Jacko (15 page)

Jacko had stood up. He flapped his hands, dripping orange juice, and spluttered as if he had been swimming. But he showed no anger.

—Oh mate, he said in a chastened voice. Oh mate!

He seemed to be offering an acknowledgement of the justice of what had been done to him. Like a bystander and witness to an act of God, the barely amused governor fraternally handed Jacko wads of tissues and paper serviettes. I also took a wad of paper serviettes from my end of the table and presented them to Jacko. But he only had eyes for those offered by Dart. Such was the transaction between them.

Torlucci wandered in with a spacious grin on his yokel face. He said to Jacko, I'd offer you some clothes, mate, but I don't think they'd fit you.

—Look, I know, Jacko told him.

Jacko was still in the mode of level acknowledgement.

At last Torlucci was overcome by great shivers and then a throaty gurgle of honestly declared laughter. It tended towards the baritone.

—Christ, when you beat your way into the governor's mansion, you didn't know one day you'd have to face Amy!

I was still there, watching Jacko now become contrite towards Torlucci, saying he was sorry he had destroyed the birthday party. Torlucci, of course, told him that the opposite was true: he had saved it from oblivion, set it in the memory against all the other soon forgotten parties, the ones that blurred.

With a last courtly smile and a shrug, Dart excused himself now and went to get his overcoat. Amy could be heard in the corridor offering to send someone round to see that the sofa wasn't stained. Rachel Torlucci gave one little bark of laughter and told her not to be ridiculous.

We thought they were gone then, but Dart reappeared once, sticking his head round the doorway into the kitchen and living room.

—Jacko, he breathed in his Secesh lilt, I was wondering if you wanted my business card?

Jacko put his head back and he and Torlucci bellowed with hilarity.

—Go to buggery, Dart. And listen. Keep your bloody door locked from now on!

—How can I, Jacko? asked Dart. I'm a servant of the people.

Sporting Rachel Torlucci, who did not talk much but who attended to things, including the thing of keeping Torlucci himself under control, loaned Jacko a bathrobe and dried out his orange-juice-stained shirt and pants in the communal laundry up the corridor. Jacko was fully restored by these kindnesses.

—Christ Rachel, he yelled after her up the hallway, you'd be just about the only Jewish sheila who ever put quarters in that drier eh. Hope it bloody takes them from you.

He meant, of course, that generally Puerto Ricans and Jamaicans came in to do the laundry of the apartment dwellers. Having paid his price to society, he was now entitled to be impudent again.

So he drank some wine and flapped the inadequate bathrobe across his thighs.

—Because, he'd told the Torlucci women, I'd hate you to be affronted by a sight of the old Aussie pork sword.

—I've seen it, I've seen it, murmured Rachel. It's nothing to write home about.

In the cab we shared on the way home, Jacko, warm in his stained, dried clothes, told me what had happened in Tennessee to make Dart so socially lethal and Amy so furious. A year before, towards the end of the governor's first term in office, his former wife began to campaign for the Republican candidate, claiming that Dart was a homosexual. Jacko had been sent down by Durkin and
Live Wire
to interview her.

—Mad as a cut snake, said Jacko. She would have caused him real harm if she hadn't been so rabid, but she overdid it. She made remarks about the size of his old feller, and said that if he couldn't put a smile on a woman's face how could he put one on Tennessee's? She was so over the top, even the Republican candidate disowned her in the end.

This wife's attack caused Dart to go public about Amy. You couldn't work out America any more – Amy was Jewish and a New Yorker, but they really loved her in Knoxville.

After Jacko interviewed the furious first wife, the idea of gatecrashing the governor's mansion occurred to him. Somehow Jacko and Dannie and Clayton, but above all – you could bet – Jacko, had talked their way in through the guards on the gate, and were in the foyer when Dart had emerged and asked at the yell what was happening. Jacko and the others had been seen off the premises by armed guards, and so on. Lots of
Next time get an appointment!
and
You're lucky you're not locked up!
from the mansion officials. Repartee from Dannie:
I thought the First Amendment still applied, even in Tennessee
.

All shame expiated through the little penance of the orange juice, Jacko jack-knifed with laughter about it all the way home and wanted me to go on drinking with him in the Odeon in honour of the fact that it had become a story about itself. Jacko, to whom legend was more important than history. This had to be said of Jacko: unlike that oafish bumper sticker which said
He with the most toys wins the game
, Jacko believed in
He who made the most myths goes to heaven
.

I begged off the proposed session in the Odeon.

—Not even for a glass of orange juice?

It was curious that all the men who had women waiting for them
did
prefer to drink with other men once the right glands had begun to secrete a fable by which we could sail and fight together. We'd all been mates that night. Torlucci had been a prime mate, and Jacko was very pleased with him. And in a way, Dart, with his gracious, whimsical revenge, had been a mate. It was Amy who'd fallen into the classic woman posture and been sparked by the masculine languor of the party into throwing the orange juice.

The Haitian cab driver flinched as Jacko roared forth his favourite mantra:

—But the man from Snowy River let the pony have his head,

And he swung his stock whip round and gave a cheer,

And he raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed,

While the others stood and watched in very fear.

The question the cop had raised outside Coghlan's some time before, was waiting to be dealt with at some darker hour. Orange juice was a gentle projectile. There were more severe ones available to the aggrieved.

10

Sylph-like Hefty Mulcahy, operamane wife of the operamane-in-chief Oscar Mulcahy, loved Jacko's young brother, Francis Emptor. Her horror of queers did not extend to Francis, who really knew his opera and who was so admired by her housekeeper, René. It was the gays who considered Francis Emptor and his ermine coat vulgar that Oscar and Hefty felt most opposed to. To Oscar's Australian soul, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. He approved of the fact that Hefty went to lunch on Mondays with Francis, who had often returned only the same morning from San Francisco and who chivvied an extra hour from his boss. For the lunches, Francis wore Italian suits he had put on at dawn to face the Sydney Monday, but his memory of operatic Friday nights in San Francisco lay unsullied in him and ready for recounting.

He shared his lunch table at Emilia's, a Double Bay restaurant which specialized in seafood, not only with Hefty Mulcahy but with Irma Lauber, wife of a real estate tycoon who served with Oscar on the Opera Board.

There, in the salad days, in the last seasons before the cold rumour of AIDS arose and threw a pall over the epicene Harbour and the sun, Francis Emptor sat unthreaterned between these two fine women. The young waiters all knew him, and wanted to favour, emulate and please him. He would tell Irma and Hefty what Delva Costa had said at one o'clock in the morning at the reception in her honour at the St Francis Hotel, San Francisco. The names of film stars and American senators fell from his lips like oyster shells and crumbs. The waiters moved like charged ions in a cloud chamber.

I visited the Mulcahys one Saturday afternoon and found Hefty sitting with a glass of gin by the big Mulcahy windows, looking up-harbour to the Heads. Her eyes were misted and her chin shuddered.

—Oh, she said, sit down here.

I obeyed her, and the sun cut across my lap, making my knees hotter than the rest of my body.

She sopped up her tears with a tissue.

—Poor Francis, you know, that divine boy. He has cancer.

When I stared at her she said, nodding for emphasis, I've seen the letter the doctor wrote him. Lymphatic cancer. Or is it lymphoma? He had pain in his chest, you see.

I did not realize that doctors broke the news by letter. The only experience I'd had of the phenomenon was from breaking-the-hard-news scenes in films or on the stage. I hadn't imagined warnings of death coming in buff envelopes with the doctor's letterhead.

I notice now that rosary beads were entwined like ivy in Hefty's long fingers.

—He has to have radiotherapy. I can't believe it. So beautiful. René and I went to see him at home, and that terrible mother of his was there, down from some burned mulga tree in the bush. Oh she's a virago, that one!

—Not really. She's an honest woman. You and she would have a lot in common, Hefty. I mean, you're both great readers. She likes Thomas Mann and she's crazy about Michael Bickham.

—That old queen! said Hefty.

Michael Bickham lay on the dark side of Hefty's map of Gaydom.

—Is it really the truth? I asked, remembering the large, sensual-ethereal mouth of glorious Francis Emptor at the Opera House.

—Give him a call anyhow, Hefty urged me. He likes you a lot. He was telling me.

I gave way to the temptation of saying, Will I go round there when that terrible woman isn't in?

—If you like her so much, I suppose you could go any time you want. I think you ought to take him a really good bottle of champagne. It's against the rules, but he can still get a glass or two of that down.

—How long has he got? I asked.

—Six months, tops, said Hefty, full of generous tears again.

I delayed telephoning him. If Chloe happened to answer the phone, the only way I could console her at all would be with news of a possible meeting with Michael Bickham, and I didn't have the capacity to offer her that.

In all I delayed for two days. The night after Hefty broke the news to me, I drove into Sydney again from the beach an hour north of the city where I lived. I was used to making that car trip, and it was a pleasant enough drive unless the Bridge was clogged, as it was more and more. Nothing is like Sydney; nothing is like the arms of the Harbour on which our lowgrade immigrant forebears stumbled. The regular regimen of that drive would add to my later delight in finding that in New York you were rarely more than twenty blocks' walk from the dinner or the event to which you were travelling.

The cultural event I was driving to that Sydney night was the opening of an exhibition of photographs of Australian writers. Bickham would not attend of course, even though he was the one of all of us who was internationally known as
The Australian Writer
. There were, of course, other internationally known Australian writers: Morris West, Colleen McCullough, Nevile Shute. But they would not be found represented here. They had broken the rules by writing about subjects other than the
Australian
subjects approved by the Aussie culture police, the critics whose purpose in life was to convince themselves there
was
indeed an Australian literature – as indeed there was, independent of their huffing and puffing and however indifferent the large world might be to it – and who confirmed their faith by generously sponsoring calendars with Australian writers' faces on them, and by holding exhibitions like this.

I was very flattered to have been included in this exhibition, and yet uneasy. Because of occasional commercial success perhaps, and because I'd written about Europe and Asia and Africa as well as Australia, I was placed on the cusp between a certain international renown and the perceived duty to write continuously about Australia and enrich the national cultural well-springs.

I had been photographed at the beach, others in leafy back yards in Woollahra, or against dour factory walls in Richmond. Melbourne writers in particular clung to the dour. It was a sign of their seriousness and their melancholy.

And then, Michael Bickham pictured walking in Centennial Park, an ageing, long-faced man with great bravery, great melancholy, and some annoyance in his face.

—What do you think of Michael? said a heavy Germanic voice tinged with Australian vowels at my side.

It was Erich Tallemann, a poet who was always sombrely present at these events. He had been an Austrian emigrant in his youth and had learned early to graze the fringes of the Literature Board, the both beloved and inveighed-against chief endower of Australian writers. No tradition in Australia of private patronage for writers! Either you lived off your royalties or you got help from the good old Board or you gave up your desire to write.

—I think Michael looks like he should. The prophet Elijah.

—Very good, said Erich, giving me a B minus.

He was the heaviest of the cultural SS, the sort of critic who measured up, in every Australian novel, the quantity of it located in Australia, and brought down his axe accordingly. I had once written a novel set in a jet crossing the Pacific. It had been a novel full of Australians, of Australian perceptions. But introducing me at a reading, he commented that once again I had not set my book in Australia. To him Australia was not a continent of the mind, but a continent of postcodes. I could have been philosophic about that if he had not also gratuitously told his audience that the Australian reviews had been bad, when they had in fact been adequate enough to please both myself (a damn hard task) and the publisher. He had probably not been consciously lying though. He had probably run his Aussie-meter over the book and it had begun to beep.

I was quite willing to pick a fight with him. But I was careful enough these days to wonder what it would benefit me. Would it benefit me anywhere near as much as my association with the Emptors?