Geography (4 page)

The first time I was in Los Angeles my mother and father tried to make me walk out of the airport into the carpark, but the noise—people, planes, taxis and buses—upset me and I had to be carried, like a baby. It is hard for me to remember details. I can remember that I stared through the taxi windows, at the Los Angeles suburbs sprawling out and away.

I know, because I was told, that we caught the train from San Francisco to Boston. I don't know how we got to San Francisco, though when I drove down Highway 101 almost thirty years later, along the coast and through Big Sur, I thought I could remember the landscape from this time, from when I was little. But memory does that. Makes you think things have happened that maybe never did.

The train we caught was red and we were on it for three days and two nights. We slept on little foldout beds attached to the wall and it felt like magic to me, like living in a doll's house. I remember that I spent most of the time reading books of my favourite fairy tales:
Sleeping Beauty
,
Cinderella
,
Snow White
.

We changed trains in Chicago, the day of the Chicago riots in 1968, the ones where the yippies got squirted with firemen's hoses and put flowers into the ends of the soldiers' guns. This is something I've been told, by history books and my father. My father likes to remember things as events, as newsworthy and I'm left with his exaggerated sense of things in lieu of memory, or facts.

When I watch the footage of this on the television, years later, it seems strange to me that I was in that place on that day, moving through history without it touching me. My father and everyone else his age seemed trapped in those times, defined by them; this falling away of all that they knew. To me change was a constant, so that when I grew up it seemed to me that I did not know how to stand still.

We'd gone to America so my father could study journalism at Columbia University. One day soon after we arrived he took me there. People were wearing beads and badges and the men had long hair. That day at the university people were upset because Robert Kennedy had just been assassinated.

‘He's the brother of the man who was assassinated the day you were born,' my father told me.

‘What's assassinated?' I asked.

‘It means that someone has killed you and you are dead,' my father said.

‘What's dead?'

I can't remember now what answer he gave, but the memory of asking the question came to me vividly when I was in India that first time. Death was everywhere and I spent two weeks with amoebic dysentery. I was twenty-two, but felt like a child. Frightened, and wishing someone else would come and help me sort out this mess, the mess of everything going wrong a long way from home. I realise now that that is how my parents felt when they were in America. That they were too young to deal with this, that everything was going wrong, that they were a long way from home.

When I was four, I sat at a breakfast bar in New York and was asked what kind of cereal I wanted. I remember looking up at the shelf behind the waitress and seeing little cardboard packets of all different kinds of cereal. ‘What are they?' I pointed.

‘Variety Packs.'

Choice: I could have cocoa pops or rice bubbles or cornflakes. I was four years old sitting on a barstool in Manhattan and could choose whatever breakfast cereal I wanted. Freedom in breakfast cereal didn't happen in Melbourne in the 1960s. After the Variety Packs my mother and father took me to Central Park and bought me a Mickey Mouse balloon full of helium. When I let it go it floated in the air, up and up, until it was gone. You didn't get those in Melbourne either.

My mother bought me a little wicker table and chair that sat by my new bed. My dolls slept on the table. I can still remember waking up one morning, when things smelt new, to find that my new dolls and furniture had disappeared and my mother was packing our bags. So, for a few years anyway, that was another thing New York had that Melbourne didn't. My father.

That was an early lesson. Men I loved disappeared for no reason. They lived in other places, a long way away. There was another lesson in that as well. Don't ask men why they do these things. These things just happen, and, they tell you, everyone tells you, it doesn't mean they don't love you. Things just happen.

When I arrived in Los Angeles the second time, the time I met Michael, I hired a car and headed for West Hollywood. I had been on a plane for fifteen hours, was jetlagged and disorientated. I had never driven on the wrong side of the road before. I ended up, two hours later, in Inglewood, where riots had taken place a year before. I drove another seven miles to Santa Monica, though that hadn't been where I was heading either, and ordered coffee and a ranch salad. It seemed that since the Variety Pack days the notion of choice had got a little out of control. I was asked whether I wanted blue cheese dressing, French, Italian or ranch. For my coffee I was offered white liquid that was low in fat or high, as well as sugar or low-calorie sweeteners. ‘Normal fat,' I wanted to say. ‘Just normal.' I was tired. I didn't know what I wanted.

I collect maps, have I told you that? I have maps for driving tours of Ireland and walking tours of Spain. Other maps show me where there might be a swell of land, a hill, a mountain. Relief maps, they were called in Geography. I have maps that show you where to find family clans in Scotland and the areas particular Aboriginal languages are spoken. I have maps that show me the last bits of the world where you might find a tiger in the wild, that show me where different species of birds migrate to and from and where whales swim as they move up the east coast of Australia.

I didn't have a decent map of Los Angeles, though. The streets, hills and canyons of Los Angeles were familiar to me, had formed the streetscapes of most of the films I had seen. I felt as if I would know my way around. But Los Angeles, as it turns out, was the place where I needed a map most of all. It was a place I got lost.

There is a moment, driving in from JFK airport, when you cross the Triborough Bridge and suddenly see Manhattan spread out before you, just like in the opening credits of a film. When I arrived in Manhattan the second time, just after my affair with Michael had begun, I felt a sudden rush of feeling when we got to that bridge, like I was crossing over into the centre of all that was important.

The bus dropped me at Grand Central and I caught the train down to SoHo, where Finn lived. He took me to eat Indian on Sixth Street, but I was so tired I almost fell asleep in the lamb korma.

‘I'll become interesting and worthy of siblinghood tomorrow,' I said. ‘I promise.'

‘Actually, I'm used to you being boring,' said Finn. ‘But is there a particular reason behind how thoroughly boring you're being tonight? Is it your lack of excitement at not having seen me for over a year?'

‘There are two reasons: reason one is that I am so comfortable around you that you bring out my inner bore. Reason two is that I spent all last night having sex with a guy called Michael and…'

Finn flung his hand into the air, like a traffic policeman. ‘I'm your brother. No details please. But is this a “I'm in LA so I'm going to have an international quickie” thing, or will you see him again?'

‘We might meet up in Phoenix and go to the Grand Canyon together.'

‘Is he based permanently in LA?' Finn asked.

‘I think,' I said. ‘He teaches at UCLA.'

‘Sounds good,' he said. ‘You could be like those Chinese guys I just read about in
Maximum City
.'

‘Excuse me?' I asked. Knowing the way Finn's mind worked, I hoped this was going to be good. ‘
Maximum City
?'

‘A history of New York. The author talks about Chinese men who came to New York around the turn of the century to earn a living, but they weren't allowed to bring any family out. So they'd marry a woman in China, stay three months, hopefully impregnate her in that time, then head to New York. They'd return to China three years later to meet their children, and, after that, maybe never see them again. The wives were called living widows.

‘So some guy lives in Manhattan, running a laundry, living alone in a single room, and in Manhattan he's no one. But he knows he's someone back home in China where he has a family and maybe owns some land, so he doesn't care so much what the New Yorkers think.'

‘Are you saying if I kept up with Michael I could have my very own chance to be a living widow?'

‘No, you strike me as the man,' said Finn. ‘Working in the laundry, hanging out in gambling halls. A secretly rich and powerful guy who has a whole world—well, a whole family—in his head.'

‘Ahh, thank you, Grasshopper,' I bowed low. ‘You are a very wise man and I must remember to discuss my love life with you more often. Perhaps you'll now allow me to go home and meditate in silence on what you say?'

Once we were back at Finn's apartment I ran a bath, put foam into the steaming water and stepped into it. I started reading a current edition of
Vanity Fair
but had also moved the television into the bathroom so I could watch ‘Melrose Place'. I learnt that Alison was going to win Billy over Amanda, and that Michael and Kimberly were having an affair that was being conducted, for the most part, in an elevator. Knowing these things a full six months before those episodes were in Australia felt like the height of sophistication. This is what I thought as I lay in the bath:
My name is Catherine Monaghan. I am in a bathtub, in New York, New York, The United States of America, The World, The Universe
.

The next morning Finn took me to Dean and Deluca's for breakfast, and I made another discovery. Strawberry muffins.

Finn looked more noticeably Australian than he did back home. He was tall, like me. Determinedly antifashion, he was wearing a flannelette shirt, Blundstone boots and the beginning of a beard. ‘This place is a bit of a wank,' he said. ‘But I thought you'd like it.'

‘Yes, well struggle through that excellent short black for my sake.' I stuck out my tongue, then decided that since I was twenty-seven and in a restaurant in New York I should try and act more grown up.

Once Finn had left for work I made a plan to take myself from one end of the island to the other. I caught the train down to the World Trade Center and climbed it. I floated in the sky of the city and gazed at it spread below. Then I walked down to Battery Park and looked at the Statue of Liberty. From there I walked, slowly, to Union Square, where I had a coffee.

Walk one block in Manhattan, even half a block, and everything changes and I liked that, that you couldn't predict what was around the corner. My nerves were on edge, alive. Michael had done that to me, New York was doing it to me. I felt as if I had pins and needles all over my body no matter what I was doing: walking, looking in shops, looking at art. Every brush against my skin, the movement of fabric over my flesh, made me flinch.

At Union Square I moved down to the subway and as the train sped through its tunnels I wondered what part of the city was above me—was I passing under the Chrysler Building? Would the weight of it crush me? I stared out the train windows into the darkness and imagined I could see the homeless, the mad, the devastated who lived underground in the network of tunnels and crannies that had been left when the subway was dug at the end of the last century.

I emerged on West 125th, and walked past the Apollo Theatre, the hair braiding shops and the street markets until I found Sylvia's where I ate southern fried chicken, greens and mash. Everyone had told me not to walk through Harlem, that it would be dangerous, but no one hassled me. I walked until I found the Addicts Rehabilitation Choir a few blocks away. The choir was singing gospel and within minutes I was on my feet, clapping and dancing.

‘God lives here, yes he does,' the preacher shimmied through the crowd. ‘He moves through us all.'

‘Yes,' I sang with everyone. ‘Yes he surely does.'

‘Where you from?' the preacher came up to me, ‘where do you call home?'

‘The world,' I sang into the mike, full of joy all of a sudden. ‘The world is my home.'

I had planned to go out dancing on my first night in Manhattan, but I'd exhausted myself. Finn took me to the Odeon for an early dinner.

‘More expensive groove for you,' he said.

‘I don't need groove,' I retorted. ‘I almost found God today. In Harlem.'

Finn burst out laughing. ‘I have consulted with the lord,' he said shortly, when he had recovered himself. ‘And the lord says stick to sex.'

‘Fuck you,' I smiled beatifically.

After dinner Finn and I sat, gripped, watching the drama unfold at Waco. We watched the troops built up around the fort in Texas. Listened to the commentators who described a people becoming more and more entrenched in their position, a cult that would rather die than surrender, victims of a megalomaniac who had no care for their lives.

‘How could they do it,' I asked. ‘Hand over all responsibility to Koresh?'

‘They all think they'll be resurrected, so death doesn't scare them,' said Finn. ‘I didn't understand how many crazy cults there were in this country till I got here. Everyone's desperate to give their lives over to someone.'

Before I went to bed that night I wrote a long letter home to Marion.

‘Confession time,' I wrote. ‘I told you that I thought Michael had eyes like Peter O'Toole, but what I didn't tell you is that we did more than flirt. I'm going to use big words here: I think he is
the one
. Does that sound ridiculous? But something has shifted in me—it's as though there's been some kind of chemical reaction and all the fluids in my body are somehow re-tuned to flow towards him. And now I'm in New York, in such a daze that I feel like I've had a lobotomy. Simone de Beauvoir wrote about this in
The Second Sex
—after she started sleeping with Sartre she became so obsessed that even getting on the tram became an erotic experience for her. I know how she felt, like everything around you is penetrating you—forgive the pun—the music, the art, the funk of the subway. Everything turns into sex.'