Yearn (19 page)

The silence in the bedroom thickened with the encroaching darkness. Her body, expecting a sudden caress, the surprising brush of fingertips as light as a breeze, tensed in anticipation, but there was nothing, not even a rustle in the shadows. May lay back and tried to unravel the complexity of her reaction. She was both relieved and disappointed, both sad and intrigued that she couldn't just summon her incubus through sheer will. He appeared to have a will of his own. Staring out across the bare floorboards, she finally fell into a dreamless sleep.

What seemed like just minutes later she was woken by the sound of heavy knocking on the front door. Blinking in the sunlight that was now streaming in through the blinds, she sat up bleary-eyed from sleep. The clock showed ten a.m.—she'd overslept again. The knocking on the front door persisted. Just then the telephone began to ring. Swearing, May reached for the receiver and picked it up. It was her sister, June.

“May, you'll never guess what's happened. I've just done the books and someone's stolen four hundred dollars out of the till. I guess it's one of the temps—you can never trust them. I'm really upset. I've put a call through to the local cops.” May froze, the receiver in her hand, paralyzed by guilt, not knowing whether to tell her sister that she'd taken the money.

The knocking continued. May told her sister to hold, then climbed out of bed and pulled on her dressing gown. As she ran to answer the door it occurred to her that it might be her landlord demanding the rent. She paused at the door, unwilling to let him in.

“Who is it?” she demanded through the door.

“Hello? I'm interested in the room.” It was a man's voice, a young man's, velvety and deep, laced with a foreign accent May couldn't identify.

“The room?”

“The one you advertised, on the university website?”

May's heart leapt. All her problems could be solved if only she could rent the room today. Hurriedly she unbolted the door.

He was dressed in an elegant pair of linen trousers and a loose cream shirt. Towering over her, standing with the sun behind him, the first thing May saw was his silhouette against the light. But she recognized him immediately.

“You,” she could barely whisper.

He stepped out of the light. He was even more handsome by day than by night. There was a sensitivity to his bone structure and eyes that she hadn't noticed until now.

“Sorry, do I know you?” He looked both surprised and bemused.

May blushed. “No, you just look like someone I used to know,” she hurriedly said, then blushed some more, frozen on the spot in confusion.

He misunderstood her hesitation. “I can put the deposit down immediately—if I like it. I really need to find something by the end of today.”

“That would be fantastic—if you like it, that is. . . .”

“Oh, I think I might. Any chance of actually seeing it?” he asked hesitantly. He appeared to have no memory of her whatsoever; it was as if he'd never met her.

“Sorry, of course, come in.”

He stepped into the hallway after her. For a moment she paused, then turned. “There's just one thing—you're not allergic to cats by any chance?”

He paused, doubt clouding his eyes. “Actually I am. Is that going to be a problem?”

May turned and continued walking through the flat—Shadow was nowhere to be seen.

“Not now, it isn't,” she replied with a sudden smile.

 

Let me tell you about real intimacy, the kind of intimacy in which over the years your lover shares so many of her memories that osmosis occurs and you can no longer define which are hers and which are yours. That was the love we had, love that transcends the approval of society, the kind of love that is purely and undeniably instinctive. The kind you fight for—whether you want to or not. Joanna's story begins more than three decades ago, in the last days of the twentieth century, and I know it as well as I knew her.

 • • • 

At the beginning of this story Joanna, or Tigger, as her friends called her, was of a certain age: the age at which a woman starts lying to both herself and others. It wasn't a question of vanity, pride, or even professional necessity. It was a question of survival. Up until now Tigger had only ever experienced relationships that would run for two years or so and then either the man or Tigger would suddenly leave. In those days she was, as she told me with that wry, crooked smile of hers, a serial monogamist with an attention deficit disorder. A bed-hopping heartbreaker who'd had her heart broken, she'd say, smiling a little sadly. It was hard to believe—it wasn't the woman I'd known—but I suspect that when Tigger was young she misused the power of her own allure and squandered it in reckless choices. I never made that mistake, but I digress.

At the start of my story Tigger's habitual restlessness had gone on for over two decades, although lately she'd begun to notice that it was more the men leaving her than her leaving the men. To make matters worse they all seemed to go on to successful long-term relationships straight after her, as if living with her was the catalyst for them to go running into marriage with another woman. She had convinced herself that the last one to leave had been the great love of her life, or at the very least the only man she'd ever truly loved up until that point in her life. She had certainly not fallen out of lust with him, or been driven away by boredom, as had happened with so many before him. Nevertheless he had abruptly left her for a younger woman and, even more mortifying, a single mother.

Tigger still hadn't got over the shock. His sudden departure, and even more wrenching absence, had robbed her of not only her self-esteem but also the possibility of ever having children. Even if she fell in love tomorrow, she wasn't about to have children with someone she hadn't known for at least two years, by which time she would definitely be perimenopausal, and she had no intention of ever becoming a single mother (having been brought up by one); adoption was not an option, as she was too old. At the time it did appear a very barren horizon. And no matter how she shrugged off this fact to her friends—usually with a pinch of self-deprecating humor—this decline of fertility had affected Tigger's perception of her own sexual charisma.

It was, she told herself, gazing down at her long white naked body, as if the juice had suddenly gone from the fruit, or so she told me. Cupping her breasts in her hands, she would weigh them carefully each morning, trying to guess whether her voluptuousness was diminishing or increasing with age. It wasn't a rational obsession, but then, as she explained to me, nothing before or after menopause is ever rational. And despite this obsessive scrutiny of her body and loss of confidence, it wasn't as if she was less lusty. Quite the reverse, in fact, Tigger observed, wondering if the sexual poise and emotional courage one gains with age was in inverse proportion to the dwindling amount of sex one actually gets as one gets older—especially as a woman. Sighing, she would pluck out another gray pubic hair and console herself with the fact that at least she looked younger than her real age.

Tigger was blessed genetically—neither of her siblings remotely looked their age either—and she had kept slim, although staying fit was taking up an increasingly greater portion of her time. She was an attractive woman in an interesting, strong-faced sort of way, and I would challenge anyone to argue otherwise. But what Tigger had that elevated her above other women was physical grace: however unconventionally pretty she was, when Tigger moved it was profoundly erotic. The woman didn't walk so much as flow, as if she were water shifting from one point in the room to another, or an assemblage of fluid molecules seamlessly gliding through space. She had always moved like this, and the best of it was that she was completely unaware of the effect it had on men. It was this that got her noticed at parties, at bars, at conventions, at the lecture podium, even in crowded airport lounges. Motionless she was almost invisible, but as soon as her weight shifted upward and she tilted forward on a trajectory, it was as if a wonderful unfurling mass of silver mercury had been unleashed upon the world. Watching her reminded men of their potential: of the smell of the air after rain, of the times when their thighs burned and it was still wondrous to feel stubble on their chin, of the first time they had entered a woman. Let me tell you, Tigger walking awoke a sexual joy that made all men feel young again.

Even in her midforties Tigger still had this grace. And if she was feeling a little more invisible at the time of this story, it was purely because she thought she was. In truth, men still noticed her, but Tigger had stopped noticing them. She had convinced herself no one would want her anymore. How wrong could she be?

In those days Tigger was a lecturer at Sydney University in the anthropology department. She was good, one of those rare teachers who didn't just inspire but who seemed to be able to envisage a whole gleaming future for a favorite student; she was an alchemist of hope. But in truth, she confessed to me once that she'd sacrificed her own dreams years before. She'd wanted to be one of those popular human science television presenters, someone who might be seen striding through an Amazon forest or along a Polynesian beach while talking enthusiastically to the camera about ancient tribes or colonial travesties. Eventually she'd channeled her ambition into academia instead, and by forty she was already a senior lecturer with tenure, her own terrace in Paddington, and hordes of eager young anthropology students who respected (and occasionally lusted after) her. A gregarious individual, a giver, she was famous for her optimistic and sunny nature. And God, did I love her for that.

But back then she'd begun to feel as if this ability to exude friendliness and her desire to smile back had taken on an independent life of its own. Sometimes she told me she even felt as if she were possessed. Often, after teaching for eight hours straight, enthusing her students with the same stories, historical records, and images she'd used year in and year out, staying on her feet, reassuring anxious students, counseling those who felt she was more approachable than others in the department, Tigger would collapse at the end of the day, overwhelmed by a desire to be thoroughly nasty or at least honestly indifferent to somebody else's needs. The sensation would surge through her like a sudden influx of hormones, and nothing except a punching match with a pillow or a screaming match with the television would alleviate the feeling. In her darkest moments she wondered whether the last ex had sensed this repressed aspect of her personality: the disingenuousness of nice. Was this why he and all the other men had left her?

It was after a conference of international anthropologists that she'd both organized and fronted at the university, a conference that had deteriorated into a series of petty debates on nuances of reportage, leaving her both exhausted and disillusioned, that Tigger decided she needed a change, or at least an affair—failing that, a one-night stand. She'd told me she'd been determined to lose herself in any way possible, even if it meant behaving uncharacteristically. That very night Tigger booked a flight to Melbourne to visit her closest friend, Elise, an installation artist.

 • • • 

In Melbourne's CBD in the late 1990s, there was a miniature facsimile of Paris, or at least what Melburnians liked to imagine was a facsimile of Paris. It had evolved in the center of the city from an old nineteenth-century warren of narrow lanes that had somehow avoided urban development. And the whimsical old-world atmosphere had inspired a couple of young entrepreneurs to set up cafés along the gray stone streets, capitalizing on the influx of young artists who had rented cheap office space for studios above the narrow labyrinth.

Gradually tables and chairs outside the cafés had hijacked the pavement altogether; filled with customers, they spilled out into the lanes like an overbooked wedding reception. Along with the cafés and a government push to encourage residential living within the city, a plethora of tiny bars had sprung up like errant nocturnal fungi, illuminated only at night and accessible only to those in the know—in other words, the young, artistic, and extremely hip. In actual fact the bars and cafés were more reminiscent of Barcelona or Bilbao than Paris, the confined imaginative spaces they occupied often so cramped that people became as familiar with each other as family. But then Melburnians, in their cultural elitism, preferred the Parisian association.

Since her divorce Elise, Tigger's artist friend, had become an honorary grande dame of this bar scene; her rarefied and highly aesthetic installations provided a counterbalance to the fast, bold graffiti art and photomontage of many of the younger patrons. Elise also had a passion for younger men, a propensity resulting from the fact that the last time she had been single and hunting she had been much younger.

Elise had been married for seventeen years, from her twenties to her late thirties, and had emerged on the other side of the marriage with the same erotic gaze she had entered it with; her eye hadn't caught up with her biological age. Her utter indifference to any societal disapproval of this aspect of her character was admirable and a sign of a true maverick. Tigger envied Elise's cavalier attitude. Secretly Tigger had always felt confined by her own sexual conservatism, constrained by the inherited mores of her middle-class mother. No one but I ever knew that, but as I explained before, by the end of our relationship we were as close as identical twins.

There were things Tigger should have done when she was younger but didn't—unfulfilled erotic fantasies that had grown over the years to bloom suddenly, unexpectedly, in her dreams. Now she was frightened that if she didn't act on them they would haunt her for the rest of her life. It was, she later confessed to me, as if something was driving her to act, to shake up and even destroy the pattern of her life up to that point. Maybe it was a midlife crisis. Maybe it was a reaction to her last relationship breakdown, but whatever it was I shall be eternally grateful.

And so Tigger set out that night with Elise leading the way, both of them dressed to seduce as they advanced upon the various bars Elise knew would be populated by eager young men also indifferent to social orthodoxy. They started the evening with an exhibition opening. It was summer and the evening was warm, one of those languid, stretched-out evenings in which the air is laced with possibility. I seem to remember a full moon that had risen early, a faint silver ghost twin to the setting sun. The actual opening was in a small passage off Flinders Lane, one blind alley hung with light boxes and chipboards painted with graffiti. Gazing up at the old stone walls punctuated by these windows of illumination, Tigger wondered whether this was art. She was infinitely more conservative about these matters than Elise. But it was pretty, she remembered thinking of one particular work, a light box displaying a photograph of the sun setting behind an endless sea of red earth—no doubt the Nullarbor Plain. The light box itself grew more and more luminous as the actual sun set behind the tall buildings. It was intriguing, this small, increasingly intense portal into the huge, hollow landscape of the continent, hung as it was on a gray stone wall in a narrow lane that, by contrast, felt claustrophobic. Tigger wasn't sure where she would rather have been—Melbourne or the great interior desert. Either way the light box had begun to feel like a metaphor for hope, but then Tigger wasn't completely sure this wasn't the effect of the two margaritas she'd drunk.

A small café run by a couple of very handsome young Italian-Australians, fiercely proud of the authenticity of the Italian coffee and pastries they served, was hosting the opening. A multitude of young people clustered self-consciously, leaning against the walls smoking or sitting on the milk crates grouped around the canopy of the café, plastic beakers filled with cheap Australian champagne clasped awkwardly in their hands. Mainly art students, some looked as young as eighteen, and the eclecticism of their vintage clothes married with a neo-gothic punk style reminded Tigger of her own youth—a direct mirror reflection of the clothes she wore as a student in the streets of Melbourne almost twenty-five years earlier. She told me it was a strange feeling, as if time had momentarily folded in on itself, and staring at these young people, the look of which had been so familiar to her when she'd been eighteen, made her forget her true age, made her eighteen again. But that was Tigger, acutely empathetic to the point of taking on the persona of those she observed. This was another reason I fell in love with her, but again I digress. . . .

It wasn't just art students at this open-air exhibition. There were a few older patrons of the cafés, as well as art buyers and the odd art gallery owner. This diverse crowd mingled and broke up into knots of vivaciously chatting people, hands flying passionately, cigarette smoke twisting up toward the strip of sky above, as interwoven as the conversations and flirtations. All the while Tigger, my Tigger, looked on with a certain ironic distance, perched on a milk crate, margarita in hand.

Melbourne is a small city—or large town, depending on whom you ask and their particular world view. But there was one truth that was indisputable: most people knew each other, and a good number had slept with each other or were sleeping with each other or would eventually sleep with each other, which made for a certain relaxed intimacy. And in those days, no matter how Melbourne might have assumed it had evolved in cultural sophistication, architectural beauty, or culinary superiority, it had remained a large town that hungered for the vitality and rejuvenation of fresh blood. Gleaning a certain veiled curiosity about her, Tigger realized she had been away long enough for people not to recognize her. She was, indeed, fresh blood; this gave her a certain cachet, and, as she later confessed to me, ladies of a certain age know that they need as much cachet as they can muster.