It was still hot when Mike Bloom undressed for bed. Martha took no notice. He unbuttoned his shirt and threw it, with an exaggerated flourish, on the chest of drawers, mostly to amuse himself. Martha’s gaze didn’t swerve from her book. She lay in the bed, on her back, under the white sheet, straight and small and clenched, holding the book close to her face. She frowned as she read, and Mike wondered if her reading was causing her a slight displeasure or whether she was frowning at the possibility that he might intrude and warding him off, should he try. Martha had many ways of warding him off. It was the same every night.
Whereas Susie was hungry for him. Susie would peel off his shirt as if unwrapping a delicacy. She took audible pleasure in touching his chest; her hands ran over his arms, she deposited kisses on his stomach; she sought him out and moaned. Her body was soft—a landscape of accommodating flesh that she willingly arched over him. She gave herself as if to be eaten.
‘Did you get everyone fish and chips last night?’ Martha looked at him, finally, as he pulled back the sheet to get in.
‘Well, I got home late from work; I had to.’ It annoyed him the way she asked. It was just to show him that she knew and she disapproved and that he had failed. Why did he need to justify himself? They were his children too.
‘What time did Tilly get home?’
Again the implied criticism. He frowned. How could it possibly be his fault that Tilly got home late? He sighed. He hadn’t wanted it to go this way. He was tired and he wanted to sleep but he also wanted to make love to his wife. His desire was more proprietary than carnal. He had to balance things out. But she was already pissing him off. He propped himself up on his elbow, looking at her.
She frowned at him almost pityingly. ‘It’s too hot tonight,’ she said.
Martha had always been coy. No matter how much Mike complimented her, she still tried to hide herself. He thought it was just a girlish habit that he would break with the force of her attraction to him. No matter how much he adored her—he even pleaded with her to stand naked before him—she wouldn’t do it. Susie Layton was not perfect, but her perfection was that she didn’t care. She almost purred. In bed, she crawled over him, her breasts above his face.
Her voice was what had first drawn him to her; it was slow and she left sentences hanging. She made allusions to sex. She flirted with him and laughed or made throaty noises of appreciation. They had met on many ‘family occasions’, at school fetes, sports days, and then every now and then at the bottle shop, where she had confessed to him that whisky made her horny. There had been a dinner at her house, with her husband Joe. She had worn a silk shirt, undone enough to reveal a significant cleavage, and a short skirt, even though her thighs were large. She had licked her fingers, drunk too much, put on a fake moustache and posed for photos. Then there were the times when she was visiting Martha, caressing the teacup, leaning over the kitchen bench with her breasts. Finally, she had rung him at work. She drawled like Elizabeth Taylor. She wanted to come in and discuss her will. He felt her drawing him in, pulling him closer. And it excited him. He felt her desire for him in her voice, in the risks she took, the way she would return his gaze, say something coarse or something sweet. Vulgarities and tendernesses issued from her with the same sort of carnal intent.
‘Tell me, Mike, what were you like as a child? I bet you were a scamp?’ Her voice was syrupy with suggestion.
The truth was, he hadn’t been a scamp at all. Until now he’d been a well-behaved battler who had wanted to win from the moment he knew what winning was. And as he’d grown up in a country town, which still retained its gold-rush grandeur, he’d got a whiff of what winning was early on. The shine of it had caught at his soul. From their modest rented weatherboard home, his father left each morning to drive trams, and his mother cleaned houses and played bingo on the weekend. He and his brother had their weekly bath warmed by the old chip heater and spent afternoons aimlessly kicking a football on the vacant block. In winter they went to bed early to escape the cold and listened to the crackle of the radio serial, that faraway voice that whispered the stories of elsewhere, awakening in him the possibility of other possibilities. He was startled out of this somnolence by the much-touted arrival of the Ashman’s television set, which came in time for all the neighbours to crowd in and watch the Melbourne Olympics. Sometimes, after that, they went to the Ashman’s at 6.30 to watch The Lone Ranger. The television, with its Olympians and lone rangers, spurred Mike’s vague ambitions, which later were realised in the singular glories he achieved on the football field.
Obviously Susie was picturing a young rogue who ran barefoot through the paddocks. And Mike knew that when he called himself a country boy, it wasn’t only to excuse any lack of urban sophistication, but also to lend him a rugged hue that didn’t belong to him. He’d never sat on his father’s knee in the tractor; he’d never milked a cow or mended a fence or shot and skinned a rabbit. At Christmas when his dad brought home a chicken and they watched him chop its head off, Mike experienced a very unmanly sort of horror, which he tried not to show, because it didn’t do to be a girl about these things. Likewise, he didn’t cry when he was strapped to the dentist’s chair and choked with chloroform. Whatever courage he had he’d forced upon himself; it hadn’t come naturally. His adolescence took place mostly on sporting ovals and riding around in the town centre checking out girls.
The enviable pleasures the city offered were carefully stirred into Mike’s boyish soul by Arnold Buch. Arnold’s father was a Jewish barrister and, according to Arnold, a descendant of the Hungarian oligarchy. The family had left Hungary during the Soviet occupation. Arnold, whose pale, fine face was crowned with glossy dark curls, did in fact have a regal manner. Mike could still picture him sitting on the tram like a dark bird, with ankles flashing bottle-green socks, and a wry smile, which usually foretold a witty comment about whoever or whatever had just caught his eye. It was a mystery to Mike why he had been chosen by Arnold. Though this bestowed on him a sense of superiority, it made him all the more aware of the lowliness of his origins. If it weren’t for his athleticism, and the moments of transcendence it afforded him, he wouldn’t have had the heart to strive for more. He had tasted glory, and it had awakened a hunger. He began to look for something bigger. Then along came Arnold—delicately hewn, glowing and sardonic. His elegance was bold and his aim precise. Arnold had no interest in sport beyond that of making incisive and sometimes cruel comments on the strange culture that he, like an exotic plant in the wrong landscape, had found himself in. But he had an interest in Mike. Before school finished, Arnold had devised a plan for them to flee. Mike had used the anticipation of this to quell the usual gnawing of youth, so that when he launched his life, it would be with the force of a stone released from its catapult. And when he went, he took with him not a glimmer of canny knowledge or intention—just hunger, guts, his good looks and his best mate Arnold Buch.
Three years later he returned with Martha.
The instant of meeting her swerved his whole life in a direction he hadn’t been planning to take.
Mike wouldn’t tell Susie any of this. Men should make their own plans. And he wouldn’t speak of Arnold. Every time his mind arrived at Arnold Buch, it reared up, like a horse coming across a snake.
‘Yeah, I was a bit of a scamp,’ he lied.
Mike wasn’t ready to give Susie Layton up. Not yet. But now Tilly had threatened everything. He was annoyed at her for this. He wasn’t a man to drag his thoughts into the heart of things. He rarely wondered what other people might feel. It wasn’t his business—just as this wasn’t Tilly’s. As for Susie’s husband, he and Joe weren’t proper mates—they hadn’t played footy together; they just knew each other the way anyone who had been living here long enough did. It would be awkward were Joe to find out. He was a decent sort of bloke, well liked—Mike had nothing against him. But what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Who was Tilly to throw that high-pitched moral outrage at him? How could she chastise him as if she knew better than him, when she was too young to understand anything of marriage? She didn’t know what it was like to be married to Martha. No one did. His anger started again. He turned away from Martha and closed his eyes.
But what if Martha did find out? He hadn’t really thought about this possibility until Tilly had stood there saying she knew. What would Martha do if Tilly told her? He didn’t love Susie. He loved having sex with her. And did he even love that? It was more the whole affair that he loved, not as much for the physical pleasure it gave him, as for the discovery of the erotic tension it had erupted from and gave life to. The affair with Susie Layton had thrown his life back into the headiness of his youth. It had unstitched the seams that had enclosed him within a home, a job, a family. It had undone the package that he’d become and pulled him off the conveyer belt towards the looming inevitability of old age. Susie had done that as soon as she whispered in his ear a word that Martha would never have used. He hadn’t even known that a word could stir him up as it did—he hadn’t known that this dirtiness could be thrilling. It had opened up in him a gaping hunger; suddenly the scent of something lay before him. His life was now rushing into an alluring darkness. Distracting thoughts overcame him at work. He drove like a young man, already stirred up, to orange brick motels in the afternoon. It was sordid, alive, full of possibility and danger. Yet, he didn’t want to leave Martha. It would never occur to him to not be with Martha, and if she left him, what would he do? The affair could not exist without Martha.
She had reached over and turned off the lamp. In the dark he could hear her breath and feel the warmth of her body. She lay apart from him, but his hand grazed hers and she didn’t move it away. There was the familiar smell of her in the haze of heat that enclosed them. Or was it the interwoven smell of them, the two of them together? This was what he had lived within for twenty years. It was placid now, familiar. And yet, Martha was still beautiful to him. He still watched her as she dressed in the morning. She always got up before him. Sometimes he ignored the whole scene; sometimes he pretended he was asleep. Sometimes it saddened him to watch her, it was better to dream.
On occasions Martha made an effort. She wore earrings, perfumed her wrists and made up her eyes. She didn’t do it to please him; she did it to show him. She danced in the kitchen if the right song came on and although she didn’t dance well, or because she didn’t dance with any style, he was reminded with a pang, of his attraction to her. In her graceless eruption of energy, there was a wild untethered girl. He’d imagined she would abandon herself, that together they would be animals in life. It had never happened. Martha still had a suggestive look about her sometimes, and she stomped her hoof as if she knew it, but she never gave in to the gallop. Instead she became stiff and clever. These days, if she drew his attention, it was only so she could throw it away again, or so it seemed to him.
And yet sometimes she crawled into his arms. When she was beaten. When she was tired or sad or defeated by her own frustrations. When she had argued with the school that art classes should not be removed from the curriculum with the funding cuts and failed. When she had cooked soup for a sick friend and dropped the whole pot. Then she came inside and crawled into his arms.
Mike wrapped his hand around hers. He encircled her small wrist; he had always loved her wrists.