Martini

by Frank Moorhouse

  Retrospectively, I see that ‘The Story Not Shown’ was an immense psycho-diversion, an unconscious personality manoeuvre not comprehended by me as the young writer and beyond my self-analysis back then, a manoeuvre to make myself look away from myself as much as it was a way of not telling her about my self. It was an unconscious diversion from the silent, invisible and vicious in-fighting occurring in my personality. The story pushed something aside in my consciousness, smothered the other stories – the real stories untold.

  The first of the stories untold was that the prostitute was an attractive, very feminine, youthful transvestite and that the sexual encounter was for me thrilling, arousing and presented to me a fantasy that I had never found within myself until then and that the appearance of this girl-boy and our youthful embrace seemed dazzlingly appealing and right. It was an awakening. At first I’d thought that the tranny was a female but soon I realised that this was not so and this itself had thrilled me. The young tranny was, in recall, pleased that I was close to her age and so attracted to her, yet she was also charmingly unpractised in the business she was in.

  In ‘The Story Not Shown’, later published in the novel, the prostitute was changed to a woman from another time. From that untold fact flowed other pivotal stories untold to this day. ‘The Story Not Shown’ was a diversion from the other stories from my first year in the city which I could not tell to my school girlfriend nor tell to ‘myself’ – myself then being made up of the beginner-writer-self who at that time lacked the imaginative horse-whispering to corral the stories; and the heavy-drinking, nervous cadet journalist who was unable to tell the four stories to anyone and who locked those secret stories in a windowless barn of my mind. The self both unformed and deformed, unrecognisable and unrecognised, had its stories which, for then, were inaccrochable. But that self from that time should not be judged a lying self. Other more forgiving words need to be found.

  When intimate couples pledge to always tell each other the truth about themselves – to be totally honest – they do not always realise how difficult it is to be descriptive and to be precise when you don’t know what is true about yourself, let alone how to describe it or live with it. If I’d told Margaret the Stories Untold she would have almost certainly recoiled and bolted, and would have herself then been free – free of me. If I had had the self-comprehension and the personal agency and command to be able then to tell the stories, I would have also been freed perhaps, would have found the strength to open the barn, shepherding the other stories out into the world, into the dazzling light of my own self-comprehension. I would have gone on the stranger path not taken.

  And it was a diversion from what had happened in my life with Paul. The other Story Not Told. At the time of the love letters referred to in the story, Paul had already come into my life. I had already seduced him in a hotel room in Kings Cross.

  I paused in my reading of the story and looked at the students. I felt I should stop that reading and tell them these stories roaming in my head and how these stories were locked in a windowless room for so long. But I went on with the reading of my carefully disciplined ‘story’.

  ‘“When I began to change to womanhood … When I began to change to womanhood, Mum gave me some books and for the first time I’ve seriously looked at them and they convinced me that sexual relations between us now would ruin our life …”’

  I couldn’t look out at the students – how many of them had had sex? I wanted to say to them that it didn’t have to ‘ruin’ your life. I then lifted my face to them and tried for a smile to say ‘don’t take that too seriously’.

  ‘“… Mr W was talking to me after class and told me he once wrote a poem about love and, thinking that I would appreciate it, he let me read it after the others had gone …”’

  The sentence about the teacher and his love poem leapt up at me from the page. The teacher actually wanted her to stay back with him so that he could read her a very personal love poem? My God, had the teacher been coming on to her, making a tentative advance? Could that be true?

  Back then – at the time I’d received the letter, this had not occurred to me. Nor had it occurred to me ten years ago while working from her letters as I wrote this chapter of the novel. It had never occurred to me that the teacher had begun to see her as a sexual being.

  The teacher was probably only ten years older than she – although to us the teachers had seemed to be pretty much all of a single age, to belong to another chronology, out of reach.

  Well, well. The teacher had been flirting with her. I had never read the letter that way.

  I finished the story and asked Year 11 for questions. For comments. The students had none. I myself was filled with questions.

  I looked out at them hoping they might cry out, ‘It’s just the same – you are one of us. Come and have a milkshake with us after school. Hang out with us.’ I could start my life again.

  But they were standing, picking up their bags.

  At morning tea in the staff room, I said to the gathered teachers that the students didn’t seem to respond to the story.

  ‘Year 11 listen, but they don’t always have much to say,’ one of the teachers said.

  ‘I wonder if any of it connected? They are probably much more cool these days.’ Why was I saying ‘cool’?

  ‘Oh no, it sounded like their lives, all right.’

  I then asked, ‘What about the teacher wanting to talk with the girl after class and showing her his love poem? That would be frowned on these days?’

  ‘Absolutely. We’re all more nervous about that stuff.’

  Back in the city I told Matt about the meaning of the letter finally arriving, so to speak. ‘There I was at the school and the letter finally arrived. This teacher – Mr W – was coming on to Margaret back then. Maybe W and Margaret had something going. Does it sound like that to you?’

  ‘Sounds like it. When was all this?’

  ‘When? At school. When she was at school. The year after my final year at high school.’

  ‘But how long ago in years?’

  I calculated. I had difficulty saying it. ‘About forty years ago.’

  ‘And the letter has just arrived?’ Matt said. ‘So to speak.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it just left-over lover’s paranoia, so to speak? Could it be that, do you think?’

  ‘Could be that. Everything is so weird in my life these days that the commonplace has become unusual. But I like the idea that Mr W and Margaret had an affair. It gives symmetry to it all, gives a counterbalance to my sexual complications at the time. My Story Not Told.’

  ‘If it’s true, it’s a good story.’

  ‘It could very well be true: or it could have come very, very close to happening.’

  ‘“Close to happening” is not to be easily dismissed. It is itself a narrative event.’

  ‘Her Story Not Told. Maybe not even told to herself?’

  It was intriguing and somehow pleasing in its narrative symmetry, that my young innocent girlfriend may have had a remarkable, secret Story Not Told from back then.

  ‘Don’t dwell on it,’ Matt said, in closing.

  I had lunch with two of my and Margaret’s friends from the schooldays recently and they brought along photographs from that time. One was of Margaret in school uniform – starched white shirt, school tie, school tunic – aged sixteen. When I saw her my stomach turned over, both physiologically and poetically, at the photograph and at her beauty and youth and from the memory of our time together then, of the petting and swooning in private places and in the dark, as our childish bodies became sexually alive, and from the queer act of possession of her girlhood that I unconsciously attempted.

  Which brings us now to Mr W.

  Mr W. Mr W the school teacher who wanted to show Margaret his love poem, is now retired. That teacher, although he never taught me, was the most influential for her and for others in the school. He was a Christian Socialist and he introduced us, the s
chool intelligentsia, to Fabian socialism. He also introduced me, through Margaret, to the poems of Carl Sandburg. When my father first visited New York he asked me if there was anything I wanted. I can remember no other time when he asked me to name my gift. I asked for the complete poems of Carl Sandburg, which he bought for me, even if a little perplexed that his young son wanted poetry (oh, oh).

  ‘Why don’t you just ask her whether anything happened?’ Matt asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I think I’m frightened of her. Always was. She’s so grounded. She thinks I’m screwy.’

  ‘Frightened?’

  ‘Disquieted. Sometimes, in some places, in some moods she still disquiets me.’

  ‘We are quite right to be disquieted by the other sex, I suppose.’

  ‘Panic-stricken. I’m frightened of some sorts of men. By the way, the teacher’s still alive.’

  ‘He is?’

  ‘She writes to him.’

  ‘They have an email relationship?’

  ‘She writes letters to him.’

  ‘He must be a hundred.’

  ‘She writes to him. Yes. He’s getting on. School students don’t usually write to their teachers all their lives.’

  ‘Ask them both. Have it out with them. Get the true story.’

  ‘Ask my high school girlfriend whether she had an affair with a teacher when she was my girlfriend in high school? Or after?’

  ‘That’s my suggestion, yes. Get to the bottom of it. Find this thing called “closure” we hear so much about.’

  ‘I want narrative symmetry more than this-thing-we-call-closure. I suppose I could ask Mr W as well. But he may put me on detention.’

  In London last month Margaret and I dined at Mirabelle.

  ‘I know Mirabelle isn’t fashionable any more,’ I said. ‘We probably won’t get our photographs in the paper.’

  She looked at the menu. ‘It’s hugely expensive. Do you worry about getting your photograph in the paper?’

  ‘I am still puzzled and surprised when it happens.’

  She looked across at me. ‘You mean that it happens?’

  ‘It has happened. I have been photographed in restaurants and my photograph has appeared in the paper.’

  ‘It’s very expensive. We could have had something at my place.’

  ‘We only get to eat together every twenty-five years.’

  ‘I suppose that’s true.’

  The meal meandered on; how unbelievably out-of-reach she was to me.

  I then said, ‘Mr W had a crush on you. We all knew that.’

  She blushed more deeply than any mature woman I had seen. ‘I don’t understand what you mean – a “crush”?’

  ‘He was attracted to you. Attracted to you as a young woman coming alive – sexually.’

  ‘But he was married. It was his first year as a teacher when he taught me. Through to the end of high school. He was the most important thing in my high schooling. Nothing happened, if that’s what you mean. You’ll have to explain to me about the “crush” he had on me – how do you know this?’

  ‘Maybe you weren’t tuned in to the signals then. Too young.’

  ‘Nothing happened like in Capturing the Friedmans, if that’s what you’re alluding to. I think there were people casting “nasturtiums”.’

  I recalled but did not mention that she had excited the passion of another adult male back then who had to be sent packing by her parents when he turned up at her home.

  Mr W once wrote to congratulate me when one of my books won a prize. He reminded me that he gave the speech at Margaret’s and my wedding. She invited him, obviously, as an act of adoration. He said that there was an error in the book – I mention 44-gallon petrol drums in 1936. He said that there were no 44-gallon drums before World War II.

  Thank you, Mr W.

  I realised after all this time that I had been hopelessly competing intellectually with him at high school. Worse, he was competing with me. He couldn’t win a place in her social life: she was out of his respectable reach, too far out of her age group. But in private with her he would have won – what chance did I have of impressing my teenage girlfriend when I was competing against a charismatic Christian Socialist polymath and expert on 44-gallon drum history.

  ‘Mr W made me a socialist,’ she said, out of the blue, there in Mirabelle, ‘and I still am.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I made you a socialist. I read the Communist Manifesto to you after school in the lounge room of my home.’

  ‘No, Mr W made me a socialist. He introduced me to G. D. H. Cole.’

  ‘I made you a socialist one afternoon but I forgot to turn you back.’

  ‘What is that supposed to mean?!’

  ‘Oh, forget it. There are other more interesting positions than “being quote a socialist unquote”.’

  ‘I think it’s an honourable position and one day the world will wake up to itself.’

  I write to Mr W and ask him how ‘special’ Margaret had been in his life back then when we were all together at school. He wrote back something about her being ‘a remarkable young woman’.

  I tell Matt about Mirabelle and the letter from Mr W.

  He says, well, that’s that.

  ‘What do you mean “that’s that”? By not telling me, they might be protecting me. Protecting themselves?’

  ‘You could let it go. Why don’t you get back to your book?’

  ‘Matt, this is the book.’

  ‘I thought it was about the folklore of the martini.’

  ‘The book is about what the book is about. I love the idea that there was something going on that I have never been told about. The narrative symmetry which we’ve discussed.’

  ‘You know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t think you’re ever going to know if something happened. They’re never going to tell you. That’s the narrative symmetry. That’s the justice of it. Or it could be that they did not know what was going on. Neither of them realised what it was or could admit it. Consider that for symmetry. Symmetry of the undiscovered. Symmetry of the unknowable.’

  ‘They were dabbling with taboo. I was also deep in taboo. I had one foot deep in taboo. I was wandering off further and further into taboo.’

  ‘That’s good – you are now wondering but wondering without pain, wondering with a unique piquancy. That’s the symmetry. That’s the piquant justice of it all.’

  ‘Suppose that’s a possibility. This fearful symmetry.’

  ‘The fearful symmetry – you beat me to it.’

  ‘Nature abhors perfection. I suppose it abhors symmetry as well.’

  ‘I mean symmetry “so to speak”. And I don’t think narrative abhors it.’

  ‘She says it’s all in my head.’

  ‘I don’t want to feed your paranoia, but she would say that, wouldn’t she?’

  Another feeling came creeping up from my buried past. I was not competing with him only for Margaret, I was also competing with Margaret for Mr W’s affections. Although he didn’t teach me, he was very alive in my consciousness at school and I carry a strong attractive image of him, blond hair brushed forward over his forehead in that private school way of those times.

  More importantly, as my therapist might point out, the three of us, Margaret, he and I, are still strangely – directly and indirectly, consciously and unconsciously – interacting, all these forty years later, perhaps, still, with very little understanding of what was happening back then.

  ‘Matt, remember that school teacher who competed with me for Margaret’s affections at school – the story “Memoir of a Story: Story of a Memoir” – who challenged the accuracy of me mentioning 44-gallon drums before World War II?

  ‘At last I’ve found a photograph taken in Christchurch, New Zealand, circa 1930, and the caption reads: “A Highways transport Leyland truck carrying a load of petrol in 44-gallon drums. Circa 1930”.

  ‘I have now sent this photograph to her to send on to Mr W
.

  ‘The photo also shows that there is always something to do in New Zealand. Always something to photograph. There is always something going on in New Zealand.’

  Why do I feel the need to have a cheap shot at New Zealand?

  While I was at the Hong Kong Literary Festival giving my martini lecture, Margaret sent me an email from London with the subject title: ‘Hong Kong and martinis’, which read, ‘I can’t quite gather from your email whether you are still in the hellhole of SARS and when your speaking engagements – about martinis??? – will take place. We were planning to go to Hong Kong but have cancelled.’

  What hellhole? I was in the Sonata bar most of the time drinking martinis with Jon Cannon and Lui Hong.

  Her email went on, ‘You say that your state of mind is low, I find it strange that you should be lecturing around the world about the martini. I don’t remember that you ever drank martinis when we were together. Is this lecturing on the martini what you do now?’

  Margaret often excites in me a perverse desire to tell her that her worst predictions about me have come true. So in my reply, I confirmed that lecturing about the martini cocktail, literature and film in dim bars and nightclubs around the world, was pretty much what I did now – it was not the way I’d intended to use my life. I told her that Rob O’Neill had recently been quoted in a newspaper talking about how things turned out for me: ‘He wrote some decent short stories, but I saw him recently returning from an international literary festival or whatever wearing a baseball cap with the name of a gin on it and a T-shirt bearing another brand name. He does this lecture thing about the martini in literature. It’s rather sad, really.’

  But I asked her more questions about our school days. ‘I know that you have little interest these days in our past, and do not “dwell on it” as you say. I find I am still writing about it. Nothing ever concludes. I don’t know whether I told you I went back to our high school and read the chapter “Portrait of a Virgin Girl” from Forty-Seventeen, which I know you haven’t read. No response from the students. But I felt all sorts of interactions and emotions … Oddly, throughout my life I’ve dreamt of you just about every week. My therapist says not to worry about it … Do you remember a friend of my mother’s telling you when we were married that my mother wanted a girl when I was born? At my mother’s funeral she told me that again. What was she trying to tell us? Me?’