Monkey Grip (15 page)

‘I'll get you a piece of bread and butter,' I said, dropping my feet out of the double bed.

‘Hey, Nor – get me one too, will you?' called Javo.

I got them, in the dark kitchen in the sleeping house; and when I came back to the bedroom they'd both gone to sleep again. So I ate one of the slices of bread and thought a bit, and climbed back into bed and lay on my side and read
Flying.
And the day began.

Grace and I went over to Balmain with Peggy. We bought flowers for Micky's birthday and she dropped us off at his house in Darling Street. We knocked. Javo opened.

‘I woke up,' he said, ‘and the house was empty. I thought you'd end up over here, so I came over.'

No touching, he won't touch me, he won't allow me his body. But, as usual when I was being of service, he cheerfully accepted an omelette and a cup of coffee when I made lunch for everyone. Mistakenly interpreting his smile, I finished cooking and threw myself on the big bed beside him. No response. I started to feel really bad, not daring to have anything to do with his body even for friendship's sake, watching his face become animated only when he spoke to Ruth or Micky, or when he paid attention to their conversation with each other. I got off the bed, humiliated. He fell asleep. I talked with Micky in the kitchen. I heard myself yelling.

‘
I'm so unhappy, it's just ridiculous!
'

I would have liked to shake the teeth out of that Javo, lying there under the rug, boots hanging off the end of the bed. There was a sickness in the air of that house: it was the awful pointless temporariness of waiting to score. Micky chirped and chattered, like old times, but his face was white with it; Ruth's gaze was abstracted. And we infected each other: they with their loneliness in a strange town, we with our blank wall between us and our fear of speaking the truth.

Fear of being loved; fear of not being loved.

I decided to leave. Gracie came with me. We walked sadly down the hill.

‘What do
you
feel about Javo?' I asked, in a kind of dull curiosity. To my surprise she had plenty to say, several theories to put forward, and some advice to give.

‘I think it's because he's a drunkie,' she opined, trotting along beside me holding my hand.

‘Junkie.'

‘Yes, junkie. Well, I think you should leave him alone. Because if you talk to him nervously, he will get nervous, and won't talk back. And if he was
alone,
after he'd taken a pill – '

‘– Stuck a needle in his arm, you mean.'

‘Yeah, a needle – well, after he'd stuck a needle in his arm, he might
think,
if he was
alone,
well, I'll
try
to stop, and not be a junkie any more.'

‘Do you think I talk nervously to him?'

‘No, not much. But you should talk to him nice, like he talked to me once when I was with him and Willy in the car going to the tower. And you should leave him alone.'

I thought about that.

It was a dull, grey afternoon. A grubby wind blew, and the houses in the street looked depressingly dilapidated. We walked along, keeping each other company. I thought about the patterns I make in my life: loving, loving the wrong person, loving not enough and too much and too long. What'll I do? How much of myself will be left hanging in tatters when (
if: I don't want to end it
) I wrench myself away this time? I have this crazy habit, a habit as damaging as his, of
giving it all away.
I remember a line of Villon, which Bette Davis quoted in
The Petrified Forest:

Serve what, serve whom?

Go on taking it, it means. No more of this ancient, courtly masochism.

I have to get free. But there is this incomprehensible bond that keeps us together. The night we talked in bed, he put his arm over his face and said,

‘Why do you put up with me?'

Giving it all away.

I talked about Javo to Peggy, and felt better. And while I was washing the dinner dishes, in walked Tom, the perfect person to save me, all light and speed, his brain sparkling with bombs and crackers. I thought I was too tired to talk, but we sat down and began, at quarter to nine, and gradually the old magic made itself felt, talking about ideas and words; our minds raced each other joyfully until one o'clock in the morning.

And yet, as my fatigue took over after midnight, I began in spite of myself to listen for footsteps at the front door, a knock, a sign that Javo had come back.

He didn't.

He did. I heard his voice, and a woman say his name, in a laughing conversation outside the room in which I was falling asleep. I didn't get up, but let my mind slide away. Hours later (it must have been nearly dawn) I got up to go to the dunny and found him sitting alone in the living room, writing in a small notebook. He looked up at me dully.

‘Hullo,' I said, passing his long legs. ‘Are you coming in to sleep? Because I'll need to move Gracie out into her bed.'

‘Yeah. I'll be in soon.'

He came in, thumped into bed beside me, folded himself along my curled-up shape, put one arm round me, for all the world as if nothing had happened. So I talked, he talked, both of us sighing, stammering and starting again in a dogged need to
say it.

‘I'm neurotic,' he said. ‘I do this over and over. Whenever I get something good, I destroy it.'

‘But everyone has these patterns which they can't break. I've got one – it's just different from yours.'

‘Yeah?' he said, interested.

‘I go on giving it all away.'

So sad. I get so sad.

‘I'll go back to Melbourne in the morning,' I said at last.

‘No.
I'll
go. It's me
doing
this to you.
I'll
go. You stay. It's your holiday.'

We fell away into silence, lying side by side in despair, bound to each other yet pulling away, him pulling away from me, but for a few moments in a truce . . . he took hold of my head gently, made me kiss him, brought my face close to his and looked at me for a long time. His gaze out of that bony lantern head. The light was coming faintly, dawn already, and I got his cock in my mouth and my cheek against his familiar belly, made him groan a little; he lifted me back up to his equal level and we fucked, he came and the delight of watching his face dissolve brought me to join him with no effort. Light on his skin, bones and skin under my eyes.

We fell asleep.

During the day, once the end of it all was in sight, he was as pleasant to me as he usually was at home. We spent hours lying on the bed, his head on my hip, with a book in French about Luis Bunuel, which he toiled through, asking me to teach him.

‘Aren't you bored with this?' I asked, laughing at my rusty attempts to translate.

‘No – I'm learning!'

He wanted us to communicate on some intellectual level where we didn't usually function together.

The house was full of people, and while dinner was being prepared Javo and I lay on the bed, talking and waiting for his taxi to arrive. I kept looking at those blue eyes he had, still bright blue in spite of the dope. In these last few minutes it was possible to say things crudely, in haste not to leave them unsaid.

I said, ‘I love you.'

He said, ‘I can see myself in three or four weeks, coming back to you and begging you for forgiveness . . .'

I said, ‘I don't know how to break off sharp like this. I keep remembering things which give me hope.'

‘Like what?'

‘Like – there's no-one I ever touch, the way we touch when we fuck.'

He said, ‘I'll go back to Melbourne and put myself on the rack.'

The cab came. Javo thrust his mouth-harp into my hand.

‘Here. Give this to Gracie.'

He hugged me clumsily, heaving his suitcase towards the front door, but it wasn't enough, and I went out to the car with him and we kissed properly, face to face, and held each other.

‘'Bye, Javo,' said Gracie, who was standing quietly watching with her thumb in her mouth.

‘See you, Grace,' he mumbled, getting into the front seat. The taxi drove away. He didn't look back.

It was already dark outside, and cold. We went back into the house. I went into the kitchen and stood at the sink with my back to the light, ashamed to show the rush of grief I was feeling. I put my hand into the bowl where the fruit salad had been, picked at one or two passionfruit pips that stuck to the enamel sides. Peggy, working beside me at the table, said in her brisk voice,

‘Does this outcome satisfy you?'

I shrugged, not daring to speak until I could fight down the weeping. I wanted to turn to her and throw myself on her thin shoulder and her surprised kindness – help me! I'm so sad – but I was afraid of crying out of control.

I whispered, ‘I can't talk right now.'

‘Oh!. . . yes – all right,' she said, perhaps not daring to follow an urge to comfort.

Somehow, with that kind of grief, the moment for weeping passes, and after it, to weep would require a small forcing. The meal was served, and in the clatter and conviviality I perceived an oblique kindness, for which I was grateful. I went to bed with Gracie, who slept, and outside the closed door of the bedroom people were laughing and clashing plates.

In the morning it didn't seem so bad. When I woke up, beside Gracie, in the sunny room, it occurred to me that this was the first morning in three months, give or take the odd dope binge, I hadn't woken up next to Javo. I felt a bit empty, staring out the window and wondering where he was and what was going to happen when we got home. Then I remembered what I had dreamed:

Javo and I were in a very expensive women's clothing store on the upper floor of a building. I was flicking through the dresses on a rack, while Javo, good-humoured and courteous, wandered over to the window and waited for me. While he stood at the window,
somebody shot him
, out of one of the slit-like upper windows of the building opposite. The bullet entered his neck. He was not killed.

Peg took Gracie out for the day and I went off by myself. The sun was shining and I travelled on the top deck of the bus and I was afraid of the openness of myself – as if, one lover gone, I was opening up in the search for an immediate replacement. Smack habit, love habit – what's the difference? They can both kill you. For the bus journey I fell in love with a woman who smiled at me. The motion of the bus made her thick mop of fair curls tremble. We talked about desperadoes.

‘I am fatally attracted to them,' I said. ‘In fact, I probably
am
one.' The idea had never occurred to me before.

I thought I was going to veer in and out of tearfulness all day. I got myself out to Bondi, where Tom lived, but when I reached his door and knocked and no-one answered, I sat down defeated on the concrete and would have liked to throw back my head like a dog and howl with unhappiness.

The door opened. There stood Tom, naked except for a towel.

‘Oh, it's
you!
' he cried. ‘I was asleep. Come in.'

We sat at his kitchen table. He went about the room awkwardly making coffee. I looked round the small white room lined with weatherboard. He had pinned a Matisse print on the wall. My trembling insides began to settle; I sat there accepting his shy hostliness.

‘If you look out that window,' he said, ‘there is the sea. I am going to have a shower. Will you mind waiting?'

‘No.'

I stepped over to the window and, indeed, the sea was there: the bungalow was only yards from the cliff edge. It was the ocean. I stood weakly at the sink and pressed my face against the small sealed window with its four panes. I stared. I felt my breath go in and out.

He led me down to the cliff path. We lay on our fronts on the bare rocks, staring dizzily down at the water smashing itself underneath us. We must have lain there for hours, talking drunkenly about what we knew of the world. When we stood up, the sun had moved across behind us and we were chilled right through.

‘We must be the last of the big-time ravers,' said Tom. ‘Let's go to the movies.'

We saw Leni Riefenstahl's
Olympiad.
Tom sat beside me hissing irreverent remarks. I pointed out that the German runner had not made a showing in the marathon.

‘He's probably picked up the vibe of the whole event and headed for the border,' said Tom. We snorted and giggled behind our hands in the front row.

The sun was shining after a night of rain. I sat on the back doorstep of Peggy's house, the sun warming my right side; I squinted my wrinkly eyes in the light and tried to read a magazine.

‘What are you thinking of, up there?' inquired Peg affectionately from the yard where she was hanging out wet clothes.

‘I was thinking,' I replied, ‘that I have got right over Javo leaving.'

‘That's good.'

‘And I was also thinking about something Tom quoted once, from Reich –“love and work”, he said, that's what it's all about.'

‘Do you want to work?'

‘I'll go back to Melbourne and work on the women's paper.'

With Javo gone, I had had sweet sleeping at night, slow thinking as the light came in in the morning, and the company of people who liked me. It was time to go south, home again. I booked a sleeper for me and Gracie, and I kept thinking about: her asleep, me looking out that cold glass at the moon passing, the ground rushing, remembering for the thousandth time that poem of Judith Wright's,
Train Journey
– ‘glassed with cold sleep and dazzled by the moon'.

On the phone I said to the railways booking clerk,