Reading Madame Bovary (2 page)

I have heard of a brothel in Paris in the
1890
s that had a hundred rooms. In each room a different fantasy: a Samoan hut, a Victorian train carriage, a beggar's archway under the bridge, a dark alley with trash cans (real or fake? How often would they empty them? Would it smell? The smell of fish bones and rotting banana? Would the smell be essential?). I think this a marvellous idea but wonder at the pitfalls. The man would have to have such confidence, such easy wit and physical charm to carry off, unselfconsciously, his costume – his grass skirt, his dirty overcoat, his blue serge uniform and peaked cap. I shared this fantasy with my husband, Frank. Most likely, said Frank, most likely the women would just laugh at him.

I decide to save this fantasy for Diana.

The huntress

Diana is my best friend. She is a senior librarian at TAFE, buxom and blonde and with a great interest in goddesses. She was christened Maureen and changed her name when she turned thirty. To her surprise, everyone took to it straight away, perhaps because it clearly suited her. She was a Diana at heart, a huntress.

Diana is a trivialist. A student of trivia. Not, as she points out, a trivialiser – on the contrary – but one who ascribes the proper importance to the common, the ordinary, the everyday, the familiar, the trite. One who studies the popular, the vernacular, the vulgate. Like a good librarian she is familiar with her reference works and quotes, from the OED, the English author O.W. Holmes,
1883
.
You speak trivially, but not unwisely.

Diana recently enrolled in a goddess workshop. She subscribes to a magazine called
Crone Chronicles
and another called
Sage-
Woman.
She read a book entitled
Megatrends for Women
and was deeply affected by the chapter ‘The Goddess Reawakening'.

For someone into crystals
et al
Diana is surprisingly hardheaded; ruthless even. When we are discussing sex one day she says, ‘Sometimes I think that sex itself is insignificant.'

I stare at her in disbelief. I know of no-one who has had so many lovers.

She corrects herself. ‘That is not entirely true. It is significant, like food, only when we have none. Once we are enjoying sex it becomes insignificant; a mere pre-condition, like eating and shitting, to the rest of life. It is a spasm of fleeting and short-lived sensation that helps to regulate the nervous system and dispel accumulated tension, anxiety, etc, etc.'

‘This is a very unspiritual view,' I say, deadpan. ‘Not very Tantric.' I am mocking her.

I tell her I could not disagree more strongly. When you have a sexual relationship with someone, they have a piece of you. They enter you not sexually – phallically – but electrically (your field). Their vibrations enter your body and disturb your vibrations, sending all your atoms into disarray. After a while you recover – your atoms re-arrange themselves into their old patterns but they bear the imprint of the invader, like lung lesions after TB, or war wounds – an erotic branding iron. And sometimes, with a deep, painful infatuation, sex isn't even necessary for this to take place.

Until I had children I was prone to infatuation. Probably still am, although now I pull back from the brink before I am close enough even to gaze at the view. Why? Because children have radar. They sense the moment when they have ceased to live at the centre of your attention. They sense the alien intruder. An insidious vertigo begins to pollute their consciousness; they reel inwardly. I would not take them there. I would not put them at risk.

Still, unruly desire is always present, always roiling in the substratum.

My dream

I'm in a modest suburban house. There's a small swimming pool out the back that takes up almost all the yard. It's surrounded by a strip of concrete and a high wooden fence on four sides.

The house is full of people.

I go out on my own and look into the pool. At the bottom is a huge, thick snake, cut into several pieces, and three enormous fish like elongated skates.

While I'm watching, one of the creatures emerges from the water and attaches itself to the fence by suction.

I'm mystified. What is it?

At first it looks like a huge, dark turtle but as it slowly inches its way up the fence I realise it's a monstrous flounder. As its blunt nose reaches the top of the high fence it leaps into the air and hovers, horizontal, above me, three metres of dark, streamlined flesh. Slimy, and gleaming like a giant placenta.

Suddenly it soars over the fence into the pool in the yard behind and I hear a thunderous, rasping splash! I see the water rise up on all sides above the height of the fence.

‘I'll be back,' I say to the beast. ‘I will return later.'

I go inside and say to the others: ‘Am I imagining this or are there monstrous fish out there in that pool?' They seem unmoved.

I wake.

Fate

Diana is superstitious. She consults astrologers and clairvoyants. I find this surprising in someone whose IT skills are in advance of just about anyone I know (barring experts). Boolean logic isn't everything, she says.

Diana makes raids into the outer suburbs, looking for clues. Once, when the kids were interstate with my parents and Frank was at a conference in Adelaide, we spent an hysterical weekend together. On the Saturday afternoon we drove out west to see Diana's latest discovery, a woman with second sight. Diana believes there are wise women in unlikely places and this one was a Mrs. Cluny who lived out in the sticks at Bankstown. Diana had rung and made an appointment for three o'clock and when we finally managed to locate the street we were surprised to find a small weatherboard cottage built in the '
30
s with a rickety fence and bare, scrubby garden. We walked to the back of the house, as instructed, where there was a shabby grey veranda and a white sulphur-crested cockatoo in an iron cage that looked at us and said nothing.

Diana knocked on the door.

No-one came.

She knocked again, and after a minute the door opened a foot or so and the grey head of a woman in her early sixties appeared and said abruptly: ‘You're early. I've got someone with me. Wait on the veranda.' And the door was closed again.

After ten minutes a middle-aged man, dressed like a businessman, opened the door, nodded to us and headed down the pathway towards the gate. Diana looked at me knowingly. ‘Probably came to ask about his shares,' she said. With a wave of her hand Mrs. Cluny beckoned us in. She was a short, fat woman who seemed to float about in a cloud of flesh. In her movements there was a certain refinement, delicacy even, though she was blunt in her speech and drab in her dress. In her mouth was a cigarette that gave off a strong, acrid smell.

We followed her into a kind of musty parlour at the front where she indicated a fraying couch opposite her own armchair. On the small wooden coffee table between us was a chipped saucer full of ash and cigarette butts, and next to that a packet of Woodbines.

So this is a psychic, I thought. Where is the velvet turban with the crescent moon? The fringed shawl? The Turkish slippers?

Mrs. Cluny asked for a personal object and Diana unbuckled her watch and handed it over. The woman closed her eyes, adjusted her wide bottom in the chair and began to rub the leather band of the watch between her thumb and forefinger, up and down, up and down, mesmerically, as if it were Aladdin's lamp.

‘If I see anything dark, do you want to know?' she asked.

‘Dark?'

‘Yeah, dark. Like death.' This was followed by a long drag on the cigarette.

‘I don't know.'

‘Make up your mind.'

‘Um … yes. Yes, okay. But I've come about something in particular.' I looked at Diana and realised how nervous she was. This was serious. ‘Can I ask questions?'

Mrs. Cluny nodded.

‘I keep having this dream, a recurring dream about a baby.' And she gave Mrs. Cluny a semi-coherent account of what seemed to me a cluster of mundane events made significant only by the appearance of a baby surrounded by a white light.

For a long time Mrs. Cluny said nothing, just kept rubbing the watchband, up and down, up and down. Then she said, still with her eyes closed, still fingering the fine strap of leather: ‘You're not dreaming about babies, you're dreaming about your spirit self.'

‘What's that? You mean, like the soul?'

‘Whatever you like to call it.'

Oh, no, I thought, oh, no, I shouldn't have come. Not this.

Next she'll be talking about past lives.

There was a silence and then she added, ‘You'll see it one day.'

‘You mean in the dream?'

‘No, you'll see the baby.'

What baby? There was no real baby.

‘You'll see that baby again, just before you die.'

Diana was speechless. And then she surprised me. ‘When am I going to die?' she asked.

Mrs. Cluny closed her eyes, and went on fingering the watchband. ‘I don't see your death at all clear.' She paused. ‘That's the way it is. Sometimes I see it clear with people, sometimes I don't. You've got a kind of cloud coming toward you. It could be your death, but it could be something else. In any case,' she added, ‘it won't be for a while yet.'

Then she sat, very composed, with her hands on her lap. She put Diana's watch down on the table beside her, a signal that the interview was over. She would ‘see' no more that day.

Diana fumbled in her purse until she located her cheque book.

‘I only take cash,' said Mrs. Cluny.

On the drive home Diana was uncharacteristically quiet and a little unnerved.

‘She didn't really tell you anything much,' I ventured.

‘Hmmmm,' she said, biting her lip and staring ahead at the white line. Every now and then her eyes would flutter in an odd way. ‘I should have asked her what she meant by
a while
,' she said. She was in a funk.

Back in the city we went to The Malaya for a bowl of blinding hot laksa and then on to a Bette Midler movie to restore our morale. By the time we got back to Diana's place she had snapped out of it.

Despite her weakness for the consumerised supernatural (tarot festivals, crystal workshops, astrology on the net) and what Frank derides as a certain credulousness, Diana can be very funny. She, too, is absorbed in lists, though not of the kind that plague me. Hers are a diverting game of mapping the world through trivia, and often over coffee we compile them together or, rather, she goes off on a riff and I throw in the odd contribution. Here is the latest one, recalled from memory. Knowing me, I've probably forgotten the best bits: I'll have to check with her later.

The narcissist's bedside table versus the non-narcissist's bedside table

THE NON-NARCISSIST:

– K-Y jelly

– toilet lanolin

– tissues

– anti-histamine tablets

– Body Shop moisturiser

– reading glasses

– detective novel or the
Women's Weekly

– contraceptive pills

– small asymmetrical plaster vase made by offspring in Grade Two art class

– twenty-dollar alarm clock with tinny beep

– bedside lamp: cheap Taiwanese knock-off of a Milanese design

THE NARCISSIST:

– pink ceramic oil burner with ylang-ylang aromatic oil

– vibrator in purple velvet case with silver draw-string

– Almond and patchouli massage oil

– The
I Ching
or Liz Greene's
Astrology for Lovers
, Stephen Coulter's
The Empathic Friend (and Where to Find Them)
or Jack Kornfield's
A Path with Heart

– Magazines:
Marie Claire, Vanity Fair
and, if of a certain age,
Vogue

– Estée Lauder night cream and eye gel

– buff stick for nails

– black silk eye mask for when partner is inconsiderately reading

– mobile phone for late-night calls when depressed

– bedside lamp: (under forty) cheap Taiwanese knock-off of a Milanese design or (over forty) Laura Ashley with pale-blue flowers on the base and a pleated shade in satin cream

The beautiful object

There is a joy in money, and we are all too refined to speak of it directly. We say, ‘What fine linen, what a lovely bowl, what nice shoes.' I'm not materialistic, we tell ourselves, it's just that I love beauty.

Yesterday, I took an extended lunchtime and went to David Jones. I go there often. Frank says it's my temple.

Leaving aside all the deep and meaningful contributions of my career path (more of that later), my job means that I can walk into David Jones and buy two pairs of shoes at the one time. Not that I do this very often – in fact I've done it twice in the last ten years. The point is: if I want to, I can. Something my mother could never do, or her mother before her. And if my shoes are good, I feel powerful, so that no matter how badly things go in other spheres, there is some part of me – the shoe part – that can't be humiliated.

Shopping can turn into mania. Some people buy on impulse. Not me. I am a member of the school of exhaustive research. Come the new season I cannot buy one pair of shoes until I look at every pair of shoes in the city. I must survey the field. I must not make a mistake. It's my professional training. I have a reputation at work for being thorough. I am.

I can't understand Frank. When he goes shopping he buys the first thing he sees that he likes and goes home. Don't tell me it's a male trait because my sister is the same.

I have to conduct a complete reconnoitre, a thorough evaluation of available resources. I cannot go home at night haunted by the nagging thought that something better might have been just around the corner.

Yesterday I went to buy a lipstick. I tried one colour on my bottom lip, one on the top, choosing from the testers.