In Bed with Jocasta (11 page)

F
riends can be cruel. At Jocasta’s birthday party, they’d all combined to buy her a folding wooden chair, a lovely thing, which she could use when sitting outside in the sun, dreaming of what her life might have been. And so she sat on the chair and laughed at how great it was, and the friends smiled and drank her health, and then, yes, I too was invited to sit, and relaxed into the slatted frame, my drink held high.

Which is the point at which the whole thing collapsed. Not just broke. Shattered. From Elegant Chair to Pile of Splintered Firewood, it made its journey in half a second, leaving me sprawled on the floor, limbs akimbo, the drink flung from my hand, the friends caught between horror and laughter.

It was Jeff who broke the silence with a droll whisper: ‘Meet Richard, the Man Mountain.’

A few of them laughed, which instantly warmed Jeff, a natural show-off, to his theme. The chair was made in Vietnam, and as I staggered to my feet he was busy painting a word picture of the moment of its construction — the villagers summoning the fattest man in the district to test the thing out, perhaps perching a child or two on his lap, the timbers taking the enormous weight without complaint, the package being stamped for export.

‘They’d have never dreamt of a bloke with an arse like yours,’ Jeff said with a quiet, sad shrug. ‘Not in their wildest dreams.’

It was most unfair. Later, after they’d all had their fun and left with their cheeks aching from laughter, I reconstructed the shattered mess as best I could. Obviously, this was not a case of an overweight passenger, but of inadequate gluing and poor design.

Yet still I have to face Jocasta, as she examines the almost inconceivable collapse — not so much that of the chair, as that of her husband’s once-svelte body.

What’s worse? Is it the way she weeps over the broken present, or the way she now flinches each time I lower myself into a chair, expecting the engineering to be unequal to its task? The standard of Vietnamese glue has a lot to answer for.

In an effort to save my battered dignity, I begin a campaign: all modern furniture is made of the thinnest pieces of wood and plastic, and all of it is portion-controlled and miserly. To prove my point, I take Jocasta on a tour of the flat-pack, build-yourself, furniture which we bought just months ago at Cheap and Nasty World — all of it already trashed, the melamine peeling, the drawers sagging, the chipboard swelling. Other people’s surfaces may be distressed; ours are merely distressing.

And that’s aside from the trauma I went through putting the stuff together, connecting Bolt A to Sprocket B via Nervous Breakdown C.

Suddenly, in the middle of Batboy’s bedroom, staring at his stricken bedside table, I come over all philosophical — wondering why nothing’s built to last, how we’re increasingly living in a world built of lattice and Gyprock, of melamine and plastic drawer-runners, and how the throwaway society has finally engulfed our furniture and even our architecture.

My heart was full, my buttocks a-quiver, and I said it all. Jocasta endured the full oration, an eyebrow cocked in amusement. ‘Maybe you should hop down off your soapbox, now,’ she said finally, ‘before it splinters under your weight.’

This is what I get these days, my friends lying in wait to make some cheap joke; some one-liner about the killer bum; the man of the mighty beam, striding through life, making furniture-owners everywhere tremble.

‘Sit down, Richard,’ they’ll say, ‘we need some firewood.’

Or, ‘Richard’s coming over, better reinforce the porch.’

Or, ‘Just perch on the bed, mate — I’m trying to convert it into a futon.’

And so I dream of that glorious prelapsarian time, the time before my bottom became literally the butt of jokes. Back then, before the Fall.

T
here’s a moment in the development of every great sport when the rules are written down and formalised, and surely that time has arrived for the game of backyard cricket.

Backyard cricket again reveals the family secret: those idiotically competitive genes came from someplace.

I
t was Batboy who had the insight. The grand moment of vision. We’d gone to the Art Gallery, attracted by the new gallery of traditional painting. But first, we thought, we should head downstairs and introduce Batboy to some contemporary art. In particular those rocks they’ve got on the ground floor, all hanging in a circle from the ceiling.

Whenever you look at contemporary art, there’s always someone in the background mumbling that ‘a child could do better’, so this was the perfect opportunity to see whether an actual young person agreed.

Batboy, as it happens, adjudged himself quite unable to do any better and was very admiring of the circle of hanging rocks — especially its capacity to be used as a weapon. But the interesting moment happened when we clambered towards the traditional paintings, and Batboy made his announcement: compared with that sensible modern stuff downstairs, this lot was, well, kind of weird.

Jocasta and I examined the paintings, and you could see his point. The joint is full of the odder outpourings of the pre-modern mind: unicorns, nymphs, crucifixes, men with animal bodies, severed heads on trays, and a veritable plague of stags and lutes. Traditional painters are very big on lutes.

There’s all this moaning about the weirdness of modern art, but when you finally open your eyes, you find a striking and beautiful circle of stones. Not weird at all.

Meanwhile, upstairs, is your typical traditional painting, and it will feature a bloke with goat legs, suckling a devil with his engorged breast (oh, didn’t I mention the breasts?) while somebody in the background has his head hacked off with a sword. Batboy is right. It’s sicko stuff. Enter it in the Biennale and they’d be denouncing you as a typical sybaritic modernist.

And then I notice this other thing about the galleries of traditional art. All the women are in the nude. You’ll have these groups of people, doing something quite ordinary, like cooking a meal or hacking the festering head off a succubus, and all the men will be in full ceremonial dress while the women, whoops, they’ve somehow forgotten to put on their shirts.

Oddest of all, they don’t even bother explaining why the women are naked. They just are. On principle.

At least today’s film-makers contrive a storyline to get their female stars naked (‘Scene Five: Sharon decides her turtle-neck sweater is so hot she’d best remove it.’) But not these people. They can be painting a woman welding the back axle of her oxcart, and they’ll think: ‘Just as easy to make her starkers.’

It’s like the famous painting by Manet,
Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe.
Here’s a group of friends; they’ve decided to have a picnic; they’ve spread out the rug; the blokes are dressed to kill, and everybody’s getting stuck right into the King Island brie and the Rosemount chardonnay.

And what does the woman in the picture decide to do? Naturally, she elects to strip off and plonk herself starkers right there among the plastic plates, happy as Larry.

We blokes have seen the painting at school. We have studied the poster on kitchen walls. And we’ve gone on about 4 000 picnics ever since, always with that vague sense of hope.

Our conclusion? Manet must have been running with a crowd of sheilas somewhat different to the ones who attend our picnics.

Or take another example — the famous Sid Long painting of the pink flamingos. It’s got two women and they are watching a glorious flock of pink flamingos, and so what do they do to increase their viewing pleasure? Off come the duds. Stark naked is the only way to get a good viewing of a flamingo, and why don’t all the zoo’s female patrons realise it?

Surely, the good news is the popularity of artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, in whose work it is almost always the men who are walking around naked. Men oiling up their bodies and flexing with pride. Men removing their clothes at the slightest provocation. Men staring at themselves in the mirror and going: ‘Um, not bad.’

It’s taken centuries to get here. But at least some art seems to be recording the day-to-day realities of your typical Australian suburban home.

O
ccasionally, while cooking, I’m forced to ask the odd question. For instance: ‘Who the bloody hell has hidden the garlic crusher, since it’s supposed to be right here in the second drawer?’ In response, Jocasta usually points out there are only two people who use the garlic crusher. Her. And me. Which means my question is not a question at all. But rather a thinly veiled accusation.

Jocasta reckons men are always asking these sort of ‘questions’ — questions like ‘Who’s lost my keys?’, ‘Who’s moved my bag?’ and ‘Who’s broken the washing machine?’ Questions to which the men clearly feel they already have the answer. We might believe we are launching a speculative inquiry, but all Jocasta sees is a nation of Emile Zolas, shouting
‘J’accuse’
over the kitchen bench.

Take last week, when we were finishing off the new bathroom. I’d climbed down the ladder, tripped over my open tool box and was busy being catapulted head-first towards the still-talking toilet. Naturally, as I came to rest on the ground, I put the question. ‘Who,’ I said, ‘put my bloody tool box right at the foot of the bloody ladder?’