‘Betga was right, I should have been paying more attention to what was going to happen to me after the plaintiffs settled.’
‘You’re much too hard on yourself,’ Jessica told him. ‘You initiated countless delicate negotiations, many at personal peril, which at every turn looked like they were about to fall over and you arrived at an incredibly fair outcome for four women that even managed to be good for your client. I know, I was there too. And all while missing your children and virtually living out of a suitcase.’
It was the night after Maserov’s meeting with Malcolm Torrent and they were back in the library section of Jessica’s local cocktail bar, the Ghost of Alfred Felton, with the famously egoless bartenders. But there was one bartender who, having nurtured an ever-blossoming affection for Jessica, could not help but wonder if his ego had restrained his id for too long. To hell with the bartending job and its requirement that he not laud his skills with muddlers, tongs, shakers and shot glasses over any man who dared come within an arm’s reach of this woman. He could shake crushed ice like the very best percussionist in the Banda de Ipanema during the Rio Mardi Gras. He could quip like the best late-night television sidekick and his innate understanding of people told him when to ask whether someone meant to order a traditional Negroni, a Negroni Bianco or a Negroni Sbagliato, and when to make the decision himself. But he now regarded himself as a fool for hiding his own feelings under the counter of an establishment in which he had no shares and where he was contractually forbidden from screaming when Jessica Annand looked with such unequivocal, heartbreaking warmth into Stephen Maserov’s eyes.
‘Personal peril . . . I know, I was there too,’ Maserov repeated what she’d said and smiled. Jessica smiled in return and placed one of her hands on his forearm. The gesture was too much for the bartender. He knew that Jessica was going to find a reason, albeit thinly disguised, to take Maserov home for the first time. He knew it before Maserov did. He’d seen this kind of thing before. In fact he saw it several times every night. He was in its line of fire every working night and ought to have been paid danger money for it. Maserov hadn’t seen this kind of thing for so long that he almost missed it. Almost.
Her flimsy excuse was that she wanted to show Maserov a draft of her policy recommendations to Torrent Industries to try to eradicate sexual harassment in the workplace. Of course, they both knew that she could have emailed them to him or, if she did want to discuss them with him in person, they could do that in one of their offices. But Maserov’s description of his uncertainty as to the strength and now the terms of his deal with Malcolm Torrent had spurred her on. What if he suddenly stopped being available for her to see every day whenever she wanted? It made her feel like a lover in a time of war when what passes for the niceties of a peacetime society may well turn out be the passport to eternal regret. So they found themselves drinking more upstairs in her St Kilda apartment with their shoes off, pretending to be focusing intensely on the statutory definition of sexual harassment in the workplace.
At that point their shared look into the face of the other blocked out all thoughts of anything else. The sweetness of the shared smile triggered the memory of one thing only, the hunger of their kissing that first night, its ferocity. To be that close again and not in the street but alone on Jessica’s couch, to be in private, to already know that neither of them needed to be embarrassed, at least not to kiss, because they were two people who enjoyed kissing each other. This had been established and this emboldened them. He undid the buttons of her blouse with one hand and then felt the contours of her breast with the palm of the other hand. Was she going to pull away? Was she going to ask him to stop, even politely, with gentle esteem-saving regret? Why should she? No, not only was she not going to stop him, she kissed him even more frantically, greedily. He returned her kiss with equal vigour. But in contrast, his cautious exploration of her breasts through her bra was like that of young man unsure of whether the very next step would be a misstep, a retrograde step that could lead to a reconsideration of what they were now, unequivocally, doing. Wanting to encourage him, wanting the fury of their kissing to be matched wherever they touched, she unhooked her bra and slid one strap off her shoulder. Then he slid the strap off her other shoulder.
She was now naked to the waist. He stopped kissing her for a moment and leaned back to take in the sight of her breasts, something he had so often fought not to think about, not to look at, not to imagine. She smiled. Her nipples were hard. She was not afraid at all and she put one hand to the crease of his suit pants and followed it all the way to the crotch where it was warm, hard. Then she stood up, took him to her bedroom, unzipped her skirt and proceeded to undress him.
She peeled the cover off her bed slowly and guided him down. This was her bedroom. These were her sheets. This was the smell of her and soon, at least for some unspecified time, of him, of his skin wrapped in her sheets. He wrapped himself around her, pressed against her tightly and then, slowly, entered her. He felt a radiant joy he hadn’t felt since his early twenties.
For Jessica, here at last was the real thing. She hadn’t had to preen or pretend to be someone she, herself, didn’t much like. She had taken a chance on being herself to a man who was in many senses an old-fashioned gentleman, not in the sense of being a man of property or of a distinguished lineage, but in the sense of being a gentle man of integrity who possessed a strength he himself didn’t know he had, an intelligent man, a compassionate man, who was honest to a fault, his own faults to start with. He was handsome in a way that, like his other qualities, didn’t shout or draw attention to itself. But once glimpsed it was undeniable.
From the time Jessica discovered that men were attracted to her, which slightly preceded the time she first realised she was attracted to men, she had always sought the company and attention of men whose belief in their own worth, whose so often misplaced, unshakeable self-confidence had seemed intoxicatingly worthy of her own abasement. These men were the prizes, the ones you went after for the proof of your own prettiness and desirability despite your differences, even if you had to squint sometimes to avoid a clear-eyed recognition of their fetishisation of you and of your background and their sooner-or-later drunken mockery of the customs and accents of your family.
But Jessica had grown up. Here was the proof of that beside her. Stephen Maserov, the antithesis of those men, he was the real prize, and as she lay beside him there she celebrated finding him. And it wasn’t just good fortune. He was devouring her again. It wasn’t the act that animated him. Undeniably it was her.
And as finally somnolence overtook him, Maserov recognised what a miracle it was to have met someone like Jessica in, of all places, his place of work, the sort of place where so often the only thing people really had in common was the compulsion to contort the essence of themselves into a facsimile of someone else.
At one stage Maserov woke while it was still dark, thinking about his children. Whatever was going to happen, he couldn’t live without them. He wanted the feeling he got from Jessica and he wanted to live with his children, children he would never try to separate from Eleanor. He even wanted Eleanor, but the way she used to be. And he wanted Jessica, breathing Jessica, urgently. Uncharacteristically, because logical inconsistency was an anathema to him, he was able to convince himself that all of this was possible and he fell back to sleep.
He was suddenly in some kind of pit, about to be executed by firing squad, when the light reflected from the bay across the St Kilda Esplanade woke him from a nightmare. His brow was moist with his own sweat. And he was alone. Jessica was not there.
Before he had a chance to imagine where she had gone, she came into the bedroom, showered, dressed for work and more beautiful than ever with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.
‘I squeezed this for you,’ she said, kissing his forehead as she gave it to him. ‘You’re wet! Are you unwell?’
‘No, I think . . . I just had a nightmare.’
‘What about?’
‘I was going to be executed by firing squad.’
‘Oh my God!’ She sat down on the bed. ‘You’re worried about your job.’
‘I guess so.’
She took his hand. ‘You know, that might be premature, and even if it’s not, you’ll find something else. And maybe the first thing you find isn’t ideal but it doesn’t have to be the last thing, the thing you ultimately settle for.’
‘I don’t have any savings, not to speak of.’
‘No one does. And just so you know . . .’
‘What?’
‘I don’t care whether you have any money. I don’t care whether you have a job. Those things come and go, faster than ever these days. I’ve seen who you really are. The qualities that make you the person I’ve come to know, they don’t change.’
Now he took her hand. ‘You’re dressed for work, already?’
‘It’s already past already,’ she said.
Maserov looked at his watch. ‘Oh shit!’
‘I’ve got a meeting,’ Jessica continued calmly. ‘You stay here as long as you like. There’s a towel for you. Have a shower. Enjoy the view of the bay and call me when you get to work.’
She kissed him on the lips, turned, and he listened to the sounds of her leaving.