Australian Love Stories (20 page)

Outside, among the photographers, a line of dressed up people wait, wishing they were inside, wishing they were us. In the fluorescence of the valet parking bay, Bette and I plot to be elsewhere. She tells me there's a happening downtown.

‘A
happening
?' I ask. ‘Do people still say that?'

‘Irony,' she says. ‘Remember?' Then she tells me Rhona Kagan's reading, just to piss me off. Rhona in her Topanga Canyon gypsy hideout, working for weeks and churning out New Yorker stories when I've been fritzing about down here like a circus rat.

I get in poor Sinbad, wondering if I'm losing things, like irony or humour generally. The sensation of sinking into a swamp, but I'm actually bouncing up Highland, following Bette in her seventies purple Bug convertible, onto the litter-blown Hollywood Freeway. Foggy at night in April, the tarmac blistered like a set from
Children of Men
. Sinbad rattles about me valiantly; it knows it's important for me to have my own car, to be able to change my mind. Like Bette, who lives in a wood panelled Airstream caravan parked in her girlfriend's driveway—she can escape any time.

Bette drives like she's on the verge of flight, an iridescent scarf out taut and high like it might get caught on the wing of a low flying plane or do an Isadora Duncan. Then I think of Arthur alone at the post-awards dinner, how I've disappeared again with no excuse.

I loved him once, back when he was young and I was younger, when we'd go to the flea markets, before he imported his chairs from Paris or Buenos Aires. The sweet, vulnerable awkwardness of him. I was the most real I've ever been, almost secure and on the verge of optimism. Back when I was fun.

A small white shape, a kettle, no, a cat. Its eyes glint in the car lights, stone-still along the verge. I don't even like cats but I don't think it's dead, just crouching with its tail wrapped around itself among the paper cups and rubbish. It brings on an old stricken feeling. Memories paved over like parking lots. Sadie, my border collie pup, left by my father at the feed-store. I searched for days, on my own, for nothing. It has me pulling over, losing Bette in the river of tail lights.

A tractor-trailer whips by and makes the car shudder. I watch in the rear view mirror, wait for the cat to run out and be carnage, but all I make out is myself. Like I'm someone on board
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
. It's me become feral, not just the words in my studio on the thin billfold of pages. I remember the Rhona Kagan story, the Long Island girl being driven around by her crazy mother in the night, picking up wounded animals on the dark expressway.

I clamber over the gearstick and get out the passenger door and stare. The cat stares back as I approach. In shock, maybe, or does he think he's invisible? Los Angeles traffic just feet from me, honking. This is what deranged people do. An echo splits the air above us. Firecrackers. Hollywood
cholos
in their secret world of exits and overpasses. But this cat is like a china statue. Maybe he's deaf or hibernating in shadow.
You're too white for that, little man.
I slip out of Arthur's jacket and kneel, gingerly enfold him. A faint mewl as I wrap him; he doesn't struggle. As if he knew I would come. I wonder if Marvel knew Arthur would come.

Carrying the wrapped cat back to the car, I think of the feral kitten I caught as a boy that bit a hole right through my
thumbnail. I hold the foundling close and wait for claws and panic, but the coat is reverberating with the low vibration of purring.

He likes me.

From the passenger seat he looks over, nestled in the Dries Van Noten jacket. Shedding on it. As we drift off the freeway, he searches up at me with translucent amber eyes. Fur soft and white as an astrakhan pelt.
How are you so clean?
So white, I want to call him Merwin, the laureate poet who lives in Hawaii with the mane of silken hair. As I reach over to stroke my purring friend, I wonder if he's been thrown from a car. Do people actually do that? He sits like some miracle, placid as a pale fur hat; he doesn't freak at the world outside, the passing shadows on Franklin, untrimmed palms bearded like tribesman, guarding the Scientologists in their ‘Celebrity Centre'. Harbouring wannabe Travoltas and little Tom Cruises. Worlds within weird worlds.

The cat arches up and I notice a smudge on the top of his head, the shape of a dusty grey yarmulke.

‘Moses,' I say. Because I found him. ‘You're Moses of the Freeway.'

The air in my studio hangs in slabs of darkness. The cat's already lapped up all my Organic Valley chocolate milk. Now he sleeps like a babe on my daybed, white against Arthur's coat. No one knows we're home.

I sit in my low, dimpled Victorian chair, watch out into the Hollywood night and try to conjure the coming out stories that my hawkeyed agent wants. I search for motes of a story behind my eyelids. Sitting here at this computer, all I want really is to
type in my two favourite words and get swept up in the bowels of the cyber burrow, move back to
Bareback City
. Inebriate my spirit.

Why can't I just hold my breath, or breathe more easily, wait for the vein of my voice? Why can't I be in love? Arthur worships me, invests in me for God's sake. He holds me close and gives me space, he found that scary little Del Mar agent in the first place.

I thought writing would be as advertised—
like sitting up with the dying, a room you enter with dread and hold the patient's hand.
Didn't realize I'd have to sit up with myself. Of course, Marta advised sandalwood candles and bubble baths, a page a day, a story at a time, but what does she know about that shit. Rhona's got slain freeway dogs, their bloody-haunch stains on a ribbed Rambler seat.

The cat yawns at me as I take my yellow pencil and my blank brown
Telemundo
notebook.

I am not Australian.

I grew up on a poultry farm outside Ventura.

The line of words falls soft and clean across the page.

I reinvented myself.

For Arthur.

The words I've never spoken.

I have no slain-koala memories, just a mother with lumbago in a folding chair on a hot veranda, a father's bags packed in the drive. A child stunned silent for what seemed like a year, home alone in a hot Ventura sandpit, an oleander hedge. A mother
smoking in a fuming silence of her own. Eventually she said: ‘A rat gets caught in its own trap.'

But she was the one stuck at the sitting room window, waiting.

I look over at Moses and wonder.
What's wrong with me?
It's Arthur likes cats. He desperately wanted a Burmese but I wouldn't let him. My grand aversion to gay men with cats. They bring out my inner homophobe. Worse than that real estate couple who parade about with their pair of Miniature Pinschers.

The silhouette of Aviva Borenstein, Arthur's mother, emerges in the living room window. Arthur with hair in a bun. She travelled overnight on the pilgrimage Greyhound from San Antonio. Can't fly with the oxygen tank but she's walking with the babe held close, the extension from the tank an umbilical shadow, framed by pampas grass outside. The brilliant redorange swirls of the Jackson Pollock on the wall. So enthralled with the child she doesn't see me. The final hours before the bris. Marvel in those unsteady arms, unaware his tiny Honduran feet will be strapped to a table for the lesbian rabbi to slide a metal ring over his
weho
until the circulation cuts off. As if children don't remember.

Marta warned me, her voice always inside my head.
All you really want is to be held, but you seek it from those who need holding themselves
. ‘What about Arthur?' I asked.

The cat stands and stretches so I go over and pick him up, scratch under his fluffed white chin. He's still chilly, so I swaddle him back in Arthur's coat, a pinstripe papoose. I pick him up. ‘Arthur's not stupid,' I tell him. He knows couples' counselling is the beginning of all goodbyes. Arthur who does the cooking and now I wash up. I used to play the old game: ‘If you want to
adopt, you have to wash up.' But that game's over. He's called my bluff. He's still keen to visit my family farm in Gippsland, the old Victorian homestead with a tiled veranda all round, and horses, views out over the Hereford cattle. Maybe he knows that history doesn't exist.

Moses lifts his head to look as the Boxster swerves up through the dark and parks with its lights to the garage. Moses is not deaf.

Arthur slumps against the wheel for a moment, before he gets out. Standing there, ruddy-faced in the neon lamplight, his bow tie undone, beholding the stark shape of Aviva through the window, his child enveloped in grandmotherly arms, but he doesn't go in. He removes a wrapped up thing, probably from the silent auction, a thanks to his nightmare of a mother.

He's flush with drink as usual and, as he tears at the tape, lacquered strands of his hair swing up. He pulls another swath of brown paper free. The delicate half-turned face of Rosa Parks, her placid eyes as if seeing through the dark, through me.

Arthur looks over and spots me here in the window. He's walking toward me, along the dim lit path, Rosa Parks under his arm like a rudder, for luck.

As he opens the door he sees what I have swaddled against me, wrapped in the jacket. He smiles as he puts my painting down.

‘Who's this?' he asks.

‘Moses,' I whisper.

Tears cradle in my eyes as Arthur reaches to pet the white face that cranes from my arms, from his coat.

He kisses the cat on its dusty head. ‘It's going to be okay,' he says.

A Greek Tragedy

CLAIRE VARLEY

It starts as a romance and ends as a tragedy. There are tears, there is hubris, there is a damnation and regret. It is, after all, Greek.

It ends as a tragedy…

A young woman hears her grandfather crying in the room next door. In the still, cool night his words are a pained murmur of whispers and wails. She doesn't understand the language but can translate the heartache. It is the early hours of the morning. It is his birthday. He is old. He is eighty. He is weeping.

It starts as a romance…

He never noticed her until his brother, Stavros, did. They were sitting on the porch eating grapes, watching the sun set on another humid Cypriot day when Stavros drew his breath.

‘You see her, Christos?'

Christos frowned at his brother.

‘See who, Stavros? Mama?'

Christos shook his head impatiently.

‘No, not Mother, Christos, the girl.'

Stavros looked around.

‘I don't see any girl, Stavros. You've been staring at the sun
too long.'

‘Bah!' Stavros cried, ‘Your eyes! That girl. Across the street. In
the blue dress.'

Christos squinted.

‘Yes, I see her. In the blue dress. Elias's daughter, I think it is. Why am I looking at her?'

‘Because,' Stavros whispered,' she is beautiful. ‘That is girl I will marry.'

Christos grimaced and looked at his younger brother, laughing.

‘Marry? Not even seventeen and already you're ready to marry?'

‘Not now,' Stavros shuffled his feet impatiently, ‘soon. Soon I will
marry her. Soon.'

The next morning she woke to the sound of movement in the kitchen. It was early but already he was up, moving about the house, unloading the dishwasher. She could hear him grunt to himself, coughing up a lifetime of smoking. She heard a softer grunting and knew her grandmother was up too, most likely sitting at the kitchen table working through her procession of medication. This one for the arthritis, this one for the diabetes, this one for the nausea caused by the last two. There was a loud metallic clatter followed by cursing. He must have dropped a pan. He was always doing that these days as his eyesight faded and his capacities declined. She threw off the blanket and sat up.

Now that Stavros had shared his secret love with someone, he started confiding in Christos more. In the mornings on the way to the orchard he would list her endless qualities and perfections. As they worked, picking the grapes from the vines, he would shout across to Christos the things she did that made him love her; the way she did her hair, the way she picked flowers for the old women in the village, the way she sometimes smiled at him showing her dimples then blushed and looking away. And each afternoon as they walked home, Christos
found himself becoming more and more enchanted with Elias's daughter. When Stavros recounted tales of her kindness, Christos's heart soared. When he joked about her good nature, Christos laughed too. So by the time Stavros pulled his brother aside and asked him to deliver a letter to her declaring his love, Christos was dying to finally talk to her in person.

‘Of course, Stavros, of course. I'll do it next chance I get.'