A Woman of the Inner Sea (5 page)

So she found herself—to her own astonishment—content with that commonwealth of three. Kate, Siobhan, Bernard.

Afterwards it would always amaze Kate how the eternal banalities had been proven by her case. The banality that a man who is allowed to socialize without his wife will speak to and be spoken to by other women in a way he wouldn’t be if the wife were there.

In staying home from the dinners, she forfeited, she was penalized, and ultimately she paid gigantic tolls. Because she didn’t know she was a player in the trite game. She thought she transcended all that.

Paul’s first affair, so far as she knew the record of his affairs, was not with his own secretary but with old Andrew’s. This was a minor adventure. The real thing began—by irony—at a dinner at which film distributors honored Jim Gaffney. Paul met the great obsessive love, the one who demented him, for whom he felt not simply desire but a delirium, for whom he would willingly and in the end devour fire, be damned, walk through hell.

Kate happened to be there; an off-the-shoulder dress in the days before her shoulders were scar tissue. If Paul’s affair had not become the heroic obsession it did, Kate might have thought that the Gaffney-esque quality of the evening might have been what led Paul to take a little conscious or intuitive vengeance against the Gaffney family by seducing a stranger.

The woman’s name was Perdita. She was angular like Paul and had fine skin and blond hair. Kate knew and could recite all her features; Perdita and her Croatian-born husband were regulars on Palm Beach during the summer, so that Kate even knew how Perdita looked in a bikini. So did Paul. But it seemed he did not really notice her in that superheated and single-minded way until he was seated beside her at the Gaffney dinner. Anyone would have said that neither her conversation nor her beauty came to explain the hectic and disordered devotion which possessed Paul Kozinski from that point on.

Paul’s affair with Perdita Krinkovich began soon after the Gaffney dinner. It caused Kate the usual anguish. But what she most hated about it was that it altered the terms under which planet Palm Beach maintained itself. It brought to an end the ecstatic age—the one in which by choice she dispensed the laughter and the sunlight while the divine children, with easy and infallible grace, availed themselves of it all.

For their sake and by choice she had been in social exile. Now she was a social exile by Paul’s choice. He found reasons to stay in the flat at Double Bay during the week. When he came to the beach on weekends, he slept a great deal on Saturdays. He and Kate would go out to dinner together on Saturday nights, but the conversation would be tentative and sporadic and would turn gratefully to questions and anecdotes about the children.

He would take a boatload of targeted people out on the
Vistula
on Sundays. Though she sometimes took the children so that they could swim with their father, she often found a pretext not to go. She hated the sight of Burnside and the others.

The plain, square-faced man Murray first came to Kate’s door with a petition he wanted her to sign. She’d had him pointed out to her once on the beach. He was a lawyer who worked for a merchant bank. Now he was engaged in an uncharacteristic act of overt politics—gathering signatures.

Someone wanted to build a two-story restaurant on Palm Beach. Its roof would break the pure sweep of Pacific he could see from his sun deck. It would also go bust and stand vacant or become a disco. The roads out here weren’t built for that sort of traffic. They were not built for young men to drive on fueled with grog (he used
the old-fashioned, convict-naval term) while showing off to some tanned girl passenger.

The strain of all this activism just about made him sound pompous. But little ironies in his manner kept saving him.

Murray Stannard: an old-fashioned honorable man of the Anglo-Australian tradition, the way Jim Gaffney was an old-fashioned man in the Celtic vein. Two very different kinds of creatures nonetheless. He was never as funny as Jim. He had values, and she quite rightly thought the day he first visited to get her signature that he was bemused, that there was an intensity to his desire for petitions which perhaps his stated cause itself didn’t justify. That he was trying to preserve more than he said he was trying to preserve.

There were rumors his marriage was going wrong. The conventional wisdom was that it had happened because he was a man who typified the values of the early 1950s. His young wife, a seventies child, more of a freebooter in sex and culture, in reading and opinion, originally attracted by his quaintness, now couldn’t stand it.

—Of course (he said) people think it’s only because of my view I’m tramping round like this. It’s more than that. People come here from all over the world just because the view isn’t broken by structures. The building itself, Mrs. Kozinski, is—I admit—inoffensive by comparison with other buildings elsewhere. But that’s not the point. This is nothing else but Sydney’s last chance. If this view goes, then the whole coastline’s brutalized for the whole community. We have a concrete coast from Wollongong to Palm Beach!

She signed, yet she was sure he would take the list of signatories home and bore his wife with it.

There were plenty of people to tell her what was happening between Perdita Krinkovich and Paul Kozinski. Some did so with malice and some with concern. Krinkovich was—by report—delighted. He had a girlfriend of his own. He wanted to get out cheaply too, and he was most likely to do that if his wife married another of the group known as “Big Developers.”

Her mother, Kate O’Brien-Gaffney, demanded that she do something tough about Paul. Her mother-in-law advised her to be kinder and to go to more parties with him.

In the summer before the cataclysm, people could sometimes sit
on Palm Beach and see with one sweep of the eye the parties to the three drowning marriages—the Krinkoviches, the Kozinskis and the Stannards (Murray and his wife). Not that people talked excessively about or were amazed by such things in Sydney.

If Reg Krinkovich however was said to take love easy, Paul Kozinski only pretended to.

Someone at the coordination clinic had mentioned that dance classes might be good for little Bernard. Dance appealed to Bernard temperamentally, Kate could tell, and might even unleash in him the athleticism looked for in antipodean males.

The classes begun, Siobhan managed in no time robust pliés and arabesques. Bernard achieved a more intense form of balance.

Attending a Christmas concert at the dance school Mrs. Maria Kozinski, always alert for signs of a malign destiny for her grandson, said, But there is only one other little boy in the class.

The curse inherent in the improper baptism and the Jewish first name continued to display its omens to Paul’s mother.

—I want you to speak to her, Kate told Paul. When we see them on Christmas Day.

—Why don’t you? She listens to you.

—No. You tell her to leave him alone. None of this,
Wouldn’t you like to play a game that other boys play?

—Come on. You haven’t actually heard her say that to him, have you?

—She’s come close to it.

—And you say
she
misjudges
you?

—She’ll be influenced by you, Paul. For God’s sake, just warn her off. Bernard may never keep wickets for Australia, but he’s got a greater strength than that. He takes things as they come. He’s practically the only boy in the dance class, but he doesn’t see it in those terms. They’re all just other dancers to him. His sister’s just another dancer. He sees her do some lairy
grand jeté
, but he doesn’t think: I don’t want to do that because it’s a girl doing it. And he doesn’t think: I don’t want to do it because I can’t. He just rejoices, that’s all. And I don’t want her messing him up, Paul.

She could tell Paul thought all this was only a matter of making an adjustment in the balance of rivalries between his wife and his mother.

He was in any case already bored with Kate and the tussle for Bernard’s unimpaired soul.

There was a thin freckled girl called Denise who had been coming for the past two years into the Gaffney-Kozinski household to help with the children. She was gentle. She had trekked in the Himalayas again and again. The Himalayan journey had become one of the rites of passage of the Australian young in the 1980s. They helped pollute the slopes of the mountains, even of Everest itself, but they also learned from the Nepalese to be vegetarian and studiously gentle. Denise was a vegetarian and intended to go on periodically trekking until she was thirty-five. She lived with her parents, who were bemused by her, her penitence, her lack of concern over real estate and career and all the rest. She had a special feeling for Bernard, and her Zen sense of the priority of all acts, human and animal, drove Siobhan to paroxysms of somersaults and jetés. She never drank, and for an ascetic, she drove well. It became an established pattern that she drove the children to their Tuesday dance classes.

Arriving home early during the summer one Tuesday afternoon, Paul found Kate sitting sun-dazed in an armchair, sipping a substantial glass of vodka and reading the
Bulletin
.

Kate felt bound to explain herself.

—The days Denise takes them to dance classes, I indulge myself.

She couldn’t help sounding defensive.

—Drinking to the overthrow of old mother Kozinski, said Paul, and poured himself a drink, and sat and looked out to sea.

There were a few such Tuesdays, when he got home early to sit with her and join in her hour-and-a-half party. Usually, he would be traveling or would not get home until late, drugged with fatigue, complaining about the long drive from the city.

He woke one night as she was returning from the bathroom with a bottle of sedatives in her hands.

—You’re taking too many of those, he complained, his side of the story for their cold bed. And she was. She was taking plenty. Probably twenty milligrams too much per night, and she was drinking extra vodka too. Marriage was a state of such rigidity. All the other people’s marriages seemed flexible and escapable. It was well known that people went for the bottle or the dalliance
before they went for the lawyer. Another banal rule whose force had fallen on the Gaffney-Kozinski household.

—I hope you’re clearheaded when you’re driving the kids, he said.

Paul on his own could be happy for her to go on being mother to his children when the marriage ended. But Mrs. Kozinski might inflame her son, calling on his pride with the idea of extricating her grandchildren from the frightful ambience of the not-so-Reverend, from the flawed sacraments. Evidence such as the use of liquor and drugs were a gift to his case.

Preparing for unconsciousness at last, Kate envisaged some court scene, and a brief astringent sweat broke on the surface of her skin.

—Mr. Kozinski, did you ever remonstrate with your wife over the use of sedatives?

—I remember one night, when I saw her returning from the bathroom with a pill bottle in her hands. I complained then. I was worried about her competence to drive the children …

Kate took the interior oath to live in Guatemala with them if she had to. Or on the beaches of Costa Rica. She had a nightmare in which they went driving blithely away in a black car at whose wheel sat smiling Burnside, Kozinski Constructions’ heavy and enforcer.

She thought of asking Paul if the sight of her taking sedatives made it easier for him to sleep with Perdita. And then she thought that she was too tired to sustain the loudness this would generate.

That counting of small costs was a sign. They were near an end.

And then the features of a pleasant man, a man who would never be vengeful over children, broke with that random sort of clarity. The man who had come for the petition. Murray. A man who didn’t simulate.

Uncle Frank used sometimes to come to see her and the children on Mondays. Most of his confreres played golf that day, but he was already not so much a pariah but a sign of contradiction amongst his fellow priests, even though his cardinal archbishop had not yet—to use his own whimsical phrase—pulled his plug.

He was always restless on Mondays. Jim Gaffney said, Monday’s Frank’s black sabbath. He’s got to wait for the midweek race meetings before he can have another bet!

But the not-so-Reverend Frank had by now become more abstemious with liquor than he once was. Cronies in the police force and the magistracy who would have protected him had he driven boozed in the past were now retired or else facing charges. At Kate’s place, he sipped white wine on the sun deck and discussed politics. Cuchulain between cattle raids.

—If your poor grandmother could see us here in the sun, drinking this golden wine, she’d understand what all the suffering was for. Just the same, Kate darling, things aren’t good with your man, that bloody Pole …

—Not good, Uncle Frank, she admitted, against all the urgings of her passion for privacy.

—Oh, Jesus, he said. Marriage is a bugger, you see. It can aggrandize ordinary people. It can make extraordinary ones miserable. Do you love him still, this Paul Kozinski?

She had no answer. He had been easy to love in the celebratory sweetness of the first six or so years. Could he be said to be loved in the cunning warfare of the present?

—Dear Kate, breathed Uncle Frank. I suppose your parents will want you to undergo the entire canonical circus of annulment. All that stuff’s easier these days. To have a contract, according to little canonical weasels like Monsignor Slattery, you need material appropriate to a contract, suitable persons, mutual consent, and full knowledge. Now anyone can prove that one of those was missing. And I suppose you’ll want to go through all that. After all, it’s tradition. And tradition’s worth something. If the faithful realized how easy it was—and if they could afford it—half of them would be divorced right now.

—We’ll just see. The marriage can be retrieved, Uncle Frank.

But he had obviously heard differently. Everyone was hearing differently. Paul Kozinski bore all the marks of a man far gone.