Trust (6 page)

Show me
, whispered a voice in her head, and on impulse she turned over one of the sketches on the table, picked up a pencil, and began to draw. The young woman and the old together, the sheet between them, their faces serene and open. A peaceful scene; a simple, necessary chore.
Domestic work; women’s work
, she thought.
That used to be depicted, often, in art, but one never sees it any more. Why not?

A lightbulb went on in her brain.
This
could be the topic of her article: the way a subject that had for centuries depicted women in action, absorbed in their work – and clothed, rather than as aesthetically or sexually appealing nudes – had disappeared. Was it because of the changing nature of women’s employment? The continued devaluation of such tasks in a society increasingly dependent on both technology and outsourcing? Rich material to consider.

Excited, she began to scribble down ideas, and had just got her initial thoughts down when her mother came back in, carrying the basket of neatly folded washing, chatting with Gerry who was right behind her.

‘Your mum’s staying for dinner,’ Gerry announced. ‘Right, Jean?’

‘Oh, are you cooking?’ asked Jean archly.

‘Do, Mum,’ Susanna urged. ‘I’d love you to.’

‘That’s very kind of you both, but I’ll say no, thank you. It would mean driving home after dark and I’ve been finding night driving hard on my eyes lately.’ Jean patted her daughter’s hand. ‘That’s one of the pleasures of going to book group, Susie, having you as my chauffeur.’

‘But book group’s not till next week. I’ll see you before then, won’t I?’

‘We usually manage to, don’t we?’ Jean said. ‘No matter how busy you are.’

‘We do,’ Susanna agreed. They kissed goodbye, and Gerry saw Jean out to her car. Susanna could hear her mother’s distant laughter, and Gerry’s joining in, and smiled to herself as she looked again at her quick drawing of the women folding the sheet. Dancing; yes, they did look as though they were dancing.

‘Whatever those things are, do you have to drop ’em on the floor like that? It’s like a bloody brick landing, every time,’ said Gerry, frowning at her. They were sitting up in bed together, pillows stacked behind them against the slatted wooden bedhead.

‘Sorry,’ Susanna said, reaching for the next one in the stack of large black spiral-bound notebooks. ‘They’re my second-year students’ art journals. I have to finish marking them.’

‘Their journals get marked? I would’ve thought they were just for their own use.’

‘Oh, everything gets marked these days. These are worth twenty per cent of their overall mark, not that you’d guess that from looking at most of them,’ she said, turning pages rapidly. ‘Most of these kids seem to think it’s enough to just slap in a few pictures they’ve torn out of magazines, and scribble down a list of websites. Sad, really. When I think of the care we lavished on our journals when I was at art school. We drew and wrote and took photos and poured all our dreams and ideas into them …’

‘Kids are way too cool for that now, Suze,’ Gerry said, turning back to the MacBook Pro propped on his angled knees.

Susanna sneaked a look at him. She liked being able to watch him like this, while he was so focused on the screen; liked the way the soft light from the bedside lamp gilded his hair and the stubble on his chin. She thought of the Happy Prince, in Oscar Wilde’s story – but Wilde’s golden prince had stood immobile on his pillar, while her handsome husband was alive and warm, right here beside her. She stroked his arm dreamily below the pale blue sleeve of his T-shirt. ‘What are you working on?’ she asked.

He pivoted his knees obligingly, swinging the big laptop toward her. ‘Remember we were talking about design competitions, and how important they are? Well, this is what young Alberto’s come up with as Visser Kanaley’s entry for a new visitors’ centre in the High Plains National Park.’

Susanna stared at the maze of lines on the screen. Gerry clicked through, saying tersely ‘North elevation’ and so on. None of it made any sense to her, but she nodded, murmuring, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh.’

‘As you can see, it’s yet another take on the Murcutt-style pavilion,’ Gerry said. ‘Completely inappropriate for this site. This would require complete demolition of the existing building, which admittedly is butt-ugly but it’s structurally sound and it’s
there
. Trucking every brick of that out to landfill, then trucking in every single nail of this new structure.’ He shook his head impatiently as he swung the laptop back toward himself. ‘For fuck’s sake. I don’t know why we employ some of these kids. Do they actually get what I’m saying about connective interstitial envelopment, or are they just sitting there watching me flap my lips? Then they trot off and reiterate exactly what got rammed down their throats at uni.’

Susanna made some noises to indicate intelligent concern and, seeing that he was engrossed again, turned back to her students’ journals. She had her own quandaries about the young people she was dealing with: how could she help them to see what a useful tool an art journal could be? And beautiful, too. Because on the evidence before her, they didn’t get it.

‘Phew! I’m finished, for tonight anyway,’ she said at last. ‘You nearly ready for lights out?’

‘Just about,’ he said distractedly, and kept tapping. ‘There.’ She heard the little zooming sound his computer made when an email was sent. He looked at her over the top of the glasses he had to wear these days for reading; it was amazing how he could even make glasses look like the most desirable fashion accessory. ‘Just putting a rocket under Seb’s coach, telling him he’d better get cracking and find Seb a new doubles partner – a really good one.’ He took the glasses off and rubbed hard at his face. ‘I still cannot
believe
they lost their quarterfinal. It was appalling.’

Just remembering the raised voices, slammed doors, and dark silences from both Seb and his father when they had arrived home from that recent match made Susanna’s chest tighten. ‘I think – I think we were all disappointed.’

‘Disappointed!’ Gerry snorted. ‘A bit more than disa-bloody-pointed, I can tell you. They were playing like they
wanted
to lose.’

That had been the accusation he’d hurled at Seb, and she knew how the thought outraged him. ‘Well, that’s great that you’re getting on to Seb’s coach,’ she soothed. ‘The sooner we find him a new partner, the better.’ She leaned over to kiss his cheek. ‘I’m just going to brush my teeth.’

While she was flossing and brushing, a thought that had been niggling at her rose again, something she’d been meaning to put to Gerry all week. Sitting on the edge of the bed beside him she asked, ‘Darling, do you think Seb has a girlfriend? Could that be distracting him? Worrying him?’

‘Nope. I’d know about it if he had,’ Gerry said with confident authority. ‘He’s been too sports-mad to get serious about girls.’

‘You’re probably right; they’ve both been late bloomers that way, like I was. For which,’ she added, ‘I’m not ungrateful.’

‘Not much longer, is my guess. Young Sebastian … There’ll be girls lining up at the door any minute, you watch.’ Gerry smiled, aware both that his good-looking son was the spitting image of himself and that he, at fifty-three, still turned the heads of women of all ages. He always noticed.

Susanna frowned, flicking a fingernail between her teeth. ‘Gerry, you have talked to him about, you know, safe sex and so on?’

‘Yeah, a couple of times. Or tried to. He assures me in no uncertain terms that he knows
all
about it.’

‘I suppose he does. They know everything, kids these days.’ She leaned closer toward him. ‘More than I ever did, that’s for sure.’

‘Oh, you knew enough, I seem to recall,’ he responded, raising a suggestive eyebrow. His hands reached to caress Susanna’s breasts, cupping each and hefting gently through the thin cotton of her nightie. ‘Little pigeon.’

‘Shweeet-heart,’ she purred in response. She slid one hand to his crotch, and stroked. Under the light bedcovers, she felt his penis swell.
Mmm, in the mood … A little more of this and that
…
And if I lifted up my nightie and climbed aboard
,
I’d probably come, too
. That’s what she should do – but that position, despite being more fun, was also more effort, and she was tired. Okay: lazy. Susanna went back round to her side of the bed, shedding her nightie in one quick movement as she slid under the covers, beside Gerry.

‘Not much of a striptease, pidge,’ he said, drawing her close. She nestled her head into his shoulder, her cheek resting on the smooth flat part of his upper chest, and lightly tickled his nipples, pinker than her own, just to watch them crinkle up, then raised her head a little and grinned at him.

Sometimes she still saw him just as he’d been the night they first met. A pub in South Yarra; a Friday night, crowded and noisy. She’d noticed him the minute he walked in, but they were no match – she a plain and unremarkable newly graduated teacher, he the confident, good-looking, going-places architect – so she’d stood back and watched her girlfriends flutter round him, like parrots round a bird-feeder. At the end of the evening, when Gerry followed her outside and asked her for a date, she’d been so sure he was kidding she’d almost been offended. But no: he’d really wanted her. Wanted to take her out, talk to her; wanted to kiss and make love. To
her
! He still did, even now when her body was becoming middle-aged, whereas his had hardly changed at all.

Gerry made a growly noise and folded his other arm around her; she snuggled deeper. She loved feeling his arms around her: his size and muscularity made her feel womanly and safe. As he kissed her he slid one hand to her thigh, moved it slowly over the ripe contours, trailing his fingers over her vulva. She lifted, stroking his leg with her instep, arching her body toward him. With an appreciative ‘Mmm …’ he kissed her again, and she pressed her mouth to his.

Yes
. She loved saying yes.

Gerry shifted his mouth to one of her breasts, then the other; kissing and licking, he began to follow the well-charted course down her body. She stroked his hair; its thick silky softness such a luxuriant pleasure. He was licking between her legs now; she didn’t actually get off on that, but had never objected, or even hinted so. Soon he moved up again, and slid into her. Sex, it occurred to her, was not dissimilar to playing tennis: strokes, returns, and volleys, all pleasantly familiar, practised, and enjoyable – more enjoyable than their tennis partnership had been. She moved willingly with and against him, and after a suitable length of time she clenched the muscles of her thighs and pelvic floor and made the sounds of orgasm, to be rewarded by Gerry’s habitual throaty noise of appreciation, acknowledging that he could move now into those final thrusts which brought them to conclusion.

They rested together for another minute or two, a closeness she always found gratifying. ‘Mmm, honey,’ he murmured as he withdrew, ‘that was good.’

‘Was it, darling?’ she teased affectionately. ‘I mean, when you could be playing A-grade?’

Unexpectedly, he went still. ‘We’re married, Suze,’ he said reprovingly. ‘There are no gradings.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised. ‘That was a silly thing to say.’

‘S’okay,’ he said, reassuring her with a last cuddle before turning over and falling immediately and soundly asleep. Susanna slipped out of bed again to go the toilet; a wet spot, apart from being unpleasant to sleep on, would just mean she had to change the sheets earlier. Lying in bed again, with one hand resting on his broad warm back, she thought about his comment –
There are no gradings
. Such a masculine way to put it – so Gerry! – but what he was expressing, she realised, was the essence of his commitment: to her, to their marriage, to their family. He was saying, simply, there was nothing with which their life together could compare.
It’s perfect.
She gave a contented sigh, and finally, gratefully, allowed her muscles, her nerves, her whole body and mind, to relax.

FIVE

Seb woke in the middle of the night with his bedside light still on and his laptop, lid ajar, pressing into his side. He stared at it woozily then fell back against the pillow with a grunt. Checking out porn sites, that’s what he’d been doing: trying to get off on images of girls giving blow jobs, being fucked here, there and everywhere. He must have fallen asleep. What kind of guy falls
asleep
looking at that stuff? Cum spurting over their tits, their faces.
You’re meant to get turned on, not zoned out!

And then, with a hot gout of shame, what wasn’t fantasy came crashing in on him: the insistent, intrusive memory of the fight he’d had with Clarence before their quarterfinals match. It wouldn’t let him go: the stupid things he’d never meant to say, the cringe-making memory of his high-pitched cry: ‘You don’t care! You don’t care about
us
.’ Tears, god,
tears
had brimmed from his eyes, and Clarence had seen them. Seb rolled his head back in agony, only to find himself looking up at the poster of Rafael Nadal above his bed: his awesome biceps and lion-like gaze. Rafa would never crack up like that, no fucking way!

They had gone out then and played so unbelievably badly, worse than if they’d never been on a court together before. Visser and Chong, the doubles team who’d always shared an instinct for how each other would move, almost like they were the same person in two bodies: down in straight sets.

And now Clarence was gone. Gone for good, gone for ever, and there was not a single freaking thing that Seb could do about it.

He lay on his side with the laptop propped against a pillow, and went to Facebook. No, Clarence hadn’t updated his status, not since the day before the doomed match. Seb updated his own:
pondering icebergs
. Cool and deep, that was the idea. And icebergs too were mostly hidden, below the surface. So did that make them great big fakers, just like him? He roamed from one friend’s page to another, commenting on a photo here, posting on a wall there. He checked out Sylvia Albanese’s page: shit, she had close to five hundred friends! What the hell was going on with Sylvia Albanese? Did she really want him to be her date for the senior school social? Year Twelve chicks, especially ones like Sylvia,
never
wanted Year Eleven guys to take them to the social. And yet Sylvia and a couple of the other girls like her all seemed to be angling for the same thing.
Weird
.