Reunion (36 page)

He peered into the magnifying mirror: shaved, plucked and moisturised he thought he looked urbane and contemporary, youthful yet wise. Only the eyes disappointed. He willingly confessed to physical dissatisfactions like his claw-like toes and narrow shoulders, but he had never told anyone, not even his various wives, that his eyes were a cooler blue than he would have liked. It was a colour too readily aligned with ‘chilling', ‘suspicious' and ‘transparent' rather than the ‘remarkable', ‘mesmerising' and ‘oceanic' of his preference. Unlike toes and
shoulders, eyes were burdened with such significance. Although it could be worse: Harry Guerin's poached-egg eyes, for example, were a worrying indicator of the state of his soul.

Sara had selected his outfit, a woven cotton shirt in a smudged blue-grey pattern worn loose over jeans. Connie had thought his polo-neck jumpers and corduroy trousers to be timelessly stylish, but Sara had pronounced them dated and ageing. He did not argue; like all young people Sara was media savvy.

He could hear her taking a shower. She had arrived home very late after what she described as a rave with friends, and had tossed and turned through a drug-sprung sleep, only settling around the time he got up. She assured him she would be as good as new after a shower. He hoped she was right; he was relying on her today.

He had tried to give the impression he welcomed this second pilot but in truth he had been shocked. The books did not come so easily these days, and he needed, or rather his career needed, the series to go ahead. And despite the prejudices of some of his colleagues, as the person who first proposed cyberspace as the contemporary transcendent realm replete with a world wide web of devotees, a TV series could be seen as a more fitting launching pad than conventional print for the next phase of his career. Already he was drafting an online version of the series, teeming with interactive tangents, video, music and games, stimulation of such variety that even twenty-something cyberspace aficionados might feel overloaded.

Connie had never been an appendix to another person's life. But he was beginning to feel as if he might be an appendix to his own: what he once was, what he hoped he now was, and what he expected still to be. He needed this series to go ahead; he had staked his future on it.

 

A suspicious person like Jack would have known as soon as he walked on to the set that there was some serious white water ahead for Connie. The filming had been moved from the State Library to a TV studio. There was a backdrop of three huge plasma screens to create the impression of changing web pages.

‘For the target audience,' the director, Tamara, said. ‘The twenty-to forty-year-old group.'

‘Why the upper cut-off point?' Connie knew his usual demographic was in the forty-plus range.

‘The ABC has already captured the grannies and grandpas.' Director Tamara looked as if she should still be in high school. ‘We want this show to reveal the cool side of public broadcasting. We aim to be
au courant
.' And for his benefit added, ‘Cutting edge.'

For a moment Connie took some pleasure in being the focus of a cool and cutting-edge program and overlooked both her appalling French accent and that she thought he required a translation. But the pleasure disappeared when Tamara handed him to her assistant who handed him to Lexi in makeup. The pleasure disappeared and it did not return.

Lexi shredded his fantasy script before he even sat down. ‘I'll need at least forty-five minutes for this job,' she said to the director's assistant. ‘And you'd better alert wardrobe. This,' she picked at his shirt, ‘won't work with this,' she clapped a hand under his chin and tipped his face towards the light.

She draped him in a smock and sat him down in a glare of lights and mirrors. She made it quite clear she was too busy to talk, in fact she behaved as if it were not quite fair she'd been given this job in the first place. Her touch as she laid
foundation was firm to punishing. She slathered his face in a cover-all beige and then repositioned one of the lights on his neck. She touched the loose skin as if it were rotting lettuce. She shook her head slowly – the situation was clearly impossible – and sent the assistant out for the director.

Wordlessly she pointed to his neck.

Tamara looked and nodded. ‘Best we just cover it with a polo-neck sweater,' and returned to the set.

If Connie were not so humiliated he might have enjoyed a small moment of triumph.

Lexi settled into the job. The forehead, the cheeks, the dark rings beneath his eyes. She leaned in close, he could smell her spicy perfume, he could see her fine unblemished skin. Her manner might be abrupt, but she was quite an attractive girl.

She stepped back to check progress. He heard her mutter something about ‘a mature gig', and wanted to protest, to enumerate his youthful credentials, but instead he sat in silence while Lexi, who according to the birthday cards on display had recently celebrated her twenty-first birthday, set about putting cosmetic filler in his wrinkles and camouflaging sun damage with cosmetic paint. It was as if this girl had seized him in her smooth white hands and held him up to scrutiny like a tatty old jacket. But rather than throwing him out as she believed he deserved, she had accepted the challenge of getting a bit more wear out of him.

Finally she was finished. She looked him over and merely shrugged, and when she packed him off to wardrobe failed to acknowledge his ‘I expect we'll see each other again', making it quite clear she thought the pilot had no future.

Wardrobe was similarly unhappy. The shirts and long-sleeved T-shirts of their preference would not be kind to his neck. A tie
was out of the question for their demographic. They tried a kerchief scarf but he looked like a ‘pirate preparing to meet the mother-in-law' according to one wit. The solid colour of a polo-neck jumper against the changing plasma screens made him look like ‘an escapee from Pentridge' according to someone else. In the end they opted for his own shirt: it would fight some of the screens, but it had less against it than the other options.

‘And I'll see what the lighting people can do about the neck,' Tamara said.

Throughout the exercise the wardrobe people and the director talked as if he did not exist. In service to self-preservation Connie had taken his attention elsewhere, so when Tamara did finally address him he did not hear. Tamara raised her voice to deaf-old-man level and leaning in very close asked if there was a hearing problem. Connie shook his head; he did not trust himself to speak.

 

Two hours after he arrived they were ready to begin filming. Sara, perched on a high stool beyond the cameras, blew him a kiss and gave him a thumbs-up as he walked on to the set. He was desperate for a minute alone with her, a restorative of sorts, but with so much time spent in preparation the director insisted they begin immediately. She took him by the arm and positioned him on the left of the set. She wanted him moving through cyberspace, and moving with authority. ‘Like God,' she said, with neither humour nor irony.

‘God would choose a different outfit,' a lark called from the darkness.

The director was grim. ‘We'll manage.'

During the filming of the first pilot, Connie had been treated with the respect due a man important enough for his own TV
series. How quickly are the mighty fallen, he was thinking, as he was shoved here, pushed there, told how to stand, how to hold his head, how to speak. In a matter of minutes he knew his good side – actually he lacked a good side, there was a bad side and a worse side; he learned about the asymmetry of his posture; his walk, he was told, was more of a slouch. He was wondering just how much more demeaning this could become when the director slapped a script into his hands.

‘What's this?' he asked, knowing exactly what it was.

It appears Connie will not be writing the script to his TV series based on his work. Although director Tamara assures him he will have major input.

‘We need the writer to be someone in touch with our target demographic.' She mentions a name familiar to Connie as the brains behind several reality shows.

‘I must be missing something.' Connie's voice is louder than he intended. ‘What does this tosser know about philosophy?'

Tamara is suddenly all smiles – Connie's question is right on the money. For reality-TV writer knows nothing about philosophy, that's Connie's area. Reality-man's job is to make sure Connie's ideas reach a young audience.

Dispossessed of his appearance, dispossessed of his sense of self, and now dispossessed of his work, Connie is desperate to find Sara. For a moment he is afraid she has deserted him, but then he finds her off to one side speaking with some of the crew. She must feel his gaze because suddenly she turns her brilliant smile on him and immediately he feels better; she's the only person here on his team.

The script for the second pilot is, in fact, much as he wrote it, although it has been cut through with ‘entertainment'. There are kaleidoscopes of kids at computers, concertinas of laptops,
figures of people fractured and reconfiguring as animals, trees, buildings – the impermanence of the present, Tamara explains. And a Q and A segment has been added in which Connie interacts with viewers via computer-cam. At this point, the director invites Sara to take part. Having her involved repairs his confidence and his own performance improves. By the time the filming is finished he is feeling much better.

As he and Sara prepare to leave, a number of the production team, including the director, gather round. Everyone is buoyant.

‘I think it'll get the go-ahead,' he says to Sara once they are outside.

She gives him a hug, she thinks so too. And yes, she thinks he did an excellent job. Yes, she says, he looked great on camera. Yes, yes, she says, he was very
au courant
.

He suggests a cautiously optimistic celebration and they arrange to meet up later at their favourite bistro. He watches her in his rear-vision mirror as he drives off. She's still standing near the studio entrance, waving and blowing him kisses.

1.

It was an ordinary evening in late spring with a fading sun and a few smears of cloud. The deciduous trees were fleshed out with new leaves, the jacarandas in the college gardens were in bloom. There were the usual fumes as Harry walked home from work, the usual cars parked in the street, the usual joggers on the track alongside the cemetery. It was just an ordinary evening.

Harry had spent the morning on the NOGA fellowship problem. Fortunately he alone knew there was a problem and he intended to keep it that way. He would not be extending any of the current fellowships. In fact, he was prepared to dump the entire program – a drastic solution, but as none of the inaugural fellows had produced the work expected of them, it was better to kill the project than let it tarnish NOGA's otherwise impressive slate.

Conrad was beyond saving. Anyone could have told him an affair with a twenty-five-year-old would end in disaster, although not even Harry could have predicted this particular disaster. In less than a month Sara had swapped Conrad for a
TV career – Conrad's TV career.
Travels in Cyberspace
had been put on hold while a four-part ‘post-modern frolic through post-colonialism' fronted by Sara was already in pre-production. Conrad was drinking himself into oblivion; he was also making a fool of himself on email with his wife. Of them all, the self-designated web expert should know better than to try and sort out his personal life online.

Not that Harry had any intention of giving advice, for it was clear that Conrad Lyall drunk or sober was more concerned with his personal life than the broad cultural issues that used to occupy him. Charm, reputation, style, all those qualities which feed reputation need a solid undercarriage of ability. But whatever ability Conrad might still possess had remained hidden during his NOGA appointment. Last year's celebrity philosopher will only make it to this year's list if he produces this year's goods. And Conrad had not.

Jack was in a different category altogether. His kindness to Ava mattered to Harry far more than his absurd essays and misjudged public conversations. For all the help he gave Ava, and no matter what happened with the fellowship program, Harry would find Jack some sort of job at NOGA.

Which left Helen. After a year of indecision, an entirely wasted year from NOGA's point of view, she was finally returning to America. She had promised to keep NOGA in the loop regarding her research, and with her son remaining in Australia she would be a regular visitor home. Whatever benefits flowed from Helen would happen irrespective of the fellowship program.

At the usual monthly board meeting that afternoon – just an ordinary day – Harry had signposted the possibility of the fellowship program being forfeited for more high-yield
NOGA projects. He would, he said, be providing a comprehensive report at the next meeting. He had proceeded to table several member reports, including some interesting information out of the former Yugoslavia regarding natural gas – there was a surprising number of Australians now working in Serbia and Croatia – followed by discussion of his future directions paper. As Harry had expected, the board welcomed an expanded role for the Network and was happy to approve all but a couple of the minor recommendations. Conrad had sensibly phoned in his apologies. Harry had left the meeting greatly satisfied.

On the way home he detoured via the market. Most traders had closed for the day and with the shutters drawn, the bare shelves and the wan cry of a solitary spruiker, the place seemed strangely derelict. It unnerved him, but still nothing so significant to topple the day from its perch. He stood at the top of the delicatessen aisle. Only two stalls remained open. He bought smoked mussels for Ava and a wedge of a nicely ripened Livarot, and as he was leaving he spotted a single
bâtard
on the near-empty shelves of a bread stall and he bought that too.

He caught a tram back to College Crescent and walked home via his usual route alongside the park. There was a group of boys playing cricket and a cluster of dog owners on the oval. Everything was ordinary. Perhaps now was the time to get the dog he and Ava had always promised themselves, not the border collie of their discussions but a smaller dog to sit with Ava and keep her company.

He turned into their street; there was the familiar squawk of rainbow lorikeets on their evening rout, and in the distance the growl of home-going traffic. He reached their gate; Minnie from next door waved, he waved back. On the verandah the
deckchairs were in place; in the front window the cedar blinds were set for maximum light with minimum intrusion; the mail had been collected. Everything was as it should be.

He opened the front door, the house was comfortably warm. ‘Ava,' he called. And when there was no response, he called again, ‘Ava.'

Still nothing out of the ordinary. He removed his jacket, put his briefcase on the bed, then entered the kitchen. He paused in front of the wine rack and settled on a middle-aged Coonawarra cabernet sauvignon that he knew Ava would enjoy. Four coffee mugs perched unwashed on the draining board – Ava had never seen the point of washing dishes several times a day. Her lunch dishes were stacked in the sink, again unwashed. He noticed traces of one of her favourite meals, grilled processed cheese on a crumpet. What in others would be an unacceptable failure of good taste was an endearing eccentricity in Ava. Her preferred cheese resembled a block of yellow plasticine that blistered and burned when grilled. ‘It's for comfort,' she explained, ‘not for taste,' – and not a distinction he would make himself.

He opened the wine, and with the bottle and two glasses went into the living room. She wasn't there nor in the garden beyond, but neither was that unusual. He crossed to the stables and called up the stairs; no response from her study. Back in the house and to her bedroom just in case she was lying down, but the room was empty. He carried the wine and glasses through the house to the front verandah and settled himself in one of the chairs; she often took a walk in the early evening, he would wait for her return.

At twenty past six he checked the house phone and his mobile. No messages on either. He took both phones outside to the verandah and poured himself a glass of wine. At six
thirty-five he was surprised to find his glass empty; at six thirty-seven he began to worry. At quarter to seven he couldn't stop himself and dialled her mobile. There was a faint delayed ringing, which he traced to the living room. Wherever she had gone it was without her phone.

It was just before seven when he crossed the courtyard and climbed the stairs to her study. He was looking for clues, he told Jack later, to indicate where she might have gone. What struck him first was the tidiness of the room. Papers were stacked in neat piles, pens were in their jar, her desk was clear, and she'd removed her working notes from the wall. Ava tidied up at most once a year, but he had suggested recently that less clutter in her study might clear away some of what she called her ‘cerebral debris', so what might have been odd in other circumstances could be easily explained.

‘I kept staring at the tidy desk, the bare wall,' Harry said to Jack, ‘taking in the strangeness of it.'

And then he saw her. On the floor, on her back, her head resting on a cushion, lying motionless, her eyes closed but – a glance was sufficient to reveal – not asleep. And in that moment when everything was blatantly not normal he found himself thinking about the lies perpetrated about the dead. For dead people do not look as if they are sleeping peacefully. Dead people look lifeless. Dead people are changed, changed utterly. No peace to that pallor, no peace to that stillness. His wife overlaid by death, death-wrapped. It was horrible, it was fantastic. His wife dead on her study floor, wearing a shirt he had never seen before, her feet bare, her hands spread on the rug, her face utterly lifeless. His lovely, lively wife. He had promised to be with her at the end. ‘Please don't let me die alone,' she had said.

He knelt on the floor and touched her breast, an automatic reaching for the heart which had failed her. There's no predicting these things, the neurologist had said recently. Her body was in a weakened state, anything might take her. But not yet, not yet.

He pulled in the air and expelled it forcefully in a brutal resuscitation of his own arrested life. He couldn't look at her, it was too brazenly real – her death – and a sense that if he didn't see, if he refused to cooperate, this unnatural turn of events might be reversed. Seconds later and he had to look at her, this woman he had loved for most of his life, had to take her in before she disappeared entirely. She had a fearful uniform bloodlessness. The lines, the flaws, the tics, her idiosyncrasies had all disappeared from her face. Sheared of expression it was as if the life, all of Ava's big brilliant life had been fleeced from her. The face on the cushion was perfect.

He touched her arm just above the wrist, plastic skin just like her favourite cheese. And cold, already cold. How quickly does it happen, this settling of the blood? And how long has she been lying alone? He hated the thought of her being here without him. And if she had died in distress, he would never know, this awful death mask would have removed all signs. Only her hair was unchanged, her beautiful golden hair, and he sat there stroking it as she had always liked him to do, stroking the hair of his wife.

Outside night fell, and a chill breeze eased through the open door and up the stairs. On the floor in her study Harry sat quietly stroking his wife, as if that might hold triumphant death at bay. But it was a struggle; he needed the sort of imagination Ava had possessed to survive this no-man's-land between a normal past and an incomprehensible future. He opened his
eyes and felt for the desk lamp, knocked something to the floor, winced in the tight hard glare, looked down and picked up a bottle. Pentobarbital was clearly written in black block letters; the rest of the label was in Spanish.

He knew exactly what it was. Pentobarbital was Nembutal. He knew exactly what it meant.

He held the bottle to the light. There was a lick of fluid left, the last unnecessary drop. Her heart hadn't failed, her brain hadn't haemorrhaged, she had done this to herself, she had done this to him. How could she have left him like this? And lying flat and white on the desk surface, an envelope, her handwriting, his name on the front. Nembutal and a note. And despite the incontrovertible evidence, he couldn't believe she would have killed herself. He couldn't believe she would have killed herself without letting him know. He couldn't believe she would kill herself knowing he would find her. He couldn't believe she would leave him before it was time.

2.

Thirty-eight days had passed since her death and the house reeked of her absence. Each new day loomed with a frightening twenty-four hours, each new hour threatened with sixty impossible minutes. Harry felt as if normal life had been stuffed into a pipe lined with glass shards. Grief in others with its self-indulgent drear had always made him impatient. Get over it, he had wanted to say, just get over it. But it wasn't self-indulgent and he had no idea how to get over it.

He wanted to throttle those idiot commiserators with their inane ‘better it happened now'– publicly the cause of death had been given as heart failure; ‘it was time'; ‘she was saved from the worst'; and the one he hated most of all: ‘
you
were saved from the worst'. Because it wasn't time and he hadn't been saved, he wanted more, much more of Ava. She was wrong not to have waited, she was wrong not to have told him what she planned. If she had been so desperate, so determined, why hadn't she begged him, forced him to change his mind and help her?

Several times a day he would cross the courtyard and enter her study as if he might find her reading or tapping the keyboard or just staring through the window. The condemning patch of floor he had excised from his field of vision. At four o'clock the morning after her death he had leapt out of bed. If anything should ever happen to me, she had always said, check the shelf of my favourite books. Her Parker pen lay in its felt pouch in front of the books; he put it in the pocket of his pyjamas. He removed her Proust, her collected Milosz, her cloth-covered
Portrait of a Lady
. Nothing. Behind
Mrs Dalloway
was a flashdrive marked as a copy of her latest novel, behind
Wuthering Heights
was a wad of Euros. Nervous, expectant, desperate for something, anything, he had continued along the shelf. But there was nothing. No letter, no proper explanation of why she had acted as she did.

Thirty-eight days after her death, her desk drawers, the filing cabinet, the stacks of paper still remained exactly as she had left them. Such finality, unbearable it seemed, if he were to move any of her things. Yet he had found her dead in her study along with an empty bottle of Nembutal – how much more final does it get? He had seen her coffin, he had buried her ashes and now he was rattling around in the life they once
shared. How much more brutally blatant could it be? None of this was logical, but logic played no role here.

His loneliness grew large in their kitchen, at a table set for one, in front of their collection of CDs. Her garden was a hell of loneliness. He would dash outside when he could no longer tolerate being indoors, and dash inside when her bushes, her pot-plants, even the mottled sky threatened to crush. From house to garden to her study and back again, always on the move, always slamming against the walls of his own loss.

His eldest brother, Miles, flew in from Adelaide as soon as he heard the news. It helped to have someone in the house. But the day before the funeral, when the rest of the Guerins arrived, Miles moved with them into a city hotel. Harry would have been happy for the entire family to have stayed with him, anything to drown out the roar of Ava's absence. But the Guerins had never been the sort to press their needs, so he remained in the house alone.

During the first two weeks Helen had phoned every day, but it was her loss not his that prompted the calls. Each day her gushing tears and the same questions: Why so soon? Surely there were signs her heart was failing? Surely you noticed something? And his unspoken accusation: if you'd turned up when you promised, perhaps Ava would be alive today. He loathed Helen's outpourings and in the last days before she left for America he screened his calls to avoid speaking with her.