Tremble (40 page)

It’s no longer raining, but I can hear the water dripping off the gutter and onto the path below. It’s cozy in here. I’m wrapped up in the duvet and I think I can feel a tickle in my ovaries. Conception. At least I hope so.

I suppose I reached some kind of decision driving home in that shocking rain. I like my car. Revise that: I love my fucking car. It is my metal skin, the extension of my own body heat teased out and stretched across its perfect steel chassis. You know why I love my car? Because I can climb in, switch it on, ride it hard, and it doesn’t ask any fucking questions. Which is why I fell in love with Madeleine in the first place, because she never asked any questions. Blind trust: there’s no greater turn-on. I mean, she really believed in me. She’d look up at me with those big blue eyes, pure adulation shining out of them. It used to give me an instant erection. Used to.

You’ve got to understand: my wife is an intellectual. Yep, I married an intellectual with a rich daddy, because I could and because…well, in truth, I suppose I thought some of it would rub off on me. Knock the rough edges off, take the country out of the boy and replace it with
Hunters Hill. Fat fucking chance. If anything, despite
The Economist
,
The Guardian Weekly
, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra subscription, I find myself becoming even more ocker, in reaction. I reckon it’s Georgina’s fault. Then again, it could be the influence of our wonderful prime minister Johnnie Howard. Since he got in, every redneck north of Cairns suddenly embodies the Great Australia we all know and love and—the radical minority anyway—escaped. I was that redneck predeconstruction. The big sullen oaf who hitched down from Tully around 1972, hit the Cross and the happenings at the Mandala Cinema and the boozy all-nighters at the Manzil Room, then one stoned night talked his way into being a roadie for Tamam Shud. That was my first break. The rest is history.

By the time I met Georgina I was managing three internationally successful bands and had my own office with fifteen employees. But secretly, between you and me, I still didn’t feel legitimate. What I didn’t realize then is that
you never do
. When I met this sophisticated ice queen with the degree in European Film, who’d lived in Paris, who had actually turned Mick Jagger down and was the first chick who didn’t want to go to bed with me and hated rock music, I thought that if I could seduce her it would be the last piece of the puzzle. The final legitimacy. The finishing touch to this identity I had constructed for myself: Robert Tetherhook, head of Pear Records with an international reputation for all things cultural and discerning. In those days I really thought those things mattered. So I pursued and wooed with my rough-trade charm, and, much to my amazement, Georgina married me.

I remember when I first fell in love with my wife. No, I didn’t love her when I married her—in fact I spent most of the wedding fantasizing about her sixteen-year-old niece who was one of the bridesmaids—but I did fall eventually. I recall it vividly. Georgina had been decorating our spanking new terrace in Paddington herself. It was about 1980 and she was wearing these really high shoes that were fashionable then. She was walking across the polished wooden floorboards carrying a vase of tulips when she slipped and fell, twisting her ankle. Glass, water, and petals flew everywhere. Georgina lay in the center of it in shocked silence, her legs splayed out, her skirt flung up exposing her little-girl knickers she liked to wear back then. All her neatness, her control, eradicated. Then, in this trembling vulnerable tone I’d never heard before, she calls out my name and I rush over. It was in that moment, in
the sounding of her need for me, that I fell. Yep, every rational defense melted; it was like a flame-thrower shooting through permafrost. It was the first time I felt like her husband: needed, wanted, desired. Put the lead straight back into my pencil seeing her lying there. Fuck, things have changed since then. I’ve changed since then.

Now all she does is make me feel small, dickless, as if I don’t earn enough, as if I haven’t given her every bloody dream a chick could want, as if I haven’t proven myself professionally. Like when I was awarded the Aria for best record producer in 2003—only the highest accolade in the country for a man in my position. I’ve even got the silver pyramid sitting on my desk at home to prove it. You know what she said when I told her? “Does this mean the Americans are finally going to start returning your calls?” In that bitch-butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-your-arse voice of hers. As if she was terminally disappointed with me. Terminally.

Actually, at the time many things felt like they were terminal. You know that sensation when you’ve been running really hard for so long that you don’t even notice the pace anymore? It’s only when you stop, your knees buckling, your head hanging down, your chest heaving for air as you retch with the effort, that you realize how fast you’ve been running—or living your life. Well, that’s me, from the age of twenty-three through to now. Forty-fucking-seven.

This morning while I was shaving I found myself wondering what the point of it all is. There’s that window of opportunity in shaving. You blokes would know what I’m talking about—when you wash the scrapings off with cold water and catch sight of yourself in the mirror. Nine times out of ten you barely register your own reflection, but there’s that sneaking tenth time when, for a flash, you really see yourself—your creeping grayness, your aging—and you find yourself thinking: who the fuck is that old codger and what’s he doing in my bathroom?

Sorry, I always get morbid after sex. Post-coital depression, sort of a male PMS. Maybe it’s the spilled seed factor. Always thought I didn’t want children, and then when we found out Georgina’s tubes were damaged the decision not to have them seemed easy. Don’t get me wrong, I love children. I am, after all, a dedicated uncle, especially after my brother disappeared. When he went it was like a whole section of my childhood was torn out from inside me. Strange, because we never spoke much. But we were
connected
.

He’s dead, I know it. I’m not religious but I can tell you the moment his soul left his body, because he
visited
me. It was in February, one of those stinking hot nights when you know it’s a waste of time trying to sleep because the sheets stick to your body and the humidity sits on your chest like an outraged child. My recording company, Pear, is housed in this converted warehouse in Darlinghurst and I had all the windows wide open. There was this slight breeze that brought the smell of frangipani in from the street. It was past ten and the street below was alive with a flotsam of youth and energy. I remember leaning out, stretching my arms toward the shadowy limbs of the Moreton Bay fig, and breathing in the air as if the perfume of all that life could erase my own aching cynicism. It was then that the fax machine suddenly kicked into action behind me. I remember thinking, that’s weird, it’s after hours, and I wasn’t expecting anything from overseas. Expecting some illicit note from a lovesick kid to one of my trainees, I walked over. There, staring up at me in full color, was my brother’s face.

I nearly had a heart attack. I tore it off and walked over to the light. There he was: Gavin; more aged and worn than I’d ever seen him, with this smile—half-sardonic, half-triumphant—playing across his lips. As if he were saying, fuck you, fuck you all, I got away and I’m happy. Then, as I stared, the strangest thing happened. The photograph literally began to fade, these weird greenish patches bubbling up until nothing was left but his eyes staring out at me, then in an instant they disappeared too and I was left holding a blank piece of paper wondering if I’d imagined it all.

After that I started flying my nephews and niece down to Sydney for the occasional weekend. Maybe it was so I wouldn’t feel so much of a prick for having lost contact with Gav the last few years of his life, or maybe it was about genetic continuity. I don’t really know. Nowadays I try not to analyze things too much.

What about the girlfriend, you’re thinking. Is he ever going to take moral responsibility for that? My friend, I’m a man, and we men have a distinct advantage over women. We stay desirable as we get older—shoot me down for saying it. But let’s look at the plain facts. We’re all animals when it comes to behavior. You can impose as much cultural trappings, as much fancy psychology, economic reform, whatever you like on top, but when it gets down to the biological reality: we all think with our genitals. As simple as that. How do you think I sell records?
What’s a hit song consist of? Easy; it’s either a chick singing about how she wants her lover’s penis to stay in her for the rest of her life, or it’s a guy singing about how he wants to stick his penis in as many chicks as he can for the rest of his life. Excuse me for being so crude, but that’s the way the world goes around. Georgina is past, Madeleine is future. When I’m with Georgina I am constantly reminded of my failings as a man. But with Madeleine I forget everything—work pressures, the fact that I’ll need to get my teeth capped in the next year—and, most importantly, when I hold her smooth fleshy body I am suddenly back where she is in her life, with my future laid out in front of me, all the different pathways stretching forth like a myriad of golden opportunities. I’m an unabashed time vampire. She makes me young. Does that answer your question?

I can hear his car pulling into the garage. It’s still comforting to me, the roar of confirmation that punctuates my day. The husband has returned. The ironic thing is that Robert would have no idea that I listen out for him, that I am secretly riddled with anxiety until I hear that familiar soft rumble as the BMW turns the corner into our street. I can’t relax until I’ve heard it. There have been nights—we wives know them well—when I’ve lain there in our bed, pretending to myself and the rest of the world that I’m sleeping, when really I’m tottering on the edge of a half-dream, waiting for him to return. And as soon as the BMW drives around that bend, all the tension dissolves from my muscles like dew evaporating from the glistening threads of a spider’s web in summer. Robert would laugh if I told him any of this. That bitter self-deprecating chortle of his, the one that says, I’d love to believe you, baby, but I know what you really think of me.

Yesterday I actually spent about twenty minutes trying to pinpoint the exact moment we stopped being emotionally honest with each other. I think it must have been sometime around the mideighties when I finally confessed that I’d known for about two years I was infertile but had failed to tell him. Or perhaps I’d merely failed to face up to the fact until then. But just because you stop being emotionally honest with someone doesn’t mean you stop loving them. In my case, it has been the contrary. The longer the silence stretches between us, the more
enigmatic Robert becomes and the more I want him. Some kind of perverse human psychology…the fatal inaccessibility of desire.

The tragedy is that he thinks I think he was never good enough for me. I don’t. I never have. He’s always been good enough for me. I recognized all that turbulent shimmering potential the moment I met him; understood his fear and how it powered him, how it would propel him much farther than the preppy private-school boys who were drifting through my life at the time. Why do you think I married him? But does Robert know how I feel? No. Because that isn’t our
way
. Our way has become an intricate game of poker, of never letting the other know the true emotional stakes. This is what keeps us burning.

I’m sitting at my desk right now, staring down at this painting by Vermeer,
Woman in Blue Reading a Letter
. Did I forget to tell you? I’m a mature-age student doing a late-age Masters in seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Ridiculous really, but I have this dream of becoming a curator in my fifties. This painting will be the one I base my dissertation on. It’s of a pregnant woman standing at a table entirely absorbed by a letter. There is a map of the Netherlands on the wall behind her and we can assume that her husband, the father of her unborn child, is away on travels. Her mouth is slightly open and her eyes are downcast. It is as if nothing exists for her in that room but the letter. A string of pearls sits on the table. You can only see part of the strand, but it fascinates me. Has she taken it out to fondle to remember him? Is she thinking of perhaps selling it? Does the letter contain some terrible news that she is just on the brink of responding to? We will never know.