I
t’s happened. Clare’s met someone. He’s not what I’ve been dreaming of for her. I got home from my swim on Saturday and he was sitting in the kitchen on my chair with his head on his arms, spread over the table listening to the football, an open tinny from my stock of Carlton Draught beside him. There was no sign of Clare or Stubby. I came into the kitchen and he stayed down on the table, looking up at me with his head on the side, his right eye looking out past the peak of his baseball cap.
‘I’m Clare’s dad,’ I said, wary.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Who’s winning?’
‘We
are. Shush!’
Clare told me later, ‘He’s a mad Hawthorn supporter, Dad. You just have to accept it. He wasn’t being rude.’
I’ve never been to a football game. None of my books have football heroes. Everyone I know in Melbourne has been telling me for years I’m missing one of the greatest emotional experiences of life. But I don’t go.
I asked Clare, ‘What does Robin do?’
‘He’s a stand-up comic.’
I was deeply shocked.
‘Don’t start on him.’
He’s younger than Clare. It worries me. How is it going to work in twenty years’ time when she’s nearly sixty and needs a loyal companion and he’s still a flighty fifty-five-year-old making the girls laugh at the stand-up place where he works? Wherever that is. I’ve never seen a stand-up comic either. Local stand-up comedy is as arcane to me as the footy. It’s everywhere these days, except where
I
am.
I went up to my study and poured a large scotch and read through my latest notes on the saga of John and Sabiha. My refuge! I wrote some stuff that I thought had promise. It felt good to get it out. Moving it on towards an eventual reader. That’s the good old feeling. It didn’t last, but I enjoyed what there was of it. I’m prepared to be thankful these days.
John’s story was keeping my mind off the fact that there was nothing much
on
my mind. John was my weekly visit to the therapist. He had seemed a bit
depressed the other day when he was telling me some of the tough stuff about his wife’s activities with the Italian. I felt sorry for him and asked him if he’d like to bring his wife and daughter around for dinner one Saturday night. He said they were always busy Saturday nights with the pastries. Sunday trading was wearing them out. I said, ‘So what day would suit you?’ He said he’d give it some thought, and would speak to Sabiha. An image of Sabiha sitting at my dining table, her hair up and wearing one of her gowns that she wore for her Saturday night singing at Chez Dom, was deeply interesting to me. I knew in my heart I was never going to see this for real, so I made the most of imagining it.
Asking John to dinner was my attempt to push our friendship to another level. And maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do at that point. I felt him backing off. So I said no more. Anyway, I’d begun having visions of him and Sabiha and their little girl and the baseball cap and Clare and me all sitting around our dining table looking at our food and wondering what the hell to say to each other. The Cap, I guess, would have one ear and one eye to the television replays. He doesn’t take the cap off while he eats.
I told Clare I didn’t think he was funny.
She said, ‘He’s only funny when he’s working.’
‘So he’s a professional? No free stuff for us, eh?’
‘I love him, Dad.’
This really knocked the wind out of me. I got up and drew the cork out of a bottle of Henschke and drank a whole glass before I thought of offering one to Clare. Stubby was lying under the table giving me a warning look. I was on the point of saying something—I forget now what it was—when Clare cut in with, ‘I know what you’re thinking. Don’t say it. This means a lot to me.’
I drank some more wine. Clare was cooking something. It hadn’t struck me till then that she was actually cooking at her mother’s cooktop. It was evident, now that I started taking notice of the kitchen, that she’d been shopping, for
food.
I said, ‘Is he coming for dinner tonight?’
‘His name’s Robin, Dad. And yes, he’s coming for dinner after the Geelong game.’
‘I thought he was a Hawthorn supporter.’
‘He’s interested in all the football. He follows it in detail.’
‘Is that the area of his jokes?’
‘He doesn’t tell jokes. That’s your area.’
‘What’s that you’re cooking?’ I stood beside her and looked into the pan. ‘It smells great. You’re making bolognaise sauce! How do you know how to do that?’
‘Everyone in Australia knows how to cook bolognaise sauce.’ She turned to me. ‘Please be nice to Robin, Dad.’
‘I will. I’m always nice to people. I don’t have any enemies, do I?’
‘Promise?’
‘I promise.’
‘Hand on your heart?’
‘Hand on my heart, darling.’
She leaned and kissed my cheek. ‘I love you, Dad.’
‘I love you too, honey pie.’
‘Promise you won’t call me that when Robin’s here.’
‘I can’t promise that,’ I said. I was dismayed. Maybe I would go back to Venice and die there, do a Gustav Aschenbach after John had finished his story. Venice was always an option. I like to have an option.
Clare said in a let’s-change-the-subject voice, ‘So how’s your friend John?’
‘He’s been dealing with some tough stuff. He’s a bit down.’
She stirred oregano into the pot and we were silent for a while, watching the sauce bubbling along nicely. I looked around the bench. ‘Did you get parmesan?’
‘Of course.’
Of course! Suddenly she was the complete
hausfrau.
She stirred the sauce thoughtfully for a half-minute, then said in a dreamy voice, ‘I wonder if
I’ll
ever have a baby?’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘You’ve never said anything before about being interested in having babies.’
She looked at me and smiled, the certainty in her eyes that I would not understand what she was experiencing. It was an infinitely soft smile and made her look at least five years younger than I knew her to be. ‘I’d like to have
Robin’s
babies, Dad. I’ve never wanted anyone else’s babies.’
‘Does
he
want babies?’ I imagined a row of half a dozen dwarfish stand-up comedian babies with Clare’s eyes and wearing baseball caps. I don’t know why they were dwarfish.
‘He wants
my
babies.’
I was lost for something to say.
She laughed and said, ‘Dad! Cheer up. It’s okay. It’s normal. You and Mum did it.’
‘Does he have a house to put this family of his in?’ I asked gloomily.
‘No one has houses these days, Dad. We’ll live here till we can get a flat. We both love the beach. We’ll get somewhere in Elwood. It’s expensive, so it’ll be a while.’
I drank most of a full glass of wine and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. The health benefits of my swim had all been used up and I was suddenly feeling like a very old man.
She looked at me with little-girl eyes and said, ‘Is that okay with you, Dad? Me and Robin staying here?’
‘Of course it is.’ The idea of having the Cap around the place day and night terrified me.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Positive. It’s what your mother would have wanted.’
‘Is it what
you
want?’
‘Yes, darling.’
I could see she wasn’t convinced.
‘Are you glad for me, Dad? Really?’
I pulled her against me and gave her a big fatherly hug. My throat was tight with emotion for some reason. ‘I’m just a little bit puzzled, darling.’ I sounded as if I was being strangled.
She broke away impatiently and stirred vigorously at the bolognaise sauce, splashing it on the back of the cooktop.
‘It’s just very sudden,’ I said. ‘Where did you meet him?’
‘It’s not sudden. Anyway, love
is
sudden. In a pub. He was doing stand-up. I thought he was hilarious. I was laughing louder than anyone else and he started
playing his jokes to me. We fell in love.’ She stamped her foot. ‘We
did
! Don’t say anything, you bastard!’
The image appalled me. My beautiful little Clare falling for this weirdo in a pub, half-pissed and laughing her head off at nothing, desperate to move her life along, ten years older than the rest of the audience. My poor little Clare! What would Marie have said?
Babies!
If I lived, I could yet become a grandfather. My baby time of life was long past. I thought of my room in the little hotel on the Lido where I’d been staying before I came home. I could pick up the phone tonight and give Signora Croce a call and be back there in a day and a half.
I climbed the stairs slowly, Stubby at my heels looking serious, and I went into my study and closed the door. I sat at my desk and looked at my notes. I needed to be in someone else’s story for a while.
S
abiha’s fourteenth day fell on a Friday again; the rhythm of her body figuring her life in Fridays. She walked out into the chill morning air, leaving the café by the back door. The smell of the garbage bins strong and cold in the dark laneway. She had left John in bed warming his hands around a bowl of coffee and reading his book, savouring his precious solitary hour of the week. When he was alone reading like that, did he imagine himself to be a man endowed with the liberalities of a finer life than this one? she wondered. Did he imagine himself to be Benvenuto Cellini, the hero in his book?
As she walked along the early-morning streets towards the
métro
at Porte de Vanves she was hanging back in her mind with the innocence of her husband and his book. She told her stories in her songs, as her
grandmother and her father had told them, by the fire in the evenings when she was a girl. She did not
read
stories. Books were too solitary for her. With her grandmother she believed that stories needed the company of listeners; the story finding its life as a gift, passed from teller to listener. For Sabiha the spirit of story was in the community of its telling. Unlike John, she saw no advance in writing over telling. She would sing her stories to her child; and her child, its warm sleepy body against her breasts, would come to know the stories in the intimate interior tones of its mother’s voice. John’s books seemed mean-spirited things to Sabiha; too private, too secretive, too solitary. Books, the silent interior lives within their closed covers, made her feel lonely.
She came up out of the
métro
and turned into the street of the market. Here the city had been awake for hours. She could never approach the brightly lit entrance to the market without seeing a kind of Aladdin’s cave, a flicker of her original excitement at the sight of it even this morning. Such an incredible abundance of food! There had been nothing like it in her childhood. She could never take the market for granted. It would always be for her a place of enchantment.
Her purpose this morning did not have the grand simplicity of her first visit to him. It distressed her
this time to visit the smelly toilet and prepare herself. The sheer cold-bloodedness of it. The calculation. The possibility of failing again. The grimness of her surroundings. She felt like an animal crouching over the open pan. But she went through with it. She was not going to give up. She would not face her life as a barren wife.
She came out of the toilet and walked along the main aisle, her underpants in the right-hand pocket of her overcoat, a pad in the left. Bruno’s stall was at the back of the market, several aisles across to the left, in the far corner. As she walked along the aisles between the fruit and vegetable stalls, the skin of her thighs was shivery and goose-bumped. She felt as if she had a mild fever of the kind she used to suffer from when she was a little girl, her fear of her schoolteacher inspiring the shivery spasms, her longing that her mother would let her stay home from school. She knew nothing would come of it. This was not a symptom of bodily disease.
She saw three women pushing prams, one after the other, as if they had been put in her way on purpose as a sign to her. But she had never envied other women their children. She had never doubted that the motherhood other women experienced was different from the motherhood she would experience herself one
day. Other women’s babies did not interest her. The world of mothers and babies did not preoccupy her. It had never occurred to her to ask herself why this should be so. She and her baby were unique. They were inseparable. It was a mystery to her. A sacred mystery. She did not want an explanation for it, she just wanted to fulfil it.
Would Bruno be enraged when he saw her? Would he shout at her to get out of his sight? Would he accuse her of trying to destroy his marriage and his life? Her mind seethed with these anxieties. But she kept going. It was either that or turn around and go back …
To the respectable world, when it came to know what she had done, she would seem no better than a whore. Going to see Bruno a second time was not the heroic project of claiming her child it had been the first time. There was desperation in this visit, a sense that she was approaching the end of something, the enterprise sliding into a deep entanglement from which she would never be able to extricate herself; this was the moment when a sweet dream turns into nightmare, casting the intricate net of her illusions into the depths of herself—to snare what monsters?
They saw each other at the same instant.
She stopped. Her hand going to her throat.
He was standing on the far side of the divide between the end of the fruit and vegetables and the bulk stores. He was talking to a man, looking over the man’s shoulder and holding her with his stricken gaze.
The man Bruno was talking to turned now and looked at her. Had Bruno said something to him about her? She felt a rush of shame. Was Bruno telling him,
See that woman standing over there looking at us? She comes to see me. You know what I mean? She can’t resist. I’m onto a good thing there, hey?
The two of them sharing their joke. Men. She, the woman. But the man turned back to Bruno and they shook hands and he walked away and did not look in her direction again.
Bruno was walking towards her, making his way around the end of the last bays of fruit stalls, his figure lost to her briefly behind a pyramid of golden melons, then reappearing. He was not hurrying. Despite the chill of the morning his red checked shirt was open at the neck, his sleeves rolled above his elbows, his black curls falling to his shoulders, his leather apron the attire of a man who might hold a great wagon horse by the halter and make it kneel to him. Master of his place here.
There was a sudden sharp pain in her bladder, as if a blunt knife dug at her insides. She flinched and put a hand to her side.
He came up to her. Unsmiling. His eyes on hers. And he reached and took her hand and led her back the way he had come.
At the touch of his hand dizziness swept through her. She walked with him to his van without feeling the ground under her feet. She wanted to cry out and tear her hand from his grip and run away.
He took her lovingly, gently, with soft words of desire, with sobs, with laughter. For an insane, fleeting instant she envisaged another life for them, a life in which they lived out their story to the very end. A story without his eleven children, without his Angela, without her John, a story even without her child. A love story it was, herself and Bruno, the impossible, exquisite agony of sex. In that terrible blissful moment her mind could hold nothing else …
She gasped as he withdrew, emotion sweeping into her chest. This time it was she who wept.
While she fumbled about in the dark, sniffling and wiping at her tears, putting in the pad and rearranging her clothing, she felt him waiting beside her, something of the animal in his calm, his patience, his unnatural stillness, his silence but for his breathing. When she
had finished, she straightened and looked to where he stood beside her. She found her handkerchief and blew her nose and wiped her eyes. The light from the crack between the doors of the van behind her was reflected in his eyes, two points of light in the darkness.
‘Don’t say anything!’ she said. She buttoned her overcoat.
‘My Sabiha,’ he said softly, a tender sadness in his voice. He put out his hand, his touch on her shoulder, his voice an entreaty. ‘I think of you all the time. I would have been all right if you had not come back to me again today. I would have been changed forever, but I would have been all right.’ He laughed softly. ‘Now I am lost. Now I am damned. I don’t care.’ He kissed her gently on the lips. ‘I love you, my beautiful Sabiha.’
She permitted the kiss then drew away. ‘You and Angela have eleven children. I have none.’ She wiped at her tears. ‘Why can’t you just be a man?’
‘I am tortured.’ He spoke quietly, calmly, as if he had not heard her. ‘I no longer sleep at night.’ His voice was low, little more than a murmur. He held her arm, holding her to him. She did not resist. ‘I get up in the night and walk about the streets of our town,’ he said. ‘I look at the clouds and at the moon and I speak your name and ask you what you are doing, and
if you are thinking of me, and if you, too, are sleepless and looking at the moon.’ He laughed quietly. ‘You would smile and think me a fool to see me standing in front of the butcher’s window under the streetlight, looking at the reflection of my own lips speaking your name. I see in myself the ghost of a stranger who has come to haunt me. Someone I knew long ago, but no longer know. I am lost, Sabiha. I have a great need to say your name. I want to say it in the presence of Angela and the children. There is a torment in it that I delight in. How can this be? I want so badly to know what your name means to me. What it
really
means. Sabiha? I repeat it again and again. It is a riddle. I try to find the answer to it.’ He broke off. ‘Forgive me, my darling Sabiha. I can’t help it. This is the way I have become. I am no longer Bruno Fiorentino. If anyone of our town sees me from behind their curtains in my nightly wanderings, everyone will soon hear that Bruno Fiorentino is mad.’ He laughed quietly again, as if the thought amused him.
She reached for the door handle but he gripped her arm and held her.
‘Sabiha! Without you I’m finished.’ His tone was quiet. He drew her close and held her against him. ‘I don’t care if I am mad,’ he murmured into her hair.
‘I don’t want you to be worried. They are nothing to me, Sabiha.’
She was drained of will. She was exhausted. She rested her head against his chest and gave in, just for a moment. His broad chest, the smell of him, strange and familiar, so unlike John. ‘Bruno,’ she said, but could not go on. Had she been about to ask him for his forgiveness? What did he understand of her?
They stood together in the dark, the sounds of the market outside.
‘That is not the worst of it,’ he said. Again he spoke so calmly, his tone so confiding they might have known each other since they were children, and this just another of their childhood escapades, him telling her his secrets.
She waited.
But he said no more.
She withdrew from his arms and wiped her eyes with her handkerchief. ‘I’ll never love anyone but my John.’
Bruno said, ‘The worst of it is, I can’t make love to Angela anymore. I think of you, and I can’t touch my wife.’ He made a sound of disbelief. ‘Angela is silenced by it. I was going to tell her about us. I was going to tell her everything. I prepared my thoughts, but when I saw the look in her eyes I couldn’t speak. She doesn’t
know what to think. What can I say to her? My eldest son looks at me across the table while we are at our evening meal as if I have become a stranger to him and am no longer the father he loves. I ask myself, with the greatest anguish I have ever known, my Sabiha, has my dear son learned to hate his father? He sees his mother’s unhappiness and is shamed and bewildered. I am not able to decide whether I see in my son and my wife my own guilt looking back at me, or whether I see what they are truly feeling. I don’t know. I can no longer distinguish between what is real and what I fear to be real.’ He paused and expelled the air from his lungs. ‘Or that what I most fear will suddenly break out and become real. I live in two worlds, Sabiha. Theirs and ours. This is the truth. Talking to you here, now, I see this clearly. I understand it. When I am not with you I am confused and filled with doubt and uncertainty and I think of you all the time. At night and during the day. But now you have come back to me I see it clearly. In my heart I know I am faithful to Angela, and will be faithful to her until the day of my death. I know it must sound strange to you to hear me make such a claim. In this world of yours and mine I love only you.’ He fell silent, the faint creaking of the van’s springs. ‘When these two worlds meet, both will be destroyed.’ It was his conclusion. It was simple. It was
real. It was not to be disputed. He might have been speaking of a surprising and impressive phenomenon of nature that he had happened on by chance.
Sabiha had her eyes closed. She was waiting for him to finish.
‘Promise me you will come to me again next Friday.’ He stroked her cheek with his fingers.
‘I can’t.’
‘I have dreamed of this and now it has happened to me and I am glad. I can never go back to being who I was.’
‘I came to you to get with child,’ she said. ‘That’s all. Not because I love you. I love John.’
He said nothing.
His breath on her cheek. The sound of his breathing. His hand cupping her breast.
‘Why can’t you just be a
man
?’ she said. She removed his hand from her breast. He offered no resistance and placed his arm around her shoulder, lightly holding her against him. ‘Why can’t you accept what I’ve given you and go on being yourself? Other men would do that.’
‘What other men? Have there been other men?’
‘No! Of course not. You are the only one.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Yes, I believe you. But if I don’t know when I’m going to see you again,’ he said, his voice calm, as if their situation was commonplace and
manageable, ‘it will be a torture for me. But if I know when I am going to see you again, I can dream of our meeting and count the hours.’
‘I’m going home,’ she said.
There was a sudden stillness. An expectation of something. A little shock travelling between them. She did not pull away from him but waited for what was to come.
He laughed. A soft laugh it was, gentle and filled with wonderment. ‘You have changed me. I am a man I hardly know.’ He laughed again at this, a low, private laugh of deep amusement, sharing his astonishment with her. ‘Just a little of this man I know. The new man, I call him. You saw him in me. You saw him waiting for you and you called to him and he came to you.’ He was silent for some time. His arm around her shoulder, holding her against him. He said quietly, ‘I think this new man is to have a very short life.’
She said, ‘Don’t say that! Please! You mustn’t say things like that.’ She had a horror that his saying it would make it real.