Significance (27 page)

One by one, the gang departs; Yasmin first, then Gregory, then Daphne, who at seventy
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two is the eldest and claims to have seen both W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas read in New York. Then the others drift away, until there is only Lawrence and Marilyn, who has decided that she is not the sort of woman men want to date and marry, so she had better find consolation by being someone's mistress. Lawrence suggests a drive, wants to show her the place where he wrote the title poem of his second collection and she agrees. How could she not?

She agrees to everything he suggests, in fact. Even sex without a condom as he promises to pull out in time. And does. Or at least she thinks he does.

Then on Thursday, Scott rings and says he's been given two tickets to the theatre. A David Mamet play. A long explanation about the friend who bought the tickets and had to fly to Toronto because of a death in the family. Scott actually bought the tickets himself, but disguises this fact. It protects him from rejection.

But the explanation about the tickets is so longwinded she feels he does not really want her in particular; he just wants company to see the play. Because it's a good play by a good playwright and has had good reviews, and is therefore good culture and good for you, like bran for breakfast, like going to the gym or using unleaded gas in your car.

She says yes to the theatre on Friday. This time, after the play and as she is about to get into the taxi, he stands with two hands lightly holding her shoulders, looks into her eyes, and solemnly bends to kiss her, but again it's only a peck on the cheek.

Saturday she goes to a reading at a bookstore and who should be there, but Lawrence, so they go for coffee after. He buys her a Greek pastry, sweet and sticky with honey, then after she has complained that there are no napkins, he licks her fingers clean. He holds her hand by the wrist while he swallows one finger after another. There in the brightly lit café with the painting of the Acropolis on the back wall under the stucco arch.

He drives her to a bluff overlooking a steep valley, where he leads her into the trees and undresses her in the moonlight. ‘I should write a poem about this,' he says, as she shivers. It's understood that they'll forego the condom and in the nick of time he'll withdraw. He asks her for her phone number, does not give her his, because of the wife, the kids.

Later that night Marilyn rings Sarah; a friend from college whom Marilyn knows has been having an affair with a married man for several years. She confesses about Lawrence, but doesn't name him.

‘Be prepared to bleed,' Sarah says, mysteriously.

‘What do you mean? Be prepared to bleed?'

‘Oh, you numbskull. It's a line from ‘A Case of You'. Joni Mitchell? I mean that it'll hurt. You'll always come second. Christmas, birthdays, holidays. Sundays are hell! Who am I to talk, eh? But if I was you, I wouldn't go there. Just don't fall for the bastard, eh? Watch your heart, you deserve better.'

Sunday morning Scott rang, suggested a walk.

Maybe he's gay, Marilyn thought, just enjoys female companionship. But then he'd held her hand, the same hand that she was ashamed to remember had been fellated the evening before by Lawrence.

Sarah's words had stuck. She threw herself at Scott. And he caught her.

Unlike Lawrence, he was careful to use a condom.

But the condom, damn it, the condom wasn't so careful. Perhaps her nail snagged it, who knew? But that was beside the point. It broke.

She saw Lawrence one more time. The next Wednesday she went to the poetry workshop again. She half
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believed Lawrence would have new poems to read, hoping perhaps, to find some fragment of herself, a finger, a nipple (small and pink, he'd said, unlike his wife's), a lock of hair in one of his poems. Disguised perhaps as Freyja from the Norse myth, or Brigid the Celtic goddess, or Phaedra or Echo. But he declined when invited to read. They all went for drinks after as usual. There'd been two new writers at the workshop that evening – an attractive mother and daughter from Seattle and he danced attention on them all night long. So she only found a sudden clarity about Lawrence. A clear
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sighted realisation that she really didn't matter one bit to him. A lucky escape.

Then her period failed to arrive and there she was caught up in her growing romance with Scott.

So quietly, without telling either man, she made her careful arrangements to undo all the old carelessness. Told only Sarah.

Bled like a stuck pig for days afterwards.

How right Sarah had been.

She'd been prepared to bleed.

But not now, thank God, not now.

Nature Morte

Vivier was contemplating stillness. Aware of his own body, his stomach at last silenced, leaving a faint buzzing in his ears and beyond that far
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off voices and distant sounds, a door opening, then closing, footsteps approaching and retreating, the chirrup of small birds.

In his mind's eye an array of images. He possessed, if not a photographic memory, then something close to one. He can summon up the picture of the dead woman's face without looking at the photograph pinned to the notice board. He can visualise the scene that morning, the sandal which dangled from her foot, the fall of pale hair covering her face. Then, unsummoned, he found himself picturing a painting he had seen at the Staatliche Museum in Berlin two years earlier: Portrait of a Young Girl by Petrus Christus – which had been painted in Bruges around the middle of the fifteenth century.

Oblivious to the crowds moving around him, Vivier had spent a long time gazing at this painting, startled and entranced by the egg
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like contours of the subject's face, the hint of a defiant pout on her lips, the steady almost disdainful expression in her brown eyes, the oriental slant of her hooded eyelids, the delicate childlike neck and the nearly complete absence of brows which added to the alien quality of the whole. And the picture's surface, seemingly ruined by the deterioration of paint which had broken down, producing an overall effect like that on a crackle
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glazed pot. Crazed lines ran everywhere like a fine webbing, showing up most notably on her creamy skin. She was damaged, but still utterly, unforgettably beautiful.

All this Paul Vivier thought about in mere seconds, as when dreaming. Epic scenes seem to take up hours in the sleep world, but in reality they are only the product of a few minutes of R.E.M. sleep.

Damaged, but utterly, unforgettably beautiful.

Paul Vivier moved slowly towards the door that led out of his office, feeling as if he were floating; as if the part of him that travelled across the room was some spirit self, while his physical body remained near the desk, lost in contemplation.

It was only a sensation borne out of tiredness and stress. He knew that well enough. And he was particularly prone to it. Had first discovered it in himself when he was a boy of no more than perhaps seven years old. It was the age of self
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awareness, of wonder and perhaps also terror. The age where one self
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consciously discovers the potential to lie and invent. Or as Vivier did, to fake sickness in order to avoid the rough and tumble of school and spend a glorious day in bed with his books, his crayons and sketch pad, while his mother spoilt him, bringing chilled glasses of freshly made lemonade and tempting him to eat by cooking his favourite dishes. Then as he feigned a headache, his beloved mother fretfully laying a deliciously cool hand on his not at all fevered brow.

At the doorway he glanced back at the place he had been standing seconds before, almost expecting to see himself, almost disappointed to find that he did not meet his own surprised eyes looking back at him.

He needed to eat. To sleep. To recharge his batteries. But first, duty.

Meaning to move forward into the corridor, into action, Paul Vivier looked to his left, subtly aware of someone moving down the corridor towards him. And there he was, Lamy, back already from his mission. His step rapid and weightless. Lamy the plodding, the exacting, the wearying, the over
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dutiful, over
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keen, was fairly bouncing along the narrow corridor. The overhead lighting was green
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tinged and harsh, casting heavy shadows under the eyes, making Lamy appear ghoulish despite the obvious energy and earnestness in his step. In his hand a paper evidence bag and in the bag something white and almost weightless.

The ectoplasm of an evil spirit, a voodoo charm or, as it turned out, a cardigan.

Written on the Body

Hilda and Michael sat in the back of the car that had been sent for them. The car was a courtesy offered in regard to their age and also because they were assisting the police – not resisting them as in their many previous encounters with the forces of the state.

Both of them, without knowing it, were thinking about the young woman they had seen the night before. As they sat on the sun
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warmed, burgundy
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coloured seat in the back of the car they instinctively linked hands and threaded fingers through fingers. When the car started up, their bodies inclined away from the other as they gazed through their respective windows, his on the left, hers on the right.

It was a short drive and the car was unmarked so no curious bystanders gawked at them, causing them even more uncomfortable degrees of self
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awareness. The small town that they had enjoyed so much before suddenly looked different. Harsher and more full of danger.

Each man that Hilda saw looked potentially evil. Not just the obvious suspects; the rangy youths in their baseball caps, with cigarettes held between finger and thumb as the smoke curled up the shielding palm, or the powerfully built workmen pausing amid churned
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up road works to scratch their lean bellies while their eyes followed the rolling heft of a passing woman's ample buttocks in tight jeans, or the gruff man with extraordinary eyebrows, the pensioner in braces and beret scowling into a coffee cup. No, it was every man – the hippy tourist with his baby strapped to his back and his t
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shirt with the tree
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hugging eco message. It was the three sharply dressed bank employees with their briefcases and manila folders heading for their car. It was the man pausing to carefully tuck in the exposed shop label of his girlfriend's singlet – who touched her shoulder tenderly when he was done and planted a quick kiss at the nape of her neck. It was the butcher turning the sign on his shop door from open to closed.

One of the feminist claims Hilda had struggled with most was the belief that all men were potential rapists. The idea that all men were bad, were the source of all evil; beginning with capitalism and war and ending in the control and violence acted upon women's bodies. The argument went that the only defence was to exclude men from as many aspects of your life as it was possible. Certainly from one's bed and from one's body. Maybe also, as Lady Macbeth had threatened to do, to pluck the boy child from one's breast and destroy it or at the least, banish him.

And what of the other lesson of feminism? That the male constructed legal system often blamed the victim. Especially if the crime was of a sexual nature. If the woman dressed in a particular way – if she drank or took drugs, if she danced in a certain way, if she walked in dark deserted places, smiled, laughed, breathed. Or failed to find herself a male protector – father, brother, husband, boyfriend, lover.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.

Did young boys have an equivalent device for divining the future in their prune stones?

Gypsy girl, seamstress, typist, librarian, rich woman, poor woman, beggar woman, whore?

It hardly tripped off the tongue, besides which, a man's destiny is seemingly not defined by his choice of life partner.

And what are little boys made of?

Slugs and snails and puppy dog tails.

And girls? Much sweeter, more fragile stuff.

And that particular young woman last night? So feminine in her pretty white frock, her long golden legs, perfect and hairless, her platinum blonde hair that shone and danced as she moved. The funny little (and thoroughly impractical) bag she carried, the white, not very useful cardigan.

Now that Hilda thought about it, she remembered it more clearly. The tall American had left the young woman sitting alone and she had lit a cigarette and smoked it, sometimes tilting her head back and blowing the smoke directly upwards. Then she had stood and picked up the cardigan and draped it over the silly little bag. Hilda had seen this seemingly out of the corner of her eye. Peripheral vision. The edge of their lives; hers and Michael's. They had been talking of Paris, of hope and youth. Love too. She saw the young woman stand up. Then, when Hilda looked again, she had gone and the waiter was clearing the table and Michael was saying something that Hilda felt compelled to disagree with, if only a little.

Michael was also thinking about the young woman and her conversation with the tall man. He should have intervened, told the man that he should be ashamed, that he should apologise. And if he refused? Then what? Would Michael threaten him? Would he strike him?