He says, “It’s a long story.”
“Let’s hear it,” says Rod easily, as if they’re sitting on the living room floor in their shabby terrace, a small bag of weed and a family-sized pizza box on the floor next to them.
Everything has changed and nothing has changed at all. Leo is filled with equal parts terrible regret for the time they have lost and sweet relief for the time they will hopefully have again.
He presses his phone hard against his ear. “It’s so good to hear your voice, mate.”
There is another pause, long enough for Leo to wonder if they’ve been cut off, and then Rod says, and he sounds a little congested, “Likewise.”
Chapter 93
It’s a strange experience to be married to someone who dislikes you but loves your body.
I do not recommend it.
It took me a long time to understand this. I don’t know if David ever understood it about himself. It probably wasn’t good for him either. Perhaps he tried to resist his feelings. Perhaps he woke each morning and told himself, I will not find her annoying, just as I woke each morning and thought, I will not be annoying.
I think this kind of relationship is only possible when you are young enough to fully inhabit your body. When you are older there is more separation between yourself and your physicality. Your body lets you down, it creaks and cracks and aches, it often feels unfamiliar, but back then my body was me, and his body was him, and if our bodies loved each other, that was enough.
Although, of course, it wasn’t.
He was never cruel. Perhaps if his feelings had been articulated more specifically, I would have understood sooner the fundamental truth: This man simply does not like me.
When you live with someone who dislikes you in a mostly unspecified way, you begin to dislike yourself too, especially if you are someone, like me, whose self-esteem, at least regarding my personality, has never been high. A different person, a stronger person, would not have allowed her sense of self to be blown away like grains of sand in the brisk winds of Perth.
Perth is one of the windiest cities in the world.
Sometimes, even now, if I feel a hot dry wind, that strange time in my life comes back to me in choppy fragments, the same way a scent creates an instant memory.
Living at Beachside Blue was a little like time spent in a cult. As residents, we had our own culture, our own customs and practices. Nobody had children, and everyone was in their twenties and had come from somewhere else. Our families and childhoods were far away.
The Friday-night rooftop parties were like ceremonies: intense and dreamlike.
They began just before sunset. There were no skyscrapers around us. The sky and the sea were ours, and the alcohol hit our bloodstreams at the same time as the sun set.
Growing up on the east coast, I had seen pale pink-blue sunrises over the Pacific Ocean, but I had never witnessed the symphonic magnificence of the sun sinking over the Indian Ocean, turning it indigo and the light a molten gold. Being up on that roof as the colors spread like spilled paint across the sky was both sensual and spiritual, like being ravaged by God.
I’m sorry, Grandma, for that blasphemous remark, but that’s how it felt.
Or perhaps it was just drunkenness, because, like many an unwilling party attendee before me, I discovered the solution to feeling awkward was to drink as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Not only did the awkwardness vanish but David much preferred me that way. Drinking improved my personality. I was not so uptight.
Before I’d moved to Perth, I’d been tipsy, but never drunk. I did not know a room could spin. I did not know you could wake up with unexplained bruises all over your legs and black nightmarish spots in your memory.
I drank Bacardi and Coke, vodka and orange, Tequila Sunrises and Harvey Wallbangers. Galliano was big at the time. The only food was bags of potato chips and pretzels. There was always plenty of beer, cheap wine, no soft drinks, no water. We didn’t really drink water back then the way people do now. Most people smoked. There were drugs. The host was not required to provide them, but somebody always had something, of good quality, because most of the residents were medical professionals. I didn’t bother with the drugs; alcohol did the trick.
We sank rows of empty bottles and cans into the gray dirt of a long-since-abandoned garden bed as if we were planting them. Three empty Eskies were lined up against a wall, and when it was your turn to host you had to fill them with ice and alcohol. (It sounds so silly now, but it felt so important at the time: this vital curating of the alcohol.)
A previous resident had hung colored Christmas lights around the edge of the terrace so that once the night turned dark people’s faces were flecked with color. Someone’s old portable cassette player remained permanently on the deck, and if you were hosting you were DJ for the night and brought along a selection of cassettes.
There was dancing. As you know, I can’t dance, but when I was drunk enough I could sway on the spot in a way that one of the doctors told me was “mesmerizing.”
There was a lot of flirting. David liked it when other men paid attention to me. He told me to read people’s palms and I did. I pretended to read them, anyway. I could never really see their palms in the shadowy light. One night Stella and I kissed, cheered on by our partners and everyone else. I didn’t enjoy it. She tasted of pretzels. I’ve never liked pretzels.
On very hot nights there was a plastic children’s wading pool to cool your feet, or your whole self if you chose or slipped or were pushed. On very cold nights we lit a fire in a gallon drum.
People sat on the low brick edge of the balcony, their backs to the sea. There was no railing. It would never be allowed now. It was inviting trouble. I had a recurring vision of two people falling. One grabbing at the other’s T-shirt sleeve. Both disappearing into the night. The drunker I got, the more I talked about this vision. Everyone knew my mother was a “famous” fortune teller, so it was a running joke that Cherry was predicting deaths, which made the men pretend to lose their balance, tipping their bodies back as far as they dared, which made the women scream, which made them do it even more.
Did I love those parties or did I hate them?
It’s not clear. Each one felt like a fever dream. I guess the simple answer is I both loved and hated them.
At the end of each party David and I would lurch down the flight of stairs to our apartment, fall into bed, and have sex. It never got stale. It was often very angry sex. To be frank, and once again I apologize for being vulgar, the angrier we got, the better it got. It was like we were punishing each other for I don’t know what. For our behavior at the party? For not being different people? For our aggravating habits?
I know I was aggravating.
For example, when I looked for something in my handbag, I bent my head into the bag to find the missing item, and in doing so I appeared like a “dithery old lady.” When I sneezed, I made a squeaky sound, like this: eee! eee! eee! Nobody should sneeze like that. When I cleaned my teeth I tapped my toothbrush on the side of the basin multiple times. Once was enough. When I ran into the ocean I held my arms up like chicken wings. This made me look deranged. When I woke each morning I cleared my throat far more often than the average person. When I locked the apartment door I always forgot which way to turn it, and hence turned it the wrong way before I remembered the right way, and this was aggravating to witness. My taste in music and in fact all forms of popular culture was boringly mainstream, my underwear insufficiently sexy, my repartee insufficiently witty. I sometimes tried to be funny and I was not. David was witty. I was not. I should never try to be witty or funny. It was embarrassing to myself and to all.
I could go on, but I won’t.
Gosh.
I see now that David’s dislike was articulated quite specifically on numerous occasions! Or perhaps these were just quibbles, normal in any relationship, and the fact that I remember them all these years later is evidence of my overly sensitive nature, which was also annoying.
I do know my mother, who loved me very much, was also aggravated by my throat-clearing in the morning, but her annoyance was never laced with acid-like contempt.
You may wonder why none of this came out that first year in Wahroonga, where I assume I sneezed, tapped my toothbrush, cleared my throat, tried to be funny, et cetera. I think it was to do with his parents. David loved his parents, and his parents loved me. Hence, I was more lovable. Once we were out of the dappled green light of Wahroonga, and in the exposed fierce light of that white-walled apartment in Perth, David could see me more clearly.
Never mind. It wasn’t all bad. I was very happy with my new job! I got a position at the Perth branch of the Australian Taxation Office. I worked in data matching in a team of mostly men. It was interesting because—
