Zigzag Street (25 page)

Thursday morning Rachel calls. She says she and her housemates are having a few people over for dinner tomorrow night and do I want to come? She says she's sorry it's not much notice, but the idea just occurred to them. She says,
Seven would be fine. You know where I live
.

I should tell her that I have a well established dialogue with a close friend that relies on there being some validity to my struggle over whether or not to make The Call, and that if she keeps calling first and suggesting things the dialogue is wasted. Particularly when I'm probably going to say yes every time. What kind of a struggle is that? This could really get my hopes up.

It could really get my hopes up, and I'm not sure where I want them to be.

Jeff and Sal come round with Baan Thai takeaway. This is big. Tonight I need two opinions (as if Jeff hasn't given me several already, and all of them from the heart).

I think she wants you
, he says.
If you want to know, I think she wants you
.

You'll get his hopes up
.

His hopes are up. They're up, aren't they Rick
?

Hey, this is Rachel Vilikovski.

Exactly
.

What do you mean
? Sal says.
What do you mean exactly? Do you know this woman
?

All I know is what I've been told. That and the high regard Rick has for her
.

The high regard Rick has for her
.

Yeah
.

Yeah, why not?

Because, you know, you worry me with this. You two boys, getting together and spinning this into some fantasy. Some fantasy where only Rick gets hurt. And I'm also not sure about the way Rachel Vilikovski gets treated in all of this. I'm not sure about the regard business
.

The regard is entirely respectable.

Oh really? How do you regard her breasts
?

Her breasts? I suspect her breasts are very fine.

And your aspirations. Do they involve intercourse
?

It's possible.

So tell me more about this regard
.

Oh, so I do get a turn to tell you things. I feel like I'm being done over in the witness box. You don't know a fraction of what it is we regard highly about her, and mostly it's things that would impress you. She's cool, confident, powerful. She's a very powerful woman, and you know that's what we like. You know that if she was only breasts and pelvis she'd mean nothing to us. Well, not much. I've got all this gender thing covered. I've read Naomi Wolf. I've read
The Beauty Myth
.

Really? And what are your views on
The Beauty Myth?

It's no myth. Naomi Wolf's a babe.

Do you think that Rachel Vilikovski would be impressed with that line
?

Rachel Vilikovski's getting nowhere near that line. With Rachel Vilikovski I intend to conduct myself with unimaginable subtlety.

Unimaginable subtlety. I'm not sure that there's anything subtle about you. Or is that just what makes it unimaginable? And what makes you think she'd like subtlety anyway? She seems pretty up front to me
.

Yeah, that worries me.

Why? Because you aren't in control? Because this whole thing can't be decided by the endless theorising of two boys in a coffee shop? Sometimes I wonder if it's only the process that matters to you and the women are almost incidental. All the women do is make you think you're straight, when you're actually in love with each other, and just dressing it up as mutual intellectual masturbation
.

But Sal
, Jeff says,
what about Rachel Vilikovski? If Rick and I worked out we loved each other it'd be a tragic waste of a babe
.

I'm sure she'd get over it. And she'd probably never realise how lucky she was, not having to spend who knows how long around the peripheries of the crap you two go on with. I don't know why you don't just flop them out, compare sizes and be done with it. And then we could all get on with things
.

Look, Sal, we can't even use the urinals in public toilets. We're a way short of actually flopping anything out. And I think we're both a bit scared for Jeff's sake. We want this to remain an equal relationship, after all. How many inches was it?

I told you I don't know Imperial. It's as long as my arm, okay? I have to use an extension ladder to give him a blow job, okay? He's so big I can't go down on him, I have to go up on him, okay? How big do you want his dick to be, Rick? Word is yours isn't so special
.

What?

This is all too easy really, isn't it? You think your dicks are so important women would bother to talk about them? You know Rick, I think I've had the opportunity to meet half a dozen women who've acquainted themselves with your penis, and not one of them's said a word about it. And I bet you hate that idea
.

I don't know if I should hate it or be profoundly relieved.

And you know what? I never want to know the answer to that. You boys, so much crap. Jeff had to stay at work
late cause he spent the whole day talking crap to you yesterday. And some people think men don't talk
.

I think you're being a bit harsh on crap Sal, Jeff says. I think you're underestimating how useful this process is
.

Useful? Useful? You're such a pair of leisure-time philosophers. What about all your stupid theories? What about your cricket theories? I don't think any use has been found for them yet. It's the most boring game in the world, and the only thing more boring is talking about it, and the only thing more boring than that is the crap you two talk when you think you're talking about it. What about that time you decided every human achievement could be measured in units of milliBradmans? What about all those faxes you sent each other when you were trying to pick Australia's worst possible cricket team of the 1980s
?

I don't think you're being entirely fair
, Jeff says.
I think if you're trying to quantify human achievement the milliBradman is as good a unit as any. I'm sure most people would agree with that. And there was a lot of support for the cricket team idea. A lot of people wanted to see Bad Cricket, Bad Australia taking on Bad England
.

Listening to Jeff's defence I probably have to accept she has some kind of point. It may not have been the most useful thing two people have ever done. But what I don't understand is why this kind of fantasy is seen as both less credible and less acceptable than any form of sexual deviation (unless, of course, it is some form of sexual deviation). It's amazing how she can make some of our finest achievements seem like such disappointments.

So we drink the wine they've brought and eat the curries and Sal says,
Look, I just don't want you to come to any harm, okay? And I'm worried about this girl. I want you to be nice to her, and I want her to be nice to you. You're really a very fragile boy, even if you do go out of your way to appal me sometimes
.

Trust me Sal, I never have to go out of my way.

Of course, I realise that I know almost nothing about Rachel Vilikovski, and that in one way Sal's right. This has been talked up into a fantasy of some importance.

Two ways, she's right in two ways. Jeff can't get hurt, but it can trash me. So I tell myself to step back a little. I call Sal and tell her I'm okay, and that I'm stepping back a little.

In the cab on the way to Rachel's, I omit to put this into practice.

I gaze out at the slowly darkening twilight sky, I guard my carefully chosen bottle of chardonnay (seriously good, but not outstanding—three golds, no trophies) and I watch the streets and the traffic go by. And I think of Rachel at her rusty gate, her three concrete steps. Just Rachel even though I know it's a dinner party. Rachel in Tuesday's black dress and the dark frames of her new glasses. Quartering her smile and giving me my share.

The cab pulls up and the cabbie says,
Have a good one mate
, as he drives away.

I walk through the rusty gate, up the three concrete steps, along the path and up to the front door and the porthole window, and I knock. I hear footsteps, shoes on a polished floor. Rachel opens the door. I get the smile. Three days have passed and she's still a babe.

Hi
, she says.

Hi.

And then I notice her new glasses are covering two black eyes.

It's a good look isn't it
? she says.
Your doctor friend did say this could happen when the swelling went down, and he wasn't kidding. It hurts a lot less though. I thought about covering them up with make-up but this is really paper bag territory
.

I can't believe I did that.

What, you think I got hit twice in the same week
?

No, I believe I did it. It looks like my work. I just can't believe it, you know? But you've got a great nose. Did anyone ever tell you that? It hasn't existed for me till now.

Thanks. It's always been one of my favourite parts of myself. Come on inside
, she says.
No-one else is here right at the moment. The others just went down to the shops for a few ingredients
.

So who else is coming?

We've each invited someone, so there'll be six of us altogether. I don't know who the other two have invited. Their boyfriends are both away with work. But anyway, come in. Let's get a drink
.

We go through the lounge room, past a dining table with a white linen tablecloth and a setting for six and into the kitchen. She takes my wine, says
Mmmm
graciously (or maybe honestly, since it's a good wine).
Shall we open this
?

Sure.

She pours us each a glass, gives me mine and raises hers, saying,
To well thrown shoes
.

I'm never going to live this down, am I?

So why should you live it down
?

I ask her about the house and her housemates, mainly because I want to minimise the chance of awkward silences and the dumb things I tend to say to end them. She tells me the floors are uneven, the bathroom's bizarre, but she thinks the place has character. The best
bedroom went to Melina who was there first, and the biggest went to Kathy who was there second.

And I was third, so even though I seem to be the only one who never goes away I have the third best room. Melina's involved with distance education and Kathy's a journalist, so they both travel round the state with work. Kathy's going out with a journalist too, and he's away on some story at the moment. Melina's man's an engineer in a gold mine in PNG. Hence their non-attendance tonight
.

I don't think I ever found out exactly what work you do.

No, I don't think you did. I'm a recreation officer in a nursing home part-time, but that's only since late last year. The rest of the time I'm a visual artist, well, I paint mainly. And I think that's what I really want to do, but of course the nursing home has its moments. Bingo, world news, Christmas lights tours in the minibus
.

You can do that in Brisbane?

Sure. Like most of us, you obviously thought this was a make your own fun kind of town, but I can assure you that at Bulimba Haven the Christmas lights tour is big. They all come along, even the ones who have no idea what Christmas is any more and point and shout enthusiastically at traffic lights. And I'm there going, Yes, good one Harry, it's Christmas at the intersections too. And we drive past all the shop windows and I talk us through it, standing up at the front with my microphone. And next, on Yvonne's side of the bus—Yvonne's the driver—
and she uses her glass as a mike and points to the right,
we can see the Christmas tree in King George Square. And now back on my side of the bus
, bending, swapping hands and pointing to the left,
you can see Santa and his elves in the window of David Jones. And what do you think they're making for the children? Then we try to name all the reindeer, which can become a little competitive. It doesn't really matter who said Blitzen first Gladys, does
it? And on the way home, we sing carols. Did you know old people can't sing
?

I think all of that's unfamiliar to me. I'm beginning to think my Christmases are pretty mundane.

I notice art work on the walls of the lounge room.

Is any of this yours? I ask her.

Yeah. Most of it actually. It's got to go somewhere
.

Do you mind if I look?

It's on a wall. It's for looking
.

One of them looks exactly like Munch's
The Scream
, but when you get close you can see that along the bottom it says, ‘The Terrible Moment When Anke Realises the Search for the Perfect Bagel Never Ends'. On another wall are three blocks of wood in a vertical column each with a burst blue balloon pinned to it under perspex.

This is great, I tell her. This is great stuff.

Really
?

Sure. It's great.

I can't tell her it's the coolest thing I've ever seen, which is what I want to tell her. I can't tell her I want her right now. Here I am in her house, and for the moment it's just the two of us on the third time we've met and she's smart and funny and certainly a babe and I'm feeling better than I've felt for a long time. And I can't find the catch. Is she a lesbian, and we're just going to be good friends and I've missed the signals? Or maybe she thinks I'm something I'm not. Smarter, more interesting. Just because this all started when I knocked her out at medium range with another woman's shoe. And I think that's the most interesting thing I've done for years, and I can't live up to it, surely.

It's really good, I tell her. It's even funny. I just look at it and it makes me smile. I nearly laughed at the Munch joke. The search for the perfect bagel. Humour comes to post-modernism. It's great.

Are you kidding? Are you just having a go at me
?

No. I mean it. I don't like much, but I really like this. I really do. The balloons. What a great idea. You
know I once had an idea, and I always thought it might be a really bad idea so I kept it to myself, but what I thought was that you could make some powerful statement about the twentieth century outlook on everything as disposable by taking all the lint from a lot of clothes drier filters—you know the way it forms that sort of dirty pinky-grey mould in the filter—and by doing some big installation with them, piling up all these discs of filter lint. I thought that'd be good.

For a moment she says nothing. I am concerned that my idea might not be good. That it might indeed be very bad, and that I had been right to keep it to myself all this time. Wrong to bring it out now when it can do me most harm. I should have just told Jeff and given him a few minutes of laughing at me. Instead I told Rachel, Rachel Vilikovski, the fabulous Rachel Vilikovski before she's had the chance to learn there's more to me than just crap like this, and now she's looking at me as though I've made a big mistake. Maybe I should just tell her I loofa'd the fuck out of a wardrobe as well, and then take the rest of my bottle of wine from the fridge and walk back towards the West End shops till I find a taxi.

You are having a go at me, aren't you
? she says.

What?

You're having a go at me. You don't like my work, and now you're having a go at me about it
.

No.

So you're making up this thing about filter lint …

No, I mean it. I like your work. I really like it. And I really had the idea about filter lint. Not that it sounds like a very good idea right now, but I used to be … I used to share a flat with someone, until last year, and we had a drier, and I used to empty the drier and I couldn't be bothered throwing the lint out so it started piling up and then one day I thought, Hey, I know what I can do with this. And I never told anyone, and now I know why.

You mean it don't you? Either you mean it, or you're
still having a go at me. And if you mean it, then any doubt I have means I'm having a go at you about the filter lint idea. This is a tough one
.

Oh, I know. Look, I've felt unwell ever since I mentioned post-modernism, in case that was stupid. And then I just plunged into the deeply personal lint filter story. I'm putting a lot on the line here.

I had a friend. He used to collect grass in jars. He also used to lie on the road to get a really close look at the stones. And he'd just lie there and go, Wow, and sometimes people would run out of buildings to save him. The number of times that boy got rolled on his side and had well-meaning fingers hooking into his mouth to clear any vomit
…

Obviously there are a lot more people trained in CPR than you realise.

So maybe your lint filter idea is fine. And maybe I'm just a bit defensive about my stuff
.

You shouldn't be. It's great. It's the people with lint filter ideas who should be defensive about their stuff.

Melina and Kathy arrive and, before I even know which is which, one of them says,
Hey, the dermatologist
, and I know tonight's not going to be easy. Their guests,' also women, turn up closer to eight. I wonder if we were all told the same time. This has the danger of potentially leading to a lot of hopeful wondering.

I am introduced to everyone as
Richard Derrington
,
the guy who decked me
, and the shoe incident dominates early conversation.

Rachel tells me to put on some music and leans over close to me when I'm kneeling at the stereo cabinet making my choice. And the open door has the strange effect of separating us from everyone else.

You have great CDs, I tell her.

You expected crap maybe
?

I didn't say there wasn't crap. It would be a brave person indeed who would try to defend the place of The Proclaimers'
Sunshine on Leith
among these fine albums.

It's a great album
.

Don't do this.

I stand by my collection. So what are you going to play
?

This one. The Triffids.
Calenture
. Did you know there's a theory that you can't actually have a successful dinner party unless this album is played?

Really? I've heard the same theory
,
but about
Sunshine on Leith.

No-one ever said that about
Sunshine on Leith
.

So she lets me play The Triffids and she goes into the kitchen with Kathy to get on with dinner.

This leaves me with three women, all already on at least their second glass of wine, all thinking that maybe I set out to injure their friend (or friend's friend), that I am a man whose intentions are far from honourable. But really, what's an honourable intention any more? And as the conversation goes on it's only a matter of time before I am expected to accept personal responsibility for the subjugation of women, the invention of war and the phallocentrism of architecture.

And I tell them, sure, men have done a lot of bad things, but they weren't all done by me. I'm as unenthusiastic about the patriarchy as the next person. This only makes things worse.

Knowing I've got no chance on the subjugation issue, or on the matter of war, I take on the cause of the architects, from the Doric column to Harry Seidler. And argument seems to come at me from all corners, probably at least partly because I know nothing about architecture, even though I find myself raving about the little churches of Hawkesmoor, his fine pencilled spires, his neo-classical porticoes, his vestries just like home. And I tell them it's all about intimacy, not about genitals. Can't they understand that?

So what exactly
, Melina says,
is your understanding of the neo-classical portico?

I understand it to be the front bit, I tell her. Where you go in.

And I know I'm gone.

The conversation starts to resemble what I think must be Sal's fantasy about this evening rather than mine. I'm half tempted to see if I can set up the Naomi Wolf joke.

And in the middle of it all, I wonder if I did some awful subtle male thing that made Anna leave. Nothing as obvious as starting a war, but something criminally insensitive, and I can't work it out. But with the energy of the discussion that all seems academic.

Dinner's ready
, Rachel says, walking in with Kathy behind her, each of them carrying a fragrant curry. She sits next to me and says,
It sounded interesting in here. I bet you're glad you came
.

Well, I will go committing acts of violence, however inadvertent.

And the debate ranges across other topics, and on occasions I am not required to be the enemy. But usually I'm treated like I'm fair game.

When the table's clear Rachel says,
Come into the kitchen and help me make dessert
, and she gives me fruit to cut.
I'm sorry about that
, she says.
You were really cannon fodder in there weren't you? In case you're wondering
,
that's not why I invited you
.