My Hundred Lovers (17 page)

The first time the Suspicious Wanderer slept with the dissolute lover he placed a tab of acid on her tongue. Afterwards they drove Claudette for miles, right up to Palm Beach, throwing money out the window.

They were looking for a precipice they could drive Claudette over. They shared a glorious dream of flying through the miraculous air, their hair streaming. For some reason, there were no precipices to be found. By the time they realised this, dawn was breaking and they were coming down.

They drove, laughing, all the way back to Balmain, looking out the window for the fistful of notes they had tossed to the wind.

She wished to be forgetful and reckless, like him.

After the Suspicious Wanderer moved in with the dissolute lover she took to going to work without wearing underwear, so that she could feel the pleasure of the soft wet mound between her legs. Between her legs was a sweet sticky feast, his and hers, the succulent spill of them. When she awoke in the mornings the mound of her pudenda was swollen, ripe, smeared with fragrant, gliding come so that her fingers, which loved her, naturally found their way there.

Every morning her fingers slipped in and around the delicious wet slopes of flesh, the raised blood-swelled tip, and she imagined being fucked again, him once more raising her into the air. He entered her so perfectly, so precisely, she was filled. She imagined him coming over her breasts, her face; making her watch while he fucked someone else. She imagined herself tied to a chair, her legs wide open, wanting him to fuck her instead of the other girl. Lying next to her lover in the bed, the woman tried to be quiet but once an involuntary cry escaped her lips and woke him.

‘You bad girl,' he said. ‘You very bad girl.' He rolled the woman onto her front and thrust into her straight away while the first orgasm was still in her.

She attracted men's stares in a way she never had before. Like a bitch in heat the woman must have emitted some secret odour. Standing at bus stops men pressed into her hand scraps of paper scrawled with their telephone numbers. Once, when she and her lover were having dinner and her lover excused himself to go to the bathroom, the restaurant manager walked quickly to their table and asked her out. Beneath her skirt the new burn high on her hip was raw and weeping.

The mark of it can be found there still.

FIFTY-SIX
The impotent lover

MEMORY IS NOT DEMOCRATIC. IT
creates its own hierarchy concerning what will be at the top and what will be at the bottom. Memory decides what it remembers and what it forgets, and what emerges from the daguerreotype.

Look! The impotent lover approaches, that loyal, sweet lover who preferred sleep's caress. I knew him in the dying days of the dissolute lover, back before the birth of my son, back in those days of warm sleep.

When romance died between the dissolute lover and me, exactly two years, six months and twenty-five days into our relationship, neither of us could bear it.

When we awoke in our warm bed to discover that the erotic dream in which we had dwelt had disappeared, neither of us could stand to live instead an ordinary, companionable existence. Rather than be pitched into routine sex and routine days we sought new bodies to conquer.

In our last days together the dissolute lover returned to that which gave him succour, that is, the bodies of women. Despite his ruined face he still had about him a wrecked grace, a plaintive charm that saw the most unexpected women succumb.

I returned, too, to that which gave me succour, the bodies of men. In this we were childishly alike: we sought the restoration of ourselves through the conjuring of desire in new bodies. We believed this moved us far from the helplessness of sadness.

We hardly talked.

I recall only a few words the dissolute lover ever said to me. I recall him, drunk, making a distasteful joke at my cousin's wedding. I remember the sound he made when he came.

I remember that he once declared, ‘I may be in love but I can still feel the wall behind me against my back.'

Once, in our desperate last days, I had to go to Melbourne for an editing job. In truth my mission was to talk a children's book writer down from the ledge (it is a well-known fact that the authors of children's books are the most delicate of creatures). The dissolute lover supposed me to have a rendezvous with a man I knew, a former lover, who worked for the same Melbourne publisher. By chance this former lover happened to call two days before I was due to fly out. After I hung up the phone and told the dissolute lover who it was, I saw fear upon his face.

‘He's going to be in Adelaide,' I said. ‘Otherwise we could have had lunch.'

Did the dissolute lover nod? He obviously believed he had overheard a coded plan for me and my former lover to meet up.

When I returned to our shared house in Sydney there was a lipstick not my own in the bathroom cabinet and red welts from fingernails not my own on the dissolute lover's warm back.

He was very insecure, despite being a Labor Party apparatchik, despite being a sectarian leftist and a celebrated madman. Critical theory is all well and good, except when life rushes in with its insistent hot breath.

In search of solace in those desperate last days, I suggested a drink to a pleasant man I occasionally worked with.

Damien was a short, dark-haired Englishman, head of the poetry department. He had tanned, swarthy skin, and did not look like my concept of an Englishman.

‘That's because I've got gypsy blood,' he said, smiling, as he handed me a drink.

‘Sure,' I said. ‘So do I.'

‘No, I have. Really. My mother is Romany.'

I was not entirely sure what a Romany was, so he proceeded to give me a short, romantic history. Before long I pictured myself travelling with him on a gaily painted narrow boat down an English canal, my feet bare, a pot of red geraniums by the door.

He said he had to go home.

He said his wife, Lorraine, would have dinner waiting. I had met her once, a pretty, fair-haired woman, a primary school teacher. I had seen photographs of their two daughters, one pretty, fair-haired like the mother, one pretty, dark-skinned like him.

He said he had to go home and then I kissed him, that magic kiss of which everyone is capable but which only some of us choose to culpably employ.

We went to a swish hotel up the road. I stood to one side while he chivalrously handed over his credit card. I had already offered mine, being a member of that new breed of women who had money and credit cards and the right to sleep with whomever we wanted.

Going up in the elevator he grew visibly more nervous. As soon as we got in the door, he raced over to the mini-bar and popped open a bottle of champagne.

‘I think I've had enough,' I said. ‘I'm going to run a bath. Want to join me?' I put out my cigarette.

He quickly drank from his glass then moved towards me. ‘Are you sure you won't have some?'

I took the glass from him, putting it down on a table, where it made a satisfying sound. ‘Come here,' I said.

We began to kiss, urgently, deeply, and I could feel the swell of him against me. His hands moved to my shirt, unbuttoning it, pulling it from my shoulders, and my hands moved to the buckle of his belt.

Soon we were entwined naked on the bed. His penis was small, hard, insistent against my thigh, a dewdrop of come glistening at its peak. We kissed and kissed, he squeezed my nipples, navigated the circumference of my breasts. I felt his hardness deflate, felt all his desire evaporate.

‘I can't,' he said. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘Shhh,' I said. ‘Never mind.'

‘It's not you,' he said. ‘You're beautiful. I can't believe I'm lying here beside you. I want to make love to you so much.'

‘We don't have to do anything, you know,' I said. ‘We can just lie here. Maybe he'll perk up.' I gave his penis a jolly little shake before chastely kissing him on the nose.

For the next two hours my gypsy colleague slept in my arms, so heavily and so deeply that my left arm began to hurt. Without waking him, I gently extracted my arm from beneath his sleeping head, gathered up my clothes, dressed, and snuck out the door.

I still admire my gypsy colleague's fidelity to love and sleep, woven from the same cloth, stitched together by our submerged dreams.

FIFTY-SEVEN
Nana Elsie,
encore—épater le bourgeois!

ALL THROUGH THOSE DAYS, THOSE
days of a hundred lovers, of my willing abasement at the hands of the shadow lover and at the feet of the dissolute lover, my refuge was Nana Elsie, whom I still loved best of all.

She knew I liked croissants, though she had never eaten one herself. If she knew I was coming to stay the night, she made a special trip from Abbotsford to Five Dock on the bus to pick up a couple from the wog shop that made them. Back then, the inner cities of the world were not gentrified. Back then, no-one but wogs had heard of a macchiato
.

Nana Elsie kept a couple of tins of sweet corn kernels, too, because as a child I had liked them. My grandfather, Art, was always around, fixing up a stuck door or in the front yard, mowing or washing the car. He was an unskilled factory worker, good with his hands. Despite the fact that he could not dance, she loved him all her life, dancing or not.

Nana Elsie thought I could do anything. ‘You've got the world at your feet,' she often said. Whenever she spoke of me it was ‘Our Debbie has done this' or ‘Our Debbie has done that.' I never once heard my father or mother speak about me in that way.

I never knew why Nana Elsie was so proud of me either, since I had never done anything of which to be proud. In fact, I increasingly regarded myself as a disappointing sort of person, even as someone who had done much of which to be ashamed. But always, when I was with my nan, her love turned me innocent and singled me out, absolving me from blame.

She seemed proud of the fact that I existed.

She seemed to be the only person in the whole world who was.

Nana Elsie never said a harsh word about my poor choice of lovers, not even when I chanced upon the dissolute lover, drunk at my cousin's wedding, asking for her opinion about my work as a part-time prostitute.

Does that even qualify as a joke? I suppose it had something to do with
épater le bourgeois
, with the same
eat the rich
sentiment then popular with the sectarian left. The fact that Nana Elsie was neither rich nor a member of the bourgeois was irrelevant. What the dissolute lover intended, I think, was to set the cat among the pigeons of marriage and monogamy, and to make clear the ringing fact that he was trying to break free from the template of ordinary existence.

I confess that I gained a certain satisfaction from setting a rabid dissolute lover upon my family, though I never intended to set him upon Nana Elsie.

‘He's taken a drop too much,' Nana Elsie said later, which was as far as her loyal lips would take her.

At the same wedding my father threatened to beat up the dissolute lover, over what I do not know. I was on the dance floor when I saw them standing up, scuffling drunkenly across the table. My tipsy mother was already manoeuvring my father away.