He can’t speak, but I know the look and I feel good and strong, as though in that moment something missing between us has been restored.

  The doctor says they need to conduct some tests. It could be a while.

  ‘Let’s get something to drink,’ says Meredith, Kyle’s bitchy colleague, now my new best friend, looping her arm through mine as though the fact that she rode with me in the ambulance qualifies her as kin.

  We head to the canteen. It’s a scrappy little place for a hospital, tucked away like an afterthought furnished with someone else’s spares.

  A coffee materialises before me, watery and hot.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say to Joannie, the social worker, who wants to know if I’m all right.

  ‘Yeah,’ I tell her, realising I’ve got yesterday’s T-shirt on back to front. But I’m a trouper, I can see it in her face. She squeezes my shoulder and says, ‘If there’s anything you need my office is right down the hall.’

  It’s like a casino in here, constant sweat-stained desperation, a perpetual morning-after. It’s only noon, but it might as well be midnight. The fluorescent light washes everybody out.

  I find a couple of old magazines and begin to browse. Tom. Katie. Nicole. The kids. Meredith smiles at me whenever she gets the chance but I want to say piss off you two-faced cow, cos I know she’s the one who’s been encouraging Kyle to break it off. A fundamental incompatibility is how she puts it, not that she said as much to me, but it was right after one of their ‘editorial’ meetings that Kyle used the term for the first time. It doesn’t take a genius to figure these things out.

  She thinks she’s the big expert on the complexities of queer relationships on campus since she and Lorrie parted ways on the grounds of her having the hots for someone else (one of her postgraduate students, no less), what she called their mismatched personalities and interests. ‘It’s not that Lorrie’s stupid,’ she said to Kyle over a glass of sauvignon blanc at our house. ‘I don’t count degrees. I’m not an intellectual snob. We’ve just grown apart, that’s all. I wish she could see that instead of getting so worked up about Nikki. Nikki’s not the issue.’

  ‘But Nikki is the issue, isn’t she?’ I asked after Meredith took off.

  Kyle tilted his head and pressed his fingertips together in that thoughtful way of his, shorthand for how do I begin to explain this to you, eyes casting about the ceiling looking for the right expression. ‘It’s complicated,’ he finally said.

  The physician (Doctor Peck, I’ve since learned) approaches us just as I’m finishing off a tuna and salad sandwich on rye bread, having regained sufficient composure to eat something (not to mention that it’s about my lunchtime anyway and I’m good and hungry, having missed my usual midday snack). The sandwich has helped me put the whole deal in perspective, and I am mindful that beyond this brief reprieve (two days, two weeks, two months, who knows?), the trajectory of my immediate future looks very much as it did before Kyle so unceremoniously keeled over on his way to the chair’s office only hours ago, where he was to discover his committee assignments for the coming academic year. I’m still going to have to find another place to live, another job, my own social life, etc., but for the first time I see it might turn out okay for me. If nothing else I won’t have to put up with people like Meredith anymore. And, as Kyle keeps saying, we’ll always be friends. It’s not like if I need something there’ll be no one to call. The more I reflect on this the more I recognise the lesson in it, and so find myself resolving to be more at one with the world and what it throws up
at me from now on. I’m thinking that I should start by practising being more magnanimous, when I hear Doctor Peck say that they’ll have to operate. As soon as possible. It’s something to do with his heart.

  For a second I flip, feeling my face freeze as the scene dissolves into pixelation, a universe of tiny electronically generated dots, but then Meredith begins firing questions (the risks, the surgery, his chances) and everything comes back into focus. They don’t know exactly what they’re dealing with or precisely what they’ll find, but his blood pressure’s way too low. There are major irregularities.

  I want to see him. A stocky nurse leads me to the room where they’ve got Kyle lying on a stretcher, already prepped for surgery. He’s got tubes sticking out all over him like feelers from a large elongated bug. They’ve put that little shower cap thingy on his head. ‘Honey, they’ve put that stupid shower cap thingy on your head,’ I whisper, leaning into his face. His hair smells of sweat and vomit and some kind of antiseptic, like someone’s had a quick go over his major surfaces with a sponge and a pumpaction anti-bacterial cleaning agent.

  He’s unconscious. The room is quiet but for the beeps and squeaks of the surrounding machines and the slow whoosh of his breath, which I can hear because my ear is right up next to his mouth.

  Until this point I’ve been experiencing everything through a kind of theatrical scrim, but when the nurse tells me it’s time for me to go, that I’ll have to leave now, something opens inside of me and I feel desperately that I don’t want to let Kyle out of my sight. ‘Just one moment,’ I say as I’m being steered out the door and I run back to him and put my lips to his, pressing my tongue inside his warm claggy mouth, tasting the mix of chemicals and bile, savouring the bitterness between us, the brief unmediated exchange.

  I think it freaks him out a bit, the nurse, because he won’t quite look at me afterwards, keeping half a pace ahead as he leads me back down the corridor. ‘Here we are then,’ he says at the lounge, obviously relieved to be done with me, as though I am a senile patient, found wandering about, now safely returned to my room.

  ‘Muchas gracias,’ I say in as campy a voice as I can muster and instantly about-face to the exit for a cigarette.

  The fog has cleared. Sunshine pours happily over the pale cement. A sign on the wall says, No Smoking Within Ten Metres of Door. Two guys are already out there earnestly puffing away beneath the air conditioning unit. We nod at each other. The man in the Bombers T-shirt holds up his cigarette. ‘Talk about discrimination,’ he says. ‘I feel like a drug dealer.’ I rummage for my cigarettes then remember they’re still tucked in my jacket pocket hanging on the back of the chair in the cafeteria, where only thirty minutes ago I was sitting over an empty sandwich wrapper feeling happier than I have in months. So much for lessons. ‘I don’t suppose I could borrow one,’ I ask, reaching into my jeans for some change. ‘I left mine inside.’

  ‘Help yourself,’ says the footy fan, waving away the coins. ‘We smokers have to stick together.’

  When I go back inside, Meredith is still in the cafeteria, waiting. As soon as she sees me she puts down her magazine. ‘The sister’s arrived,’ she says.

  The sister is Ann, also from Caboolture, Queensland, a more recent economic refugee, two years older than Kyle, married to Robert the accountant, mother of three children (Bobby, Steve and Leila), a rampant Baptist with no clue her brother is gay (and therefore no clue who I am), because he’s too scared to tell her, or the rest of his family for that matter, claiming they wouldn’t understand. As evidence, he points to their consistent questions about his marital status and argues that if, at thirty-six years of age, Ann still hasn’t put it together then either she can’t get her mind around his sexual orientation or she doesn’t want to. I don’t bug him too much about it, not having any family to tell myself, so not feeling that entitled. Still, it puts me in an awkward position.

  ‘When did she get here?’ I ask.

  ‘Maybe ten minutes ago. She’s in with the social worker.’

  ‘Great. That’s all we need.’

  ‘Fuck it. I hope she tells her,’ says Meredith. ‘Frigging Christians and their brotherly love, they’re such a bunch of hypocrites.’

  Meredith’s got this whole theory going about sexuality and power and says that the longer Kyle remains in the closet the more he is enabling his family’s homophobia by feeding a belief that even he is ashamed of his sexual identity. She says that on some level they know he is gay, so in a sense the only person he’s hurting is himself because he’s the only person modifying his behaviour to maintain the deception. I don’t exactly disagree with her, but she also thinks Catholics are devil worshippers and that her mother is the Antichrist, so while I can see where she’s coming from, clearly she’s got some issues.

  ‘I just want whatever’s best for Kyle,’ I say, figuring the last thing he needs is to wake up to a family crisis. ‘He should decide when to tell them, when he’s ready.’

  ‘Is that right?’ says Meredith. She smiles at me and raises her eyebrows, two sprays of steel wool I’d love to take to with a set of rusty tweezers. ‘You do know I know, don’t you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About the two of you. Your rel-a-tion-ship.’ She says it slowly, sounding out each syllable, her fingers indicating quotation marks.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Don’t give me that shit. You know exactly what I mean. You and Kyle, over, kaput. He’s talked to me about it, many times, so don’t pull the authoritative lover trip with me, okay?’ She holds my eye for a second then picks up the magazine and starts leafing through it again, but evenly, without pausing, so I know she’s not really reading.

  ‘I’m not pulling anything,’ I say hollowly.

  She smiles again, that same miserly squint, and crosses her legs.

  Watching her there, so self-satisfied with her magazine, thinking she’s trumped me, gets right under my skin. I’m so totally on time to give her a piece of my mind about how much I can’t stand her and that she should learn to mind her own goddamned business but just as I’m about to get started a woman wanders into the cafeteria, walks right up to me and introduces herself. ‘You must be Kyle’s friend,’ she says warmly. ‘I’m his sister, Ann.’

  I’ve only seen Ann in pictures taken a hundred years ago, so I don’t recognise her at all. She is much prettier than I expected (especially for a God-botherer) and much friendlier. I shake her hand, noticing the way she holds herself, a little lopsided, the same way Kyle does. Meredith stands up. ‘Friend and colleague,’ she announces, giving Ann the once-over. I can see she’s also caught off guard, no doubt also expecting someone much less attractive, a replica of her favourite nun perhaps, or one of her Sunday-school teachers.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ says Ann politely, then turns right back to me. ‘How are you holding up?’ she asks.

  Meredith and I exchange the briefest eye contact. Does the sister know? I think the sister knows.

  ‘I’m doing okay,’ I say gingerly. ‘Given everything.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ann mutters to herself, fingering her crucifix. ‘Such a shock. I got here as quickly as I could.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you and Kyle were close,’ says Meredith.

  Ann looks confused. ‘We’re family.’

  It’s five hours before anyone comes to tell us what’s going on. We wait in the lounge, mostly watching soap operas. Meredith sulks on the couch.

  ‘Have you welcomed the Lord Jesus into your life?’ Ann asks her during a commercial break.

  Meredith stutters, doesn’t know what to say.

  ‘I have,’ I answer.

  Meredith looks at me as though I’m crazy.

  ‘Yes, I was smoking a cigarette one day, down on the pier, leaning over the hand rail, daydreaming really, and I don’t know what it was but something made me start. It was almos
t as if Jesus had tapped me on the shoulder, I guess, and I looked up and it was like the whole bay was on fire. Brilliant light as far as I could see. And that was it, the click. I was filled with this overwhelming sense of peace, of connection, like I finally understood the way everything fits together and I turned around, got right back in my car, drove to Borders and bought myself a Bible. That was nearly a year ago now. I’ve been a regular at Sacred Heart ever since.’

  Ann buys it. I could hold out a diced jalapeño and she’d eat it from the palm of my hand. ‘So you’ve been baptised?’ she asks.

  ‘Uh huh. Yep.’

  This is too much for Meredith. She hops up from the couch. ‘Can I see you outside, please?’

  ‘Sure. Will you excuse me?’

  Ann smiles beatifically. ‘Of course.’

  The lounge area is so much its own little cosmos that it surprises me to see the rest of the hospital still running along much as it was earlier. The people look basically the same. There is the same steady hum of activity. It could just as easily be eight in the morning as eight at night.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asks Meredith as soon as we’re out of earshot. She’s got her hands on her hips and keeps blinking erratically, like a vampire exposed to natural light.

  ‘Nothing. What do you mean?’

  ‘Back in there, the God business.’

  ‘Are you referring to my faith?’ I say, placing my hand on my chest.

  ‘Your faith? What faith? You’re about as spiritual as a dildo.’

  ‘I resent that.’

  Meredith laughs. ‘That’s very funny. You’re incredible. I’ve got a good mind to go back in there and tell her what you’re up to. Say it’s all bullshit. How do you think she’d react to that?’

  ‘Go ahead, why don’t you.’

  Meredith studies my face for a moment. ‘It’s not going to make him want you back, lying to his sister. Nothing’s changed. You understand that, right?’