Yearning (19 page)

She swept her hands over her thighs, along the length of her arms, and weighed her breasts in her palms, recalling the hands and kisses she missed so much their memory left her hollow inside. Biting her lip, she brought Solomon back until he felt real. In her memory he never aged. He was ever young, ever vital, ever available to her as he once had been. Wind moaned through the cracks in
the door jambs. It was on a night like this that she’d lost her virginity. And her heart.

With her eyes clamped shut against her bleak life, she turned to lay on her back and shifted her legs apart, imagining she was sixteen again and laying across Solomon’s oval bed on his satin sheets. She could almost feel the weight of his hips pressing down upon her, the taste of his smoke-tainted mouth as he licked her hesitant tongue. She groaned softly as the moment when he’d first entered her returned in full force, the slow burn of him inching her apart. How good it had felt, the raw, animal strength of his length plunging inside that tight space between her legs.

She licked a forefinger and, spreading her vagina wide open with her other hand, circled moisture over her clitoris, imitating the action of Solomon’s remarkable tongue. Her mouth parted, releasing her jutting tongue as she sought the spicy hint of Solomon’s sweat. How she longed for the brush of his long curls against her breasts.

Her fingers mimicked the teasing strokes and lunges that had once been so familiar to her. Cogent body memory brought the pleasure of their first coupling back to her. Her buttocks tensed and she arched her back as an intense orgasm shook her. She pressed a hand over her mouth to muffle her gasping breaths, tears dripping down the sides of her face and into her ears.

As the tremors in her legs subsided, an ache settled in her chest. Lonely. Wanting. A fervent yearning, so strong it made her throat hurt. She lay staring into the darkness, swallowed by pain, and sent up a prayer begging Solomon to find his way back to her.

How she glowed with triumph on their wedding day, the eve of the turn of the millennium. She was glorious in a sheer dress of pale rose silk with white flowers sprinkled among her auburn curls. Her long neck arched elegantly away from shoulders that were self-consciously hunched forward, as though she wanted to fold in on herself. She held a posy of white and pink camellias, picked from the bushes at the front of Max’s house. Their house now. Her camellias. Flowers made hers by marriage.

As Max stood beside her, awkward in a hired white suit, he admired her simplicity. He liked that she wasn’t all trussed up like a meringue. She was pretty and sexy in a straightforward way. His mates teased him – ‘She’ll be like the Y2K bug. You’ll wake up tomorrow and she won’t work anymore!’ – and he laughed at their jokes. He liked that they thought him of him as snared, when in truth he felt saved. He was entering the new century a new man, with a bride at his side.

Their vows were a simple, carefully crafted set of words. She’d spent weeks scouring through libraries of books for
meaningful words, leaving pages of quotes on his pillow. They gathered like fallen autumn leaves on his side of the bed. He indulged her by reading them, but they bewildered him. What was the difference, he wanted to know, between ‘I will honour and love you above all others’ and ‘I promise to love you eternally and only, forsaking all others’?

‘The vows are just the vows,’ he said. ‘ “I do” is all that counts.’

Exasperated by his ambivalence, she wrote the vows herself.

Today I make a solemn vow to join my life to yours.

I promise that from this day forward you shall not walk alone.

I promise to share your life with you, as your partner, lover and friend.

I promise to love you eternally and only, forsaking all other lovers.

I promise to be honest with you always.

I promise always to respect you and to consider your needs.

I promise to say sorry when I have hurt you and to forgive you when you have hurt me.

I promise to encourage you to be all that you can be.

Let my arms be your shelter, let my heart be your home.

We are two hearts who now walk this one road together.

Max felt tears sting behind his eyes when he read them. The words gave him a frightening sense of coming home, of rest. But to her face he laughed, not wanting to admit that the words had touched him.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘It sounds like something out of a fairytale. Are you sure you don’t want to finish off with “and they lived happily ever after”?’

She pouted, and he was sorry he made fun of her after the effort she’d made. He pulled her into a bear hug and apologised.

‘I’m sorry. I’m a bloke, remember? This stuff just isn’t my thing.’

Max thought marriage wouldn’t require anything more of him than a ring and the embarrassment of the wedding waltz. He kissed her, agreed to the vows and ignored the vague suspicion that hung like a shadow behind him, worrying that perhaps he might be agreeing to something he didn’t quite understand.

*

A dedicated loner, Max was grateful for the tension between his new wife and her parents. It meant his contact with the in-laws was limited only to Christmas. His own mother was long gone and the decades had swallowed his father, who had disappeared way up north to live out his love of the bottle. Max was relieved of family obligations. Now he was married, he considered himself secure and free.

He continued to live as he always had. He worked, he watched TV, drank beer and saw his friends. He took it for granted that things would go on as they had before, so was surprised when she started to complain. She accused him of being selfish and inattentive. He’d married her, hadn’t he? Why wasn’t that enough to prove he loved
her? The accusations seemed to come out of nowhere, her love swinging hard against him as she insisted that he make greater effort to be intimate.

The vapour of worry that had settled in the moments he agreed to their vows began to take solid form. Max started to feel he’d been duped. The simplicity of their relationship was eroding into draining arguments over how he didn’t care about her needs. The more she pushed, the more frustrated he became, until he felt himself spinning out of control. He fought back with a nastiness he knew would silence her. He left her weeping helplessly on the bed and he escaped to the pub to drown his irritation in beer.

Hours later he’d return home, the effect of alcohol and distance softening him towards her. They would make love and she would cry all the way through it. Afterwards, while she slept, Max would lie staring numbly into the darkness. He didn’t understand what was happening to them. She’d been so happy with him once. He didn’t know how to stop this unravelling between them or how to stem the radiant anger that burned them sore. In those silent hours he thought about the vows she’d written for them. They were now stowed away in a cardboard box in the back shed along with the other wedding memorabilia. It seemed the promises that had once been so important to them both were slowly gathering dust.

*

Her words stuck to him in the summer heat. A baby? Did he hear her right? She wants a baby? Sitting opposite him on the paint-spattered stool in a summer dress, she looked
cool in the stuffiness of the shed, swatting flies from her expectant face. As he looked at her he realised she was assuming that he wanted a baby, too. Slowly he began to shake his head.

Her smile faded. After all these months of arguing, she’d discovered what was wrong with her. She’d been discontent and demented because of a driving maternal instinct. A baby was what she needed; what she’d always wanted. A baby was the natural bridge that would bring them together. With a baby in the house they’d stop fighting.

‘You want kids, don’t you?’ Her look was quizzical, as if she didn’t quite understand what she was asking.

There it was again, Max thought. That assumption. Why had she assumed he wanted a kid? Why had they not had this conversation before? There’d been so many conversations, important conversations, about Max setting up his own furniture business, about selling the car, about the possibility of her going to university to study Arts, about why he didn’t want to visit his family or hers. But not this. Of all the important things that had been discussed, how did they miss this?

‘No. Not really.’

He might as well have punched her. He saw her gulp and steady herself on the stool with one hand. Cicadas rang out around them, making the air seem closer and more intense.

‘But . . . But I thought . . . ’

What had she thought? All this time she’d thought that children came wrapped up in the same package as marriage, that’s what she thought. He could see she was
wavering, confused, trying to make sense of his words. Did he mean ‘No, not now’ or ‘No, not ever’? He wasn’t sure. How could he have been so stupid not to have thought about this before?

Max started to fiddle with his drill, itching to get away from the idea, wanting it done and forgotten before it went any further. He turned his attention back to the table he was working on, hopeful she would take the hint and just drop it.

‘I want children, Max.’

Internally he cringed, wishing she’d just stop, wishing she’d just say it then leave it be. Let it be in the past, where it belonged, not here and now in this heat.

‘I’ve always wanted children. I’m already thirty-five. If it’s going to happen, we need to start now.’

As Max started the drill he wondered if she’d heard him properly. Why was she still talking like it was going to happen? Maybe she misunderstood. But how could she? ‘No’ was as straightforward as it gets and that’s how he’d said it. He drilled three holes while she sat there watching him. Leaning across the workbench he retrieved some screws and worked them into the table joint. She’d gone quiet. He knew he should look at her but he couldn’t. Suddenly she let out a sob.

He looked up to see her face scrunched all out of shape. She was crying. Hard, fat tears were racing down her cheeks. She didn’t take her eyes off him, she just sat there openly sobbing. Max gazed at her helplessly. He began to say ‘I’m sorry’ but she cut him off.

‘You selfish prick. You give me nothing.’

Max looked down at his table again, his hands hanging by his side.

‘If you don’t give me this, I’ll leave you.’

Max started to laugh with the shock of the threat. ‘You wouldn’t leave me.’

Her voice was quiet as she leaned in close to him, her eyes scarlet with emotion. ‘Try me. This is really important to me, Max. A deal breaker.’

She stood up and walked to the door of the shed. As he watched her walking away, a bubble of panic rose in his chest. A deal breaker? She’d leave him for this? When she reached the door he called out to her and she stopped, her back to him.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a baby.’

He watched her shoulders lift as she drew in a breath of relief. Smiling through her tears she ran to him. He wrapped his free arm around her waist and listened to her whisper muffled thank-yous into his shoulder. But even as he thought to himself, ‘It’s only a baby. How bad can it be?’, anxiety wormed into him and he wondered again if he understood what he was signing up for.

*

Max was grateful he’d given in to her. For the next few months they made love a lot. No begging or persuading or courting required, just free, unfettered, regular sex.

The next year little Joshua was born. The frail baby made a noisy entrance to their lives and quickly exhausted his mother. For Max the sex dried up, the house got messy and his meals came out of a box in the freezer. There were no more nights of lingerie or poetry in front of the
fire, just the boring routine of work and more work and demands from her and the baby.

He tried to fight the resentment. It bit hard into his pride, leaving him lonesome and weary. He left her to her caring duties and turned to his outside world for solace. He worked long hours, doing overtime whenever it was offered and dropping into the pub to pick up a six-pack of beer on the way home.

She constantly nipped at his heels, complaining of his ever-increasing absences. All he wanted was the freedom to do what he wanted when he wanted. He didn’t see how she could be lonely or why she needed his help. He’d given her a child, what more could she want from him? His mates said he was a trouper, giving her a baby was a big deal, she should be bloody grateful. He’d made a concession for her and had adjusted to it as best he could. As long as she was there when he wanted her and didn’t complain too much, he could be happy.

Max’s frustration grew as he watched Joshua bond closely with his mother. She disappeared into her son, sharing everything with him, meals, jokes, even her bed. She sang to him, fed him from her breast and rocked him to sleep, while Max jealously fumed in the lounge room. When Max became impatient with Joshua she intervened, pulling the child away from him with an admonishing look.

Little things irritated him and most of them were her fault. The dishes were never done, his shirts never ironed, there was never any toilet paper and the shower was mouldy. Sometimes she asked him to help and he did so, but with bad grace, and he made a point of telling her how
demanding she was. And that she was lazy. He lost enthusiasm and gained weight.

At night after Joshua had been read stories and put to bed, Max sat in front of the TV, drinking his beer, and ignoring her. Sometimes she’d stand between him and the television trying to talk to him and he’d wave her away impatiently. By ten o’clock he flicked the box off, put the dog outside and lumbered to their bed. Without saying goodnight he switched off the light, even if she was scribbling in that stupid diary of hers, plunging them both into darkness.

‘I guess I’ll go to sleep then,’ she said.

He cleared his throat in reply. He wondered vaguely what she’d been writing about. She spent half her life with a pen in her hand and her nose buried in a notebook. He’d looked for it once or twice, when curiosity got the better of him, but he’d never found it. She had it too well hidden. It was hard not to take personally, this secretive and urgent scrawling of hers. He knew it would be about him. It was probably a lot of whining about how hard her life was now. Well, she had no one to blame but herself.