Blueberries

by Ellena Savage

  At the truck stop, where all the passengers had to wait for a replacement bus, he looked at me very seriously and he said, ‘The truck that hit us fell off the cliff.’

  I peered into the dark. The road did not appear to be running along the edge of a cliff. I said nothing. He was famous for twisting the truth. Whatever happened to the truck, I would never know.

  ‘I thought about giving you my shirt,’ he said, ‘to wrap around your head. But it’s YSL.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s ten-dollar YSL from the markets.’

  Windows

  From the couch, I watched a big blonde woman bring in her laundry from the balcony. I didn’t mean to invade. It just happened; I was just… Looking. Through another window, across the way, I saw an older guy spread out on his couch watching the football, a can of Coke at his feet. His legs were outstretched, emphatically.

  I wondered, does it get too much? Living in a real city, unlike spread-out suburban Australia? After forty years of half-clothed bodies in your line of vision do you think: enough! I’m moving to the country.

  I couldn’t imagine getting sick of it. The safety of knowing that other bodies were nearby.

  A few days later, I sipped a cup of tea at the kitchen window, looking again, mindlessly, and a man across the way dropped his pants, hunched his thick shoulders over, and started masturbating. He was looking straight at me.

  Baggage

  Although I didn’t yet have my L-plates, he let me drive almost the whole way interstate in his Commodore. When we got to his parents’ house we were shown to his old room with two single beds, which later that night we pushed together and made love on with wide-mouthed kisses.

  He took me to the top of the mountain to look at the bluest lake I’ve ever seen, a lake that radiates light at certain times of the year due to mysterious alchemy, and then we had dinner at a pub that had only one vegetarian option, with a guy whose brother had disappeared in India two years before. They talked a lot about how the search was going, not saying, both, what they didn’t want to think about.

  After dinner, he told me that he liked me so much because I had no baggage, which was true mainly because I was seventeen years old and he was almost a grown man.

  Luxury Hotel

  It was not the first luxury hotel room. There had been the Lupe Fiasco afterparty fiasco—we access-all-areas girls entered the smoke-filled room at the Marriott, and the chief groupie poured us each a vodka.

  Where’s Lupe? we asked.

  We sipped from plastic glasses, sat nestled on couches piled high with overcoats, and waited. Loud music. Then, the chubby guitarist’s hand on my leg. And the danger sliding like oil on the lips of the bassist, who wore sunglasses inside and a terry towelling robe. Our faces drained when we realised that Lupe would not be coming to the party. The lights switched off quickly then, pitch darkness, me on my knees digging for my bag. Her tears in the corridor. And our escape.

  So, not the first luxury hotel. But perhaps the first rental car? It was the early days and he wooed me. You know. Just a regular guy, staying at luxury hotels for academic conferences. My dreams of our coupling. Every email I composed to him had an eagle eye on posterity.

  We arrived at the conference late, large sunglasses on.

  ‘You sure know how to do a conference,’ someone said as we stepped out of the rental car. As he delivered an incomprehensible paper, I read the news. As he debated with his seniors, I stepped out for a constitutional. In the evening, we met with some of the academics he knew for a drink. My first encounter with them, the teachers, not as a student. One of them hated his wife but loved his baby. Another insisted that everyone drink the same overpriced, swamp-flavoured whiskey he was ordering for himself. One of them, I saw over his shoulder, had twelve thousand dollars sitting in his everyday bank account, which was an amount of money I had never considered existing all in one place. That was, I think, the beginning of my education.

  The Swan

  While he was in the shower, I used his phone to check my email. Maybe I looked through his messages while I was there. Maybe I read something I wasn’t supposed to. Maybe I lacked discretion and I blurted out, who is she? He yelled about privacy and his phone. Which I suppose he was right to. But.

  The one time I went to his hometown with him, he took me to the Swan. Said it was his old local. We went there several nights in a row. A friend, rich from mining business, plied us with mid-strength beers. Said to me, ‘I didn’t expect a feminist to look like you.’

  ‘Whatever do you mean?’ I asked.

  That night I counted eight pints down his throat, though it might have been more, and afterwards he drove me home. I didn’t want to get in the car.

  ‘How else are you going to get home?’ he said.

  I didn’t know where I was.

  We’d been fighting, starting to fight. I wanted to go home, he wanted to keep pounding beers. There was no point in being left alone in the middle of wherever. So I got in.

  On the highway, he weaved between lanes and other cars, the puddles of light on the tarmac slipping quicker and quicker beneath us. I looked at the faces of other drivers as we passed them, their eyes mad with alcohol, too. I screamed at him to let me out. Over and again I said, ‘I’ll get an Uber! I don’t care if it’s a hundred dollars.’

  ‘There are no Ubers out here,’ he screamed back.

  He laughed, then, in a way that reminded me of Al Pacino playing the devil in the 1997 horror-comedy The Devil’s Advocate.

  Later, at his mum’s house, I cried and cried. He wrestled me in his rage and placed his body on top of mine, pinning me down. His mother busted into the room to tell us to stop.

  It was at the Swan, another time, months or maybe a year later, a time when I wasn’t there, with a person whose name he’d never mentioned. But its traces were there on his phone.

  Probably I had seen it coming.

  Green Lake

  She and I disrobed at the edge of the water, slid beneath the emerald surface. Once we were immersed in the dark green pool, he ran down the bank, stripped to his undies and hurtled in, too. It was two or three days before Christmas. We were in the North of Vietnam, one or two or three hundred kilometres from Hanoi. The water should have been chilly, but it wasn’t. The water was warm like red wine served badly in summer. It thawed our skin as we rolled around in its stillness. As she lunged into a floating backflip her breasts, belly, thighs and finally her knees darted through the folds of dark water. My joy deepened with every turn.

  They were a couple. Her, I’d known since underage gigs: cowboy boots, bangs, love-me-please red lipstick. He was her London-life boyfriend: leather jacket, sixties moustache, carrying about a look of having been put upon.

  The lake was so picturesque it had the look of man-made perfection. I have never since been able to locate it on a map or online. I have to accept that my memory is the only trace I have of this afternoon. Or was it the morning?

  Sometimes the water is amaranth, when I remember it. And the trees lining its banks are forresty grey pines with long soft needles, like fingers. Mostly I can agree with myself that the water was green, green with a sweet muddy flavour, and the foliage all around it was bamboo. The heat emanating from the water concerned me, but only a little. I thought of the blue-green algae that had given kids pelican itch when we swam in dams and lakes as a child. No one else was swimming there. Or fishing. Or washing.

  Which made me think: odd. Contaminated? Or a reservoir. Or some kind of nature reserve?

  Whatever it was, at least we’re still alive.

  She told me, years later, that he hurt her on that trip. I knew they had been fighting, but I wasn’t there. Why wasn’t I there?

  It took us another day or two of motorcycling through twisting, chilly mountains to get back to the city, where we split up, went off to our respective hotels. When they got to their room, he hurt her.

  At least, we’re still alive.

  You Dirty Phony Saint and
Martyr

  I was in the courtyard of a cafe in East London (£7.50 for my coffee and sandwich and some wifi) and the two waitresses working but not really working working were smoking cigarettes and drinking ‘cheeky’ juices at the table next to me. The one with false eyelashes and long, slim, honey-coloured limbs told the other about her seventeen-hour trip to Ibiza with Diplo, who was, for the weekend, her squeeze, where she had embarrassed herself by drinking four little bottles of red wine on the private jet, the purple of which Diplo had to wipe off her lips when she arrived. Before and after the show, she said, Diplo and his dancers drank green tea and ate quinoa salads because, for them, it wasn’t a party, it was work. Of course, as a feminist, I saw her extravagant make-up and her limbs, taut despite the red-wine calories, as a kind of work, too: a work, at least, of imagination and of aspiration.

  ‘Like, I used to have posters of Diplo on my wall as a teenager,’ she said to her colleague. ‘I couldn’t imagine him even looking at me, you know? And then, there I was. On his private plane.’

  A year before she died, Kathy Acker wrote in a notebook:

  Concerning imagination: At age 30 I was working in a cookie shop. There was absolutely nothing in the society that in any way made it seem possible for me to earn my living as a writer. I was, and still am, the most noncommercial of writers. I said, if X doesn’t exist, you have to make it exist. You just imagine it…

  Much has been said about how writers earn money writing when writing does not itself generate money; more will be said, too, of the nexus of power, privilege and prestige in literature, and I have little to add here. More interesting to me is that some artists, in fact, do it without networks of financial security. They do it because they are driven by desperate and belligerent ambition. They believe, at least in the beginning—they must—that they are the specials. (‘I used to believe that I was exceptional and abnormal,’ wrote John Berger.) Special enough to ask for more than they have been given.

  There are many kinds of hunger. And when we are hungry, sometimes it is our own goddamn fault.

  Last year I read a lot of Gertrude Stein and, while drenched in her odd, somewhat aggressive and sumptuous world, I’d teach my classes ($120 per hour) armed with printouts of her ‘portraits’. If my students neglected to do their readings, I whipped her out as a form of punishment (of course, Gertrude Stein is no real punishment). During one such session, the brightest student—who every week arrived late and left early, holes in her tights, clearly hungover, yet in possession of an extraordinary brain—brought up Hemingway’s ‘lyric memoir’ A Moveable Feast; brought up how, in it, Hemingway brutally criticised Stein. I’d gone through my Hemingway craze in high school, when I loved his languor and barely concealed petulance, but I hadn’t returned to his work to see if I might still value his opinion. In any case, I had never read A Moveable Feast and couldn’t comment on this accusation, except to declare in the classroom that autobiographies tend to reveal more about their authors than their authors know.

  A little while later, I was invited to speak on a panel addressing my old university’s new honours students, which was surprising, because I had done okay but not brilliantly in my honours year, which I had enrolled in, initially—and perhaps unbelievably—for the purpose of receiving the Austudy ($440 a fortnight) that I had never been able get before on account of multiple universe-not-aligning reasons. This meant my undergraduate years were pure hustle and debt until I came to edit the student newspaper ($17,000 per annum). After graduating I learned that not only was I terrible at earning money from writing, I was also an undesirable in the broader job economy. Following this revelation, I met J, a slightly older, slightly more affluent boy (yet frantically self-made), and I joined him overseas on his research trip. He paid for most of it on his meagre scholarship, so that took care of half a year or so, but still we were broke and mainly ate noodles and drank malt liquor instead of beer, and while he ‘worked’ on his project, or lay in bed consumed by guilt for not working on his project, I developed a fitness fanaticism and—when I wasn’t running or doing weights—read a lot, and wrote some short pieces that brought in a few hundred here and there and in one case some prize money. But, really, what I needed was a living wage, and Austudy, at $440 a fortnight, sounded pretty plush, so the idea of returning to Melbourne to do my honours year was appealing, in that it would force me to write, and to write with seriousness as my goal.

  After finishing the panel for the new students, I was handed a $50 bookshop voucher, which I promptly exchanged for a new Clairefontaine notebook ($6.95), another copy of Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing ($24.95) to replace the one a friend had accidentally defaced, and A Moveable Feast ($16.95), though I didn’t read A Moveable Feast until I was walking out on Melbourne and into a new life in Berlin ($500 sale fare, one way), where I thought it might be possible to live off what was now my PhD student stipend ($26,000 per annum) while writing a serious thesis, or, at least, a book. It was a strange sensation to read A Moveable Feast under these circumstances: to be in the process of establishing a writing life away from my social support structures and my comforts and my access to crappy temporary hospitality jobs when things went sideways, and to read the most commonly cited (and arguably most hackneyed) handbook on the topic.

  Let’s forget what Hemingway says about Gertrude Stein and, by extension, women as a class—‘there is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers’—and instead think about him and Paris and money.

  The Berlin decision and, in fact, every decision I have made so far in both my writing and love life, has, to some degree, been made with day-to-day money and future money in mind. For example: I guess I’d hoped, or imagined, that working as a volunteer for the literary journal the Lifted Brow for years (five) would accrue cultural capital that would morph into material capital, but it has not, yet, and might never, unless I wish to become a scholar of independent literary magazines, or edit a hypothetical one that pays a salary the fraction of what I could earn in a regular middle-class profession like teaching high-school students.

  Aside from fearing great women and truly ambitious women writers in particular, Hemingway talks about living in poverty in Paris while learning to write; he speaks of a wretched sort of living, but a wretchedness tempered by the choice to make art, and this is summed up in a strange tale about child care.

  In the spirit of candour, I should admit that while reading A Moveable Feast I imposed upon it my mean-spirited feminism; as I read, a little voice instructed me to ask: who is looking after your baby, Hemingway, who is washing your socks? Presumably your WIFE, your suffering female companion, while YOU pursue YOUR INANE PASSIONS. And while my instinct for framing and naming patriarchal behaviours is usually correct, in this case it was wrong.

  Hemingway’s wife at the time, Hadley, is a pianist; after Ernest goes off to the cafe to work, she trundles down to her studio, coming home intermittently to feed the baby, Bumby, because:

  There were no baby-sitters then and Bumby would stay happy in his tall cage bed with his big, loving cat named F Puss. There were people who said it was dangerous to leave a cat with a baby. The most ignorant and prejudiced would say that a cat would suck a baby’s breath and kill him. Others said that a cat would lie on a baby and the cat’s weight would smother him. F Puss lay beside him in the tall cage bed and watched the door with his big yellow eyes, and would let no one come near him when we were out…

  I can’t attest to what Hemingway is attempting to evoke here, particularly regarding his contempt for the ‘ignorant and prejudiced’ who dared question the reliability of animal guardians. What I take from this passage is that Bumby was raised by a cat because it’s very difficult to write stories or study the piano when you are caring for your child. Child care is a feminist issue, but moreover it is a capitalist issue and, like all capitalist issues, it
is an issue for artists who, like (many, most?) women, are towards the bottom of the heap. Children might add value to one’s life— intangible value, or at least nonquantifiable value—but they cost a lot, more than what some people possess. Having a baby will cost me money and time I do not have, and may never have, so the man I am in love with says he will have a vasectomy ($500) so that we will be able to learn to write side-by-side without leaving a young human in the care of domestic animals. (We have also ruled out pets, for now, and anything that leads to consumer debt.)

  …

  In London I felt a little bored. I was not particularly excited to go out consuming and not in the mood for art, either, sentiments which may be connected. So I took the bus to Oxford (£14 return) to see two friends: a couple, both young scholars but more than that—more golden, more like baubles singing. When I arrived, E was still polishing the references in the thesis she would submit the following morning, so to kill a few hours I walked around the old town. The sandstone everything of the ancient university was scorched—a sweaty brightness I did not enjoy—and so I ducked into Blackwell’s, a large and famous but frankly quite boring bookshop. I couldn’t find any of the books I was after, (Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell by Katherine Angel, or John Aubrey: My Own Life by Ruth Scurr). But I dawdled nonetheless. Somewhere around the ‘queer studies’ section—a section comprised of four hundred copies of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, which I had read, already, twice, and little else—I found a stray copy of I’m Very into You: Correspondence 1995–1996, a collection of the emails Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark sent one another after sleeping together when Acker visited Sydney in the mid-nineties.

  A lush record of two minds, two hearts at work building lives for themselves that could seem vital, real. How much longing for recognition there is in their exchange, two queers living at the centre of things, or rather the centre of something marginal and vivid and alive, enmeshed in their times. Hemingway might paint a picture of what it is to be young, dumb, full of cum and choosing art over the affluence he’d inherit someday anyway, but he doesn’t scratch the surface of the how, the why, the superstructure; he carries with him the security of Midwestern bourgeois prosperity. In 1995, Acker and Wark painted the grimness that seems much closer to my inheritance.