I understood what he was trying to tell me. This wasn’t his problem. Lyndon was alive. Lyndon was behaving strangely, that much was true, but Brian had done his job and it was time for me to take the issue of my problematic husband and my flawed marriage and leave.
I asked Brian if I could watch the recording a few more times and he told me I could. I didn’t want to miss anything, in case Lyndon had been trying to send me a message. I watched it for half an hour, and I studied every nuance of Lyndon’s movements, but there wasn’t anything that gave me a clue as to why he had done what he did.
I decided that Brian was probably right. Lyndon simply needed a bit of time to himself. I decided to go back to our hotel and have my nice hot bath and no doubt Lyndon would stroll in and say he’d needed some air or something or other, and that would be that.
I had to admit to myself that Lyndon hadn’t been behaving normally for a while now, and this trip, which I had thought would be a cure for him having lost his job, had only seemed to trigger in him a mid-life crisis and plummeting self-esteem.
“Thank you for all your help and patience,” I told Brian who patted me on the shoulder.
“We men can be strange fellas at times,” he said, and I tried to smile. He seemed less hateful than before or maybe I had run out of steam.
Jerry drove me back to my hotel, and I thanked him for his help and took my leave. I tried to walk casually through the lobby as if I was simply returning from an evening’s dinner after a day of fun-filled sightseeing. Nothing to see here; just a tourist after a long day.
But when I got up to the room, I closed the door, sank down onto the bed and buried my face in my hands. Everything was wrong. Yes, Lyndon was alive, but everything was wrong.
I forced myself to run a bath, but I couldn’t luxuriate like I usually do. I scrubbed my body and washed my hair vigorously as if I were in a hurry because I needed to be ready and vigilant. And if I could get clean, my whole life would sort itself out. I just had to get myself moisturized and into my pyjamas and everything would be fine.
But then I was clean, and moisturized, and in my pyjamas, and things were not fine. I sat motionless in the wingback chair that overlooked the harbour, my hands folded in my lap, and watched the blackness of night fade, pushed away by the coming light of day. The sun rose and my phone did not ring and there were no messages from Lyndon, no texts. There was nothing in reply to the messages and calls that I had sent him.
But he is alive, I kept telling myself. He will come back. Please let him come back.
He’d never done anything like this before in thirty-five years of marriage—just wander off without telling me. He’d never even taken too long at the store. And his phone was always on and I could always reach him.
I was fifty-eight years old. I was a part-time archivist at McMaster University, but mostly I was a wife and a mother, and I thought I was pretty good at both of those things. A niggle of doubt told me that no one was perfect, of course not, but I had tried my best. Tried my best. Such a stupid saying. My best obviously wasn’t good enough if my husband walked away from me without so much as a goodbye. It wasn’t as if he’d ceased to find me attractive. He still jumped my bones two or three times a week and I happily anticipated our encounters. I’d never been beautiful. I was pretty in the girl-next-door kind of way, with a narrow nose that had a little upturned tip—Lyndon called it my “princess nose.” He said I was like a Disney princess, but I said Snow White’s nose was much more of a button nose than mine. He agreed and commented that perhaps it was the elegant narrow ovals of my nostrils that bewitched him. Only Lyndon could say something that asinine and sound sincere. He also said I had the most perfect philtrum he had ever seen. When I looked blank, he explained that that was the term for the indentation above my lip. A Greek word, he said, meaning “love.” A term for the two folds of flesh that, during embryonic development, grew and met in the front of the head. The philtrum was the last bit of the “seam” where the two halves of our face are fused together. All of which kind of grossed me out. I twitched my princess nose and my philtrum in distaste, and we both collapsed with laughter, while he poured me more wine.
I was five-foot-six and slender, except when I bore my children. They had both gone out of their way to double my size, but I soon bounced back to my boyish figure for which I was grateful. I kept my reddish hair short and feathered, coloured in recent years. I never worried about my freckles or the fact that my one eyebrow arched way higher than the other. The ordinary shape of my mouth was counterbalanced by the striking colour of my eyes. I had gotten lucky there. Hazel eyes could be boring, but mine had a starburst of red-brown around the pupils, in the shape of a sunflower, all of which was framed by thick, long eyelashes.
I was a white-capri kinda gal in spring, and in summer, I wore a uniform of white jeans and soft cashmere sweaters. I also favoured colourful blouses with jewellery accents to match. I took care with my appearance, but I was never vain. I didn’t have anything to be vain about. I wasn’t sexy or curvaceous or sultry. Was that why Lyndon had left me? Did he have a sudden urge for a big-breasted sultry diva?
Meanwhile, Lyndon had always reminded me of Ted Bundy. He had that same patrician look and similar features. I thought that the first night I met him and later, when we hooked up, I joked about it. He told me that I wasn’t the first person to make the observation, and he seemed hurt and dejected by the comment, so I dropped the subject and never mentioned it again. But now, I couldn’t help but be reminded that Ted Bundy escaped from prison by jumping out of the law library, and now Lyndon had run off a ferry into the Australian night.
These crazy thoughts and others swirled through my head throughout the night as I sat there watching the blackness become day.
I forced myself to get up and turn on the television. I needed to watch the morning news. I didn’t expect to find anything about Lyndon, and I was hoping not to. Please, don’t let there be any stories about tourists knifed in Kings Cross or somewhere unsavoury. But Lyndon wouldn’t walk around unsafe neighbourhoods, would he? But he was a tourist, and he wouldn’t know the safe from the unsafe. I clicked on the news and watched a traffic report and a weather report, which said it was going to be another glorious day in Sydney. It was the end of April, and hotter than usual. The day would reach a perfect 27 degrees without a cloud in the sky. Lovely, really but who the hell cared?
I pulled the chair closer to the television and watched the international news roll out, followed by local news. Nothing of note. But then, an announcement. Breaking news: A man had stolen a Jeep from outside a coffee shop in Kirribilli, and what was more, the Jeep had an expensive cat in the back and the distraught owner was about to be interviewed.
Lyndon got off at Kirribilli. It was him, I knew it was. I leaned forward and turned up the sound.
A thirty-something blonde was sobbing into the camera. She had left her car for a moment to go and get a flat white, and the next thing she knew, her car was gone!
What kind of idiot leaves a car running? I asked myself and the interviewer must have thought the same thing because she asked the question of the woman.
“But why did you leave it running?”
“For MooshooBear,” the woman wailed. “I was going to drop her off at daycare. I always stop there. Right there. And I go and get my coffee. She hates it when the car is hot. She likes the AC, so I always leave it on when she’s in the car. There’s never been a problem till now.”
“Who is MooshooBear?”
“My cat, of course,” the woman wailed. “My Maine Coon. She’s only four. She worth thousands of dollars but I don’t care about that. She’s my baby and someone stole her. I don’t care about my car, just give me back my cat.”
The blonde turned to the camera and looked imploringly at me. “Please,” she said, her makeup as much of a mess as mine had been the night before, “please, just give me my cud
dle-wuddle back. Keep the car, I don’t care. But please, give me my baby. Wait, here’s a picture of her.”
She flipped through pictures on her phone and pointed it at the camera. I agreed; the cat was magnificent.
“Please,” the blonde wept. “Please, just give her back to me.”
The reporter made a signal and someone led the woman away. “If anyone has any information about the Jeep, registration number A, C, 75, W, G, with a cat box in the back, please call the number on your screen. All community help is welcome. Let’s help this woman get her cat back!”
The news returned to bombings in Baghdad, so I muted it. I sat there in the wingback chair, all clean and moisturized, in my pyjamas, with my world in ruins. Lyndon had stolen that car. And Lyndon had stolen that cat. I just knew it.
4. LYNDON
I FINALLY GOT MYSELF under control and stopped crying. I examined the cat, prodding her this way and that, and she didn’t seem to mind. She was a she and she was huge. She weighted at least fifteen pounds. She let me pet her and roll her over, and her fur was soft and silky. She had a ruff around her neck, like a lion’s mane. She appeared to be in good health, and I wondered why she was in the cat box. Was she on her way to the vet? She didn’t have any obvious injuries and she seemed happy on my lap. She made little trilling noises, and my eyes welled up again, but I choked down the tears. For God’s sake, what was wrong with me? Well, in answer to that question: I had abandoned my wife, stolen a car, and was now sitting crying over a cat. I guess you could categorically say that there was a lot wrong with me.
I stroked the cat’s hair, admiring all her colours. She was a tabby with red and gold in her fur, and she was utterly magnificent.
“Wow,” I told her. “Wow. Are you okay, baby? Are you sick?” Two minutes into our meeting and I was talking to her like she’s a newborn, in a way I never spoke to my own kids, not even when they were tiny. I crooned and chatted to her, and I wondered what my son and daughter would say if they could hearme now.
“Do you actually ever feel anything at all?” my son, Adam, had asked me in one of our last conversations. I had tried to answer him, I did, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. There were no words. He had looked at me for a while, waiting, and then he got up and left.
Maybe he had been looking for more of a response to the news that he was gay, but it hadn’t really been news to me. I wasn’t shocked or surprised, and the worst truth I guess, was that I didn’t really care one way or the other.
He had chosen our Around-The-World-For-However-Long-We-Want party to make the announcement. The party—and the trip—had been Margaux’s idea, not mine and perhaps it was Adam’s fault for choosing that time to tell me. But no, it wasn’t that. I would have reacted in the same way, which was, no reaction at all. And it wasn’t his fault, that was just me. Besides, at thirty-five, he didn’t, or shouldn’t, need approval from anyone, certainly not his parents.
I considered myself to be a nice guy, but then, if you have to tell yourself that, you’re probably trying to appease the knot of guilt in your gut. Except that there was no knot and there was no guilt. If I were a nice guy, there would be a knot, wouldn’t there? Why didn’t I feel guilt? Why didn’t I feel anything?
I had never been one for introspection. I simply never thought about things much. That was my way—just don’t think about it. I had often said to Margaux, “Don’t think about it, honey,” and she had often snapped back that she couldn’t help but think about things. Whereas me, I couldn’t think about things if I tried. Obviously, I thought about a lot of things, but they were practical things, like taking out the right garbage on the right day, and putting all the correct things into the recycling and not chucking things in willy-nilly. I was meticulous about that. I thought about recycling a lot and how we were filling the world with garbage, how the level of junk was rising daily, all that packaging and glossy cardboard that couldn’t be recycled. I thought about carbon emissions and gas pipelines, about oil and pollution and global warming. So it wasn’t like I didn’t think about things at all, I just didn’t think about emotions or the meaning of life, or why we were here, or where we were going, or where we had come from, or why one’s children never seemed to stop needing to be looked after even when they were supposed to be adults.
I was savvy with repartee, and in fact, I was considered to be quite the wit. You could always rely on Lyndon at a party, I’d heard countless people say. I had a dry wit, a cutting wit, and I loved to see people laughing and at a loss with their response. Sometimes people looked a bit alarmed, as if they were worried I would turn my rapier wit on them, but I was never cruel. There was, however, a certain satisfaction that came from being the most clever person in the room, and I had worked hard to achieve and maintain that status. I read the newspapers at breakfast, preparing my commentary for the day, should anyone ask for my opinion, which they invariably did. I had been, until recently, the editor of a business magazine, a post I had held for a very long and yet a very short, thirty-three years of my life.
I was twenty-seven when they made me the editor-in-chief, the youngest hotshot ever. I was already married to Margaux and we had our Adam; he was two years old and our daughter, Helen was on the way. My whole cookie-cutter life had been laid out in front of me, and all I had to do was show up at meetings, say clever, funny things, strategically guide the magazine through its various advertising crises and technological developments, and generally keep the ship afloat.
All of which I did extremely well, primarily by not thinking too much at all. Yes, the physical state of the world distressed me, and I did what I could to save the planet by separating our garbage and taking my own mug to the coffee shop, thereby playing my part in fending off the impending disaster of the death of our planet. I did as much as I could, anyway.
I sat there stroking the cat, and I didn’t want to think about my life, but the cat was wonderful on my lap, a heavy, warm comfort, and I didn’t want to disturb her—or me. So, I carried on doing that uncharacteristic thing, thinking. Thinking about the unthinking life I had led.
My life had been a blessed one by all accounts. I was born of suburban parents who were acknowledged to be nice people—good people—although my father had been quick with his fists whenever I behaved in a manner, or offered an opinion, that he did not like. He never punched me—that would have been far too crass—but many times he smacked me across the back of the head in a pseudo joking way, a way that brought fireworks of light spinning across my vision and the sting of tears to my eyes. I often wondered if I had suffered from a constant concussion when I was growing up because I didn’t feel right a lot of the time. I suffered from headaches, wooziness, and a flulike malaise that my father called my “‘Linnie’s vapours.” “Poor little fragile flower,” he would say, “suffering from the vapours like a Victorian heroine.” But I never questioned him or his methods of parenting. I had been brought up to believe that my father was a good man, that he merely wanted what was best for me, and I tried to trust that was true. I did try to tell him, as I grew older, that being hit on the back on the head wasn’t conducive to facilitating me seeing his point sooner rather than later, that all he had to do was simply say what he wanted to say, and that he could keep his hands to himself. He hadn’t appreciated my insight and issued a couple of blows with increased force as if to punctuate for emphasis.
I left home for university and never went back. I phoned my mother regularly, and she and I kept in touch, but she never asked me if she could come and visit, and I never offered.
I did not invite my parents to the wedding.
“Dad will hit me,” I told my mother, and she was immediately silent. I was trespassing on forbidden ground, discussing that which should never be mentioned. When Margaux had told me she was pregnant, I spoke to her about my father. It was the only time we ever discussed him, and she was supportive of a clean amputation of the relationship. Ce
rtainly, she did not want him around our children.
My mother died of cancer when I was in my mid-thirties. Adam was ten and Helen, eight. They had never met her. We told the children that they died in a car accident, years before they had been born. I attended the funeral alone. I walked up to my father and stared at him in a way that warned him not to touch me, but he was too grief-stricken to even notice I was there.
I skipped the reception and didn’t hear from my father until days before my sixtieth birthday when, out of the blue, I got a text message from him. Decades of silence and then a text message for God’s sake? “Got Alzheimer’s. Wanted to say goodbye while I still could. Hope you made something of your little life. Don’t reply, there’s no point.” I hadn’t shown Margaux.
A less-than-happy, rather shrill meow interrupted my musing and I realized I had been kneading the cat as if she was a stress ball, and she looked up at me with an annoyed expression.
I picked her up, nose to nose. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “You’re quite right. Please accept my apologies. So, what shall I call you? You need a regal name. A queenly name. Queenie. Yes, that’s you.” I poured some water into the dog’s bowl and she lapped up a tiny amount with an adorable tongue, leaving a drop of water on her chin.
“I’ll get you some food soon,” I said. “I wonder if you need to go to the toilet?” I looked at my watch. A good half an hour had passed, with me just sitting there, talking to myself and Queenie. I needed to get moving, I would be noticed soon, a guy sitting in the back seat of a Jeep, talking to himself. I looked around. Yes, the parking lot was filling up. I couldn’t dally. I put Queenie back into her box. “Just for now,” I told her. “We’ll stop in the next town and get you some food. Okay?”
I got into the driver’s seat, turned on the air con and the seat warmer, and we hit the road, heading for Melbourne.
The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist's Solution Page 3
