The Point (31 page)

She liked to climb over me. I stretched out like a monument to be scaled, placid to the view but inside full of twitching scurrying life. I was not the portly fellow I had been in my Franciscan days. Now I am scraggy, then I was lean, dense-fleshed, solid. Aware of the delicacy and fine bones of Flora, but of her energy too, her strength. Her hard breasts, her pretty pointed knees and the silky parts behind them, her rough hands, and under them me quivering with delight. Oh Flora. The words do not catch you, not your body or your mind, which looked at me with widened eyes and smiled and laughed sometimes with throaty breathless pleasure. It was in that looking that love dwelt, the looking knew us, knew me, it was clear-eyed and plain, and desire was there and so was its satisfaction.

No, the words do not catch you, but that does not stop me laying out more and more of them, thinking that soon I shall find the ones that will.

It was Flora who taught me to say fuck. I had not been in the habit of the word, not as a swear word, and certainly not as a loving term. Fuck me, she’d say, in passionate moments, and I did. I fucked her sideways, and lying on top of her, and with her feet round my neck and her toes caressing my cheeks, and her lying on her stomach with her bum pushing up into me. We reinvented all the positions, as lovers do. I slipped in easily, I belonged. She fucked me. Sitting on top of me, her breasts brushing my chest, or lying back with her head against my knees, or with her back to me so I could stroke the long lines of her spine. We explored the sensations offering in all possible angles. Whatever way, we fitted, I knew that as the most glorious thing, we fitted. And afterwards we lolled together, our bodies open, their intricate parts that had met in pleasure wide open to our clear gazes, and smiled our delight.

I had not paid a lot of attention to the expression
sleeping with
, except for thinking it was rather silly as a term for having sex with, since the point of the act is to be awake. Why name it after an aftermath that may not happen, since circumstances need not allow any dozing off? Adultery, I’ve tried that, you don’t get much snoozing there. Or ought not; I’ve known it to happen, and the couple come undone. Them blissfully innocently asleep, evidently in flagrante delicto, even though the act is not at that moment being committed, the transgression proclaiming itself in the mingling of their naked limbs. These lovely entwined bodies, and what it means to the person discovering this sight, the betrayal to be read in that passionless delightful sleep. Recognising the dreadful intimacy of the post-coital nap. That husband demanded a divorce; I did not offer to marry the woman, that would have been a true disaster, but I did feel remorse, though I think she is happy now.

But then, ah, with Flora, I learned the delights of sleeping with, as a pattern of my days, and understood the term in quite other ways. Sleeping all night, her head on my shoulder, mine on hers, her breasts against my back, her back against my chest, my hands on her breasts, her legs tangling through mine, sometimes parting for separate sides of the bed, then moving together. It was like a slow dance, that our sleeping bodies knew the movements of, and as if after a lifetime’s practice could perform with grace and perfect unison. And then after sleeping with, waking with. The sleepy birds, the first pale slats of light through the wooden shutters, and Flora lying turned into me as though we were a pair of spoons nestled in a drawer, her bottom gently pressing into my groin. Our selves more asleep than waking, but our bodies stirring, not needing much consciousness from us. And fitting, fitting. Oh Flora, why did you not have faith that our lives could fit, as our bodies did? We’d fuck sweetly and doze and fuck some more and then sleep and wake and talk, eat fruit in bed and thin tea and croissants that shed buttery flakes on the sheets. I had never known such happiness. I held her tight and she lay curved against me. Do you know John Donne, she said, and I didn’t, that wasn’t part of my education, indeed not, but she spoke his words and got a book and read them. I remember one about the sun, which only need shine on the lovers to be shining everywhere:
This bed thy
centre is, these walls, thy sphere
… Yes, it was, they were.

Do we ever know that a person will break our hearts? I don’t know that we do. We love them and so we think we are safe. I looked at the velvet sheen of Flora’s head, the lovely frail shape of her skull underneath, at the sharp points of her breasts that my tongue loved to taste, to feel, and feared for her, not for me. I knew her terrors and worries and foolish idle fears. I held her and willed her to believe that all would be well. Remember Dame Julian of Norwich, I said, she was then quite fashionable, but her words still so moving:
but all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner
of things shall be well.
Flora smiled, but I knew she doubted.
Love
is our Lord’s meaning,
said Dame Julian. I love you, Flora. But sex and John Donne were one thing, belief in love another.

My Flora. I think she knew that she would break my heart, and after a while it made her nervous, sometimes, and cold. Or perhaps it was a way of warning me. But that was later, in the short season of our love, when the weather warmed up to an unnaturally early spring, when we got hot under the doona, and slippery and sweaty against one another, and that not the fun it could have been, but a matter of sighs and sudden awkward lunges into new separate cooler positions.

Sometimes, not every day, I wake up in the morning in despair. It’s in the middle of it that I wake, as though the feeling has swept past and I am caught in the backwash of it. Not wallowing but holding still so the fear won’t swamp me. My muscles clenched, everything clamped down, and my breath held as though I don’t know where the next one will come from. Sometimes I wonder if this might be to do with something I ate, the preservatives in sausages, maybe, or the histamines in red wine, or an excess of salt, or even a failure of vigilance against the dreaded monosodium glutamate; if there might be thus some simple chemical reason for it. But it seems like real despair. And when I think about it there’s the state of the world, what’s happening to people, the wars and terrorism and cruelty, and even here in this comfortable country there is the rich and the poor, and the dispossessed, all exacerbated by a government that lacks compassion and demands of the people it wants to make its subjects that they be as heartless as it is, ask no questions, believe their masters know what is good for them. Masters they may wish to be, they are not leaders.

And then I think that despair is really only a way of seeing suddenly clearly. Like wearing glasses, you’re going along in your little hazy close cocoon and then when you put them on you see the world as it really is, the cobwebs on the ceiling, the crumbs on the floor. The man standing on the roof of the building across the way ready to jump. Whereas normal short sight leaves you unknowing and possibly happier for it. Except with glasses you have a choice, whereas despair seems to choose itself. You can’t not wear it.

I think about Clovis who saved my life, for certain he did, I’d be dead now without him, and how he’d lost his glasses or broken them I think and he reckoned he was happy going through the world not seeing it. I was appalled at the time, and indeed I still am, I need to see. But he claimed he saw all he needed. Maybe no crumbs, no cobwebs, but then he had neither ceilings nor floors, and no hopeless figure waiting to jump from a tall building. I was going to write, he had no despair either, as neither did I, then, but how can I be certain of that about him? Maybe that was his way of dealing with it. Fuzzing his eyesight. Whereas I need my glasses still. Maybe I see it as somehow a moral obligation. An obligation to look.

I don’t have my despair every day. Sometimes the words on the page, and my sweet leonine friend on the page also, the sun slanting in, they are positively not despair. Not happiness, never that, and not contentment, but positively not despair. Moreover, I have taken to writing without my glasses on. It means I have to put my face close to the page, I like that, I like my bare face and my eyes their own selves, seeing at their optimum point, a few centimetres from the words I form, about a pen’s length in fact. It’s a comfort, this closeness, and when I raise my eyes to the bare bagged wall I don’t notice I can’t see it properly, since it is of an invisible dullness to the sharpest sight. Of course, on my rare forays into the outside world I wear my glasses, I do not have the strength that Clovis had.

It might seem remiss of me not to have paid attention to the homelessness of Clovis. Looking back there is a certain guilt now, but at the time – I remember all that business of trying to persuade him to let me get him some spectacles, or at least borrow one of my spare pairs, and he wouldn’t, simply courteously refused. He was himself, self-contained, you had to respect the choices he was making, he did not invite curiosity and certainly not charity. I even ate one of the tiny cakes he offered, and not until I’d taken it did it occur to me that he was hardly in a position to go round dispensing hospitality. Yet, at that moment, that is exactly what he did.

I ramble and repeat myself. The same facts and ideas and speculations go round and round. I cannot bring myself to read over this stuff. Writing it is bad enough. Maybe having written it I will arrive somewhere. Maybe not. Once I wanted to know, now I am content to record.

What could I have said to Clovis? Come home with me? Bring your friend? For he and Gwyneth did seem to be together and there had been that wondering if they were lovers but I don’t think so. They were both self-contained, they did not ever haze into one another the way people who are lovers do, nor did they hold themselves in that other way that lovers have, as if they are each drawing a membrane round their fluid loving selves so they won’t spill out and melt together. I remember being with Flora, in public, and the self-conscious holding of myself separate from her that made me even more achingly aware of her.

I have postponed this writing down the matter of the love of Flora and me. But when you are writing something for yourself you have to be honest. Writing down our love-making is not a matter of despair but heartbreak, with I suppose a small comfort that once it was, and in the past is there forever. But very small comfort.

And now I come to the morning in bed when I kissed her breasts, as of course I always did, she liked me to take her nipples in my mouth, and I loved to feel them grow strong and hard against my tongue, I did not have to do this for very long before she would have a whole lot of little orgasms. But the morning I was recounting I noticed that her body had gone stiff not in an ecstatic way but in a sad way, and tears were running out of her eyes. I held her while she wept and didn’t want to talk to me, but then she stilled and lay calm in my arms and that’s when she told me about her baby who had died, Adrian, so strong and vigorous, such a lively happy baby, so healthy and full of energy. She could hardly carry him, he was like a big wriggling puppy of fearless strength. It was a wrestling match to dress him. But fun, such fun, she said, a game, his part to wriggle and stay naked, mine to get clothes on him. I would win, of course, in the end, but we’d both be breathless and laughing by the time I finished. I hadn’t gone back to work, then, which was lucky since all this took ages.

Her breasts got quite big, she said, there was a lot of milk, enough even for a big boy like him. She would sit on the sofa with her feet up and read while he suckled, such a greedy hungry child, she loved the satisfaction he took. Very early on she realised that his sucking on her nipples gave her little pulls and tickles in her tummy, that she was having little orgasms, and when she noticed them they became quite particular. She didn’t ever give him a bottle, he learnt to drink juice and water out of a cup at an early age, the suckling was their pleasure, mother and child. They lay together on the sofa and he fed and snoozed and she read and held him, and they were suspended in a blissful timeless time.

And I knew it, said Flora. I knew that this was bliss. That it would end, that he would grow out of it, but for this period it was the most perfect gift of bliss.

When he died, she said, the ache in her breasts was unbearable. She wanted to kill herself. The milk kept flooding in, enough milk to nourish a large and blooming boy; it hurt, she felt she would burst, and the pain of it in her breasts was the physical expression of her grief in losing him. She wouldn’t take anything to dry it up. She nearly went mad with the pain, her husband kept begging her to take drugs for it, to dry the milk up and to stop the pain, but she wouldn’t. She needed the physical pain, she said, otherwise …

I couldn’t do anything but hold her tight. She lay still in my arms. She said, That’s where I learnt that my breasts could give me orgasms. With Adrian. It took me a long time to let myself have them in this other context. I slept with other men and wouldn’t let them touch me there. With you, somehow, I could. I couldn’t not think of Adrian, but somehow it was all right. I could just let myself go into the pleasure of it, and a sort of faint blissful memory of him, as though while I had this I couldn’t entirely lose him. Then, this morning, suddenly it all shifted … the whole loss came back.

I understood then her remark about hostages to fortune. She had given hers, and paid the price. There had been no relenting, no mercy. Her fears weren’t premonitions of ill to come. It had happened.

You can’t imagine, she said. The desolation. Desolation. It never really goes away.

I thought I could, at least partly, because of Anabel and the abortion, but I didn’t say this then. I just held her still, and made soothing sounds to her, as though she were a child. Then I said, You and I, we can have children. Such things do not happen twice.

Besides, there are ways, these days, modern medicine can make sure that things like cot deaths don’t happen. I wasn’t sure what I was saying, but I did know that there had been breakthroughs in the matter of babies suddenly dying. Oh Flora, I said, I do so want to have a baby with you.