Susie Layton had rung Mike at home. She said Joe was out for the whole day. He had a job in Elphinstone.
‘Can you take an hour off? Come here?’
There was the deep, breathy voice, the throaty giggle and the well-worn line. It was all so calculatedly cheap, but that was what got him. She turned him into a player. They’d never done anything at her house. This was a riskier transgression. He looked at his watch, pretending to himself that he was considering.
‘I’ll come now,’ he said. After all it looked like Martha had a migraine coming on. It was better he leave the house.
As he drove he wondered whether he would tell Susie that Ada had seen them and that Tilly knew. If he did, he would do it afterwards. It would ruin the mood if he did it before. But afterwards…Afterwards was already becoming complicated. Susie had started to linger, snuggling up to him and talking about things. He hadn’t wanted to hear why she married Joe (because she was desperate to have a child), how Joe had problems sexually, how he loved her, though, how he would do anything to please her, how he still read stories to Toby at night, and how her own father had died suddenly and she still hadn’t really recovered. It wasn’t that her stories bothered him, it was just that he wasn’t interested in knowing her in that way. He didn’t want to become close. He never asked her anything, yet she spilled herself all over him, showing him a woman, just like Martha was a woman, a woman whose body was exposed and lying beside him on a hotel bed, in the late afternoon. The instant she nestled her head onto his chest and spoke of love, she weighed a tonne. He wanted to fling her off before she buried him. He didn’t want her love; he wanted her hunger for him. No, it was better he tell her nothing about Ada and Tilly knowing. Better that he not encourage this sharing of confidences. As it was, she would be exactly as he liked her: she would sweep him up, pounce on him as soon as he walked in, lead him where he wanted to go. He imagined what she’d be wearing. She would have prepared herself. His mind happily succumbed to a stampede of possible scenarios…
He drove fast. Something of the hunger of his youth, the sense of anticipation, seized him. But it wasn’t the same; it was dirtier. When he was young, everything was explosive and ardent and dream-like. That’s how it had felt when he met Martha.
But Arnold Buch had ruined that night. And Mike had fled from it for good reason. Arnold had broken every rule. Those rules had the rigour of a sport; they were played on a field with boundaries marked with fat white lines. Mike should have seen it coming. But it was so fluid between them with their complementary tactics, that Mike hadn’t noticed the shifting terms. Had Arnold? Had it been part of a master plan from the beginning or was it just the culmination of the night’s lawlessness? And then afterwards, Mike cut him off. He’d had to. Even now he flinched at the memory of it.
Martha had been asleep on the bed. He and Arnold were drinking. They sat at the window. Mike lounged back in the old armchair, half dazed and sodden while Arnold perched feverishly on a bedside table, issuing wild observations, which became more incoherent and passionate the drunker he became. He lapsed occasionally into moments of absorbed quiet from which welled the sound of the ocean as it shifted its great bulk on the world’s surface. Finally, Arnold began reciting poetry. Mike closed his eyes, bored.
Arnold had demanded he listen. He had claimed that if Mike did not listen to poetry then he did not have a soul.
Mike didn’t understand poetry, not even when he was drunk, and he had no intention of listening. All he understood was that Arnold was making some sort of criticism of his nature. If he did have a soul, and Mike didn’t even believe in such things, it was a utilitarian one, and he liked it that way. The words still sailed over him, like the sound of the sea and the salt wind that came off it.
When Mike’s eyes opened, Arnold was bent over him. His face, through the darkness, showed an unfamiliar expression of pain or, thinking about it now, maybe it was ardour. Mike began to sit up properly, but Arnold seized his face and, with unrestrained fervour, kissed him on the mouth.
Mike’s mind twisted at the memory of it. It can’t have been his fault. Had he loosened his grip on himself? Arnold’s speech had swum over him, like a story he wasn’t really paying attention to. In fact he had been in his own sort of pleasant swoon for Martha. But Arnold’s mouth crushed against his before his mind could even register what was happening. He had been ambushed. And he was pissed. It took him a moment to pull himself back together and when he did, he pushed Arnold off him, of course. He should have done it sooner. Not submitted, like a girl.
Arnold stumbled and fell. Mike got up—not to help Arnold, but to get away. He’d shouted at him, called him a homo. Martha stirred on the bed but didn’t wake. They’d both stared at her. She was a woman, not a part of this, but the point on which everything pivoted.
Arnold had begun again on his damn poem, as if life would go on as it was before, and night would raise its curtain on a new day, clean as the baker’s truck.
Mike saw it all then. Arnold Buch was soft and mad and queer. Their whole friendship turned on its side, twisted and gaped open, the past lifted like flesh from a bone. Mike turned away from it. He was disgusted. He had kissed a man. The night sky leered, stars mocked. Everything he had known to be true jeered at him with the maniacal persistence of Arnold Buch’s poem. He didn’t know what else to do but to get out as fast as he could.
And from there his life sped away, on the run from such sinister uncertainty. When he and Martha managed their own courtship and then headed straight down the Calder Highway, right back to the plain country, back to the heartland of the goldmines, it was because he was still running. Martha’s pregnancy brought the sobering necessities of marriage and a job. He had rung an old mate whose father managed the Wattle Gully goldmine. And they were back there, in the first wave of new residents to the old towns. Most of the others were ‘earthenware’ to him: ceramicists or beekeepers, long-haired people in overalls who built mudbrick houses and grew their own vegetables. But Martha was happy; she had a new baby and her own house. She made friends with the hippies, even if Mike never would. Mike was as suspicious of hippies as he was of homosexuals. Ever since Arnold’s kiss, everything he did—his marriage, his work, his self-assurance—built his case: he was not a homosexual. He had proved it over and over. When Mike heard that Arnold Buch was going overseas, he had been relieved. It would end the story and the threat within it.
And perhaps it had worked. Arnold’s visit hadn’t aroused in him anything except a distant sort of fondness. He was not as sharp or quick or startled; life had worn him down. He had even wondered if he and Arnold could be friends again. After all, here he was, the adulterer, on his way to see his lover. It was hard to be good.
Susie opened the door wearing nothing other than a floral apron. He was more amused than aroused. His memory contained a select picture of Susie. It took him a moment to adjust to the embodied version. Did some hurt darken her eyes? She had seen his hesitation. But she rallied; she stepped closer and slapped him on the shoulder, lifting her chin, jaunty as a schoolgirl. She eyed him, challenging him. How dare he hesitate, how dare he temper this moment with doubt? Mike laughed inwardly at her defiance and, detecting this shift, she drew him towards her, holding his head with both hands, tunnelling her gaze into his.
Over her shoulder Mike could see Toby’s drawings of a house and family stuck on the fridge. The dog lay in its basket.
He suggested she take him to the bedroom. But there, he was even more uncomfortable. There was Joe’s side of the bed: a sachet of pills, a watch, a half-drunk glass of water. On her side, there was a pile of books, just like Martha had. He closed his eyes.
He didn’t see Joe Layton walk in. He heard Susie’s gasp, like a fish dying in the air. She began to yank the apron off as if she would be more decent in just nothing. Mike lifted his head. ‘Shit,’ he said.
Joe stared directly at him and then at Susie as if making sure they were both real. Susie said, ‘Joe!’ Then she started saying, ‘Honey, I’m sorry, honey?’ but she was fumbling with the apron tie and struggling to get her legs out from underneath her so she could go to him. He didn’t answer her. He wobbled like a skittle that had just taken a hit and then his eyes screwed closed and he turned away, his hand raised at her in a stop gesture.
By the time Mike sat up, Joe Layton had left. The front door slammed. Then it opened again. Mike reached for his pants. For a moment he thought he was going to have to fight. But the door slammed again. Mike waited, listening. Susie was crying. Minutes passed before he was certain that Joe Layton had gone.