Three

‘Fact: this is where the Australian cricketers drink,’ Ruby tells me, as we sit in the bar of the Galle Face Green Hotel, drinking a midday beer. The tropics do that to you.

‘Counter fact: Bombay has the largest film industry in the world. Bigger than Hollywood.’

‘It’s Mumbai, not Bombay. Bombay is part of India’s colonial past. Mumbai is the future. You can be a know-it-all, but sometimes I know more.’ Ruby thrusts her fist into the air as if she has just taken a wicket. ‘Yes.’

‘I know you think it’s funny, but it does seem like only yesterday that I was there, and it was called Bombay. And you’re not helping,’ I say, half accusing, half teasing. ‘On the second day we met you asked me if I was alive when Gough Whitlam was sacked.’

Ruby laughs out loud and I realise I like watching her, even when she is provoking me: the way she throws her head back to laugh, her pale freckled face, her broad mouth.

‘I just want to know,’ Ruby continues to stir me, ‘whether historical moments you’ve lived through have felt big when they happened. Like being alive when Marilyn Monroe died. Or Kennedy was assassinated. Or even seeing Kashmir before it was destroyed?’

I say that the shimmering light and water of Kashmir seemed timeless and that it never occurred to me that things could change. Kashmir felt outside of history, floated out of time, like things do when you are in love. It is only when the affair is over that you realise months or years have gone by, and, sometimes, what was beautiful has been laid waste. I tell her that she should know how these things feel, what with her months in Colombo. She refused to go home when the government urged all Australians to leave the country; now she has developed a habit of starting whenever she hears a loud noise. She’s cut short her time here for that reason.

‘I wasn’t born when Marilyn died,’ I say. ‘But I was born the very day Kennedy was killed. November 22, 1963. My mum tells me that she couldn’t sleep because the radios in the hospital were never turned off.’

‘Did you have to spend every birthday watching footage of Jackie picking the top of JFK’s head off the back seat of the limo?’ Ruby asks.

She is right, I did. And I wonder whether that is why media events are one of my organising principles. I wonder if that is why I became a journalist. There are the big moments; those things that happen that make everyone draw breath, make them realise that at any moment anything and everything could change—cyclones, wars, a man walking on the moon, bushfires, sudden deaths and earthquakes. The things that happen in the world that mean for a few moments a lot of people are talking about the same thing and for a few moments there is the illusion of community. Then there are the smaller events that act like punctuation points: songs, films and television shows.

We discuss whether this really is community. I used to think it was but now am not so certain. Ruby thinks it is, a sharing of experience as people talk about what they have seen and heard. I wonder whether it is just a kind of perving.

‘When did you ever actually do something as a result of seeing something on TV?’ I ask her, and she stumps me by saying, ‘Now. That’s why I’m in Sri Lanka. I saw a documentary about the civil war and decided to go and help out for a while.’ As she talks I realise I’m touchy on this subject because the more I’ve watched, the less I’ve done.

‘You sound like one of those old “TV is evil” fogies,’ says Ruby.

‘I’m becoming one,’ I admit. ‘I recently worked out how many hours I’d spent in front of the box. Assuming two hours a day every day from the age of five—which is probably an underestimate—the answer is 23,496 hours. That’s almost three years of my life in front of the television. Four if you allow for sleeping at night.’

‘Time for more screen action, then,’ Ruby says, downing her beer. ‘You must be feeling deprived.’

We’re heading off to watch four hours of pulsating melodrama, singing, dancing and cricket: Lagaan. We walk down the road to the Liberty Cinema and it’s a shock to be out of the airconditioning. Colombo is hot, hotter than anywhere else we’ve been in Sri Lanka. Rolls of barbed wire signal military checkpoints every fifty metres or so. The roads are pocked with large potholes and some are shut off altogether. Everything looks battered, ruined, closed down.

‘Should I be excited about a film whose title translates as “Land Tax”?’ I ask.

‘You should be very excited.’ Indeed Ruby can hardly contain her excitement and is speaking with great animation. ‘Indian film reviewers have described it as the best film ever made in the entire history of the world. The climax is one hour and twelve minutes of cricket.’

‘That pleases you?’ I ask.

‘Very much.’ She puts on a Sri Lankan accent. ‘Shane Warne,’ she nods her head thoughtfully. ‘Ricky Ponting,’ she beams. ‘Adam Gilchrist. Muttiah Muralitharan. Sanath Jayasuriya,’ she raises her eyebrows theatrically. ‘In those names, with appropriate hand and facial gestures, a whole world of conversation lies.’

It is an expansive and joyful film, it makes us happy. Ruby dances out of the cinema, doing a kind of sideways Indian rumba down the street and moving her head from side to side. We sing the words from one of the film’s songs as we move our way back towards Galle Road:

Black clouds, black clouds, shower down rain!
Let loose not the sword of lightning, but the arrows of raindrops!
Our difficult days have passed; brother, play for us the songs of the monsoon!
Our minds and bodies will be soaked by the rain of love.

As Ruby sings ‘soaked by the rain of love’ she runs her hands over her body in a sexy, comic way, putting all her emphasis into the final word of the sentence. She sings ‘lerv’ instead of ‘love’. People stop and stare.

We get to Galle Face Green and stop for a moment. Our exuberance has slowed and we are hot again. We stand and look up at the sky, as the characters in Lagaan do after their dance is finished and the clouds have moved on without unloading themselves. Parched in the heat, waiting for rain.

I would tell friends the story of the start of my affair with Michael like a recitation of great moments in pop culture. The fact that I watched my first ever ‘Seinfeld’ episode the night we got together. The fact he had eyes like Peter O’Toole. The fact that Janis Joplin died in the hotel I was staying in. The fact that it was the night before the Rodney King verdict came down. As if these dramas were connected to us, to our passion.

The rugged American landscape conspired to make our time together seem even more iconic. We met at the Grand Canyon and drove around Monument Valley, the location for John Ford’s The Searchers. We made love in a desert town where a killer was born, and that night there was a full moon.

When I retell the story I slip between what happened to me and what was happening around me. Solid facts anchored the affair, earthed the tentative messages that were sent over the years: down phone lines, by fax, by email, the occasional old-fashioned postcard. Gave weight to those seconds when his hand sat in the small of my back, when the lightness with which he held me suggested the most delicate, the most fragile of feelings. I built a relationship, block by block, from words and weather, the phases of the moon, pieces of movies, and media soundbites.

It was four in the afternoon and I’d been sitting around in my motel room in Phoenix for hours waiting for Michael to arrive. He was late, though he’d warned me he might be. He had a long way to drive. I was becoming nervous. Could you really make an arrangement to meet someone you hardly knew in the middle of Phoenix and have them turn up?

There was a knock on the door. I opened it and Michael was standing there, grinning at me, a bottle of cold beer in his hand. I had it again, that feeling of my breath catching when I looked at him. Actually, the word to use would be swooned. I swooned to see him. He kissed me on the cheek as he walked in, pulled off his baseball cap and ran his fingers through his hair. He looked tired. ‘I haven’t had a shower and I’ve been driving for ten hours. Am I too dirty to kiss?’

I put my swooning to good use and fell upon the bed. ‘Dirty enough to fuck, I’d say.’

‘That’s the kind of welcome I was hoping for,’ he said, laughing for a moment before becoming intent. He rested one hand on my hip and undid his fly with the other.

‘Wait,’ I said, and got off the bed while he stood there, hard. I pulled off my shoes, my jeans, before getting back onto the bed, turning my arse towards him. ‘Now.’

‘Jesus,’ he groaned, as he slid into me. ‘I’m going to have to try not to come straight away.’ I ground against him, lowered my body so I was at such an angle that he could get in deeper.

‘That is not helping…Not helping at all.’

I felt sluttish and horny and other things, things I couldn’t put words to. I felt like some kind of animal. I wanted to taunt him. After a few minutes I lifted my forearms so I was on all fours, and thrust my body hard up against his pelvis with each word I spoke. ‘If. You. Keep. Fucking. Me. So. Hard,’ I said, ‘Of. Course. You. Are. Going. To. Come.’

I could feel Michael breathing heavily, unsure whether he should slow down or go faster. I slammed against him. He gasped, pulled out and onto my back, curving his body over mine, pulling me tight against him. I could feel him pulsing against me, the heat of his cum spreading out over my back.

‘You’re not big on foreplay, are you?’ I said, when he had recovered.

‘And you’re not big on drawing things out,’ he smiled. ‘Foreplay is fine, if you haven’t been thinking about someone several times a day for three weeks.’ He stroked my hair. ‘For a girl who didn’t say much last time we fucked, you weren’t stuck for words.’

‘I’ve had three weeks to think about things as well.’

‘No one should come to America,’ Michael said, ‘and not see the Grand Canyon.’ And he was right. Nothing could have prepared me for its scale and grandeur. Words fell away in the face of it and I stood in silence, we both did, watching the setting sun darkening the walls, throwing shadows, turning stone dark red, purple and then, suddenly, briefly, gold.

That night I sat in bed and read my guidebook. There were so many facts about the place, so many stories; I wanted to know them all. ‘The Grand Canyon is 277 miles long, a mile deep and as much as eighteen miles wide,’ I quoted at Michael from The Time-Life Book on the Grand Canyon.

‘All of it has been carved out by erosion—by the River Colorado and the subtle but overpowering forces of snowflakes, raindrops and air.’

Michael was watching basketball on the television with the sound down. He turned around attentively—enough to make me pursue my search for facts that read like poetry. ‘At its deepest point, along the stretch known as Granite Gorge, the Canyon slices about a mile into the earth’s crust and 2000 million years into its past. That is very, very, cool. Before the Colorado was dammed, it surged along at speeds and in volumes great enough to carry an average of 500,000 tons of rocky debris and sediment each day. In flood conditions the current could actually carry six-foot boulders.’

Michael, looking at me, was all smile lines and eyes. He reached out to me and I put my book down.

The next morning we went to Mather Point to watch the sun come up behind Vishnu Temple. There are many outcrops called temples in the canyon: Brahma, Siva, Buddha and Manu. The outcrops were first isolated by erosion and then attacked by weathering on all sides. Early explorers felt that the peaks looked like oriental temples, so that is how they named them.

Despite my pleasure in that place, I struggle now to remember the beauty of it. It is the sex Michael and I had as we travelled that is bright in my memory, everything else is dim. What I remember as if it happened yesterday is stopping on old Route 66, pushing my seat back as far as I could with Michael crouched down between my thighs while my feet were on his shoulders. His fingers were inside me. His tongue as well. Disconcertingly I caught a glimpse of my face, contorted with pleasure, in the rear vision mirror, then, more disconcertingly still, I noticed a truck had pulled off the road a few metres ahead and the driver was watching us. I touched Michael’s hair. ‘You’d better stop,’ I murmured, ‘We’ve been spotted.’ Michael lifted his head for only a moment, his face dripping with me, before going down on me again.

We drove through the day, hands touching knees. We would sit in silence then chat in bursts.

‘Here’s a game Marion used to play, she probably played it with you: if there was a movie about your life,’ Michael asked, ‘who would you want to play you?’

I got a shock when he asked that because that is exactly what I had been thinking. That I was in a road movie with my dangerous and sexy lover. ‘When I played that game with Marion last I said Jane Fonda, Klute era. Now I’m thinking Julie Christie.’

‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Could be. But she’s too old now. You need to think of someone younger. Uma Thurman?’

‘Fuck off,’ I laughed. ‘And you?’

‘John Malkovich, of course.’

PM Dawn was on the tape deck, floaty, insistent. Reality used to be a friend of mine. Through the windows I could see cacti, they were blooming and I had never realised before that their flowers were so perfect and delicate. Over the hours the landscape shifted, the earth heaved up, there were rocks scattered about in clumps, more and more gashes in the earth. Everything had been flat to the horizon but now there were mountains.

No one had told me about the painted desert so it was the most lovely surprise to see the mounds of earth striped through with pastel colours: pink, beige, yellow, pale grey, blue. We drove through Navajo territory and stopped at Betatakan, the Navajo National Monument. We looked at the honeycomb dwellings of the Anasazi, carved deep into the canyon wall.

‘They only lived here for a century or so, around the thirteenth century. No one really knows what happened. They think they ran out of water. And who can live without water?’ Michael was standing formally, reading to me from a brochure he had picked up from the visitors’ centre. With his reading glasses pushed down his nose and the seriousness of his delivery, I could imagine what he would be like standing in a lecture theatre. Smart and sexy and a little bit vulnerable. I walked up to him and put my arms around him, kissed the side of his neck.

‘I don’t know that I’ve ever been to such a special place.’

‘You can see why the new-agers love it so much around here,’ he said. ‘There is a lot of talk of “energy lines”.’ He spoke in a deliberately dry, ironic tone. To make sure, I suppose, that I didn’t think he believed any of this stuff, even though I had caught him reading his star signs in the paper only the day before.

‘Why are you single?’ I asked him on one long stretch of road.

‘The inevitable question,’ he said shortly. ‘You lasted longer than most. I was married to an American woman. I met her when I first got the position over here. She was in one of my tutorial groups. A student. Your age probably. The full cliché.’

‘What was her name?’

‘Roberta. We were together for five years. That was partly how I got my green card and why I stayed after my scholarship ran out, but that’s not why we married. We were in love. Well, I was. She met someone else, over a year ago now. And—this is where the joke is on me—he was an Australian, and she lives there now. Somewhere in Queensland. As far as she was concerned I went from being this really interesting sexy older guy who knew a lot about books, to an ageing roué who spent all his time in stuffy libraries.’ He stopped abruptly. ‘Can we not talk about this?’

I didn’t listen, I pushed too hard. I asked him whether he’d ever considered coming home when he separated from his wife.

‘Home?’ he asked, sarcastic now. ‘Where’s that?’ There was a long pause and then, ‘I mean it. Where is home to you?’

I found I didn’t know what to say. Melbourne was the place from which I went out and away—to America, to India, to men and places I didn’t know. ‘A friend…all right, to be honest, a lover, my geography teacher, made me think of it this way. Melbourne is the place where I can trace the lines of affection.’

‘Exactly,’ says Michael. ‘And they are the lines that we can get tangled in. They are what must be avoided.’ Michael understood ambivalence. That made me believe he understood me. ‘America,’ Michael said, ‘is easier.’

‘It wasn’t easier the first time I came here,’ I said. ‘Like you, I was left here. But for some reason I don’t blame the place. Not like I blame Melbourne. I suppose that doesn’t make sense.’

‘It’s always easiest to blame the places and people who are closest to you.’

These are some of the things that happened to me and Finn the first time we were in New York: when we got there we lived in an apartment, not a quarter-acre block with a Hills Hoist. There was no garden and we didn’t have a cat. We didn’t go out and play on the street either because my mother said it was dangerous and we didn’t live there long because soon it was the day when I got up to see where my table and doll had gone.

I found my mother in the bathroom brushing her teeth. I stood watching her while she spat the toothpaste out into the basin. She got some in her hair. I don’t know where Finn was, though he was only two, he must have been close by.

‘Where is my doll?’ I asked my mother. ‘Why are there so many boxes?’

‘We’re going home.’

‘Why are we going home?’ I asked but my mother did not answer, just held on to the basin. ‘Where’s home?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t home here?’

‘It’s Melbourne,’ she said.

I went to find my father, to ask him why we were going home. He was in the television room, surrounded by more boxes. I asked, ‘Why are you crying? Is it because we are going home?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ Then he said that he was not going with us. That he was sad.

I tried to nail things down: ‘Will you be coming in one day? Will you be coming in two weeks?’ and my father said, no, maybe he wouldn’t come for years. I didn’t understand what that meant, because years…well, years was as old as me.

He hugged me and rocked me, both of us crying. I ran to my mother, told her, ‘Mummy, Daddy is crying,’ and my mother just stood there, leaning against the basin, her long blonde hair hanging, toothpaste smeared over her mouth. I can remember this, her sad and lovely face, as if it was yesterday. My mother was much younger than I am now. I cannot imagine having two children at twenty-five. I am thirty-seven and still feel like a child myself.

That day tangled things up for me—things like love and absence; who leaves and who stays behind and what it means—and they got more tangled ten years later when my second dad left. People don’t like it when you talk about this, not when almost everyone has been divorced or is going to be and is freaking out about what it is they are doing to the kids. This is what you are never meant to ask: why didn’t you stay together because of me, for me? Why can’t you stay together forever? Why am I not the centre of your world?

We drove through Monument Valley at dawn. When we got there in the pale light of the morning, the sun not yet above the horizon, it was not only as I had seen in films, it was as I had seen it in my own ad, the one I’d designed for work: monolithic rocks soaring out of a desert floor that was flat and hard and dry. I imagined what it must have been like millions of years before when the desert was the bottom of the ocean, and the sandstone had not yet eroded. I closed my eyes and I was flying around the jutting rocks, an eagle—no, a condor. I closed my eyes again and I was swimming through an underwater valley. It was then that the sun rose and suddenly everything was gold, dazzling me.

‘You can practically see John Wayne, can’t you,’ Michael said, ‘riding out to save his niece before she’s despoiled by the Comanche.’ He grabbed me and kissed me with stagey brutality. ‘Makes me feel like a real man. Makes me feel like despoiling something.’

I pushed him away. This was one moment when the landscape enraptured me more than Michael.

It was two days’ hard driving back to Los Angeles and we stopped in a strange little town in the middle of the desert to sleep. Kingman—the birthplace of Timothy McVeigh, although nobody would hear of him for another two years.

That night we both went straight to sleep, exhausted. I woke some hours later to feel Michael hard against me, half-moving, half-asleep. There were such gentle strokes and touches and movements between us I couldn’t tell where he ended and I began. By the time we were properly awake, I was on top of him and he was inside me. He lightly scratched the small of my back and I arched, as if I were a cat.

‘I could fuck you forever,’ I said. ‘I want to fuck you forever,’ then regretted my intensity.

‘I don’t know why,’ Michael undercut his abruptness by reaching up and kissing me on the lips. It was dark, I couldn’t see his expression and perhaps because I wanted it so much it seemed to me that perhaps he felt the same way. That he wanted things to last forever as well.

We made love again back in Venice the next afternoon, the day I was to leave, with a kind of feather-light touch that felt like love. He looked at me, for a long time, and I managed to look back without flinching. Before this afternoon I had always had to turn away from the intensity of his gaze.

He rested his face against me, breathed on me. Touched me gently with his tongue. ‘Please,’ I said.

Then: ‘Now.’

We moved together for a while before he said, ‘I can’t. I’m too sad that you are leaving.’ So we kissed and talked. For a while we slept. When I moved away from him, he pulled me back towards him, put his hand on my cheek. ‘I could love you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I already do.’ And the words filled me up.

We drove to the airport, stopping in a bar on the way for a beer and something to eat. ‘Try this beer,’ he said. ‘It’s called Bohemia, it’s Mexican.’ And I did, loving the colour and taste of it. I can still remember how it tasted all these years later.

At the airport Michael had tears in his eyes. ‘Being with you reminds me of home.’

I never really got to know Michael. But I came to know distance intimately and to understand what it did to desire; I came to understand that desire was as much a place as any country I had visited. It had its own geography. At first I thought it was just me but over the years I learnt that Michael was lost in this place as well. With him I visited the dreamscapes that had nourished me since I was a child. Distance, desire, ambivalence, city, they were all one. And always there was the fact that he was eight thousand miles away, the fact that it was impossible, the fact that distance stretched our desire so taut I thought I might die of longing.