The Best Australian Stories (37 page)

Time to crank up the Empirin and enjoy the film. But I take too much and I'm in and out of the narrative though that in itself is a pleasant enough flight-simulation of life's vicissitudes. I can half-inject the Empirin and lie so still that the needle remains docked in the vein, and a while later, with serene balance, I can push the plunger the rest of its merry way. Every object in the world is journeying.

Robert Mitchum: And then I saw her. Coming out of the sun. And I knew I didn't care about that forty grand.

And I'm smiling, which when I smile these days is like a release and a surrender all its own. The forty grand, by the way, belonged to Kirk Douglas.

Mitchum: How did I know she'd show up? I didn't. What stopped her from taking a boat to Chile or Guatemala? Nothing. How big a chump can you get to be? I was finding out. And then she'd come along like school was out. And everything else was just a stone you sailed at the sea.

When Mitchum kisses Jane Greer on the beach I remember that first night on the bed at the Town House Hotel.

I don't want to die, she says.

Neither do I baby, says Mitchum, but if I have to I'm gonna die last.

We can be together again, she says. In a way we never were. We can go back to Acapulco and start all over as though nothing had happened.

Oh, but if you could.

I was really getting into some troublesome loops, the epoch of Jane and the pier in the mist. I could have grown to love her too. But I was cracking up around this time. I have the feeling I keep making that point. My thoughts were getting very cluttered. The parts of me that acted were being ordered by the parts of me that directed to do the things that had to get done. There was so much cleaning. There were things that could assail you. Good grief, when I think now of all those moist wet cunts and what they harboured. How did I ever make it through? Quite clearly I was predestined for the quest. On the other hand, in the midst of Greer's great generosity, clearly there was
absolutely
nothing to worry about.
Even the clap (though I didn't expect it, and nor did I get it, from this virginal nineteen-year-old) was (or would have been) merely another event in the sequence of events that defined the before, during and after of our days. At least the goddamned days moved on. Otherwise you could be caught there forever: washing your hands, did I get it right, washing your hands, did I get it right, washing your hands, did I get it right, is it gone is it gone is it gone is it gone is it gone. Is it gone now?

Katharine on the Wing

Some girls would get nervous about planes. It was not like it's become by now, with jets ferrying passengers all over the globe; in the '30s all this was only just moving into the possible. (And I helped make it happen.) To some women planes were frightening and powerful at the same time, which seemed to work as a kind of aphrodisiac. There were women who got very nervous about my coming in to land. Well, it's not like parking a car. Implicit in that balancing act, that aligning of Dunlop with tarmac, was the notion of disintegration, flayed skin and crumpled steel, annihilation and exploding flame. There's a lot of power involved. You don't slow it down to twenty and come in soft. And from the windscreen you can't fully see what you're doing. Women sense this. In the co-pilot's seat it will either give them heart palpitations and dry their throat in a rush of constricted fear or it will flood them with adrenalin and desire. Someone like little Faith Domergue, I knew she never really liked it, those trips out to the air-field, the taxiing and take-off and landing, and I knew especially that the fucking in the air was something of a duty to her, no more than the expected thing. While Katharine Hepburn loved nothing more than a good fuck before or after take-off.

Katharine was so beautiful it would scare a man. Beautiful and hardly even tried. For a while I loved that freckled girl, though her strength and independence made me nervy. Nonetheless one way or another I was in her life and she in mine for a year or two, of which I would count at least several glorious weeks, a month or two perhaps, as burning more brightly than usual, flame and flight and fucking everywhere.

She was wonderfully supportive. When things were just beginning, when everything was still just chase and consummation, it was she to whom I first outlaid my plans to fly around the world, and she who said, Do it all, grab it all, eat it all. We were like two bony whippets going at it. I created my own early version of autopilot by jamming a hammer and wire into the joystick, level with the horizon, cruising speed, cruising altitude, all systems go, we had lift-off, we had landing, plump clouds in the distance, the whole vulvic extravaganza, bagpipes playing over the engine's drone, flight approval, the works. I did more than almost anyone to put the cock into cockpit. I was a leader among leaders.

At other times she'd straddle me in the pilot's seat. One time we flew all night, in the Sikorsky S-43, lovely big amphibian, LA to Chicago and on to New York by dawn, to refuel there and head up the coast to Connecticut, to Fenwick, the Hepburns' summer home. Kate curled up and slept on the daybed. I'd had the seats removed. It was like our little apartment in the sky. For a while I forgot about her. Blackness was everything; or the vague suggestion of horizon. I was there with my dials and controls. Kate receded into deep metallic dreams, infused with humming. (Or so I surmised, since my snatches of airborne sleep were always this way.) The great midwest rolled under us, milk and honey and the restless cattle in the dark fields, the high schools asleep, the children asleep, the soft breathing of millions. The hours passed. The city lights like diamond glints or clusters of algae phosphorescent in some deep ocean. There's always about an hour when you expect to see the faint pink smudge of dawn appear and when you think you're beginning to see it, but you are not. You imagine it all. It is the longest time of night. And finally it really does start to come, that longed-for hint of sun, distant as only a promise can be. An hour or more before the sun itself, a blue glow lightening, away from darkest blue, through nothing at all like pink, to pale mauve. To pink. Suddenly (I mean eventually, I mean the two things came at once) there were hands over my eyes. ‘Boo! Guess who?' She ran her fingers down my chest, down into my groin. I stirred, half-turned, her shirt hung open, her dart-like breast protruding. The roseate aureole of dawn. Her silk underclothes fell effortlessly to the floor, six thousand feet above sea level. She was red, red, red, her freckles, her fiery bush, her hair set free, the bands of flushing up her neck that overcame her whenever sex was close. I was ramjet-ready, Lord yes. I sprawled out from the seat, my long legs spread. She sat astride, she smothered me with slippery kisses and skin and heat. She ground and groaned. She smeared my thighs with snail-stuff. We kissed a good long while as the light seeped in and the objects reappeared. Joystick. Altimeter. Ignition. Intercom. She docked at last. I slid into Katharine Hepburn like Joy into a burrow, if Joy were a rabbit, heading for home. I held her bony arse in the palms of my hands. Beyond her flaming tresses the sky was turning pink. This was way past purple, I think I need to stress. And of course there is that Other, that Ultimate pink, in there, down there, where I am, where I am in, where I am in and out, where I am in and out, where I am in and out, where I am watching with such wonder, watching the edges of her pink, her pinkness, her pinkocity, almost hidden, almost exposed, enveloping, regularly, pretty much, my dick. I am in and out of there, more often in, more often in, it is in that really matters. The sky is beginning to flare pink behind her. Goodness I seem to have changed tense in all the excitement. The sky was beginning to flare pink behind her. We slowed it down. I held her buttocks in place with the controls. We gently rocked. The plane swayed, tracing a path of oscillating sine waves through the air. Katharine, Katie, groaned and groaned. Sweat dripped from her chin onto my chest. I watched the first edge of the sun split the sky. Then I'd look down at our genitals so happily enmeshed. Then back up at the sun. It's like a dialogue with the host star of your system: Are you watching this? Are you watching this? And I looked into Kate's green eyes. And perhaps, turned inwards to the fuselage of that plane, turned away from that fluorescently expanding display of light, she saw that sun come up on the horizon of my pupils. Who ever knows such things? Katharine Hepburn groaned and groaned. You would think all that angularity meant a certain coldness. On the contrary, she comported herself, she faced the world, she did her thing, demanded her demands, methodical and businesslike … and then she let go. And she was gone. I passed much happy goneness with that girl.

Dawn. Dawn. This at last was dawn, over the city of the Century, with its great towers, impregnable, never to wilt. And the goddess of dawn, oh my Aurora. You came to me. I climbed to you. You fell in love with me. I fell for you. And you made me immortal, time and time again.

All summer long we flew. Every medium tasted the same, every fluid, every solid, all the air. We landed wherever we pleased. The days seemed to bristle then burst with heat. In the middle of the lagoon on Santa Catalina Island we sunbaked on the Sikorsky wing as a giant turtle rose nearby to float and watch, with implacable curiosity, ourselves and our strange craft. On the other side of the continent one day high above Long Island Sound, Katharine stripped and stood beside me in the cockpit, her cunt all but in my face. She had the knack of making me laugh, somewhat nervously, from time to time.

‘I'm ready for a skinny dip!' she said.

We landed smoothly on the Sound. We dived off the wing (she was clothed now, in a yellow bathing suit) and swam circles around the plane. There was a time in my life when all this wetness mattered. There was a time, lying side by side on that warm port wing and drying off, when droplets of water clung to the back of her thighs and when my fingertip could prod and test the heft of a single droplet's elasticity, viscosity, until that drop's potential energy burst forth into the kinetic and ran in a tiny rivulet down between her legs. I traced my fingers down there too. She shifted her weight, imperceptibly, spread her legs an imperceptible distance wider. I stroked her inner thighs. My knuckles pressed (and all this imperceptibility was growing less imperceptible by degrees) against the soft plumpness of her sex. She arched her bum (quite perceptibly) into the air, and pushed a little harder against my knuckles. There was a time when summer actually loosened me up, as I gather it can from time to time for most of the rest of the world.

Hmmm, Howard, she murmured, face hidden beneath a sun hat and buried in her arms, stretched out on that membrane of sunstruck wing. Do take me inside and fuck me when you've half a mind.

There was a time my life was so filled with potential.

Malevolence of Microbes

Memo from Howard Hughes to an Aide

Jan 17 1972

Bob:

It has been brought to my attention by a Latter Day Saint (today's paper) that some say I am being drugged beyond painkilling necessity. And this is entirely untrue and indeed scurrilous. Nobody drugs me. I am aware of what I need. I try to practise moderation and the amount of medication I take is in fact a response to the levels of pain I constantly encounter. Not just that, difficulty with the other humans also. Indeed I feel few would understand the acuteness of the pain I suffer and have suffered fairly constantly since 1946. If I was not so unfortunate to have this level of pain in my life, I believe I might not have needed to take such drastic measures of seclusion, of putting such layers between myself and the world out there. It's not so much that I'm addicted – I'm sure I could stop if necessity dictated it – more that I feel I need to maintain a certain level of focus. The more I take, the clearer it all gets. If I've got enough in me, everything is flat, perfect. I am striving for nothing less than the perfection of forms. It is imperative to trust nobody as even physical presence can invite calamity, catastrophe, the chaos of germs and the sheer malevolence of microbes. To say nothing of psychic disturbances. Therefore I pay Latter Day Saints to be, essentially, invisible. I have not looked closely at a vase full of flowers in more than twenty-two years. Yet inside of me whole fields of poppies sway, and along a quiet hedgerow the gorse glows yellower than butter, and smells of coconut oil, and Axel, my sleek brown pointer, bounds ahead delirious with joy and disappears and reappears. Now
there
was loyalty. He flushes out a giant hare that almost bowls me over. In that moment in which Axel follows and brushes right past me his muscles bulge and his intent is absolutely, resolutely pure. (I will never know a summer's day like that again.) That is the purity of which I speak. That is the focus of or towards the invisible form, the blossomness of the blossom. I am sullied and assailed by life's more ignoble duties, daily, hourly, on an endless loop, but I will not be bowed or bloodied. I will face every challenge every memo every obstacle
in sequence
and
as appropriate.
I will give to each matter its allotment of time. I am doing this for all of us, for you too, Bob. I am trying to hold this together. The pain is the handicap and the medication merely helps me regain ground. Achieve balance. Reset the marble floor in the temple of equilibrium. In this way dammit can't you see the medication is nothing, no more than a spirit-level in the house of forms that is my life each day. One day I'll get back to the way things were. I have recently taken to the idea of flying again. I think if this can be managed by the Latter Day Saints (in terms of the hygiene of the event, of maintaining my privacy), I might just manage to do it. The planning, of course, will be complex, but I feel confident this thing can be done. I feel it will give some pause to all the naysayers; in any case I am not some strange recluse, what everyone seems to think I am, and am as perfectly capable as the next man of walking out of this hotel and strolling through the park. If I was so fortunate that my concerns were more worldly, more domestic, I might well do exactly that. It is not for lack of ability. I am not in any way crippled. I have … responsibilities. I have a structure I am trying to maintain. I am the owner and creator and controller of a network so vast it is beyond the know-how of most men to move within it, to manipulate it, to organise its every nuance and fluctuation. I am, in short,
stuck here.
It's not something of my choosing. At Dan Beard's Outdoor School at Camp Teedyuskung I swam one summer's day in a creek whose water was so cold my balls ached and all my skin was tight with contracted pores. We swung out from a rope hanging from a tree branch and dropped like pencils into the murky brown. Later this would be called a Tarzan rope because the century (and I helped create it) would open itself to cinema like a woman on her wedding night. But in 1917 we called it a tree swing. Dudley lay on a rock, soaking up its radiant heat. I floated in the shallow water in a shaft of sunlight, sifting my fingers through the mud by the shore. The reeds seemed far away. The current bent the stalks. Low to the water a dragonfly plotted out the odd angularities of its course like a draughtsman charting constellations. The dark water was a bowl of night. A horsefly bit me on the shoulder and a week later back in Houston I proudly showed the welt to Mother. Who fretted unreasonably. I still have a letter my mother wrote to Lieutenant Aurio, my stockade leader at Camp that year. ‘… I think you understand him well enough to help him over the many times he gets his feelings hurt … If you can help Howard to take the teasing without getting hurt and resentful we will surely be lastingly in your debt. Dudley makes friends so much more easily than Howard does and Howard feels that keenly too … If you can help him to forget himself, get along better with boys and perhaps teach him to keep his hut in order, I ask for nothing else.' Mother, all of my life I've been trying to forget myself. And one is always there again, where one begins. And in the end I retreated so far that any step beyond this room is rather gigantic. Not to say impossible. I mean, that's not to say it's impossible. If one wants to become what one wants to become one must start with what one is. Or has become. Perhaps I am sick, but if everything would just fall into place then I'm sure I can get better. Oh help me to forget myself. The problem is the world doesn't forget me so I'm prisoner here of my own fame and fading beauty while my voice gets thinner and thinner. I'm going to fly. I'm going to sit in the cockpit once again. Who devised this hideous speed of time? Who said it should go so fast? I am, very literally,
suddenly
sixty-six. I didn't plan it like that. Things just kept happening without any breaks, events cascaded one on top of the other, no gaps, no room for sleep, for rest, for peace. And then at forty-one you discover morphine. And God says eat, eat all the fruit you like. Break all the rules, because money is kinetic energy, the potentiality of the congealed, and it is for you to make it liquid. It drowns you in libation. And you don't drown but take on gills, and like Poseidon slumber in the deep. And you make the ocean bigger, all of it yours. And this takes away from your life that used to happen in the air. Until all is imagined as nothing more than combinations of oxygen and hydrogen in their different manifestations and flying and floating become one and the same thing. And all you are missing is fucking. I pushed Gene Tierney's knees high beside her head, her mouth was open half in pleasure half in surprise, and we both looked down at my cock moving in and out of her. My hands clasped the soles of her feet. She still wore her socks. When our eyes met I felt almost shy. She said, ‘Don't come, don't come.' Her flesh was soft in the hollows either side of her labia. It was all oceans to me. I thought that if we lived only once, then I had loved, loved deeply, loved this, been overcome by love, and that that was a selfish love. Perhaps we are born many times. What are you really talking about? What do you mean by ‘eradicating craving'? The man I was dreaming about, a very ancient chap, smiled faintly. He picked up the glass of drinking water to his left. Holding it up to me, he spoke in another language. I understood everything. ‘You see this goblet? For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the edge of a shelf and the wind slams a door and the vibration tips it over, or when my elbow brushes the table while I am working and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, “Of course. Of course!” When I understand that this glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.' And thus with Gene Tierney. What is contained in memory is made in any case infinite by the morphine. Please do not look down upon me as if I've found some lesser way to experience reality. I am trying to cram it all in. Some systems and methodologies merely take preference. It is not particularly easy to do things any way other than the actual way that unfolds. Better the devil I know. My fear speaks to me with the authority of a god. I know this in my mind but it is the heart that experiences fear. There is just so much out there to fear, Bob, even if you are the wealthiest man in the world,
more so
if you are the wealthiest man in the world. It begins with the microbes, the germs, the tiny worlds of danger in the dust. It ends God-knows-where. For a moment I dream of a mother and daughter, walking along the sidewalk, perhaps in Houston. The daughter says, ‘Let's race!' ‘All right,' the mother grins. ‘One … two—' and away they sprint. I am very far away, Bob, and sometimes, yes, I
do
understand that perhaps on every scale the world is tiny, this world here too of business we attend to. But dammit when I wake up I will be ready for action. I will take them all on! One day we may even meet face to face, and talk like men in the open air, or, let's say, in an office of your choosing. I am sorry it can't be like that at any time, at the drop of a hat. I need my solitude, as you are well aware, in order to better look after business. There are so many variables. There is so much that can go wrong in an organisation of this size. I trust you understand that. Well, Bob, of course you do. That's why we work so well together. Bob, I can assure you that one day you will kick your feet back and laugh at all the tough times. But I'm sure I don't have to tell you this. I thank you for those occasions when you put up with my crankiness. I get a little isolated in here sometimes.