Martini

by Frank Moorhouse

  He hadn’t answered that question before. ‘You are too questioning. You go to the birthplaces of people you admire to see where the magic started. You go to see if you can be touched by the magic. To see if there is any left.’

  He poured the martinis and carefully carried the brimful glasses to her on the balcony of the beach house.

  ‘You’re incredible,’ she said, taking her martini, ‘you’ve even brought along the proper glasses. I know they’re martini glasses, that much I do know.’

  ‘The glass is half the drink.’

  ‘As you always say.’

  Was he beginning to repeat himself?

  He looked out at the sea in which he’d swum as a boy. ‘I’ve never made love to anyone here in my home town – you are the first. That’s unbelievable in a way, given that I lived here until I was seventeen, your age –’

  She broke in again. ‘I’m eighteen now – you keep forgetting, you want me to stay seventeen, you find it sexy.’

  ‘Sorry. But it took me to now, well getting towards forty, to have sex in the place where I was born. Says something.’ He tried to muse on this but nothing occurred to him.

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘Was it different? Our sex?’

  He kissed her fingers, one still slightly pen-callused from her schooling. ‘It’s always different with you.’

  ‘No slimy answers,’ she said. ‘Tell me how it was different, I want to know.’

  ‘Did thee feel the earth move?’

  ‘Don’t make fun of me. For Whom the Bell Tolls?’ She said the name of the book as she would give an answer in a classroom.

  ‘Different for me because it connected with “formative circuits”,’ he teased. ‘Do you want me to say things like that? Or poetry?’

  ‘Whatever screwing circuits. Tell me.’

  ‘I think you seek poetry.’ He couldn’t tell her now. ‘I’ll tell you when I’ve found the words. I’ll write you a sonnet.’

  ‘Do you know “The Schooling of Sex”?’

  He looked at her and shook his head.

  ‘“Below the waist is at first geography, and then it becomes maths, and then it becomes poetry, and then it becomes current affairs, and then it’s history.”’ She giggled, and rushed to say, ‘I know that’s a bit infantile. It’s what we used to say at high school.’

  That is, last year. ‘I don’t get the geography bit.’

  ‘Oh – as a kid, below the waist was referred to as “down there” or “below the belt” – like “below the equator”, I suppose there are boundaries there too, and unknown country. It’s just kids’ stuff.’

  He grinned. Her youthfulness was a delight to him far greater than she could understand. Was his age intriguing to her?

  ‘The maths is from the way boys score sex – 2-4-6-8-10 – 2 is upstairs outside etc.’

  ‘Yes, I remember all that.’

  As for their sex together, it was different because he was getting emotional cross-tunings, like a radio with a crowded dial.

  ‘Another thing,’ he said, ‘is that it’s my parents’ home. Or at least their beach house. Which will do.’

  ‘Will do what?’

  She bridled when she sensed he was using the conversation to talk to himself.

  ‘There is always, you know, the mother, always the mother, but even if the bed we’re using is not the bed where I was conceived, it’s close enough.’

  ‘Yuck.’ She moved swiftly away from that, saying, ‘It’s a beautiful drink. I could become really hooked on martinis. But what do you do with the olive, do you eat it at the beginning or at the end of the drink or is it just a … garnish?’

  Garnish, nice word.

  ‘That’s a personal preference. It’s useful to play with during the conversation. You can prick it with the toothpick and the olive oil seeps out.’ He did it. ‘See, the olive oil comes into the drink.’

  She looked at the drink and then said, ‘The olive on the toothpick gives the drink an axis.’

  He looked back to the martini and its glass and the toothpick. She was so right.

  She pricked her olive.

  Regardless of the cross-tunings he was getting, seeking, he wanted also to imprint at the very same time, a uniqueness onto their experience. To mark her off from his crowded personal history. He had used up so many of his markers of distinctive ness, had been there in so many intimate situations – although it never ceased to surprise him that every relationship seemed to throw up its own distinction, regardless of any superficial similarity. Sexuality did seem to be infinite in its variations. But she couldn’t be his first, well, first anything just about, not his first love, first wife, nor first adultery, not even his first seventeen-year-old, his ex-wife had been that – and he couldn’t give to her any of the body’s six or seven significant virginities, although at seventeen – eighteen – she herself seemed to have exhausted most of her own already. Well, not all. And one, perhaps two, he wasn’t sure, she’d given to him, but not the primary virginity. And they did share also some sensual firsts of the minor scale. He supposed he was trying to consecrate their experience by bringing her to his home territory, into the aura of kin, if not kin. He wanted to rank her equal with love if not as love. He couldn’t tell her this yet. As future wife? Probably not feasible.

  She spoke, breaking his thoughts. ‘The olive is like leaking radioactivity,’ she said. She was preoccupied with nuclear war but not so much as a political issue – more as a macabre fireworks, as human inclination to self-destruction or as a video game.

  ‘I’ll give you a twist of lemon next,’ he said, ‘that’s the other classic garnish.’

  She moved herself against him, began to arouse him with her hand, but he was in another mood and said, ‘I thought this was the cocktail hour.’

  ‘I want to get rid of that sad look.’

  ‘I’m not sad.’

  But cross-tunings were coming in across the sea from his youthful marriage to a girl from his home town (although they’d never had sex in their home town – except for some vaguely recalled, fumbled caressing on a river rock in bushland, a ‘full dressed rehearsal’ which he chose not to count). And a surprising, unmentioned, almost involuntary ejaculation in a classroom late one afternoon – no joining of their bodies. The cross-tunings were entries of ill-handled love, their artless fumbled living back then.

  Momentarily, his mind left their cocktail hour, going back to a cocktail hour years before.

  In the sedate lounge of the Windsor, he called the waiter. ‘This martini is not cold enough, we asked for it very cold, and very dry. It is neither.’

  He was relieved that at twenty he had got the complaint out, slowly, and with some authority.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The waiter went to take their drinks away.

  ‘Leave mine,’ Margaret said. ‘Mine’s all right.’ She put her hand out over the drink.

  The waiter took away his glass.

  ‘You are a pain in the arse sometimes,’ his wife said.

  ‘Waiter!’ He turned back to her. ‘I thought you were big on consumer rights.’

  The waiter came back to the table. ‘Take my wife’s martini also – we’ll both have a fresh one, cold, very cold.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  She let the waiter take the drink this time.

  ‘You give me the shits,’ she said. ‘So much for a second wedding anniversary.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Fighting with waiters is not my idea of a good time. The drink was alcohol, isn’t that what you care about?’

  He knew that he’d complained to the waiter as a way of getting at her. He didn’t really care about the coldness.

  He wanted to be in New York drinking martinis in Costello’s bar with Thurber in the thirties. With the sophisticated Louise. He bet that Louise had been to Costello’s bar. He’d get there one day soon. ‘I wish I was in New York. In Costello’s, only Americans know how to
mix a martini.’

  ‘What would you know about Costello’s? Or New York?’

  ‘Travel isn’t the only way of knowing a place.’

  ‘Anyhow, the martini was invented by a Frenchman,’ she said with a superior tone.

  ‘Crap.’

  ‘Have it your own way.’

  ‘Where did you hear that crap?’

  ‘I read it in The Origin of Everything.’

  ‘Crap.’

  ‘And stop big-noting yourself,’ she went on. ‘You’re just a country boy – you’ve drunk only one martini before in your whole life. You get it all from Scott Fitzgerald.’

  He remained silent, stung. Then he turned in on himself and began relishing a secret score against her – that two days before they’d left for their anniversary trip he’d drunk martinis in bed with Louise, his first ‘older woman’.

  Perversely, while relishing this private memory, he reached across to take her hand, gaining himself virtue for making the move to heal their domestic friction while at the same time betraying her in his reverie.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, joining in the reconciliation, taking the blame onto herself.

  ‘We don’t have to stay the country boy and the country girl all our lives.’

  She held onto his hand. ‘I’m quite happy to be the country girl,’ she said, quietly.

  ‘Stirred, never shaken,’ Louise said, putting a finger on the tip of his nose to emphasise her point, stopping him with her other hand.

  He’d been doing an American bartender act with the cocktail shaker, Louise being the first person he’d known to own a cocktail shaker.

  ‘That’s how I’ve seen it done in American movies.’

  Louise laughed. ‘You have been going to the wrong movies, darling. There are some cocktails we do that way, my love, but not the martini, never the martini.’

  ‘That’s how we do them in my home town,’ he said, trying to joke over his naivety.

  ‘I believe that.’

  He put the shaker down and removed the top and looked into it. ‘They seem all right, they haven’t exploded.’

  ‘They’ll be bruised,’ she laughed, ‘or at least that’s what an aficionado would say.’

  ‘Should I throw them away and start again?’

  ‘No – I’m sure we can drink them with impunity – and I have an idea.’

  He stopped himself from asking who the aficionados were.

  He began to pour them but Louise again stopped him. ‘Tch, tch,’ taking away the wine glasses he’d taken out and bringing back martini glasses. ‘A classic drink demands a classic glass. And my idea is that we take the martinis to the bedroom and watch the sun set over the city. And fill them to the brim.’

  She led him to her bedroom, he slightly trembling with desire, the martini slightly spilling. He watched as she changed into a clinging, silk nightdress. She was the only woman he had known to wear a real nightdress.

  Looking out on the city at dusk from her bed he felt regret that he should be doing this against his young wife, felt the abrasion of his spirit. But it was numbed away with the lust for Louise, Louise who had the skills of living and such seeming completeness of life.

  ‘What’s wrong, love – guilt?’ Louise asked.

  ‘No,’ he lied.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  He turned over in bed to face the question from his seventeen-year-old – eighteen-year-old – girlfriend.

  ‘Memories spooking about,’ he said. Her word.

  ‘But you said you hadn’t brought anyone else here.’

  ‘That’s true,’ he said, putting a hand to her face, in awe of her youth, ‘but the heart is a hotel.’

  He reached over and took his martini from beside the bed and finished it.

  Where had his young wife learned about the origins of the martini back then? He had looked in the book The Origins of Everything, she hadn’t got it from there. He would love it to be that she’d learned it from an older lover at the same time he’d been unfaithful. He’d love that to be the case. It would equalise the guilt. But more, it would be fantastic symmetry. But it was too fanciful.

  ‘I don’t want you thinking of other women while you are sexing on with me.’

  He smiled. ‘They have their rights.’

  She rolled on to him, straddled him, and began to arouse him again. ‘No they don’t,’ she said, ‘all other lovers are banished.’

  ‘Mix another drink,’ he said, ‘first.’ Louise had instructed him never to say ‘another’ drink.

  She left the bed and went into the bar, her naked, youthful grace tightened his heart. He called to her. ‘Should never say “another drink”.’

  He saw her look into the cocktail jug. ‘There’s some left,’ she said.

  ‘It’ll be mainly melted ice.’

  He was taking from her the flavours of young, first love. He guessed she was engaged in her own private explorations.

  ‘I’ll make a new lot, tell me how, again,’ she called.

  He was collecting pleasures not taken when he’d been seventeen because of gaucheness. He was taking also perhaps the last taste he’d ever have of pure youth.

  The first martini, though, had honoured, he felt, his ex-wife and Louise. This one would be theirs.

  ‘One part vermouth, five parts gin,’ he called back to her. ‘Some would argue – but that’s my mix now.’

  The Pageant of Learning

  The story is fictionally autobiographical in the sense that it somewhat rearranges time and people from my life while telling something about my life.

  In a sense, I was the young man who was taught the martini by an older woman lover – a beautiful and sophisticated woman named Norma Crinion, now dead, and back then quite older than myself; and I was the embarrassing young husband – around twenty – who was so gauche with his young wife in the hotel lounge. It never took place in the Windsor. And whatever my ex-wife and I argued about it wasn’t the martini. But the sort of argument we had was like that. As for sexual relationships with another generation, they can be especially significant, intimate doorways to the world of another generation and also a return to one’s own earlier age, at least on a flying visit. I told my writing students at Texas last year that every writer should have two cross-generational relationships – one when young, one when older.

  In my life the first infidelity was not with Norma but with a man, Paul J, ten years older than I, who became my lover when I was a teenager, although I had seduced him. I had not ‘relished’ the infidelity except in moments of sexual ecstasy. At the time, I suffered dreadfully from the panic of it, until it became part of my life.

  Norma actually came later after my marriage had ended when I was about twenty-three. But it was Norma who taught me about the martini and other ways of the world. I told Norma about my sexual predilections – it was not a surprise to her, nor was it anything she had not encountered before – and it was she who took me to my first tranny nightclub, The Purple Onion. I was recently told that the expression purple onion is gay slang for the engorged head of the penis. Of course.

  To return to the story. I was the older man who taught his girl-lover about martinis, I was the older man who ultimately had his heart very seriously broken by this girl but that is another story – some of it told in Forty-Seventeen.

  I see that in the story, the martini in some ways represents worldliness and also perhaps the elixir of life, the magic potion. At the University of Texas, I realised while reading student stories related to drug experiences, that drugs are also seen as a magic potion. The history of the magic potion stretches back in fiction and folklore, potions that change us into animals, give us wisdom, give us beauty, give us sexual prowess, give us access to special places and experiences: make us invisible, Faust, Alice in Wonderland – ‘drink me, eat me’. In a way, I guess my martini story observes and celebrates one of the pageants of learning, the metaphorical passing on of wisdom through sexual intimacy, sometimes a
graceful and wonderful thing, some times not so graceful. Nor painless.

  Email to Ophelia in New York

  ‘… I am working on some engrossing and agonising projects and yes, the Martini memoir is one of them – musings on whether I have spent the richest of lives or the most wretched of lives – but the book unfolds a chapter or two of Forty-Seventeen (mainly the chapter ‘Martini’) into their own stories or Stories Not Told from that book. Perhaps the book will be about a man who becomes lost in his memoirs and his stories and who can no longer make shape of his own life, only of his stories.

  ‘Or is it about how a writer becomes lost and bewildered within his own stories while writing his memoir? Lost forever wandering in his stories.

  ‘You and your delicious book The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, the Sarah who would have preferred her breast to be a manly one, were discussed at a lunch at the Hornes last week. See, Ophelia, you are talked about. It would be fascinating to be able to have a snapshot of all the places and circumstances in which we were referred to in our absence, say, in the last week, everywhere in the world: at committees, in the dreams of others, in consideration by higher authorities for awards, prizes, medals, at meals in restaurants and homes, by cleaning staff in hotels, in bed by former lovers recounting their connections with us to their new lovers, by family members, by enemies who have met us and by enemies who have never met us, by strangers who have heard rumours and stories about us, readers who have come across our work, people we have taught, people who have taught us, who have heard our public talks, and in the fantasies of would-be lovers. By Death and his committee … By Disease and her committee. We could advertise in likely newspapers and magazines asking people who had mentioned our names on a certain date to contact us … mmmm, no, wouldn’t work.

  ‘Perhaps my book is about vestiges, and the use of vestiges, meaning a trace or piece of evidence; a sign, as in vestiges of an earlier civilisation; found no vestige of their presence; a particle; without a vestige of clothing; showed not a vestige of decency; or in biology where it means a part or organ of an organism that is reduced or functionless but was well developed in its ancestors. I see that the word comes from the Latin word vestigium, meaning “footprint”.