Authors: Owen Marshall
'We could walk the section boundary, though,' Theo
said.
That's what they did. Up the rough grass slope to the
plum tree and behind the wooden dunny, down a fenceline
of rusted out wire and a few remaining, tipsy waratahs to
the great macrocarpa hedge by the gravel road and their
two cars, back along the other side boundary marked by
three gnarled apple trees, and a return to the church pew
by the back door again. She was almost as tall as him, and
they walked quite close together, side by side. Without
intention they found themselves talking of the Californian
television programme again, perhaps because they wanted
to avoid the whole custody thing, and weren't quite ready
to talk about their feelings for each other. Penny stood in
the spikes of the brown grass in old sneakers and jeans:
any gloss of an American television programme seemed
a world away, a world in which exposure was the measure
of significance, and recognition more important than
achievement.
'The set is so bloody crowded,' Penny continued.
'That's one thing I do remember. You've no idea when
you're just watching a programme how many people there
are hovering, mouthing, jabbing gear about, just out of
shot. And it's hard not to sweat because there are lights
everywhere, hard not to look at people off camera.'
They ended up in the patch of shade by the back door,
and that's where Theo kissed her. Neither of them said
anything immediately before or after it. They just had that
long kiss with their bodies close together, then sat on the
church pew. Penny rested partly on his shoulder and partly
on the seat back. He tried to remember if he had condoms
in the car, what he had done with the packet after the last
time at Melanie's. For a long time he had looked forward
to sex with Penny, and now in the most obvious place at
the most predictable time maybe he wasn't prepared. He
put his hand beneath her shirt and cupped a breast in its
soft fabric bra. 'Shall we go in to the sofa?' he asked lightly.
She stood up without reply and led the way inside.
The sofa wasn't large: they ended half curled, half lying
there. Theo undid her bra and the dark metal top button
of her jeans. They kissed and she put the flat of her hand
on his stomach. 'You're not fat at all,' she said.
'No one to cook for me,' he said. The remaining chocolate
cake sat on the wooden table, and beyond it the
black stove. He thought of Ben asleep a few paces away,
Erskine wanting to keep some sort of family and Penny
at a vulnerable time. None of those things diminished his
eagerness to make love. He could feel the slight roughness
of her nipples beneath his fingers, catch the faint womanly
smell from the skin of her shoulder. One of the bewildering
things about sex is that it seems to promise something else:
an accomplishment of the spirit quite unrelated to the act
itself.
'You don't have to do anything out of obligation, you
know,' he said, fumbling for the zip on her jeans.
'I'm not the sort of girl who fucks from gratitude.' Her
voice had a matter-of-factness that surprised him. 'You got
the necessary?'
'Not on me.'
'Then it's no go,' she said. 'But you can give me a rub
and I'll jerk you off.'
He hadn't heard a woman use that expression, and
it seemed dated anyway. Maybe it had come back in
America. Their first lovemaking wasn't developing in the
way he had imagined it, but the more he thought of the car
glove compartment, the less he could visualise a packet of
sheaths there. So they had a rather busy and manipulative
encounter: he with one hand ranging her breasts and the
other between her legs; she giving head then a vigorous
hand job. Plenty of localised pleasure and release which left
Theo damp and out of breath. 'I'd better check on Ben,'
was the first thing she said. The separation was something
of a relief to both of them.
Penny came back and sat close again, however, a sheen
of light sweat on her face and collar bones. 'You can't take
chances without a rubber,' she said. Such an American
term — rubber.
'Of course.'
'It was what you wanted, though, wasn't it?' she said.
'Great,' he said, 'maybe just a bit mechanical.' Why did
he say it? A bad mistake. He could see her face stiffen.
'Mechanical. Jesus, Theo, I never thought I'd hear a guy
complain about sex being mechanical. Fuck you then. I'm
sorry I wasn't loving enough for you.' She started to cry,
and went from the sofa to sit at the table.
Theo knew you could never really recover in the short
term from that sort of blunder, but he said, and meant, all
the things which laid blame on him and not her. To be in
the midst of mutual masturbation one minute and arguing
the next, is superficially inexplicable, but both exchanges
are based on intimacy.
'You think it's easy here, with my son in the next room,
no proper bathroom. And everything that's happened to
me in this place. Christ, Theo, try to think with something
besides your prick for a change.'
His name again. Penny rarely used it when she
talked, but now seemed to find it both appropriate and a
satisfaction. And the accusation of thinking with his cock.
Such an easy score against men, and so customary that
no rebuttal is permitted, or expected. And so often true.
But the important thing that Penny said was quite apart
from any of that. 'Everything that's happened to me in this
place', that was the phrase, and she meant more than the
unhappiness of the last months. Theo could see Erskine
at the hotel window in Nice, hear him saying that Penny
had a whole bunch of issues from her childhood. And that
reference to her father — dead, but not gone, he'd said.
But it wasn't a time to be asking Penny anything of that:
it was a time for apologies and then hitting the road. In
their talk they worked their way rather awkwardly back to
the shelter of friendship. 'Well, maybe it's me too,' Penny
said. 'I'm an emotional wreck at the moment. Thank God
soon I should be able to leave here, and Ben and I can have
a proper home.'
'Surely you'll hear from Zack soon.'
They went down to the hedge and the cars, the sun still
warm, and they still aware of the sweat of sex, but with that
awareness kept below the surface of their conversation. 'I'd
better get back,' she said. 'He'll wake up any time now.'
'I'm sorry about, you know —'
'Yeah, well, it's not easy. It doesn't matter.'
'We'll keep in touch, though?' Theo said, hopefully.
'Things will be better, won't they, when you aren't cooped
up here. I spend a lot of time thinking about you. Often
I think about nobody else. There are things we need to
talk about, but it'll be better when all this stuff is sorted.
Okay?'
'I know. We'll get to it. There's just so much going on.'
Would that always be the way of it: so much going on,
so much having gone on in their lives, that they couldn't
have something special between them? The heat was more
concentrated in the car even though the window was open.
They didn't kiss, but Penny leant down and said goodbye,
put a hand lightly, briefly, on the side of his neck and then
his shoulder. Her lips were pale, but one ear was pink; her
capped teeth were in perfect marching order. 'Email me
if you want,' she said. 'I'll catch it in Alex sooner or later.
And thanks for coming, thanks for everything.'
Theo swore softly as he drove down the snaky, gravel
road. He turned the driver's mirror to catch glimpses of his
face: a grey tinge already in the hair above the ears, a touch
of something white at the corner of his eye that he wished
he'd wiped away sooner, a flush beneath the beginning of
stubble. Who was he kidding? Even his breath was heavy
with chocolate cake. What had Ben said — until Theo? But
what about after Theo?
Erskine tried to talk to her about it several times. The physical side
of the marriage, he called it. She imagined it a section heading in
a library book promoting matrimonial harmony. The Physical
Side of the Marriage: among chapters on the Importance of
Maintaining Dialogue, the Significance of Children to the
Marriage Bond and the Concept of Intellectual Partnership.
She never felt any confidence that generalisations about human
relationships had a useful connection with her own experience.
Erskine said she should see someone about it, that he was
willing to go with her, that maybe the responsibility was his
as well. He thought it was her, though. She could tell from his
impatience, and the occasional glimpse of suppressed and
dismissive disappointment. Once in a ski chalet in Colorado, with
conifers far down the white slope, he said the women he'd known
before he met her had liked it well enough. Lovemaking should be
a trip for two, shouldn't it? he asked her. That evening they went
down to one of the restaurants and had flapjacks, which she never
much liked anyway, and tried to pretend there was something
besides a sad familiarity between them.
She did go to a counsellor. The guy in Sacramento not much
older than herself, and still able to be slightly embarrassed by
intimate disclosure. At most sessions he mentioned something
about his wife and daughter, as if this establishment of involvement
elsewhere made a discussion of sexuality less personal. He was
large, fair-haired, subject to persistent, subdued coughing and
didn't take many notes. She took the last characteristic as a
reassurance that the things she told him were humdrum in his
work. She went alone to these sessions, for which Erskine paid.
How could she talk about sex with him there? How could she
talk about the tight, deep things even to the happily married
psychiatrist? She wasn't a Californian woman so emancipated in
sexual matters that vibrators, multiple orgasm and cunnilingus
were coffee topics.
She talked about her father in the way she thought women
would discuss such abuse but found little relief in it. She said
what she thought the psychiatrist expected to hear, and wished
he'd give more of a lead. But she was unable to put into words
the things which came most powerfully between her and men at
the very time that obstacles should be non-existent. That moment,
for example, when a lover ceased to be an attractive guy, and
metamorphosed into the generalised male insistence of panting
spasms, fierce grip, self-absorbed rhythm, eyes narrowed in sexual
gluttony. Fight against it as she might, how often she felt possessed
again by her father at just that time: heard his harsh breathing in
the throats of other men.
Penny could just remember a minor accident her father had
while fencing. A strand of number eight under tension had
whipped back from the strainer and cut the bridge of his nose and
the soft skin beneath his left eye. He had come mid-morning into
the kitchen, and Penny, not yet at school, remembered the blood
and her mother saying it really needed stitches. Even without
sutures it had healed well and was not normally noticeable. When
he was aroused, however, when the map of his face was closest
and alien, when she wanted some point of concentration other
than herself, she saw how pale the scar was, how finely grained,
distinct against the weathered suffusion of his face.
How could she talk about such things with the counsellor, or
with Erskine after they had made love as best they could? And
after a couple of years Erskine didn't bother to try to talk about it
— didn't bother to do it that much either, especially after the boy
was born. That was the point, wasn't it? How Erskine spent his
spare time on his many business trips, how close his relationship
to women colleagues, were questions never raised between them.
When Penny finished therapy, she gave the psychiatrist
a present for his daughter, who was five years old — a charm
bracelet, and he gave her a present for Ben who was two — a truck
with non-toxic paint. 'I'm sorry,' he said, and, after coughing, 'I
don't really think there's anything more I can offer, but I'm always
ready to talk if that's a help.' Their children were what they had in
common, safe territory to explore. There was no gift, though, that
she could bring back to her husband when the sessions were over:
no transformation, and any greater understanding wasn't gain
enough. It helped to understand, of course, but there is a form of
damage done to the emotions that is irreversible.
'Why don't you come round tomorrow evening?' said
Melanie. 'Come round as a friend. You know what I mean.'
'Yes,' said Theo. 'It means we don't visit the Christmas
trees.' He was at his office desk, working on a story about
some big cat sighted in Mount Cook National Park. Some
people said it was a mountain lion; some said it was a
lynx. A tourist from Calgary claimed to have seen it at
dusk on the Hooker Glacier moraine; an ironman athlete
from Nelson glimpsed something he couldn't account
for at Bush Creek; a pub owner in Greymouth said he'd
been told by a casual drinker that a yachtie from Singapore
had liberated something very strange. Journalists rely on a
world of stories.
'We're still friends, though. We can still talk,' said
Melanie.
'Of course we can,' agreed Theo.
He liked that about Melanie. She and Nicholas were the
two people he could talk to without running into a growing
incomprehension which required lengthy explanation
to dispel. He might resent her tendency to direct him as to
the best course of action, but her understanding was rarely
suspect.
Theo saw her head and shoulders at the kitchen
window as he came around the side of her house: the
undulating corona of brown hair about her small face
as she concentrated on preparing food. She came to the
door to meet him, then went back to the kitchen and Theo
followed. They had a beer there: Theo sitting on a wooden
chair, Melanie drinking as she worked at the bench. She
was preparing cannelloni, and he watched her spooning
the mince and sauce mixture into the pasta tubes, her lips
funnelled with concentration in unwitting correlation.
What a good colleague, friend and occasional lover she
was; how sympathetic, and yet equable and rational
in her responses; how much larger in intelligence than
appearance. Yet he'd never considered marrying her, before
or after Stella. Was that some natural conviction of his, or
a response to Melanie's strong independence?
'It's quite fiddly, this,' she said, 'but I usually make
enough in one go for three or four meals, and have it in
the freezer. An Italian mama wouldn't approve, would
she? I'm going to run a series in the paper about how our
attitudes to food are changing. It used to be a sort of pit
stop, don't you think: pack in what you need and then
have a breather, or get right back to work.'
'Eat to live rather than live to eat. You're right.' Theo
remembered how his father had taken his meals, sometimes
even standing at the bench, or in the cab of the truck.
He'd liked to read as he ate, and treated it as the necessary
refuelling Melanie referred to: his eyes on the newspaper, or
magazine, so that he was hardly aware of what he handed
into his mouth. He ate steadily until he'd had his fill, and
rarely made any comment afterwards on the quality of the
food or expressed any preference beforehand.
Theo's mother had been under no pressure to vary the
menu; in fact she'd had a not dissimilar attitude to food
herself. Boiled vegetables and roast, or fried meat, were the
staples, not so much favourites as dependables. 'We never
had pasta, never had rice,' Theo told Melanie. 'We never
had blue vein cheese, olives, pâté or nachos. I bet even
now my parents wouldn't know what sushi is. My father
had chops and fried tomatoes for breakfast, or bacon and
eggs, and hardly distinguished one from the other.'
'Your mum and dad okay?' asked Melanie.
'Happy with their bowls and bridge.'
'Stella's father's not so good again.'
'Poor old Norman.'
'You did ring him?'
'Yes,' said Theo. 'He never complains much — just
makes the best of things. He still does field research and
writes up his findings for the university. He's got a rotating
drum polisher in his workshop and works up pieces of
greenstone, obsidian, agate and so on.'
'Well, he used to polish teeth, didn't he,' said
Melanie.
'You're right. I never thought of the connection before,
but you're quite right.'
As he finished the sentence, Theo experienced a little
lurch of sadness within. It seemed to be directed at himself
rather than Stella's father. He had noticed during the last
two years such sudden changes of mood, and resisted
them. They were self-pitying, self-gratifying emotions, and
so to be repressed. They were the small aftershocks of his
divorce, he told himself: explicable and of no significance.
Some small gland somewhere was prompted to puff its
chemical into the system, as those creatures of the soft sea
floor become distinct for a moment and, with protuberant
mouth, puff into the brine around them. Theo deliberately
opposed himself to the sudden disposition by becoming
more animated and passing on one of Nicholas's jokes to
Melanie. 'What do you call a man who doesn't want sex?'
'Pass.'
'Dead,' said Theo.
'How are things with Penny Maine-King?' asked
Melanie after giving the joke its due.
'Good news, actually.' And he explained what had
happened.
'I mean between you and her,' said Melanie.
It was the question bound to be raised during the
evening, yet Theo was taken aback by the difficulty he had
in answering. He had no wish to be evasive: he valued
her opinions and her concern. The inhibition arose not so
much from a fear of intrusive revelation about Penny's life
as from Theo's inability to judge just what had developed
between them, and whether it had any real grip apart from
the special circumstances that had brought them together.
The turmoil Penny was involved in, the fluctuation of fear,
resolution and disorientation, must mean any relationship
with Theo was uncertain, however contained she usually
appeared. Some of all that he endeavoured to convey
to Melanie. He said nothing, of course, concerning his
unfortunate sex with Penny at Drybread, or Erskine's
references to her father; nothing of his own growing
concern for her, and his affection for the boy. 'Until the
whole custody mess is settled,' he said, 'until she's had time
to feel part of regular life again, I don't really know where
the hell we are.' He said nothing about the pleasure he felt
in being able to help Penny by going to Nice, and how
much more lasting that feeling was than the encounter on
the sofa at the bach.
'It's good you want to give support,' said Melanie.
'You're not used to being relied on. You tend to drift along
your own way.' She had an impressive confidence in her
assessment of other people. 'What about the little boy?'
'What about him?' replied Theo.
'Is he a nice kid? Can you see him with you for years
and years when he has a dad of his own? I imagine it's not
an easy situation.'
'I quite like him. Not that I've talked to him much.'
'What's his name again?'
'Ben.'
'I thought some of the best bits in your articles were
about him — about his need to have other kids to play
with, and other adults despite Penny's devotion. She'd be
aware of that too: the effects on him if they stayed hidden
away for long.'
Melanie and Theo had moved into the small lounge
to talk, and the fragrance of cannelloni drifted through to
them from the oven. Theo neither resisted, nor resented,
the talk of Penny and himself. In some ways it was a relief
to discuss it, yet it made him sad again. There were so
many checks and balances against happiness, and so many
opportunities for hurt and disappointment from every
decision.
'I may be heading for a rather similar situation,' said
Melanie. 'Becoming involved with someone with kids, I
mean.'
'Really? Do I know him?' But Melanie had gone off
into the kitchen to get their meals, and called back that
she'd tell him about it in a minute. It's easy to think that
your own existence is the only one which progresses, and
that other people in your absence become stationary,
awaiting the return which activates their lives again. Such
selfishness Theo recognised in himself, even without
Melanie's cheerful mention of it.
'Robin Sellus,' she said, when they were eating. 'He's
an architect with rooms at Papanui. The daughters are aged
three and five. His wife died two years ago of a stroke.'
'How did you meet him?'
'He bought the place next door.'
'Here?' said Theo, surprised. The oddity of having
Melanie's newly disclosed boyfriend so close inclined him
to lower his voice.
'Of course here,' said Melanie. 'He's a nice guy and the
kids are really good most of the time. They have a sort of
housekeeper-cum-nanny.'
'I really hope it works out,' said Theo.
He meant it, but couldn't help but be struck by the
element of convenient coincidence. The architect moving
house and finding love, a wife and mother, next door. But
that was the way in life. The myth of there being only
one person for you in all the world, and the reality that
you end up with someone close at hand. It was the same
with Penny and him — that he should be attracted to her
in the course of his work, and she at Drybread with no
other contact with men. How unpropitious for stability the
circumstances were.
Theo had come to Melanie's as a friend. She had clearly
signalled that there would be no sex, yet despite that, despite
his wish that she find satisfaction in marrying the architect
and caring for his daughters, Theo felt a slight awkwardness.
It wasn't that he was wrong in his understanding of
Melanie's independence, but that, illogically, the presence
of Robin Sellus in the next property seemed inhibiting.
Perhaps he was watching from a darkened room to see
when Theo left; perhaps he was showing a determined trust
and reading storybooks to his young daughters; perhaps he
hadn't been told that Melanie was serving cannelloni to an
old boyfriend.
'You mentioned I'd be here?' he asked her.
'I did, yes. No big deal. We'll still be friends, won't we,
Theo?'
'Of course we will,' Theo said.
'I believe you're entitled to keep the best of past
relationships when you move on. Not the shagging,
of course, but the friendship, the support, the shared
experiences. Why should what's happened with one
person be buried by being with another, when there's no
guilt involved?'
'Absolutely,' Theo said.
'If there's a wedding, and it won't be any big deal,
you'll get an invitation. I hope you'll like him.' Melanie
pressed the abundance of her hair down with a small
hand and leant back in the chair to rest her head and
settle in for a good chat. Theo wondered what it was like
to go through life so physically diminutive, and with so
resolute a character. He had no clear recollection of the
first time he'd met her. Odd, for the advents of Stella and
Penny were clear in his mind. Penny with her head back in
sleep, and her graceful throat, as he first looked through
the window at Drybread. Stella he saw first on the ramp
of a parking building, after an exhibition opening at the
new gallery that he'd reluctantly covered. She was wearing
high heels, and was holding her arms out from her sides a
little as a precaution on the damp concrete slope. She was
laughing with a woman friend, and as she glanced at Theo
in passing, the amusement was still there, like the flash of
a colourful bird in flight.
'Maybe that's one of the things with you and Stella,'
Melanie was saying. 'Because of the outcome you don't
allow yourself to remember all the good things, the
strengths she had, what you accomplished together. She
doesn't criticise you all the time, you know.'
'I don't criticise her at all,' said Theo.
'The point is you hardly talk about it. The two of you
managed the split bloody well, but I think you've got into
the habit of always being sad about it.'
'It is sad, and talking doesn't help.'
'Have it your own way,' said Melanie. 'I reckon you
spend too much time with Nick, and he's so bloody cynical.
All those anecdotes when in fact he doesn't do much any
more. You don't want to become part of some sort of club
for divorced guys.'
It was ten twenty when Theo left. Not late, but he
glanced at the architect's house as they said goodbye at
the door. Melanie gave him a hug in which the significant
pressure was all in the upper body. 'You make sure you
keep in touch now,' she said. There was a cool breeze, a
horned moon and many stars. He thought how wonderful
a late night run would be in Hagley Park — the play of
tree shadows in the mild wind and dim light, the ducks
in headless clusters, the sharded sheen on dark water,
the night sky's sense of vast hollowness, the freedom to
bear a relaxed, nocturnal face through it all, rather than
maintaining the conventional expressions of the day.