Yearning (3 page)

Solomon tore open the blank world she lived in. Her greatest discovery was that she could think for herself. She uprooted beliefs she’d taken for granted, chopped back biases that had grown like weeds in her mind and leapt over moral fences her parents had built to keep her safe in their world. And she wasn’t the only one. At lunchtime her friends talked about apartheid and feminism instead of boys. Solomon’s influence painted her bright with hope and after school she rushed home and wrote frantically in her diary, words charging from her fingers onto the page.

‘Solomon is the best teacher ever,’ she wrote.

He talked about love today. Not the kind of love between two people, but the kind of love that makes things grow. He talked about how love is God. Everyone laughed. Except me. I knew he was talking about something bigger than religious crap.

He said, ‘God is an experience, a presence that comes out of people when they are doing something they love.’ How cool is that? God is doing something you love. Then he asked us what we love doing. ‘What makes you excited?’ he said, ‘what are you passionate about?’ For a while everyone was quiet, then Julie said she loved roller-skating, that it made her forget time, and Solomon got all excited and asked the rest of us, ‘What makes you forget time?’ Then everyone started answering at once. They said stuff like football or drawing or listening to music.

I just sat there. I couldn’t say mine. I was too embarrassed. Solomon said to me, ‘If you don’t know, you need to find out. It’s important.’

If only he knew. The way he talks, the way he makes me feel, the only thing that makes me forget time is him.

Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes.

The Song of Solomon

When the light was on she could see well enough into his study. The bookcase on the right stood tall, crowded with books, their spines military-neat, and an orderly chequer-board of notepads and folders lay across the top of his desk. There Solomon sat, rolling cigarettes as he considered the wad of papers before him. Wary of being caught, she crouched low and kept her bedroom dimly lit.

Her homework lay open and neglected as she lifted the binoculars to her eyes and twisted them into focus. She jumped as he loomed before her, so close it made her breathless. If she tipped the glasses a little she could clearly make out his face as he leaned back in his chair to read. She followed his dark eyes as they skimmed the page. She watched his hands scrawl red rippling comments across students’ work.

Suddenly he raised his head and looked towards the door. He stood up, gathered papers into a tidy pile at the corner of his desk and left the room. She turned the binoculars toward the horizon, gazing out over the rooftops to the paddocks beyond. In the twilight the moon was rising, the wide yellow orb blanketing the surrounding farmland in mellow light, the bones of trees stark against the skyline. She listened intently for the sound of her parents’ footsteps on the stairs. The last thing she wanted was to get caught. She imagined her mother barging in unannounced, staring at the binoculars, a stern ‘What are you doing?’ forming on her lips. No. There would be no words to explain it. She must be alert and careful.

In a few minutes he returned, shepherding an awestruck girl – one of the seniors, she realised – before him. He offered her a chair and sat beside her, the girl awkward as he pulled his chair close. Relaxed and smiling, he flicked through the pages of a novel, pointed out passages and sat back in his chair contemplating the girl’s hesitant answers. As she watched, a small disc of envy tilted inside her. If only she could get that close to him.

An hour later he ushered the girl out of his study, returning a few moments later to browse the books on the shelf. He trailed his finger along them, touching each title in turn, their spines ordered like ribs, evenly spaced and ascending in height. He selected a wide black volume with gold lettering and sat at his desk again, reading and smoking. She became aware of the hunch of her shoulders, tight from holding the binoculars to her face for so long. She took in deep breath and stretched her arms above her head, then looked at the clock. It was later
than she thought. She’d been watching Solomon for two hours.

Moths flicked and clapped at her window. She watched them banging their heads uselessly against the pane. Stupid things. Even the dimmest light was enough to set them fluttering in ecstatic panic, lusting for the radiance that lay beyond their reach. Picking up the glasses she looked down again into his window.

‘Are you in bed yet?’

Her mother’s voice echoing up the stairs made her jump. Shoving the glasses into the top drawer of her desk she rushed to her bedroom door. She stuck her head out into the hallway and saw her mother hovering halfway up the stairs, frowning.

‘Nearly. I was just finishing some homework.’

‘Don’t stay up too late. School tomorrow. We’re going to bed. Good night.’

‘Night.’

Her heart thumping, she returned to her desk and stood looking down at Solomon reading while she listened to the sounds of her mother grumbling at her father in their bedroom. One last look before she hit the sack couldn’t hurt. He was lounging against the high back of his chair with one foot crossed over his knee. Tendrils of smoke wreathed around his head as he stared across the book lying open in his lap, out of his window and into the darkness of his backyard.

He looked so peaceful. He seemed to hover before her, suspended in time like a movie still, static and graceful as one of her pencil drawings. He really was beautiful – if you could describe a man as beautiful. She watched his
face. Was that a glimmer of a smile? Was it a look of satisfaction or amusement?

When his study finally passed into darkness she slipped into her pyjamas and lay on her bed licking the toothpaste from the corners of her mouth. It was very late. As his image floated in her mind she wondered what she would tell Tracey the next day.

Even though there was nothing interesting to report, she was reluctant to share what she’d seen. Not his marking of papers, not his tutoring, not his reading at the end of the night. It was private. It was time she had spent with him, just the two of them in the restful presence of night. If she told Tracey she hadn’t seen him at all, she’d never know the difference. Stupid cow. Perhaps she could string her along a bit, keep the binoculars and keep watching him to suit herself.

Drowsiness overtook her as she recalled his fine fingers turning the pages of his book. What secrets did those fingers hold? What would they whisper to her as they brushed across the fine skin of her throat? In the moments before she fell asleep she decided that Tracey could get stuffed. She would keep the binoculars and him. They would be her quiet secrets.

*

The next night, under the pretence of homework, she returned to watch him. Just for a while. Just to see. The night after, she missed her favourite TV show so she could watch and was disappointed when he didn’t appear. She sat waiting, writing poetry, intermittently picking up the glasses to search the blackened window below for signs of
his presence. After an hour and a half she went to bed, a faint hollowness echoing in her chest.

The night after that she was by the window again, and the night after that, and before she knew it she’d been staring through the binoculars every night for a week, sometimes over her homework, sometimes with the radio on in the background, sometimes in silence. The nights he tutored were her favourite because he stayed in his study to read afterwards. On those nights he was motionless and she could focus on his face, on his alluring eyes and the small furrow in his brow as he read.

Within two weeks she had a sense of his routine. He tutored students two or three nights a week, wrote endlessly on a wide notepad one night a week and was rarely in his study on a Friday or Saturday. After four weeks she realised he was sometimes at his desk on Sunday afternoons, the notepad before him filled with his bold script. She let her parents believe she was becoming a dedicated student, and barely acknowledged their nods as she scuttled away from the dinner table each night.

During the long evenings, while she waited for him, she worked on her self-portrait. Thumbing through her mother’s old magazines she searched for images and words she thought might impress him. Not an easy task with
Family Circle
and the
Australian Women’s Weekly
. Not sure what she was looking for, she flipped quickly past the beef stroganoff recipes and crochet patterns and photos of heavy-eyed women in embroidered cheesecloth. She would know it when she found it. She was five magazines in before a full-page ad caught her attention. ‘Freshness’. ‘Freedom’. ‘Alive’. The words sang out at her
and she knew she’d stumbled on the beginnings of her portrait.

In the photo a striking beauty sat astride a white stallion, galloping along a tropical beach. Her honey hair streamed behind her and her sensuous body was outlined in white chiffon. The woman rode bareback, clutching the horse’s dense mane, her wild eyes set upon some desire she was hungry to reach. Her lips parted in awe as she traced the outline of the woman’s body with her finger and reached for the scissors in the top drawer. The image and those words would be the perfect centre-piece of her portrait.

If she was that beautiful Solomon might notice her. But she wasn’t, so he wouldn’t. She was just another student to him, another face in a field of faces that looked up to him. She cut carefully around the edges of ‘Freedom’ and wondered how she could make herself stand out. A short skirt? Her mother would never allow it. Make-up? Other girls wore make-up to school. Maybe she should try it.

She lay the scissors down and went across the hall to the bathroom. Her mother kept old make-up in the bottom of the cupboard under the hand basin. She crouched down and scrabbled among the tubes and compacts and pulled out a lipstick. It was very red. She unwound it until it protruded rudely from its case like a dog’s erection. She looked in the mirror.

There it was, her plain face, fading into a blank canvas. Bland and colourless, save for the freckles sprinkled across her nose and cheeks. A nothing face, framed by fly away auburn curls. She had no idea what to do to improve it. Her chin was too long, her nose too angular
and her forehead too high. Puckering up, she traced the shape of her thin lips. The colour made her mouth leap out, uncouth and inconsistent with the rest of her. She looked like a puppet, her pale cheeks receding behind the vivid slash. Wrong. It was all wrong.

Without warning her mother opened the door and walked in with an armful of fresh towels. One glance at her daughter brought a wry smirk. Blood rushed to her cheeks.

‘That lipstick is too heavy for you,’ said her mother as she slung the clean towels over the racks. The smirk hung in the air between them. ‘Take it off and put it back in the cupboard, please.’ Her mother left, closing the door behind her.

‘You should have knocked,’ she called out, knowing she wouldn’t be heard. ‘Cow!’

Her face burned as she scraped the lipstick off with a tissue. What made her think it would make a difference? She studied herself in the mirror, searching for something that might pass as pretty. She gathered her hair in both hands, scooping it up behind her head, and pouted, batting her eyelids in a sideways seductive pose. Disappointed, she dropped her hands to her sides and stuck her tongue out at her reflection. She flicked off the light, plunging herself into semi-darkness.

‘As if,’ she said, and the shadow of her face scowled back.

*

Every week at school she watched other girls gush over him, helplessly fluttering and prattling for his attention
like a pack of starved sparrows. She couldn’t copy them, it was beyond her. Anytime he was near she felt herself retreat snail-like into her hunched shoulders. If he spoke to her she became unwillingly mute.

She decided her only hope of getting his attention was to be a model student, to study her way into his field of gravity. She took careful notes of everything he said, did all her homework and handed it in on time. She sat in the midst of his class, her chin in her left hand and pen in her right, and fixed her eyes blissfully upon him, his voice melting into her like hot chocolate. She faithfully copied his blackboard notes, agreed with his every proposition and felt her hackles rise when one of her classmates argued with him.

In the wake of Solomon her world blurred. She drifted, looking forward only to his class, and the time when she could sit again by her window with the binoculars closing the distance between them. She waited eagerly for those precious moments when he stood with one arm lifted as he leaned against the window frame, casually gazing across his backyard. Fascinated, she wondered what his body might look like naked and flushed helplessly as she looked at him, gloriously brown-skinned and strong. She absorbed his form, mapping the contours of his body, embedding the shape of every muscle, committing every dip and cleft to memory. Ashamed, she pretended she could see his cock nesting in dark pubic hair, wondering what it would feel like to touch.

She set her alarm fifteen minutes early in the morning so she could catch a glimpse of him strolling across his back yard as the sun rose, steam rising from his coffee
cup. After dinner she’d slide off her chair and bound up the stairs, jittery and nervous. Unknown sparks lit her up each night as she lifted the binoculars to her face and the muscles around her vagina tightened mercilessly as she feasted upon his image.

The glasses became her best friend, absorbing the minute details of his face and rhythms. He was amazing to watch, the way he glided around a room, the way his eyes became alive when he was excited, the way he would butt out his cigarette – slowly, all his focus on the twisted nub and the last smudge of smoke rising through his fingers. The more she watched, the more she burned for him. When he stared distantly out his window into his tussled garden, leaving his coffee to go cold, she stared too – but at his face. She cherished the stray curl that would often come loose from his ponytail and fall across his forehead as he bent to read. She loved the irritable way he pushed that curl back, away from his eyes and behind his ear. She’d have that curl if he didn’t want it. She’d put it under her pillow so she could kiss it before she went to sleep at night.