Owen Marshall Selected Stories (35 page)

W
hen I was fourteen I began suffering cruelly from lovesickness. It was a debilitating and socially unacceptable disease which so ravaged me that I survived it only at the cost of much of my emotional capability. Infatuation, which is simply the imagination uninformed, was torn out of me by merciless experience.

My first coveted love was the wife of the golf professional at Prippen Lea, where I used to caddy and search for balls. Mrs Lassiter. She must have been all of twenty-three and had a toddler around whose soft throat I imagined my hands. Mrs Lassiter liked me: she said I had a cheeky face. With a thrilling freedom of language, she said bugger and shit. There were wisps of pale hair at her neck and she looked at me sideways when she laughed. You men, she said indulgently when her husband joked with me about the girls' team he was coaching — you men. She smelt of silver paper and fabrics dried in the sun. On the occasions when she and the golf professional took me home in their Volkswagen, I imagined him having a collapse at the wheel and myself taking decisive command. I couldn't understand how he could bear to go to work at the golf club and be parted from her. He was a generous man with a quick wit, but I never took to him.

I played football in the seconds with Jeremy Annis who was a Christian, and he invited me to go to a Bible class camp at Kaikoura. I met Ruth Rossons, who lived there, and, after playing charades in the youth hall, I experienced sharp pains in my left side and decided
that I must marry her. She was very meek and when discomforted in playing out charades, put her hands to her face. The inside of her knees took my breath away and I thought that I wouldn't live long. In the boldness of this desperation I arranged to pick her up at her place on the Sunday, and walk with her to church. On that morning I walked the several blocks to her house and it began to rain: something that I had made no plans for. Wet and wretched, I hung about outside her gate and then went and sheltered in a phone box a little way down the street. I had so little understanding of courtship that it didn't occur to me to walk up their path in a manly fashion and introduce myself. I imagined that Ruth's parents would be aware of my intentions towards their daughter as plainly as I was myself. So I hid. They went to church in a dark blue Morris Oxford and Ruth gave one long, backward look through the rain to the phone box in which I stood in abject humiliation with hair plastered on my forehead. I've never seen her since and couldn't bear to do so.

My friend Alun, the one with his right-hand little finger as long as all the others, had a brother in the navy. Sometimes when he was home on leave he would deign to answer our questions. These questions were so unimportant to him that he answered them only when he was also occupying his time with more worthwhile pursuits, such as polishing the chisel toes of his immaculate black, Italian shoes, or shaving carefully down to the dark hair at the base of his neck. ‘What's it like?' he answered. ‘Well, it's like a flock of sparrows flying off your arse.' Alun told me that his brother in the navy had more fucks than hot dinners. It's like that there, he said. More than anything else in the world, I wanted to be part of a profession that had more fucks than hot dinners. A good many have shared that ambition, I imagine, and only grudgingly become reconciled to being brain surgeons, solicitors, software millionaires, physicists and silversmiths of international repute.

Amelia Bennie had the best tits at the girls' school. On her way in the mornings she pedalled past the lower entrance to our school
and often we would wait there just to have the pleasant sight of her passing. There was no mockery, no shouts, just an admiring and respectful regard as she went by; rather as dockworkers stop work a while to watch a ship of grand armament glide past them in the channel. After seeing Amelia Bennie, even a double period of mathematics with Bodger could be borne and the bullies by the cafeteria stood up to because of a surfeit of testosterone. I wonder if she was ever aware of the hundred phantom hands upon her in the course of a day.

Travelling up to a family holiday in Nelson, I fell in love with the motelier's daughter in Blenheim when we stopped for one night there. Jasmine Courts. I never knew her name, but she smiled twice at me in the little cabin of a motel office, and I lay awake most of the night in case she came to tap on my window. She must have been able to restrain herself, but for weeks the random recollection of the blonde pony-tail against the tan of her shoulders would cause an ache of despair and loss in my heart.

Albie Joseph's good-looking sister was three years older than us and heavily into narcissism, although then I didn't recognize it as such. Normally she was almost as contemptuous of me as she was of her brother, and surrounded by a galaxy of moth-like friends of both sexes. One very windy, autumn Sunday I went round to the Josephs' two-storeyed brick and roughcast house above the park and found Melissa there alone. She held the door ajar and said nothing when I asked for Albie. She looked hopefully beyond me for a better class of company. ‘Oh, come and help me for a minute then,' she said. Her bedroom seemed full of round, soft mats, frilled cushions and mirrors. ‘I'm sorting out sets of things for the week,' she said. ‘Ensembles.'

She stood, self-consciously unself-conscious, before the largest mirror in bra and pants and held frocks, tops and skirts to herself from time to time. ‘Ideally your legs should be longer than your head and torso combined,' she said. ‘I'm lucky there. Feel how smooth
my skin is.' She moved my hand to her ribs, and watched my face intently, but only so that she could see the wonder of herself reflected in my expression. ‘It's hopeless in a town like this, no matter how beautiful you are. I've sent a folio of photos to a modelling school in Sydney and had acknowledgement of receipt already.'

Only her feet spoilt it a bit; quite large feet with several deep creases above the heel of the fashion shoes she tried on. Her feet were asexual, common, rather like my own in their very practical configuration. Her feet lacked those attributes of gender possessed by the features to which I was naturally drawn — the heavy hair as a frame for her face, the flare of her hips, the slight pout of her belly above the waistband of her knickers.

Melissa tired of my few, feeble compliments. Even as a makeshift audience I was unsatisfactory. ‘You'd better go now,' she said as the wind blew the small branches of the silver birch against the bedroom window, where they tapped and scrambled like the antennae of lascivious lobsters. I never told anyone of my privileged session, because of my shame at her complete dominance, her sure knowledge that I was utterly without masculine threat.

Towards the end of my fifth form year I had a notable success with Pamela Burridge, who was friends with Samantha Chesterfield, whose older sister, known as Stunner, was so beautiful that Nobby Allidger, halfback for the Firsts, drowned himself in the Rangitata when she dumped him. Albie Joseph and I met Pamela and Samantha at the skating rink one Sunday evening. I didn't dare ask Samantha out, so instead I asked Pamela if she'd go to the end of term rage with me. Afterwards, I heard that the main reason she agreed was that she was taken with the Ivy League shirt I was wearing. It was my brother's and I'd snaffled it while he was in hospital with blood poisoning. What made Pamela's agreement particularly sweet was that Albie aimed too high, asked Samantha, and got refused.

Only later did I realize that the date with Pamela posed something of a difficulty regarding wheels. I had been a licensed driver for seven
weeks and knew that my father wouldn't let me have the car at night. It always seems to be that way with young love — the practicalities almost overwhelm the benefit. To admit to Pamela that I wouldn't have a car, to scrounge a ride with someone else, was unthinkable. What has to be done for love, has to be done. It was necessary to steal the family car for the night. Late on the Saturday afternoon of the rage I told my father that I'd wash the Humber Hawk and put it away, as he wouldn't be using it — would he? I cleaned it zealously, particularly the back seat, where I imagined Pamela recumbent, but at dusk I crept out and pushed the car from the drive and partway down the block, where I came to it later when I had dressed for the dance.

All manner of things could have gone wrong, of course, but for once the whole thing was a triumph of dangerous deceit. The adrenalin rush sustained me most of the night, and even assisted me to maintain something of a conversation with Pamela. Although I was a poor dancer she allowed me afterwards to kiss her in the back seat, and I squeezed her so tightly into the corner that she was almost melded into the upholstered junction. I think I could have gone out with her again if I'd shown more interest in her suggestion to take her ice skating at Lake Tekapo the next day, but even theft from one's family has its limits.

As an adolescent, my life within my family was completely apart from my life outside it. More than that, I was a different person in each context; different principles and beliefs, contrary motivations and emotional responses. I think for my brothers and sisters it was just that way too. If I came across them socially, at the dance hall, the beach, or movie theatre, there was only bare recognition between us. This was perhaps the reason for my failure with Prue Golightley, who was my doubles partner when we won the under seventeen title at the Sinjohn Tennis Club. She had coloured pom-poms on the heels of her sports shoes and a very solid forehand volley: in a long game her sweat would slick some of her dark hair to her forehead and neck.

Sometimes, after watching her play, I had difficulty walking. What completely stumped me was how to bridge the gap from discussing service actions and school friends, to a request for her to take off her clothes. What possible form of intermediary communication was there? Often I feared that the tension of it all would send me into a swoon.

One evening when I had been particularly impressive at the net and we were alone in the trophy room, I interrupted her talk of Monty Finchley's ringworm by reaching forward and putting my playing hand down the front of her blouse. It was a madness that I was helpless to contain. Prue and I both waited for a few moments, almost as if we expected some explosion, or some external admonition. Her bra was very confidential and easily defeated me. I think she, too, was disappointed with the experience: she removed my hand. ‘Don't ever do that again,' she said. ‘If we weren't playing in the final tomorrow, I'd tell your mother.'

I played like a man possessed in the final, hoping that a brilliant victory would save me from a charge of carnal knowledge in the High Court. Prue's mother and mine were friends. Two weeks later my mother came into my room and asked me if I ever wanted to talk any things over with her. ‘No,' I said, ‘not that I can think of.' She told me that Prue Golightley told her mother everything and not to hesitate if I wanted to talk. Was I sure that there was nothing? I was sure. There was nothing, I said, nothing that I could think of.

In the seventh form, when I was nearly eighteen, I was put out of my misery. I met Sandra Browning, who came down in a Diocesan team to the National Secondary Schools' Netball Tournament. A group of us seniors from Boys' High were invited to the dance at tournament's end in the gardens' hall and Alun's sister introduced Sandra and me. Sandra was tall and strong, with a bandaged graze on her wrist from the semi-final and a straight, dark blue dress. ‘Are you much at sport?' she asked me, and as she had little access to the truth, I enlarged my reputation somewhat. All's fair after all. She
had a very long face, well chinned, which wasn't unattractive, and she could stand a pause in conversation without uneasiness as we danced. ‘I'm going to try for Phys. Ed. School,' she told me.

Towards the end of the dance she came with me from the hall and into the gardens. It was a cold time of the year, but someone had left the door to the hothouse unlocked, and we went into that warm and heavy atmosphere, the narrow path between banks of ferns and orchids, the hanging baskets of tropical and fragrant achimenes, the sinuous hoses lying discarded and barely visible in the moonlight through the glass. We avoided the pain of conversation. Like Adam and Eve, we climbed into the rich, natural profusion of the hothouse gardens and lay down, wasteful of the flowers crushed beneath us. Her breasts were sweeter and more full beneath her dress than I had guessed. The act itself was so explosive that I expected to be bleeding from the ears, but the only wound was a deep cut on my left ankle from a ponga trunk. I had been in such transport that the pain had failed to register.

It never occurred to me that Sandra might be in need of some reassurance. She wept freely on my almost hairless, adolescent chest and then was suddenly cheerful and began to organise our life together. Distantly I could hear the thudding of the band in the hall and was amazed that the world had gone on, that any continuity could have survived what we had experienced. All the world was winter and only Sandra Browning and I lay together in a perpetual summer, or so then it seemed.

M
aybe the very worst thing that a woman says to a man is that she feels towards him like a sister, and almost as bad is to want to talk about Our Relationship, as though it's one of a set of abridged novels.

‘I need to know where I am,' says Rebecca. She is sitting on the sill of the window in our flat above Montgomery's Kitchen Showroom in Madras Street. Full summer and the warm air brings scents from the park, intimations from the Chinese takeaway, as well as fumes from the traffic. She seems settled, prepared to give time and attention to what it is that explains our presence together here. The late sun glints on the hairs of her tanned forearms, two large top teeth rest on her lower lip, but such things are inadmissible as evidence. She taps a stainless steel table knife on the grey, worn wood of the window sill.

‘Don't you have any ambition whatsoever?' she says.

‘To get you back into bed,' I say. In a sense this is true.

‘Don't you have any long-term plan,' she says, ‘and see yourself in five, ten years' time, in the phases of its achievement?'

Rebecca wishes to be a television frontperson. She is quite open about this career and already has a post-graduate journalism diploma and a part-time reporter's job with Peninsula Radio. She has acquired professional training in front of the cameras, and practises the techniques before our mirror. She can retain a direct gaze and small, natural smile indefinitely as a fadeout. It had been remarked
on, she once told me, that she had no tendency to rictus.

‘I've always thought I'll die young,' I say.

‘Why's that?'

‘I just do. Whenever I try to imagine myself twenty years on, or whatever, there's just a fog there, grey and damp and dense.'

‘That's weakness,' says Rebecca. ‘You're this sort of drifter who never imposes himself on life.'

So much is interpretation, isn't it? The emotional climate in which we experience things. Nine months ago, when Rebecca and I began living together, she thought my drifting a positive thing: a refusal to be hog-tied by the conventional. She would lie bare-breasted beside me in the midday sun and eat hard-boiled eggs. Small pieces of yolk, their outer surface gun metal blue, shimmied on her warm skin. Now she has her arms tight about her knees, and she rocks impatiently on the window sill above the kitchen showroom. Even her smile has a slight constraint of impatience. ‘Anyway,' she says.

We have spent a good deal of the night on it — Our Relationship — and in that exposition I have realised how unsatisfactory she considers it to be. Most of her grievances cut so deep that I've no reply, but I offer to do something about not having a car. ‘I could buy one,' I tell her. ‘I could get together the deposit. I think Richie Tomlinson is wanting to sell the veedub.'

‘It's not just that, although I'm sick of not having a decent set of wheels. This flat here, four rooms stuck above the shops and still with the cruddy student furniture. A toilet cistern which won't flush properly, yet never stops running.'

What we're talking about hasn't anything to do with cars, or sofas, or the warm aromas from the Chinese takeaway, nothing to do with red diamonds worn from the lino around the stove, or the ice cream pottle substituting for the missing bottom louvre. What we're talking about is the failure of our infatuation with each other. Ambition is a loveless thing. As long as Rebecca was in love she was content to lie eternally naked in the sun and eat boiled eggs. A concern for her
future as a television frontperson signalled a change of heart. As soon as she let me go then she saw that I was drifting.

‘We can still see each other around,' she says. Everything about this woman is admirable, except her opinion of me. Her big front teeth, the muscles of her shoulders, the faintest stubble of her armpits, are part of the wonder. ‘No reason at all we can't still see each other around,' Rebecca says. There is an advertising blimp floating behind her in the blue sky above the city. DOOLEY'S TOYOTA. The moment is there for me to say something that will undercut triviality and strike her soul like an arrow.

‘You're right. We're bound to still see each other around.'

I feel hard done by, that's the truth of it. I have established the pleasures of my life on her without thought for any future and now she wishes to be free. What is the use of talking of the north wind when the southerly is blowing?

Rebecca sits in the frame of the window and, although we continue to talk, I can see so clearly that there is a past now, and a future, in her conception. We have separated, she and I, as the holistic present has divided.

‘Don't think that I regret any of it, though,' she says.

‘Nor I.'

As we talk we are separate and there is the past, the present and the future once again. A consciousness of those divisions is with us when we are out of love, so that in a sensible fashion we order things in the hope of consequences to our benefit.

‘I just have to give more time to my work,' she says. ‘I've got to get ahead.' What she has to get ahead of is lying in bed until the afternoon sun is in our eyes, not answering the phone because we know we've done nothing deserving of good news, spending the rent money on a Hello Dolly Masquerade Ball.

‘Do you remember the Hello Dolly Masquerade Ball?' I ask her.

‘So what?'

They had a terrace at the ballroom, just like in the movies, and
Rebecca and I went out and looked over a carpark, but also, in the moonlight, a line of concrete tubs with ornamental conifers. The cooler air made me realise that my shirt was wet with sweat, and Rebecca's hair had started to come down. She was one of the best-looking women there, by anyone's assessment. An older woman who had argued with her partner came out and fell over the small balustrade into the carpark. She broke her collar bone and was in the papers. It happened after Rebecca and I had been standing together with the breeze on our flushed faces, but because I was only a few minutes from being there and have seen the photograph, it has become part of my experience — this heavy woman with puffed sleeves and tears on her cheeks, the thud of her on the asphalt.

‘Look,' says Rebecca. ‘If it's better for you I can stay for another day or two. I want you to feel that we've talked it through, not just that I'm walking out or something.' The blimp bobs as if in agreement with such counsel. Every time I kissed her I was excited by the smooth, white keys of those two front teeth. ‘People are changing, growing all the time.' All such generalisations are perfectly true, but I see no connection between them and what is happening to us. Rebecca drums with the knife on the window sill, holding it loosely in her fingers so that it can reverberate.

‘I'd rather not draw it out,' I say.

Less than a year ago I first met her at the final of theatresports in the old town hall. She had a lovebite on her neck and neither of us made any mention of it then, or since. She told me that she'd been invited to apply for the Drama School in Wellington, but wanted to go into journalism.

As she goes down the stairs what we have between us is drawn tight for the last time and then parts. We will indeed see each other around, as she says; will see each other here as she comes for her things. Nothing will be the same. From the window I see her walk past the display of whiteware, microwaves, dual sinks and cupboard units that we live above. We have talked a great deal over two days,
and the more intimate the discussion, the more certain was the outcome. When a glance, a kiss, a hand on the shoulder, an old joke half told, can't do the job, then recourse to analysis is bound to fail.

Rebecca doesn't look up and I see, in contrast to a Chinese girl she passes, that her hair isn't black after all, but very dark brown. Maybe in a long time I will find myself, clear of fog, in Dooley's to select a car from the gleaming new models there, and I will get an odd snag in my breathing, unaccountable, as I see the Dooley's sign. Maybe I will sign a contract and think of boiled egg crumbs on her warm skin, her slightly buck teeth, whole glamorous kitchens beneath us as we slept.