Behind the Moon (15 page)

Coffee-coloured Venus

You raise a daughter wishing she might find a fitting match, might wed a worthy mate.

Nguyen Du,
The Tale of Kieu

Stanley Wong proposed to Tien a week before the Dead Diana Dinner. They spent a Saturday morning doing the cliff walk from Bondi to Coogee, stopping for a picnic lunch around Gordons Bay. After lunch he told her he had a present for her. He made her clamber down over the knuckled rocks to where the sea bashed the cliffs and he told her to look for a small wooden box which he had crafted himself. Her fingernails tore and the skin of her palms was scraped raw before she found it because he could not remember exactly where he had placed it. They spent the afternoon getting increasingly frustrated with the task and with each other, but he would not let her give up. Finally, she unearthed it and opened it triumphantly.

A diamond ring winked at her. Then, almost perfunctorily, exhausted by the afternoon’s endeavour, he asked her to marry him. She was moved by the trouble he had taken to make this moment original. She said yes and went home to flaunt her ring to her mother as a sign that she was loved and wanted by a man. She was in such a good mood that she later allowed Linh to persuade her to attend the Dead Diana Dinner so that she could announce her engagement. But instead of basking in the congratulations of family and friends, she found herself fielding their commiserations when Stan ended up in the emergency ward of Westmead hospital waiting for the two-inch gash in his left temple to be stitched up after Gillian Gibson had smashed the statue of Sau over his head. It was not a propitious start to their life together.

The damage went deeper than the scar on Stan’s temple. Gillian had wounded Stan’s pride and cracked his veneer of amiability. Weeks that should have been spent mooning over bridal magazines, designing invitations and daydreaming about their honeymoon were now squandered on Stan’s thirst for revenge. Instead of planning their wedding, Stan was planning to sue Gillian. He was obsessed with the injury done to him.

‘You can’t sue Gillian,’ Tien argued. ‘You know she didn’t mean to do it. She was upset and not thinking right. That night was just crazy.’

‘You and your feral westie friends,’ he said accusingly. ‘I could have been brain damaged. It would have affected my future earning capacity. It still might. I’m a doctor. I need my brain cells.’

‘But you’re okay now. And Gillian is a good person. She was like a mother to me when I was growing up. I can’t let you do this to her.’

He pulled out his trump card. ‘Who do you love? Her or me?’

Tien had practised her response often enough for it to roll out automatically. She twined her arms around his neck, kissed him deeply and said, ‘You, of course.’

She slid the fingers of her right hand into the waistband of his black jeans, but he would not be distracted by sex.

‘Then you should be on my side. I’m the one who loves you. If I can’t trust you to support me now, how can I trust you after we’re married?’

Love and betrayal walked hand in hand. Tien weighed up her options and, although she chose Stan in the end, she wondered whether he was worth it.

Stanley Wong possessed the soul of an artist. His parents did not understand this. They knew nothing of art. They had never set foot inside the Art Gallery of New South Wales, let alone the Museum of Contemporary Art. Their only encounter with art was the Monet calendar his mother bought every year and the faded Mona Lisa tea towel that dangled from the fridge door. They were cultural philistines. They made him study medicine.

Tien met Stan through her cousin Van, Uncle Duc’s eldest son, who was training to be an anaesthetist. Van interned at the same hospital where Stan was posted. He brought Stan back to his father’s restaurant one evening when Tien was working there.

Stan was the first man to ask her out, so she accepted. She did not dare say no. Some girls crooked their fingers and men came running. Stephanie-Tiffany-Melanie always had more men than they knew what to do with. They ran through them like last year’s fashion, then they went shopping for more. When the time came to settle down, they married successful Vietnamese businessmen and were happy to be imbricated in new webs of family relations. They lived next door to their in-laws and down the street from each other. They were a self-contained community, as they had always been. They were friendly towards her, but their carefully cultivated affability excluded her. As always, she did not fit in.

A few years earlier, Tek Cheong had gone through a Billie Holiday phase. One night, while Tien waited for Justin to come home, she sat in the karaoke den with Tek and sang ‘God Bless the Child’ with him. She learned that to those who had, more would be given; to those who didn’t, well, they were simply losers throughout life. She was afraid that she would be among the latter.

Tien had thrown away her oldest friends only to find the new ones she made at university did not last. She was uncertain of the strength of new friendship and she did not dare test it in case it shattered under the weight of her emotional demands and her desire for intimacy. She liked her friends and they liked her, but they were missing that connection that would hold them all together when life got busy and they no longer saw each other at uni every day. She was afraid that they did not care enough about her to keep in contact. She peered into the future and could imagine little comfort in reading Germaine Greer in her forties and fifties with a vibrator in her bedside drawer if she was still alone. She yearned to get married so that she would have someone anchored to her.

Stanley Wong erupted into her life at this point, dazzling her with the brilliance of his artistic soul and the promised financial security of his medical studies.

‘I should have studied art. I won an art competition at my local shopping centre when I was in school,’ Stan told Tien. ‘They gave me a book of de Kooning prints as a prize. A great man, de Kooning. Genius.’ He was tinkering around with sculpture when Tien started hanging out with him. He’d just finished a piece he called
Multicultural Austral-Asia II
, which consisted of a tangle of piss-coloured plastic strips copulating on top of a badly soldered bronze box.

Stan told her that she had inspired him to turn to portraits and he asked her to let him paint her nude. He mentioned the Archibald Prize for portraiture. She was thrilled by the bohemianness of it all and willingly stripped for him in the middle of winter. She caught a bad cold and developed laryngitis, but he nursed her with Lemsip and echinacea and dosed her with antihistamines. She agreed that it was worth it for the sake of his art. When he finished his mixed-media painting, she found that he had Picassoed her, deconstructing her body and reconstructing it as a collage of condoms, diaphragms, tampons and twigs in the midst of violently rioting painted vegetation. She couldn’t recognise herself. She was completely indistinguishable from the still life that surrounded her.

‘That’s the point,’ Stan said impatiently. ‘It’s a postmodern intervention into the nature versus nurture debate where the liminal ambivalence of culturally constructed sexuality collides with an Armageddon of environmental concerns.’

On subsequent occasions he memorialised her naked body with abstract sculptures of corroding metal (he was really into rust) and rags of Vietnamese silk. He signified her sexuality with thick panes of spun glass imprisoning chunks of formaldehyde-preserved raw steak. For Christmas he presented her with a framed painting of her face realistically depicted with his body fluids. It was an expression of his devotion to her; he had collected nearly half a litre of his blood over a period of five months.

His mother, alarmed by his anaemic countenance, brewed him ginseng and chicken soup. She stir-fried pig’s liver for his dinner every night to boost the iron levels of his red blood cells. And she could not forgive Tien for indirectly ruining her son’s health. She began to wage a covert campaign against Tien, but Stan was oblivious at this stage, too caught up in his artwork and the muse who inspired it all.

Stan’s focus on Tien was flattering. She tamed her hair with Frizz-Ease and did her best to turn herself into a docile Asian woman. She deferred to his opinions and preferences, making him feel manly even though he was nearly two inches shorter than her. In return, he took her out to expensive restaurants (he had his own souped-up Honda coupé and received a generous allowance from his parents, with whom he still resided) and promised her that they would get married after he finished his medical studies and internship.

‘I need you. You’re my artistic muse. My coffee-coloured Venus,’ he proclaimed portentously. ‘I see you with the eyes of an artist. Other people may see ugliness. They may find flaws. But you know what? I have a different aesthetic vision. I see opportunities!’

Tien hadn’t really made up her mind about Stan until she met Justin again at her twenty-first birthday party. She had not seen Justin since high school. He walked towards her across the local community hall and her heart tripped and stumbled. He was even more beautiful than he’d been at school. Her stomach ached with love and she tasted a reflux of sorrow and rejection in her mouth. She wanted to cry. Instead, she threw her arms around him and hugged him enthusiastically, planting loud, noisy air-kisses on both his cheeks. He flinched a little and kissed her back, but his eyes flickered away from hers. He thrust a brightly wrapped box towards her and mumbled, ‘Happy birthday’. She caught his arm and dragged him to her group of giggling university friends, proclaiming with an exaggerated roll of her eyes, ‘This is one of my school friends, Justin Cheong. Hey, you guys wouldn’t believe it but I used to have the most
massive
schoolgirl crush on him, the poor thing.’

They all laughed, Tien the loudest of them all.

Embarrassed, Justin extricated his arm from hers and she shrugged off this latest rebuff, waving him away carelessly. He did not stay long at the party. It gave her bitter satisfaction to note that he seemed to be avoiding Gibbo as well. She would not talk to either of them again, until the Dead Diana Dinner.

Later that night she made Stan drive her out west to the Chullora railway yards. She undressed in the front passenger seat like a schoolgirl changing for PE: quick and competent. There were no zips caught in their tracks this time, no skirts and sleeves straitjacketing her arms. She turned to Stan and said, ‘I want you to fuck me and make it hurt.’

He winced at the crudity of her language and frowned at her. ‘Well, how could I resist such a romantic invitation?’

‘Please. Just do it.’ She reclined the passenger seat and lay back, naked. ‘I belong to you. Force me to realise that.’

She could see that the thought of it excited him. He climbed over her and unzipped his trousers. She yanked them down his thighs and he grunted as he thrust his erection between her cleft. And stopped.

‘You’re dry,’ he said in accusing surprise.

‘I don’t care. Go!’

But he would not fuck her with violence and carelessness. He withdrew from her gently and began to use lips, tongue, fingers and the rolling undulation of his hips and thighs to arouse her. He did not bring her to orgasm by the time he shuddered between her thighs, but she was slick with pleasure and she held him tight.

‘You went all weird on me just now,’ he said, stroking her hair away from her face. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yeah.’ She looked up at him and, in the darkness, she could only see a faint rim of white around his pupils. She could hear the hypnotic roar of a long freight train clubbing the silence. For the first time, she told him, ‘I love you, Stan.’

‘I know,’ he said, cupping her face. ‘I’ve painted you. I know you inside out. That’s why I love you.’

She made herself believe him because, if she did not, she would always be alone.

. . .

Something fractured inside Tien after her first sexual experience with Justin. She felt unlovely. She feared she was unlovable.

When Justin rejected her, she wasn’t simply hurt by unrequited love. She felt his rejection as a judgement on her as a woman. She later enrolled in a women’s studies course and she despised herself for being unenlightened. But academic reading only penetrated her intellect; it did not persuade her emotions or break the reflex of social expectations that taught her what to see when she looked in the mirror. She told herself she shouldn’t care whether Justin or any other man wanted her, but she did.

As a child, Tien would overhear Auntie Ai-Van and Auntie Phi-Phuong issuing hysterical warnings to StepanieTiffany-Melanie about date-rape by all men, any man.

‘You be careful,’ they’d say whenever one of the girls started dating, especially if they were going out with an Anglo-Australian. ‘All he wants is sex. Men always want sex.’

Auntie Phi-Phuong even went so far as to produce her own home-made Mace. She minced a packet of chillies, stirred them into water and funnelled the mixture into a small plastic spray bottle. ‘You carry that in your handbag, darling. If he tries any funny business, you know what to do.’

Auntie Ai-Van agreed. ‘Wait until you get that ring on your finger,’ she advised. ‘No marriage, no sex.’

In Auntie Ai-Van’s mind a man could be redeemed from sexual harasser to husband with the acquisition of a ring. Men defined the parameters of their lives. They were sinister, but they also held out the hope of salvation. Sometimes it seemed to Tien as though men were just out there, randy and ready for sex anywhere, anytime, with any woman. Except for herself. She’d offered herself to Justin—a freebie; no strings attached. And still he didn’t want her. Not even for sympathy sex. The familiar refrain of self-pity ran through her mind: what was wrong with her? Then, after the Dead Diana Dinner, she knew. It wasn’t her; he was just
gay
. She did not stop to consider that, even if he hadn’t been gay, he might not have been attracted to her. His gayness was a relief. It gave her an excuse to contact him and rekindle their friendship.

They met at a café in Newtown, ordered their coffees and sat there grinning at each other, ill at ease and embarrassed, but willing to make up and move on. They talked about the Dead Diana Dinner, then Justin told her about his sexual experiences, his struggle to accept his homosexuality, his confusion during the Year 12 formal, and the end of his friendship with Gibbo when he tried to hit on Gibbo and was bashed up for his pains.