Reading Madame Bovary (30 page)

He found the image of the red crayon titillating. He imagined a man his own age in a heavy serge suit on the Sabbath, reading aloud to his wife; a man with a large hand and a clumsy grip on his red crayon, pressing hard into the page, a pious vandal. Instantly it made him want to take the glass from her hand and push her back onto the bed, roughly. And did she guess? Did she feed him this stuff with intent? Evidently not, for on that occasion she spoke with genuine revulsion, as if she were describing some cursed or decaying artefact found on an archaeological dig. And then, more plaintively: ‘Daniel insists on keeping a bible on the kitchen table. Near the fruit bowl. Sometimes I feel I can't bear to be in the room with it.'

‘It's just a book, it won't bite you.'

‘It does bite me,' she said, and smiled sheepishly. ‘It takes a chunk out of me. I feel like, like … it's hollowing out my heart.'

This was such an arresting image; he hadn't thought of her heart before. He mostly thought of her other parts, her excellent muscle tone, its warmth and elasticity. Amazing that a woman's breast could fail her while the rest of her body went on working magnificently.

‘You need to be desensitised,' he said. He leaned across, opened the drawer of the bedside table and got out the Gideon Bible. ‘Here,' he said, holding it out to her. ‘See, no teeth.'

She stiffened.

‘Read to me.'

She made a face. ‘What?'

‘How about Letter to the Romans?'

She put the book down on the side table. ‘You
are
ridiculous,' she said, and gave him a shove. He laughed, and thought they might soon become friends.

‘Go on,' he coaxed, ‘just a few verses.'

She picked up the book and searched for a moment, a seductive but dutiful schoolgirl. Then she glanced up at him coyly. ‘
We know
that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and
not only the creation but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the
Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our
bodies …
'

He reached out and took the book away. ‘The redemption of bodies,' he said. ‘I can show you a thing or two about that.'

After his first encounter with Inez he felt the need to talk about her, to use her name in the company of friends. He couldn't, of course, not under the circumstances. Though eating alone no longer bothered him, there were nights when he would sit at the table in the kitchen and say her name out loud: ‘Inez.'

One evening in the middle of dinner Alice rang, as she did, faithfully, once a week, and he told her about Daniel, and of Inez's crack about young Buddhists and how it was the fashion now. Alice sounded tired and overworked and he thought it might make her laugh. It didn't.

‘He's probably lonely,' she said. ‘When you join the Evangelical Union you get instant friends.'

‘That doesn't explain why he reads scripture aloud at the dinner table and shouts it out in the car.'

‘Come on, Dad. He wants to annoy his mother. He's a boy.'

‘Don't be glib,' he said.

‘Glib?'

‘Smart. Don't be smart.' Sometimes a word would come between them, a word that made him feel old.

‘I
am
smart, Dad. Remember? You've told me so often enough.' And she laughed, and he was relieved that she had taken it in good humour. He had not meant to rebuke her (God forbid) and had surprised himself by wanting to defend Daniel's seriousness. He had been a serious young man himself.

After they had spoken for a half hour he returned to the cold remains of his dinner, one of his wife's specials that he ate at least once a week: chickpeas, tomatoes, garlic and spices, smoked paprika, some rounds of chorizo and rice or bread. His wife hadn't liked to cook; it was too time consuming. There were too many other things to do in life. A quick meal is a good meal, she would say; it allowed more time for her garden. At first he resented this; his mother had cooked for him and he expected his wife would do the same, but he'd soon gotten over
that
.

He carried his plate to the sink and began to rinse it, distracted by an image of Inez, naked but for a pink cotton shirt, and as the water ran wastefully over the plate he happened to glance into the white plastic compost bucket that sat by the sink. It was the bucket into which he and his wife had scraped their leftovers, scraps that were destined for the state-of-the-art compost bin she kept in the yard, a bin that hadn't been attended to since her death. And still he emptied the leftovers into this bin as if any day she might return and resume her favourite activity, and he might glance out the door and see her kneeling on the flagstones beneath her wide-brimmed hat. On weekends he weeded the small patch of front garden and saw to it that the flowering shrubs were pruned, but her built-up vegetable bed at the rear of the house was a labyrinth of weeds. He couldn't bear to look at it.

He knew the presence of the compost bucket was a bad joke, that one day he would have to take it outside and dump it in the wheelie bin, but he was not ready, not yet. Some reminders of his wife unhinged him, others helped to keep him on track and the bucket, oddly, was one of them. For a while he just stood there at the sink and gazed out through the kitchen window that looked onto Camperdown Park, and an old sandstone wall that separated the park from St. Stephen's churchyard. Often on summer evenings after dinner he and his wife would stroll across the park and through the overgrown cemetery there, past the picturesque gatehouse and the enormous Moreton Bay fig tree, its roots like great sleeping pythons. The congregation had long ago shrunk away to nothing and the churchyard was derelict and filled with weeds. Many of the headstones were damaged and leaned askew while dogs roamed through the kangaroo grass and drug deals were transacted in shadowy corners.

One evening he and his wife had been accosted by a young woman, thin and pale with rats' tails of long greasy hair. He remembered the bright orange singlet top she wore and the row of tattooed rosettes across her shoulders. She smiled ingratiatingly and asked for money and his wife smiled back and held out her empty hands. Gestures like this were liable to flare in his head without warning, more vivid than ever they had been in life.

In bed that night he found himself wondering if Inez liked to cook, but pushed the thought away. He had no desire to see her in a domestic setting. But the thought persisted and when at last he fell asleep he had a dream in which she and Daniel were sitting at a polished oak table with plates of food in front of them, food piled into steaming mounds while Daniel declaimed Grace, shouting his holy words across the bare wooden table. The Last Supper: mother and son. The apostles dismissed; Mary and Jesus, alone at last.

There were many things that, by tacit agreement, they didn't mention. He once raised the subject of her missing breast – he felt he ought to – but all she said was, ‘Don't ask.' He had always thought of it as missing, as if it fell off her somewhere while she was walking in the bush, not that it had been cut out of her by a surgeon's knife. He was curious, though not very, as to why she didn't have a reconstruction. Somehow it was like Inez not to fake anything, not that he could say he knew her well, but by then he knew her body and there was truth in that. Some women were soft and feminine in their manner but hard between the sheets, grasping and self-centred; others seemed brittle and haughty but were soft in bed, a revelation. Inez was neither. She did not fit into any of his categories. But there was something exotic about her, so unlike his wife, and she exuded what he had once described to himself as a seething sexuality, as if all her desire was forcefully contained in an internal cauldron of anger, a dark, biting resentment that enveloped him in her pain and sharpened all his senses. And she had her idiosyncrasies; after her climax she could not bear to be touched, at least not sexually, but in that phase of peace beyond peace she was willing for him to put his arms around her, though only so long as he was completely still and did not move. That motel room became a cradle in which they lay as newborns.

One evening she told him that Daniel now kept a spiritual journal and that he left it around the house in obvious places, from which she deduced that he wanted her to read it. This intrigued him, and he persuaded her to bring it along the following Thursday.

‘Do you want to read it?' she asked.

‘No, that would be improper,' he said, archly. ‘I'd like
you
to read it to me.'

And she did, though only the once and it was nothing out of the ordinary. ‘He is with me always. I feel His presence. I know His love.' The usual, or what he imagined was the usual, though there was one passage that amused him. ‘Ralph said tonight that Jesus inhabits me, that he has come to take up residence in the rooms of my body. But I find it hard to visualise these rooms. I see only the attic in my head, full of junk, all my junk thoughts. I am waiting for it to fill with light. Either that or I will have to look for the manhole into my Father's roof.' The bit about the manhole was a joke, he thought; the boy had not lost his sense of humour. But Inez couldn't see it, was anxious for reassurance. ‘Do you think he's in danger?' she asked.

‘How do you mean?'

‘You know … of losing his grip?'

‘His grip on what?'

She was exasperated then, as if he were missing the obvious. ‘His grip on
reality
.'

Unhappily the diary didn't have the same galvanising effect on him as the Letter to the Romans. The diary was wistful. It did not rouse him to combat. It did not have the gladiatorial ruthlessness of Paul the Apostle. Not that he had ever read any of the Pauline epistles and nor did he intend to. It would not be the same as hearing it from her lips. But he did one evening look up the website of the Evangelical Students Union. It showed a cluster of happy young faces and was emblazoned with the banner,
Faith alone will
save us.

Would it, he wondered? Wasn't it all about their young bodies? For believers in the spirit these Protestant youth were obsessed with the body, just like their great mentor, Paul. In all of their literature on the net there seemed to be scarcely a single reference to the soul. Death was complete, and the body lay mouldering until the moment of the Second Coming, when Jesus would appear, not to liberate the soul but to resurrect the material body. Well, then, he could relate to that bit at least. The body was the all and the everything, and in their motel-room trysts on a Thursday evening he and Inez enacted their own sacred revivalism.

Would Daniel preach at his mother if he had a girlfriend? He thought not. Young evangelicals, he discovered, believed in virginity. They even got engaged before marriage, a quaint old custom that seemed to be making a comeback. He told himself that what Daniel needed was sex, which he desired but which terrified him. Though inexperienced he perhaps already knew from deep instinct that this, the greatest of consolations, was also the most fragile. It was short-lived, and worse, another man could take it away from you. God was abstract but more reliable, and if you could throw the cage of God around your girl and hold her there then so much the better. Except
that
didn't work, as numerous scandals among the devout testified. The terror of sex could not be avoided. You had to put yourself on the line. You had to have faith of another kind.

For seven months his evenings with Inez continued without interruption. Amazingly, the cocoon held. The same room at the same time, and both of them, they discovered, unerringly punctual. In between these assignations they never rang one another. For his part he was tempted, but resisted the urge to a more mundane familiarity because he knew it would break the spell. The uncertainty of their arrangement, the knowledge in any given week that one of them might not turn up, and the other be left stranded, only heightened his sense of anticipation and the thrill of her appearance, each time, since it was he who mostly got there first (having only to walk across the footbridge over Parramatta Road). He never asked if it worked this way for her, because that would have risked analysis and the intrusion of the cerebral into their teasing animal foreplay. They might even have bored one another, and it was too big a risk to take. The tumescent magic of it was too fragile and so it had to remain as it began, like a time capsule or, rather, a capsule out of time. The very mediocrity of their surroundings was conducive: the beige wallpaper, the standard catalogue lamps with chocolate-brown shades, the green quilted bedcover, the electric jug on a tray and the cheap teabags and instant coffee they never used – all perfectly calculated to offer not a single distraction, no trace of the personal, or of fashion. No
statement
.

Some evenings they hardly spoke at all. After the first month she ceased even to mention Daniel and by then the time had passed when he had need of any proxy in the room. Paul the Apostle had served his purpose.