Quiver (12 page)

She steps back, internally chastising herself. Don’t be ridiculous, you’re old enough to be his mother.

“And tonight, are you free?”

“What?”

“Sorry, I am being out of place. A woman such as yourself must surely be busy, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry?”

“Yes. Let’s go out. I’ll meet you at Circular Quay at eight.” There they are, the words. Her heart beats painfully under the crisp linen suit. This is worse than finalizing a big deal. Get a grip on yourself.

“Good, at eight then.”

She walks off with tulips, dizzy with the new set of detonated chemicals surging through her blood. A date, for the first time in five years.

Mischa watches her go. She reminds him of the single white lily, the large blossom always threatening to blow away from the tall, frail stem. Her pale, serious face perched on that long neck. Often he’d fantasized about lifting up that fine hair and kissing her from lip to nipple. He would do it slowly as if collecting the dew of her skin like honey from a flower.

She was turning eighty-two, although officially she’d been in her late sixties for over a decade. As far as she was concerned she was the center of the universe and all else should orbit around her. Deidre was ten minutes late.

“Mauve? Well, I suppose they are rather unusual, although there is something rather common about tulips.”

“Mother, I’ve given up trying to please you.”

“That’s evident.”

She was impossible to please. Deidre knew that but she fell into the same emotional trap every time. It must be biological, a form of genetic envy that makes mothers think that anything their daughters do isn’t good enough.

“How’s Wallace?”

“Fine, it took two hours the other night but the prostate held up.”

Wallace was her mother’s seventy-eight-year-old boyfriend. They’d met at the casino during one of the pensioners’ nights out. Wallace was hopelessly in love with the flirtatious Ethel, who kept him ruthlessly dangling, occasionally allowing him the odd sexual favor.

“You should get yourself a boyfriend. Preferably younger. It’s not healthy to be inactive from the neck down.”

“I’m not inactive.”

“And as for that last slip-up! I knew the moment I saw him, but children never listen. Homosexual. That’s why he was so good with the wall papering.”

“Interior design, Mother, how many times do I have to tell you? Anyway I’ve got a boyfriend.”

Deidre instantly regretted the words but there they were, sandwiched between the sponge cake and her mother’s dentures.

“You have not.” Ethel gagged on her cake. For one horrible moment Deidre was terrified that her teeth would go flying. It had happened before.

“Not yet officially, but I am seeing someone, tonight actually.”

“He’s just after your money.” Deidre hated the sinking demoralized feeling her mother provoked in her when she came out with statements like these.

“He might just like me,” Deidre put forward, not entirely convinced herself.

“He might. I suppose it’s not entirely implausible that he might just find you attractive. Who knows, you might even get laid. Then again, a meteorite could hit Paris.”

Matricide had never seemed so attractive as at that moment.

Deidre watched her mother’s ferocious gesturing as she
grumbled about the taxation department. Looking at the pinched skin around her mother’s lips, the tightness of her disapproving mouth, as if all the burdens of the world were pressing down on those two thin strips of flesh, reminded her of the aging of her own face. Already she could see echoes of the same lines and the tensions between the eyebrows, around the nose. Eventually Deidre drifted off into a slight reverie, lulled by the scent of the tulips and the talcum powder Ethel used so profusely.

The epic, that’s what she craved: to get away from her cantankerous mother; away from her cocoon of stale middle-classdom and decay; away from the bank with its hothouse time that took no account of life cycles.

Her mother burped, discreetly. The clock chimed. Deidre kissed the dry forehead and for an instant regret passed between them like a ghost. Regret for the intimacies they had never made time to share, regret for a history that had made it impossible for them to let their guard down and be friends. Ethel, lost for a moment in the memory of the small child whose hair she used to curl, shook herself back to reality and stroked the hand of this woman, her daughter, who looked so tight and unloved and sad. God bring her joy, the old woman prayed.

Deidre pulled back the door of the cupboard and looked at her naked self long and hard. Harshly, no cheating, just the realities of time staring back at her from the glass. She had a figure like Eve in a van Eyck painting. Unfashionably broad hips that ran into long, thin legs. She extended one and turned her ankle. Her legs were the one thing she really loved about herself. They were good, slim in the thigh, and she frequently wore
short skirts to show them off. Still, her skin was firm, she looked good for forty-four years old. She turned sideways and wondered how pregnancy would sit on her frame. She couldn’t imagine it. Eight years ago, after the abortion and the divorce, she’d had four unfertilized eggs removed and placed in storage in an IVF clinic. Every year a maintenance invoice for a thousand dollars would arrive in the mail.

Four potential babies.

Deidre didn’t really know why she’d done it—a vague hormonal impulse perhaps, somewhere between pragmatism and buried maternal instinct. Always leave your options open was her major premise in life and it had served her well as a banker. Eight years later the eggs were still there, still waiting. She tried to imagine her breasts swollen in their biological destiny. She couldn’t.

She picked out a long skirt and a thin silk blouse from the wardrobe. It wasn’t too revealing, but she knew she could go without a bra and that her nipples would be just discernible under the silk. Now for the perfume, something light. She hated the heavy, overpowering scents that left you slightly dizzy and nauseous. She chose Chanel No. 19; it was youthful enough to blend in nicely with her own gentle undertones.

Somewhere a phone started ringing. She walked into the bathroom and rescued her mobile from her briefcase.

“Christ, where have you been? I’m having another crisis!” Zoe’s dramatic tones bounced off the pale blue tiles and resounded around the large bathroom. Deidre geared herself up. Sometimes she got sick of playing unpaid social worker.

“Let me guess, Justin hasn’t rung.”

“Not Justin, that was two weeks ago. This one’s called Felix and it’s a lot worse than that, it’s an utter catastrophe!”

“He’s run off with your share certificates?”

“He’s given me scabies! The whole house is crawling with them.”

“Don’t you practice safe sex?”

“You don’t get it from sex! You get it from normal things like rubbing legs together, sleeping in the same sheets.”

“Sounds revolting.”

“It’s called affection, Deidre, you must have experienced it at least once or twice in your life.”

“But I thought you just slept with them for the sex.” Zoe broke into a loud wailing. Deidre, used to Zoe’s tantrums, would make the obligatory soothing noises at the threats of suicides, face lifts or migration. She had even suggested a couple of psychologists Zoe might try. Today she didn’t feel quite so indulgent.

“Well, is it curable?”

“I have to paint my legs with this revolting ointment that stinks of horse piss and wash all the bedding. I’m so upset. I thought he was such a nice man.”

“The painter?”

“The video-installation artist. I haven’t gone out with a painter for at least a month. This time I thought it was special, we really clicked. There was a real intimacy there.”

“You did share diseases.”

“God, you’re cruel.”

“Sorry, I was trying to cheer you up. Guess what I’m doing tonight. I’ve got a date.”

“So you rang that dating service! Good for you, I knew it’d work.”

“No, this was spontaneous, you know, destined.”

“Destined? Since when have you believed in destiny?”

“I’ll tell you about it tomorrow, I don’t want to jinx the experience.”

“I’ll ring tomorrow morning and I expect the phone to be off the hook.”

“I don’t believe in sex on the first date.”

“Darling, if you don’t, some other woman will—it’s a jungle out there.”

“If he wants me, he’ll wait. I’ve got to rush, I’m expected at eight.”

“Be bad, and if you can’t be bad be worse.”

Deidre stared at the phone, suddenly regretting not asking Zoe about how to seduce or at least how to appear seductive. This was what Zoe was best at: she presented herself as a dizzy cloud of blond hair, scent and swaying slim hips that triggered immediate conquistadorial reactions in any man she happened to want that night. What she was bad at was maintaining enough cool, enough emotional objectivity to keep them interested post-orgasm. Dramatic by nature, she immediately sought reassurance that they were committed to her utterly and forever. They naturally left as soon as they could. And she was terribly frightened of growing old alone. This anxiety rose up in that little silence just after sex and overwhelmed Zoe. She needed to be needed, and until Zoe overcame that fear, Deidre philosophized, she would always be alone.

Deidre checked her watch. She had half an hour. Sick with nerves, she tried chanting to herself in the hope that it would relax her. It didn’t.

Mischa stands nervously by the Manly ferry terminal. He adjusts his collar. It feels tight, uncomfortable. He is wearing the only suit he possesses, bought on the black market in
St. Petersburg three years ago. Mischa is painfully aware of its broad lapels and baggy trousers. He’s only been in Australia for five months and it hasn’t been an easy transition. A political history lecturer faced by increasing corruption, he had been forced to give up the country he loved, in spite of its utterly humiliating poverty and a native despair that was neither romantic nor intellectually uplifting.

Here he has found a different kind of poverty—one of experience. Everyone takes everything for granted but complains anyway. For Mischa it is a strange utopia. The bright sunlight that is reflected off the buildings, all new and so modern. The birdsong that at first he’d found so discordant and alien. The endless warmth and indistinguishable seasons which mean you can walk around practically naked all year. The ever-present water, which peeps out at the end of every street, like a shimmering horizon just beyond reach. But for Mischa it lacks sadness, a sense of nostalgia.

He tried to talk about this to his uncle, but he refused to hear anything negative about his beloved city. He attempted to comfort his bewildered nephew by suggesting that it was a lack of history, and that, after a while, the sandstone, the parks, the small terrace houses would organically take on meaning for Mischa, once the young man started to love in this gaudy city. Mischa listened but couldn’t imagine this happening—the metropolis was too bright, too elusive in its ever-changing faces.

“Like all Russians, you think too much. For once, just live in your heart. What have you got to lose except worry?” the elder Gretchka had muttered, smiling, pulling on the beard of the younger. He loved this son of his sister. Mischa was the nearest he had to his own flesh and, with poignancy, he recognized
many of the dilemmas this tall, vehement twenty-eight-year-old was going through.

“Get yourself a woman. She will tie you to this city before you have time to put your clothes back on.”

His nephew was too serious, and old Mr. Gretchka worried that perhaps the Australian women would be put off by his intensity, his habit of avoiding small talk altogether, his Russian metaphors spoken in broken English with that learnt American accent of his. God knows, he was handsome enough. Like a Russian angel, the old man observed. A shrewd businessman—he’d also observed the number of women who, attracted by the natural grace of his nephew, crossed the square toward the stall. They all left with flowers, but not yet with his nephew’s heart.

Mischa rocks on his heels and puts his hand into his pocket. The thought of her has given him an erection. It’s then that he sees her walking around the corner. She looks utterly beautiful. He has never seen her out of her work clothes, and the apparition of this tall woman, in her expensive and elegant clothes, makes him pitifully aware of the shameful condition of his own suit. They meet shyly, neither knowing what to do with the moment, but both recognizing the intense attraction between them. He takes her hand like a child’s and leads her to the Manly ferry.

From the boat they watch the city transform from a brazen masquerade of advertising and office space into an insect maze of gleaming lights and mirrored windows reflecting the sunset. Overwhelmed by this crystal city, with the blue of the harbor and the foreshore between them, Mischa suddenly loses all his English. This illusion of beauty and wealth was the reason for his migration. The modern splendor of the future,
technological and man-made, not like the historical grandeur he’d left behind.

He tries to find the right words but finds himself speaking Russian to this strange woman he’s found himself wanting. She replies carefully, having picked up a few Russian words from a colleague.

They stand next to each other, pressed against the rail of the ferry, watching the seagulls riding the air currents and diving down to catch the bread thrown by the passengers. She is acutely aware of the warmth of his body. Taller than her, his hip presses into the hollow of her waist as he vainly tries to shelter her from the wind. They haven’t touched deliberately yet, and delicious tremors keep running up Deidre’s body. She’s been celibate for so long, not just physically but in attitude too, consciously dismissing the possibility of any sexual contact. Now the touch, scent and presence of this vital young man set her hormones into complete revolution. Several times she has to turn away from him.

They find themselves sharing memories and ideas about economies, magic, elderly parents and even the beauty of insects. He doesn’t have to hide his eccentricities and quirks, which is his usual way of dealing with women, who are often frightened off by his lateral imagination.