A Short History of Richard Kline (9 page)

To begin with I saw Sarah once a week, every Monday evening after work, and then once a fortnight, and then more irregularly. And it seemed to help. Not in any dramatic way but with each visit some kind of minor catharsis took place, some discharge of toxic energy or emotions. I joked with her that she was a sixteenth-century physician of the psyche, that she bled me with invisible leeches, that she saw to it that I was opened up just enough to leak out enough of my angst, my black blood, to keep the circulation moving, to stop all the circuits congealing up with the thick bile of despair, the grey clag of sadness. It was, I imagined, a bit like being on a kidney machine, like having your psychic blood rinsed.

One evening I found myself rambling on about Leni and the villa. For a long time Sarah listened, and then: ‘Were you attracted to Leni?'

‘Not sexually. She wasn't my type. Too skinny. And obsessive.'

‘But she made an impression on you, obviously.'

‘She sought perfection. In everything. I'd never met anyone before who was so uncompromising about it. And thought it possible to achieve.'

‘You admired her?'

‘Yes and no. I felt a kind of weird kinship with her, but I felt she was barking up the wrong tree.'

‘And what would be the right tree?'

This was one of those times when I was lying on the mat, staring up at the ceiling. I turned towards Sarah, who was kneeling above me, sitting back on her haunches like a relaxed muse. ‘If I knew that,' I said, ‘I wouldn't be here.'

‘From what you say, it sounds like Leni was simply trying to create beauty, and unlike most of us she had the means to do it.'

I knew that. I wasn't a clod. I had no objection to beauty; it was a worthwhile project. I had no objection to comfort either, as in Jim's London office, the converted warehouse. I had loved working there. Every morning that I walked into the atrium of that building I felt my spirit quicken. There was a lot to be said for a personal barista.

But talking about Leni was a dead end. I wanted to ask Sarah about my recurring dream, about the woman and the baby. ‘Why the baby?'

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘In some schools of thought the baby is said to represent the self.'

‘So the baby is me?'

She smiled, mischievously. ‘Maybe. Some dream therapists believe that everyone in the dream is you: the baby, the woman, even the water. You can see the logic of this. If it's coming out of
your
brain,
your
mind, it must be you, all of it.
You
create the dream.'

‘What do you think?'

‘I think it's possible to pay too much attention to dreams. If you wake up and the meaning is clear, then listen to it. If not, forget about it.'

In later years I would come to think of Sarah as a kind of transient angel in my life, someone I had the luck to find when I needed her. In some way I have never quite comprehended, she kept me from drifting heedlessly over the edge. She didn't ‘cure' me but she stopped me from becoming more careless and self-destructive. It was a conservation phase, a shoring-up of the best of what was already there.

Of course we had dealt with ‘issues': my emotionally remote father, for one. Didn't everyone have one of these? I had asked.

‘I'm not treating everyone,' she had said, ‘I'm treating you.'

Whenever I attempted to generalise she would always pull me up and bring me back to myself; what
I
experienced, what
I
felt. I could see the logic of it.

But what I was to recall later, in the light of subsequent events, was the time I told her about my inability to cry. She had looked at me in amazement. ‘You can't recall a time when you cried as a small boy?'

‘No.'

‘Never?'

‘Not that I remember.' What I remembered was being caned at school and standing alongside other boys, and how they had cried and I hadn't, and how elated I had been at the hardness of my heart. Whatever else they did to me, they could not reach me there.

Sarah shook her head.

‘I've wanted to cry, many times. But I just can't do it. I remember once, when I was nineteen, this girl dumped me. I felt I was on the edge of tears, and when they wouldn't come I put my fist through a wall.'

‘A
wall
?'

‘It was plasterboard.'

Sarah was silent for a while. Then she tapped me lightly on the arm. ‘Don't worry,' she said, ‘Tears will come in their own good time.'

ground zero

He met her at The Basement late one Friday night when he was having a drink there with a friend. Then, exactly a week, later he bumped into her at a jazz festival at The Wharf.

‘I know you,' he said.

‘Zoe,' she replied. ‘Zoe Mazengarb.'

She was small and dark and earthy, and he was transfixed. Although a little heavy in the hips, she had an exquisite waist and within minutes of their meeting she had made him laugh. Later, over a drink, he learned that she was a social worker at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital but more on the managerial side, and he sensed that she was grounded, a woman who might be able to shake him out of his periodic torpor. There was something about her demeanour that suggested reserve, propriety, but in fact they made love on the night of the first date and the sex was good from the start.

It wasn't a grand passion; in truth he had never known one, and for all that he had had his share of infatuations, they tended to dissolve with intimacy. But Zoe and he were a fit. Whenever he saw her he felt a sense of relief, as if, at last, he was where he should be: in the right place. And there was trust. Zoe was straightforward, honest in all her responses, unlike Jo, who had been avid one minute, cool the next, always nurturing some unspoken resentment. The fact that Zoe seemed uncomplicated was a large part of her appeal. After all, wasn't he complicated enough for both of them? Jo had been soulful and highly strung, and what at first had seemed fascinating and romantic had become, in the routine of day-to-day living, both enervating and unsettling. The ground was always sliding out from under him in tiresome and hysterical ways. Zoe was more fixed. She was practical, well organised and athletic. She would be loyal and dependable, and in the protective aura of her common sense he would be relieved of his angst.

Summer came early and they began to spend their weekends at the beach. He found himself basking in the mindlessness of it: this was how life should be. In the past he had wanted too much, made things too complicated.

And there was something else. Zoe had a warm family who welcomed him into their comfortable home, and he was especially drawn to her father, Joe Mazengarb. Rick had never met an older man who was so engaging and demonstrative, or such a vibrant and energetic talker. Joe was also a great and cynical reader, a kind of wily
littérateur
who liked to quote from the classics.

The two men began to play squash together every week in an edgily competitive way. Joe was small and lean and fit, with cropped hair and a black, close-trimmed beard with so little grey in it that Rick wondered if he dyed it out of vanity. For Joe was vain, meticulously tailored and, unlike many men, not afraid of colour, being especially fond of a bright red cardigan that Zoe had given him.

In some ways Joe was the kind of man Rick had once aspired to be: prosperous, successful, comfortable in his cynicism. His worldliness was seductive. Joe had a way of taking liberties with any room he happened to be in. If he dropped in on Rick at his office (they worked within a block of one another), he would stub the butt of his cigar out in the paperclip tray on the desk. At home it would be the tea tray, sometimes even the soil of his wife's bonsai maple that sat in the middle of their coffee table. If they met in a restaurant, Joe treated it as his private club. He had a kind of man-of-the-world ease and assumption of privilege that Rick envied, and he wanted to fathom it. No-one, he felt, could be that sure of himself. Beneath that suave surface there must be some self-doubt.

The rapport between the two men had been instant. Each recognised in the other a common apprehension that life was absurd, only in Joe's perception it was comically absurd, in Rick's more gloomily so. Joe was particularly fond of telling stories of idealists who had got it all wrong, utopian dreamers who had made a mess of things. In this way he liked to demonstrate his superiority as a hard-nosed thinker and rationalist. As a litigation solicitor, he was full of stories so preposterous they could only be true, but these amused him less than the follies of those he thought of, and tended to disparage, as ‘dreamers'. When Zoe and Rick came over for dinner on a Sunday evening Joe would wait until Zoe and her mother, Sally, were exchanging confidences in the kitchen, and then he would get out the whisky and draw Rick into some long and rambling narrative that only ever had the one moral point: to illustrate the comic pathos of that absurd animal, Man.

On one of these occasions, Joe was keen to discuss a book he had just read, a biography of Byron. He relished the story of Byron's efforts to bury the body of his friend Shelley on a beach in Italy, for it had proved to be exactly the kind of absurd theatre of delusion that excited him. Shelley had drowned at sea when his yacht was caught in a storm, and, soon after, his body was buried unceremoniously on the beach where it had washed up. But his friends, Byron among them, wanted to stage a burial befitting a poet. In imitation of the ancient Greeks, Joe explained, they had a pyre made by a blacksmith in a nearby village. They carted it to the beach, where they erected it on the sand and stacked it with wood. Next they dug Shelley's corpse up out of its sandy grave, and it was a gruesome sight, for the face had turned dark blue from the effect of the lime. They laid the body on the pyre, poured oil and wine over it, and lit the flames. Then they stood and watched as it burned, and Joe was graphic in his description of how the skull had cracked open and the brains had boiled as if in a cauldron. (Byron proved to have a weak stomach and rushed into the sea to throw up.)

Finally, when the body had been reduced to grey ash, the onlookers found to their great surprise that the heart had refused to burn. Reaching into the fire, one of them snatched it from the coals and put it in his pocket to preserve for posterity. This, said Joe, gave rise to a romantic legend that the poet's heart was indestructible, but the joke was on the onlookers. It couldn't have been the heart that wouldn't burn – it would have been the liver, gorged with stale and useless blood and too liquid to ignite.

‘All that palaver about the liver,' Joe exclaimed with satisfaction. ‘How romantic is that! These men of letters, they weren't anatomists, they got things wrong.' And he banged the coffee table, lightly, with an open palm, so that the bonsai trembled. ‘It's a category mistake made by all romantics. I call it the liver syndrome.'

This story gave rise to one of Joe's scornful epithets. Anything deluded he would dismiss by saying, ‘We're dealing with liver syndrome here,' or, ‘Sounds a bit liverish to me.' Rick was not entirely in sympathy with this line of thought, but on the other hand, he asked himself, how many fathers-in-law read biographies of Byron? At least Joe didn't talk about his investments or his golf handicap.

As Zoe and Rick spent more time together, he resolved to tell her about his black moods. It would be a test of their relationship because in essence he would be owning up to who he really was, and this was tantamount to issuing a warning: if she decided to love him, all was not going to be sweetness and light.

Her reaction pleased him. She told him how as a girl of fifteen she had been troubled for a whole year that her life would never make sense. But in time she had found her role as a manager. She could create order, it was her gift, and if nothing else, she could make her part of the world function from one day to the next. It was as if something clicked into place. She had no trouble giving orders and exercising authority; it came to her naturally, and others accepted what she said. Rather than her father's flamboyant and somewhat theatrical displays of conviction, she had her mother's steady self-possession, a quiet authority. And she'd learned that the thing to do was not to ask the big questions – what is the significance of this in the evolution of the universe? – but to concentrate on the small. How can I fix this problem in front of me now? And more often than not, she
could
fix the problem, or fix it enough for things to work, or go on working until, as she put it, someone came up with a better idea. She was, in short, free of the taint of perfectionism.

He decided she was the sanest person he had met.

A year later, they were married in Joe and Sally's garden. The ceremony was simple and there was an unlikely last-minute guest at the wedding – Jim Hagen. Jim had emailed to say he was flying in for a lightning tour of the outback – ‘keen to see your big red rock' – and maybe they could meet up.

Rick was pleased to hear from Jim, and curious. He wondered how Jim would look: would he still bear the marks of grief? But no, there he was, his old self, lean and manic and accompanied by his fourth wife, Birgit, who was Danish. Did he still have the villa? Rick asked. No, said Jim, he had sold it after Leni's death. The villa was for Leni. But he knew how much Rick had ‘loved the place' (where did he get that idea?) and as a wedding gift had brought him a valuable eighteenth-century engraving of the villa, which Leni had acquired. ‘You always took an interest,' he said. And Rick was touched; until the day he died, Jim would be a surprising man.

Later, as Zoe examined the lithograph, she turned it over and found there was some writing on the back: ‘As close to heaven as heaven can be.' Rick recognised the handwriting; it was Jim's.

‘What does he mean by that?' Zoe asked.

‘We never figured that out,' he said. But the engraving of the villa spooked him, and he wrapped it in an old yellow blanket and propped it against the back wall of the garage.

In the early years of marriage to Zoe he felt normal. Often the words would come to him: this is how life should be. At first the fires of the body burned bright, until in time the sex became more or less routine, as it always did, the flames reduced to gently glowing coals. But that was okay; he was older now, he had a more mature perspective on things, and he knew better than to think an endless pursuit of the flame, the hot flaring moment, was going to lead him anywhere new. And he loved his wife, and trusted her in a way he had not been able to trust any other woman. She had grown to know of his black moods, of the brooding and withdrawn silences that cast a grey blanket over the house, but she was an active woman and at these times, instead of badgering him, she simply got on with her life and left him to it.

And then something else came into the equation. His son was born, stirring in him an attachment he had not been able to imagine. For years he had resisted this yoke, but when it came his surrender was sudden and complete. He knew the moment he set eyes on that bloodied little body that he would never leave Luke, and that some new configuration of odds had come into his life. Clearly not all men felt this way or they wouldn't abandon their children, but something else must be going on there, some other kind of pain or blight on the soul that he had escaped. There had been moments before Luke was born when he had asked himself: how do people bear their lives? Not only their own misery, but also the misery of the world they looked out on? Then he became a father and the answer was given.

Not that he had wanted to have children: on the contrary. He knew that once he had a child, things would never be the same; it (the child) would become painfully wedged in his psyche like a troublesome diamond, a golden thorn in the heart. But he had been able only to imagine the drawbacks: the responsibility, the relentless presence, the constraints, the anxiety, the potential for loss. What he couldn't imagine was the sheer animal pleasure of cradling that little body, the smell of him, the early perfection of the bud – and he
was
perfection, he was unmarred, which was just as well, because Rick knew he didn't have the generosity of spirit to love anything less.