This Too Shall Pass (2 page)

Most, mind you, aren't interested. Capitalism covers all corners:
Market forces, that's what sorts the world-out. What is it you call them?…
momentary eye contact…
inequities?

By the time I was in my last year of school I'd learnt to calibrate my opinions, which didn't mean anything much had changed. Welfare was, without a second's contemplation, a natural path to follow. A social worker, I told myself, must be endowed with healthy rage as
well
as compassion. And it seemed to me that if I had an interest in the plight of the individual, even better.

Getting started, I volunteered on the phones at Lifeline. I was seventeen and like a young enlistee, keen enough to fudge the date of my birth. During all-night stints I took long and sad, if not utterly depressing, calls. I had conversations with people much older than I was who could hear the youth in my voice but gave me the benefit of the doubt. Constructing meaningful and productive exchanges with strangers is not, after all, as straightforward as it might appear. Listening on its own certainly won't do it. Skills are needed, attributes that aren't easily installed in someone. Apart from basic compassion there are things like curiosity, patience, lack of expectation – even the
arc
of a discussion is important. As for me, I was poised (almost always, back then) to be the helper. I had to learn to back off, to quieten down, to be the net for people who were falling, rather than the skyhook that was hoicking them out of their situation. Doing too much was counterproductive. People needed a delicate interaction, one that often required the listener to slowly ease themselves into the caller's predicament.

Once I'd mastered a few things though, I felt, all in all, I was on a path that would sustain my interest, provide me with gainful employment and serve as an outlet for my bloodletting. As such, for the most part – and everything comes with some revelations, but, certainly in those early years – things knitted together perfectly.

Between that time and now, it's fair to say, however, that I've vacillated in regard to my chosen profession. I was perhaps not as altruistic as I'd claimed or believed. I'd been known to get sick of people's stories, their inability to raise themselves from the mire, tiring of their corollary of excuses – excuses that allowed them to remain stuck in appalling situations no matter how unhappy or dissatisfied they were. A lot could have been done and much suffering was experienced, often by children, when nothing was.

Fed up, I'd want to throw my do-gooder career in – dig holes, knit jumpers, bake, bird watch, anything but face the complexity of someone's beleaguered circumstances. Still, apart from a necessity to eat, to afford basic luxuries, I got over these troughs, rallying with a second, third, fifty-fifth wind for the whole deal. Listening for money, treating maladies of the emotionally fraught – despite my difficulty, sometimes, in saying it – was my vocation.

Putting this aside, running parallel, there was my personal metamorphosis.

FOUR

I
met my current partner, Renny, while still ens conced in the dual reality of being both attached to Dave and acting as if I was single. I was, to put it bluntly, completely outward bound – a state for which I have no excuses. My band – four women, all of us married, all of us with children – had been cranking out ear-splitting notes to get a break from domesticity for a couple of years. We had a gig in the local hall of the town Renny was living in. It was the annual Reclaim the Night march (significant on many fronts).

Her Irish name suited her, not least because of her bold figure, robust nature and the drop of ginger that tainted her features. She'd been living in the rural town halfway between Melbourne and the town I lived in, for four years, managing an outreach service to women living with violent partners. She was also a member of the local fire brigade and generally well known for a bloody-good-time-to-be-had at the pub. Renny was the opposite of Dave: larger than life, protective, an organiser from hell, and a social magnet.
Do lessons come from opposing corners of the ring?

The evening in question wasn't my first foray into women's events. By then I was well versed, certainly in a country way, to these kinds of social gatherings, so, although I don't quite remember, I probably bounced up the stairs, brimming with confidence.

Renny was sitting at a small rickety table getting ready to collect and store the proceeds of the night.

‘Wondered if I could get some help?' I asked her rather dumbstruck face – a look I assumed was born from aggravation but came, she assured me later, from having been struck by a myriad of possibilities at the sight of me.

She rose, fumbling to close and lock the money tin.

‘My amp is a fucking lead weight,' I said as we headed outside.

(I have an inclination to swear when I'm self-conscious, which by then – perhaps a little overcome – I was.)

Love is an odd thing. I can't imagine picking Renny from a crowd. But looking her in the eye and being sufficiently close to brush up against her was enough. I returned to her many times during the evening and, at three in the morning, when she asked if she could kiss me – a group of us having made our way to the town's one nightclub, full of gaudy decor and men celebrating a bucks' night – I melted, both from the kiss and the chivalry of being asked.

Aided by the fact that Renny and I weren't into acknowledging what was going on – denial on tap – we didn't hold back. Dave was away a lot and such was the level of my warped thinking – a level easily reached when justification is fed by need and that need is a conflagration inside – I'd convinced myself he was making himself scarce. Was I also
so
naive to think my marriage could sustain my dalliance? Obviously. Or perhaps I wasn't paying attention to what was changing, what already had changed.

Whatever my premise, according to me everything would be fine. According to other laws – and I'd prefer to leave nature out of it – I was systematically heading for a crash site. Lights, sirens, maps of dangerous pitfalls: there was nothing and nobody that could have talked me out of it.

FIVE

I
t was mid-December and about six weeks after I'd met Renny when Dave found a steamy letter from her to me. It was in the left-hand pocket of my favourite orange corduroy shirt, which was thrown distractedly – as if love had minced my thinking powers – on the front seat of my car. We were having a party for our son, Marcus. It was his sixth birthday and fifteen five-to-seven-year-olds from his small rural school were shouting, eating and giggling their way through the two-hour gathering in a rush that brings motor neurons to mind.

I wasn't being my usual helpful self. The roles of carer, cook and organiser had taken a huge flip already. While for years I'd done most of this work, a new order had established itself. As I withdrew, he took up the slack. He
could
cook and clean, as it turned out, wonderfully. Added to housework, the art of bringing home flowers surfaced. In fact, in those last months he presented more bunches of irises, tiger lilies, gerberas and chrysanthemums to me than he had in the whole fourteen years we'd been together. Unfortunately, by then, I couldn't appreciate either the work or the flowers. It wasn't that I didn't like him being housekeeper extraordinaire – I did; it was more that I couldn't feel it. The rocky ledge had been tilted beyond my powers to hang on. I saw how quickly life could pivot – how, after so much stability, as easily as a coin being flipped, everything seemed to be altering.

He got through the party and, with me paying little attention – by the finishing line I was cleaning up inside, ploughing through dishes, nodding and waving from the house as he got the kids into their parents' cars – I knew something was wrong, but not exactly what.

‘I found this.' He put the letter on the kitchen table, calm as always, if not a little fluttery.

I glared at it, alarm fixing my muscles.

‘Well?' he asked, still neutral as if we were choosing a colour to paint the wall. ‘It's that woman. I picked you up from her place. It's her, isn't it?'

And I'd forgotten – he
had
picked me up from Renny's three weeks earlier, on his way back from the city.

‘Yes,' I managed.

‘So?'

Unable to speak, my heart throbbing palpably, I shrugged.

‘I'll ring her.' He nervously propelled himself to the phone. ‘What's her number?'

I scoffed. ‘You can't do that.'

‘Why not? I've got a right. I met her. I'm going to ring and ask her what she thinks she's doing.'

Who knows why I gave him the number – perhaps it was defiance, perhaps cowardice, perhaps the need for something to happen while not being the one to initiate it. He punched in the digits as I spoke them, his resolve steely. The thought of what was to come scorched. Dry ice to my skin.

‘Is this Renny?'

I got up from the kitchen table and funeral-marched from the room, my limbs heavy.

‘Are you having an affair with my wife?'

I slowly ascended the stairs. Standing at the end of our bed, facing away from the pillows, my arms out, I fell backwards as if floating from the edge of a very tall building. I could only hear his muted tone. I didn't want to know what they were talking about. I kicked off my shoes, curled into a foetal ball, and sank into a heavy unwanted sleep that prevented me from asking.

SIX

A
kind of madness took over, one that felt close to disassociation – except that, as the central character, I kept being reminded of who I was and what I'd done, even when I begged the universe to render me safely oblivious.

Eight days later, a few before Xmas, the three of us – Marcus was with my friend Ange, organised by Dave – sat at the table in our open-plan kitchen.

Because Dave kept demanding – the same question repeated like a theme –
So WHAT'S going to happen now?
Renny was forced to ask what was, on reflection at least, a ridiculous question: ‘Can I have an affair with your wife?'

I looked from one to the other, atrophied as the request pushed past me. Not only were they conversing, but they were doing so with a diplomacy that felt surreal, that could have been hallmarked for a UN convention.

‘You can't,' Dave answered.

Renny put both hands up, her palms open in stop signs. ‘That's enough for me.' She placed them then in front of her, webbing her fingers together and bowing her head in symbolic withdrawal.

Dave turned to me.

‘You're going to have to leave me if you want a relationship with a woman.'

And that was it, the pivotal moment, right then -the point at which the quintessential reality of what was happening fused, the exact time it soldered its al-lotropical equation in me and I saw that I was going to have to do exactly that. How strange, I thought even before I answered, the way that buttered-bread falls. Dave was sculpting his demise even as he thought he was saving himself.

‘I might just have to do that,' I said.

‘She never will.' He turned back to Renny who sat motionless, ‘So
I've won
and you've lost.'

She didn't answer, her face a cold mask, her thoughts hardened.

He looked at me. ‘We're meant to be going out to dinner.'

‘I know.'

‘Are you coming?'

‘I'll be there.'

I wanted him to give me some time to reassure Renny that I was serious, but that I just wasn't able to come straight away.

He did leave to pick up Marcus, his walk housing a strange rickety-ness. Renny left too, monsoonal tears railing down her face, determined that no matter what I'd said, I would never break it off with Dave. ‘Marriage,' she told me bitterly, ‘has too powerful a hold on people.'

Somehow Dave and I had a normal evening with friends despite flashes of lunacy poking at my thoughts. We roamed through our usual array of topics: news, weather, work, house matters, politics, art, children, back to news, and so on. The more mundane the conversation, the more madness prodded at my composure. On the inside I was emblazoned, on the out I remained – somehow – cool. It was a duality that tested me. I hung on.

The next morning, after a breakfast of croissants and coffee, we hopped in the car and drove four and a half hours to Sorrento for Xmas with Dave's family. That evening I told Dave this was it, our last night together. He didn't believe me, which made it easier and was, perhaps, another folly on his part because the next day after lunch, after we'd packed and said our goodbyes – his family none the wiser – I asked him to pull up as we got to the train station at Frankston.

‘You're really doing this?'

‘I'm sorry, Dave.'

‘Where are you going?'

‘Michael's.' (Michael, my brother, lived in Melbourne at the time. I could ring Renny, see if she could pick me up from there.)

‘If you go, it's over.'

‘I know,' I said, desperate for him to understand. I turned to Marcus, strapped-in in the dim interior of Dave's van. His small face was taut, a ghostly stare plastered to it. He was taking it all in. I remember my heart booming in my chest, heralding my actions with deafening clarity. I just didn't know what else to do but to stay calm and trust that I was making a decision, that at least I was taking action. I'd been attracted to women for years by then – for as long as Marcus had been in the world – and there was that nagging, burning question, the one Dave had himself repeated ad nauseam:
So WHAT'S going to happen now?
I couldn't fool anyone, particularly myself, any longer.

I slowly opened my door and disembarked carefully – gravity having deserted me – and walked around the vehicle to the side door to get out a bag I'd packed.

‘I'm going,' I repeated.