Maybe the Horse Will Talk

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Well, she did very well in the genetic lottery,’ Betga announced over his champagne.

  ‘It’s only a lottery for you,’ said Carla. ‘Everybody else has children intentionally, by design.’

  ‘You didn’t,’ Betga shot back.

  ‘Shut up, Betga. It’s not too late for a paternity test,’ Carla added.

  ‘What if I go out to buy more champagne?’ Betga volunteered. ‘That’s got to count for something.’

  ‘Would it be alright if I came with you while you put Marietta to bed?’ Jessica asked Carla.

  ‘Of course,’ said Carla. ‘Let’s see if she’ll let you put her in her cot.’ Maserov watched as Carla gently gave Marietta to Jessica, who held the tired little girl carefully against her chest as they walked towards Marietta’s bedroom. He couldn’t help but smile to see the cautious way she held her. Then he thought of his own children and the smile vanished. They were eating their dinner in his house with his wife without him. He was back in the real world.

  II

  It was almost eleven o’clock and Maserov was due to be ushered into Malcolm Torrent’s office by his inscrutable, elegantly dressed private secretary, Joan Henshaw, a woman who had been with the company so long that not only did she know where the company had buried its bodies but it was she who had signed for the acquisition of the shovels. Maserov wondered if she knew anything about the allegation he had brought to her boss concerning Aileen van der Westhuizen or about the advice the HR head had claimed to have received from Freely Savage’s Featherby. He searched her face but found nothing there but a lightweight foundation, a dab of cream blush, a schmear of concealer and a fair quantity of concealment.

  Despite the fact that Torrent was still on a phone call, she led Maserov into his office. Malcolm Torrent showed no sign of interest in his arrival other than to wave him into a chair opposite him. Maserov sat in the chair and waited for the call to end. The longer he waited the more he felt as he had when waiting for Hamilton. He tried to listen to the call to discern whether it had anything to do with any of the previous day’s events but it was impossible to know what was being discussed because Malcolm Torrent was listening while the person on the other end did most of the talking. Then, after what seemed like a unit of time that had only a beginning, Malcolm Torrent uttered a sound that was part grunt, part snort and part affirmation in a language other than English before unceremoniously placing the receiver back in the cradle of his landline. Then he looked up at the separated father of two, the second-year Freely Savage lawyer who had gambled his way uncharacteristically out of the frying pan and into an office at Torrent Industry headquarters.

  ‘Well Maserov, I have to commend you. I took a chance on you and it’s certainly paid off.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Torrent.’

  ‘You said you would make those sexual harassment suits disappear and you have.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’

  ‘You’re a bright young man who could be going places.’

  ‘Thank you. Where . . . do you think?’

  ‘But do you see how your success was inimical to your needs?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘When did we first meet, mid-April?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, it’s now only early July. You made the spate of sexual harassment claims go away before your twelve months were up.’

  ‘So?’ Maserov asked.

  ‘You’ve thrust yourself back to a position of weakness.’

  ‘That’s my default position. I’m comfortable there.’

  ‘You mean it’s a tactic?’

  ‘More a chronic condition.’

  ‘Don’t you see, Maserov, now that you’ve solved my problem so quickly, how are you going to ensure that you get what you wanted to get?’

  ‘Mr Torrent . . . we had an agreement.’

  ‘Which you would agree was unenforceable. You’re the lawyer here.’

  ‘But I did exactly what you wanted only faster than promised.’

  ‘Exactly, there’s your mistake right there.’

  ‘So I’m going to be punished for —’

  ‘No, no, the market doesn’t punish. That assumes moral intention. Does water punish people who bought land at the bottom of a hill?’

  ‘Are you the water or the hill in this?’

  ‘I’m the market.’

  ‘You’re the market?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘Usually. Look closely at our current situation; you’ve taken away my incentive.’

  ‘To honour our agreement?’

  ‘Maserov, you’re hanging on to history. Look at the market now.’

  ‘Look at you . . . now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Maserov looked at Malcolm Torrent, who was smiling at him as though his apparent betrayal was a shining gift bestowed on a much-loved pupil.

  ‘Trust me, you’ll be better for this. You know what you have to do.’

  ‘Yes. I have to . . . What do I have to do?’

  ‘You need to look at the market as you find it now and ask yourself what you can do now.’

  ‘To be desirable to the market?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which is you?’

  ‘Might be a helpful way to think of it.’

  ‘I have to make myself indispensable to you again?’

  ‘I like your thinking,’ Malcolm Torrent said, smiling.

  ‘Or you’ll shop me to Hamilton.’

  ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Exactly! Don’t take chances if you can help it.’

  ‘Didn’t you make your money taking chances?’

  ‘Yep, worked for me. Although I inherited money so . . . All risk is relative. You know, I don’t normally tutor people but I like . . . Oh, will you look at that!’ Malcolm Torrent trailed off distractedly and started reading a newly arrived email.

  ‘Me?’ Maserov offered.

  ‘What?’ Malcolm Torrent asked absently.

  ‘You like . . . me?’

  ‘More than Hamilton’, Malcolm Torrent said, still distracted by the just-arrived message.

  ‘You like me more than you like Hamilton or you like me more than Hamilton likes me?’

  Malcolm Torrent continued reading the email. ‘Friendship’s nice but like taxation it can distort the economy. Watch out for friendship,’ Torrent volunteered. ‘And don’t trust in anything you can’t trade. Okay, lesson over for today. I’ve got work to do. I think you have too.’

  There had been no talk of Aileen van der Westhuizen or of Featherby, the compromised minion of Hamilton who, at least for a moment, hated and feared his boss more than he loved his children. Now Maserov was standing outside Torrent’s office with one hand in a pocket, pretending to be fossicking for something while he tried to work out what had just happened. He’d done everything Malcolm Torrent could have wanted but too quickly.

  III

  ‘Betga was right, I should have been paying more attention to what was going to happen to me after the plaintiffs settled.’

  ‘You’re much too hard on yourself,’ Jessica told him. ‘You initiated countless delicate negotiations, many at personal peril, which at every turn looked like they were about to fall over and you arrived at an incredibly fair outcome for four women that even managed to be good for your client. I know, I was there too. And all while missing your children and virtually living out of a suitcase.’

  It was the night after Maserov’s meeting with Malcolm Torrent and they were back in the library section of Jessica’s local cocktail bar, the Ghost of Alfred Felton, with the famously egoless bartenders. But there was one bartender who, having nurtured an ever-blossoming affection for Jessica, could not help but wonder if his ego had restrained his id for too long. To hell with the bartending job and its requirement that he not laud his skills with muddlers, tongs, shakers and shot glasses over any man who dared come w
ithin an arm’s reach of this woman. He could shake crushed ice like the very best percussionist in the Banda de Ipanema during the Rio Mardi Gras. He could quip like the best late-night television sidekick and his innate understanding of people told him when to ask whether someone meant to order a traditional Negroni, a Negroni Bianco or a Negroni Sbagliato, and when to make the decision himself. But he now regarded himself as a fool for hiding his own feelings under the counter of an establishment in which he had no shares and where he was contractually forbidden from screaming when Jessica Annand looked with such unequivocal, heartbreaking warmth into Stephen Maserov’s eyes.

  ‘Personal peril . . . I know, I was there too,’ Maserov repeated what she’d said and smiled. Jessica smiled in return and placed one of her hands on his forearm. The gesture was too much for the bartender. He knew that Jessica was going to find a reason, albeit thinly disguised, to take Maserov home for the first time. He knew it before Maserov did. He’d seen this kind of thing before. In fact he saw it several times every night. He was in its line of fire every working night and ought to have been paid danger money for it. Maserov hadn’t seen this kind of thing for so long that he almost missed it. Almost.

  Her flimsy excuse was that she wanted to show Maserov a draft of her policy recommendations to Torrent Industries to try to eradicate sexual harassment in the workplace. Of course, they both knew that she could have emailed them to him or, if she did want to discuss them with him in person, they could do that in one of their offices. But Maserov’s description of his uncertainty as to the strength and now the terms of his deal with Malcolm Torrent had spurred her on. What if he suddenly stopped being available for her to see every day whenever she wanted? It made her feel like a lover in a time of war when what passes for the niceties of a peacetime society may well turn out be the passport to eternal regret. So they found themselves drinking more upstairs in her St Kilda apartment with their shoes off, pretending to be focusing intensely on the statutory definition of sexual harassment in the workplace.

  At that point their shared look into the face of the other blocked out all thoughts of anything else. The sweetness of the shared smile triggered the memory of one thing only, the hunger of their kissing that first night, its ferocity. To be that close again and not in the street but alone on Jessica’s couch, to be in private, to already know that neither of them needed to be embarrassed, at least not to kiss, because they were two people who enjoyed kissing each other. This had been established and this emboldened them. He undid the buttons of her blouse with one hand and then felt the contours of her breast with the palm of the other hand. Was she going to pull away? Was she going to ask him to stop, even politely, with gentle esteem-saving regret? Why should she? No, not only was she not going to stop him, she kissed him even more frantically, greedily. He returned her kiss with equal vigour. But in contrast, his cautious exploration of her breasts through her bra was like that of young man unsure of whether the very next step would be a misstep, a retrograde step that could lead to a reconsideration of what they were now, unequivocally, doing. Wanting to encourage him, wanting the fury of their kissing to be matched wherever they touched, she unhooked her bra and slid one strap off her shoulder. Then he slid the strap off her other shoulder.

  She was now naked to the waist. He stopped kissing her for a moment and leaned back to take in the sight of her breasts, something he had so often fought not to think about, not to look at, not to imagine. She smiled. Her nipples were hard. She was not afraid at all and she put one hand to the crease of his suit pants and followed it all the way to the crotch where it was warm, hard. Then she stood up, took him to her bedroom, unzipped her skirt and proceeded to undress him.

  She peeled the cover off her bed slowly and guided him down. This was her bedroom. These were her sheets. This was the smell of her and soon, at least for some unspecified time, of him, of his skin wrapped in her sheets. He wrapped himself around her, pressed against her tightly and then, slowly, entered her. He felt a radiant joy he hadn’t felt since his early twenties.

  For Jessica, here at last was the real thing. She hadn’t had to preen or pretend to be someone she, herself, didn’t much like. She had taken a chance on being herself to a man who was in many senses an old-fashioned gentleman, not in the sense of being a man of property or of a distinguished lineage, but in the sense of being a gentle man of integrity who possessed a strength he himself didn’t know he had, an intelligent man, a compassionate man, who was honest to a fault, his own faults to start with. He was handsome in a way that, like his other qualities, didn’t shout or draw attention to itself. But once glimpsed it was undeniable.

  From the time Jessica discovered that men were attracted to her, which slightly preceded the time she first realised she was attracted to men, she had always sought the company and attention of men whose belief in their own worth, whose so often misplaced, unshakeable self-confidence had seemed intoxicatingly worthy of her own abasement. These men were the prizes, the ones you went after for the proof of your own prettiness and desirability despite your differences, even if you had to squint sometimes to avoid a clear-eyed recognition of their fetishisation of you and of your background and their sooner-or-later drunken mockery of the customs and accents of your family.

  But Jessica had grown up. Here was the proof of that beside her. Stephen Maserov, the antithesis of those men, he was the real prize, and as she lay beside him there she celebrated finding him. And it wasn’t just good fortune. He was devouring her again. It wasn’t the act that animated him. Undeniably it was her.

  And as finally somnolence overtook him, Maserov recognised what a miracle it was to have met someone like Jessica in, of all places, his place of work, the sort of place where so often the only thing people really had in common was the compulsion to contort the essence of themselves into a facsimile of someone else.

  At one stage Maserov woke while it was still dark, thinking about his children. Whatever was going to happen, he couldn’t live without them. He wanted the feeling he got from Jessica and he wanted to live with his children, children he would never try to separate from Eleanor. He even wanted Eleanor, but the way she used to be. And he wanted Jessica, breathing Jessica, urgently. Uncharacteristically, because logical inconsistency was an anathema to him, he was able to convince himself that all of this was possible and he fell back to sleep.

  He was suddenly in some kind of pit, about to be executed by firing squad, when the light reflected from the bay across the St Kilda Esplanade woke him from a nightmare. His brow was moist with his own sweat. And he was alone. Jessica was not there.

  Before he had a chance to imagine where she had gone, she came into the bedroom, showered, dressed for work and more beautiful than ever with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.

  ‘I squeezed this for you,’ she said, kissing his forehead as she gave it to him. ‘You’re wet! Are you unwell?’

  ‘No, I think . . . I just had a nightmare.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I was going to be executed by firing squad.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ She sat down on the bed. ‘You’re worried about your job.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  She took his hand. ‘You know, that might be premature, and even if it’s not, you’ll find something else. And maybe the first thing you find isn’t ideal but it doesn’t have to be the last thing, the thing you ultimately settle for.’

  ‘I don’t have any savings, not to speak of.’

  ‘No one does. And just so you know . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t care whether you have any money. I don’t care whether you have a job. Those things come and go, faster than ever these days. I’ve seen who you really are. The qualities that make you the person I’ve come to know, they don’t change.’

  Now he took her hand. ‘You’re dressed for work, already?’

  ‘It’s already past already,’ she said.

  Maserov looked at his watch. ‘Oh shit!�
��

  ‘I’ve got a meeting,’ Jessica continued calmly. ‘You stay here as long as you like. There’s a towel for you. Have a shower. Enjoy the view of the bay and call me when you get to work.’

  She kissed him on the lips, turned, and he listened to the sounds of her leaving.

  IV

  There were brown thornbills and red wattlebirds in the trees and pink robins on the sagging overhead powerlines, all of them cheeping that morning when, coming back home after taking Marietta to the park, Carla found Betga waiting at the front door. She had been without work following the unsurprising collapse of the wishbone company. Betga kissed her cheek and lifted his daughter into his arms before kissing her too.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Carla asked, as though his appearance in the morning without warning or invitation could be explained only by the need to break bad news in person.

  ‘Nothing we can’t fix.’

  ‘What is it?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘Well, it appears the council garbage truck has already visited the street. It collected everybody’s garbage but inadvertently missed ours, I mean, “yours”.’

  ‘Oh shit! I forgot to put it out last night,’ Carla remembered.

  ‘That’s okay, I put it out last night.’

  ‘You did? When?’

  ‘While you were on the phone to your mother.’

  ‘Betga, that’s so thoughtful. You’re really trying to domesticate yourself.’

  ‘Yes, I really am, but the council, or the people to whom they’ve outsourced Black Death prevention, are thwarting me at every turn. Or really just at one turn, the one into this street. But don’t worry. I’ll call them.’

  She kissed him again and unlocked the front door and the three of them went inside. Betga wasn’t very far into the house when he felt and heard his phone ring and he saw that it was Maserov.

  ‘Top of the morning to you, Maserov.’

  ‘Right back at you, Betga,’ said Maserov glumly. ‘Listen, I’ve got problems.’