The Engagement (7 page)

“My father never understood the basics—that good-quality stock is the first priority,” Alexander was telling me. He seemed agitated, as though his lecturing were keeping him from doing something more important. “You’ve got to have good bloodlines. I try to conserve the old, well-regarded bloodlines, but also mix things. You see the vigor of a hybrid plant?” He nodded for me. “You want the same in an animal. The purebred is fine, but breeding too pure you get weakness.”

In the distance emerged a cloud of dust: an identical white utility truck was driving toward us, and at the sight of another person, a smile crept over my face.

The driver held his arm up in a wave as he abruptly turned his truck down a different dirt track.

“Is that a neighbor?” I asked.

Alexander shook his head. “That’s the station manager leaving. I’ve given him the long weekend off. No, breeding is an art,” he went on. “In the wild, animals sort themselves out, but on a farm you need to oversee it.” He glanced at me and winked. “Basically I’m always looking for the perfect cross.”

 • • • 

Other than a narrow rust-red dirt track, the land belonging to Alexander’s nearest neighbor—the national park—had been left uncleared. Out the truck windows there was chaos on either side, the vegetation dense and scrappy. We rushed past bursts of brilliant yellow wattle, bushes with bristling podlike extrusions, and bulbous pygmy trees erupting in countless long green spikes—plants all designed in a radical workshop. Nowhere in England would you move so fast from pastoral land into vast, wild disorder.

“Emu,” Alexander called, hitting the dashboard. Further down the track the creature’s feathered rump and legs disappeared into the shrub. “I told you I’d show you the real Australia!”

“Thank you. . . . I’d love to see a koala.”

“You never know.”

The mountains were closer now, close on all sides. We must have been high up and above the tree line; sometimes I could make out the detail of the boulders and vegetation on the rock walls. “Did you come here as a child?” I was trying to be kinder to him.

“Occasionally.”

“You must have favorite places?”

“There are a few.”

We turned a sharp corner, and Alexander parked by a solitary road sign, badly buckled. Near it the gum trees had black boughs.

“A fire ripped through here a few years ago,” he said.

“That’s sad.”

“Why?” Leaving the dogs chained to the back of the truck, he untied the picnic basket and lifted it out. “Most of these trees were probably having the time of their lives. They’re pyromaniacal; even their leaves are doused in propellant.” He sniffed forcefully, the way boxers do. “This whole ecosystem is predicated on everything burning.”

We walked for a few minutes until we came to a stretch of water framed all around by violet-colored mountain peaks. At first the sight was overwhelming. The water, flat as a mirror, held each purple-blue fold and crag—and also the clouds. Otherworldly and completely unpeopled, this place reminded me of a location in a children’s fantasy story. There should have been an imaginary amphibian coming ashore, sorcerers lurking behind the escarpment. But we were alone.

Alexander positioned the picnic basket near the water’s edge. He pulled out of it a tartan rug, which he spread with an air of careful urgency.

“This is extraordinary. It’s beautiful here.”

“Make yourself comfortable, Liese.”

“Really,” I said, touching his arm as I sat down, “it’s like nothing I’ve seen before.”

Pleased, he continued unpacking the basket’s surreal contents. On china crockery he laid out a complicated assortment of sandwiches and fruit and cheese like religious offerings. Kneeling, half in prayer himself, he handed me a linen napkin. “I hope you’re hungry.”

“What a feast,” I said, “how delicious”—these platitudes the wrong scale for a place like this. Birdsong was in the foreground with frogs, their rattling as rhythmic as a chain gang, layered underneath. Everything around us seemed to be humming. The
aliveness
of the wind and the water and the plants and the animals combined in a way that made the compass in my head start to whirl. Go with this, I urged myself. Soon you’ll leave Australia and this will be what you’ve seen of it. But the silence between us had a new quality. We sat eating the gourmet sandwiches, staring at the lake. Glancing over at him, I smiled, although in truth the effort he’d gone to filled me with unease. This scene, so idyllic, had the scent of ambush.

Under a napkin in the basket was a bottle of champagne. “Shall we have a drink?” I sounded too eager.

“In a moment.” Straight-backed and straight-faced, he asked solemnly, “Liese, what do you most want in life?”

“Food, shelter . . .” My fingers holding the plate felt slightly numb with cold.

“Happiness?”

I hated these sorts of conversations. “Yes, life’s happier that way, isn’t it?”

He frowned, as if deciding. “I don’t often feel comfortable enough to show people all this.” There was a pause. “I wouldn’t have imagined that with our . . . our differences in background and experience this could happen. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” I didn’t want to follow his point.

“No, really, thank you.”

The wind sent a shiver over the water’s surface; briefly it turned reptilian, scaled. Alexander was courting me, but the problem was he did not seem to be acting.

“I feel I can be myself with you,” he said.

“I’m very glad.”
But who exactly would that be?

Now he put his arm around my already tense shoulders. As I sat still I could hear him breathing. I could hear my own dumb breath
. This is all an act. You are being paid to be romantic,
I told myself,
to facilitate some fantasy.
The professionals called this the Girlfriend Experience. I’d read about it online. An escort acts like an idealized girlfriend: giving backrubs, laughing at stupid jokes, not checking her watch while fellating. (And in special cases, according to the chat sites, allowing BBBJ: a bareback blow job; DATY: dinner at the Y; and crime-scene action: sexual activity during menstruation.)

The problem was I wasn’t used to being a girlfriend, anyone’s girlfriend, so I didn’t really know what to be faking. I would go on a date, even a series of dates, and soon enough have the feeling—like running into an old acquaintance—that this new romance would not work out. Before long we’d be sitting in a restaurant finding we didn’t have much to say.

Even at the best of times I knew I came across as disconnected. I was there, but not there; often more aroused by the thought of intercourse than by the act itself, presenting my body at the outset so as to say, You can have this, but no more. Then, after the physical contact was over, something shattered. Almost immediately the man beside me seemed to be covered in tiny blemishes, and he was a little overweight, and painted with sweat, and he was
there
. Right there. I would have to try to be sensitive, acting as if I didn’t already wish to be alone. The way some men unburdened themselves after sex could mortify me; the way they suddenly revealed their most gruesome vulnerabilities, their need for reassurance, affirmation, eye contact—when all I wanted was to roll over and forget they even existed. Their neediness making me think, I should be getting paid for this.

Alexander’s arm grew heavier on my shoulders.

“Can you imagine staying longer in Australia?”

“Oh, well it’s a lovely place,” I told him, sensing that that would not be enough. “There’s wonderful food, very fresh produce.” That’s what everyone said. I picked up a fat, fleshy date upon which he’d plastered Camembert. “And people are so friendly.”

“Good; I’m glad you’ve found that.”

Australians walked down the street grinning at each other, a bunch of lovely sunny idiots whom no one wanted to upset. Everybody else took turns having wars and economic catastrophes to spare them the trouble.

“But,” I was swallowing, “I think I’d miss England.”

“We have better weather.”

“Yes, it’s usually a lot warmer.”

“Less crowded.”

“Out here it certainly is.”

He shifted position. “How do you find the countryside?”

“The countryside?” I finally laughed. “Is that what you’d call it?”

Alexander looked impatient. “What I’m trying to ask is, do you respond to the land?”

I had to stop my chuckling. “It’s fine. I mean, it’s beautiful, of course.” Here the beauty was severe. The fire had come right to the edge of the water. Not that this lake brought respite. Seconds earlier I’d seen an eagle take off, and every smaller bird perched nearby try to fly out of range. “I just don’t know much about it.”

“About nature?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I suppose I’m denatured.”

“I think that’s very sad.” He took his arm from my shoulders, reaching, I hoped, for the champagne. “But it can grow on you.” The bottle stayed untouched.

“Are there people out here? Any . . . community?” I asked. “You must get lonely.”

“Do I seem lonely?”

“No, no, of course not.” I had to avoid sounding like I thought he was desperate. “I just mean it’s very isolated, and that could get to a person if they weren’t”—my head to one side, coquettish, flailing—“as strong as you are.”

“I like it.” He bit into a sandwich.

“Well, as I said, it’s beautiful. . . .
Do
you have friends nearby?”

“Oh”—he waited until he’d finished eating—“sometimes I see other members of the district’s so-called grand families. But to be honest, they bore me.” His laugh carried a small sneer. “They see me as an outsider. I haven’t married my second cousin.” He picked up a stone and was set to skip it over the flat water, then dropped it. “God, why are we even talking about them?”

Leaning across, Alexander very carefully took my face in his hands. His hands that appeared to be trembling. “Liese, I’ve put a lot of thought into what I’m about to say.” He swallowed hard, glancing up at the sky. “I want to ask you—”

“Look!”

I’d had to cut him off, and fortunately from behind a bank of reeds there emerged a black swan—a cool, poised dream-creature; its gleaming neck was twisted like a periscope and was almost a separate entity. At that moment, this bird seemed a maquette, the prototype for all the kitsch ornaments and figurines I’d ever seen—objects of worship that now made sense. “How magnificent!”

Alexander exhaled loudly. “Some farmers think they’re terrible pests. They eat crops, graze on pasture grasses, bog up the ground.”

Looking at him I felt the heaviness of his expectations. Need was coming off him, but not the type I could fulfill.

“A lot of people imagine swans mate for life. But actually, no.” He almost sounded bitter. “No, scientists have proven that one in six cygnets is illegitimate, if that term means anything in the natural world . . .” His voice trailed off.

“So they do mate for life, they’re just unfaithful?”

“You might say one cancels out the other.”

“Anyone can make mistakes.”

His face darkened. “Yes, they can, but they shouldn’t.”

The swan leaned forward as if standing, and ran along the surface of the lake. Its neck was now straight and at the barest angle to the water, its wings like white-edged propellers.

“The male really has to court his mate. It’s very formal.” Alexander was distracted by the chance to deliver another lesson. “She flattens herself on the water, he spreads his wings right over her, pinions her neck with his bill, and then it all starts. Although it depends on the female being”—he chose the right word—“
cooperative
.”

Usually I was the one who got things going between us. I gave him some signal, and then it unfolded.

Here, by the water, there was a sexual element to being beyond anyone’s gaze, and, I had to concede, to being in nature.

I leaned closer and put my mouth on his.

I wanted him to give in to me so we could return to the part of the story I understood.

He smelled of farm and I remembered this scent on my skin when we were together, his body against the towel, indenting someone’s bedspread—or once, another time outside, someone’s daybed. With the sun in his eyes he was as vulnerable then as he ever was, the apple of his neck exposed, yet his expression still inscrutable. I was on top, trying to make his face change, to make him show something. How to persuade him to lose control before I did? Often there was an elemental fight taking place between us, the role of prey switching without warning. He might be lying on his back and, within seconds, bending over my body, long arms and wrists and hands disabling me in a heartbeat. And sometimes then we would talk about my made-up past. I’d tell him stories about the things I’d never done.

Now Alexander held me very tight, pinning my arms to my sides, keeping me in place. At first I thought it was a mode of foreplay—his inhibitions a come-on—and I wrestled, attempting to arouse him, to get him to open his mouth. I needed to taste our game behind what now felt like reality, not the reality behind the game. But nothing in his manner told me he was playing, and when I stopped resisting, he did not let me go. Around us was the buzzing and dinning of a million creatures doing their wild things. His grip was hard. Last night he’d just seemed weary or not in the mood; now, in his rejection of me, I detected actual menace.

As my breath grew steady I stared into the distance.

The light had changed over the lake. Rather than being a study in purple, all Middle Earth mauves and indigos, it resembled a black-and-white photograph—the mountains and sky, and therefore the water, were different tones of gray. This landscape was so full of morphing colors and noises that it occurred to me I was not actually seeing the place. It was all disguise.

“I think I’ll ask you my question later,” Alexander said softly, taking his arms off me.

Only the green reeds held their pigment. “Is this what your land would have once looked like?” I needed to not show any fear.

“Before it was cleared? No, not exactly. The plains below were similar to parks. It was grasslands and gum trees.”