During the month of December our choices for the evening of the thirty-first were these. My best friend, Harry, had invited us to a barbecue at his place. I was perfectly happy with this prospect, but there was another invitation. Thirty-ninth floor balcony. Black tie, cocktails, champagne, catered food, all those coloured lights exploding on the harbour. Sam could see plenty of backyard barbecues in my future, so the high-rise do it was.
And the high-rise do meant tuxedos. Party frocks. Jewellery. Professional couples. Canapés of all kinds. Private educations. The odd northern hemisphere university. Informed conversations about nothing, uninformed conversations about everything else. And by seven, well before sunset or sparkling lights in the sky, everyone high-spirited if not totally legless.
At dinner, Sam and I were seated next to Robert Crompton, a ‘dealer’ whose job was to do something with money. Gamble it, I think. Opposite him was his girlfriend, Kate. Kate worked in a large law firm drafting documents that enabled her beau to gamble with the money. She snorted when she laughed, and specialised in greedy lunges for Dom Perignon.
On my left was Scott Byrne. Scott, the forensic accountant, worked for one of the enormous ‘worldwide multidisciplinary’ firms, although fortunately for him not Andersens. Sam had written parts of some of their publicity brochures. Scott helped his clients excel despite the travails of a rapidly changing and turbulent economy. He had been to Siena to the Palio. He understood what the Nasdaq was. He was eminently suitable for a skyline balcony on the thirty-first of the twelfth.
Nearly half a lifetime ago, Scott’s wife, Sarah, and I had shared one semester of English lit together. Sarah Byrne had firm views on Literature, and was prepared to share them as if they alone were worthy of a Pulitzer or two. When I turned to my left she leant over her husband (whose fiction reading extended no further than large company accounts) and attempted to engage me in a discussion about the latest literary wunderkind. ‘It’s overwritten, overambitious and pretentious,’ was her conclusion. Too terrified to disagree, even though I did, I said nothing. ‘Have you read her latest one, Chris?’ I shook my head apologetically. ‘Don’t bother,’ she said.
The only thing that surprised me about Mrs Byrne’s conclusion was that she hadn’t delivered it in French. Madame Sarah spoke fluent French, and reminded people of this almost every troisième sentence. Back in the days when she was a mademoiselle, I had once been stuck with her and two of her friends on her parents’ patio at a drinks soiree while they conducted an animated conversation in French. Right in front of me. A few giggles, a word in Français, and away they went. Like I was L’Homme Invisible. It’s funny, I thought. All these years later and look what’s happened to me. L’Homme Invisible once again.
After deconstructing Modern Lit, Sarah had enquired after a friend of mine who was an artist. ‘Does your friend have another exhibition coming up this year? I think I heard something. Eddie, isn’t it?’
‘Edward Adams,’ I said. ‘In May, I think.’
‘His first one created some interest, didn’t it? Was the last one a little disappointing? I think the view taken was that he hadn’t moved on?’
I preferred her when she talked books. ‘He sold them all,’ I said.
‘Did he? Not quite the same, though, is it? Perhaps I’m thinking of someone else.’
‘Perhaps you are.’
‘Where’s the next exhibition? Charlotte’s gallery again?’
‘No, I don’t think so this time.’ I told her where I thought the next exhibition was.
‘There?’ She looked at me like anything less than the New Tate was a failure. ‘I’m not sure that’s the best place for him,’ she said. ‘He does have some talent, after all.’
Really, I thought. Vous êtes très gentille. Still, at least she hadn’t brought up the topic of what I was doing now. Now that . . . well, after my . . . humiliation. I knew she would be just dying to ask. I turned to my right.
John Morella was a stockbroker and, therefore, a friend of both Scott the Forensic Accountant and Robert the Dealer. John wore Armani glasses and Gianfranco Ferré (pronounced perfectly) ties. He was married to Nicole, a lawyer who sounded English but was not. No one is really sure how this happens, but it does. Nicole wore lots of pearls. Strings and strings. An entire oyster farm had been cultivated so she could go out in public. She was prone to wearing her hair pulled back in a bun. Suitably severe. Very.
‘This Peking duck isn’t bad,’ John said to me, ‘but not as good as the Flower Drum.’
‘That’s in Melbourne?’
‘The best I’ve had. Beats anything here. As good as Hong Kong.’
‘What we have here tastes pretty good if you come from Dubbo,’ a voice piped up.
‘Well,’ Nicole replied tightly, ‘we’re not from Dubbo.’
Marrying someone of ethnicity seemed a big call for Nic. But John was well-mannered, well-dressed, well-paid, professional and, if not handsome, at least groovy looking. Someone who undoubtedly received e-mails from Europe and New York containing attachments that identified the new city professional look the moment it had been christened. It’s possible he jumped on the metrosexual bandwagon before Beckham. Every new style reached him instantly from the soundless rays of some passing satellite.
I smiled at Nicole. Out of pity. She could only achieve anything approaching tranquillity and happiness if she had a lot to complain about, a lot of the time. She smiled back. Out of contempt. I knew what she was thinking. Loser. Criminal.
Dinner started just before ten, not long after the first fireworks display, watched by all on the windswept balcony. Now buoyed by the steady flow of wine, the next few hours slid by almost imperceptibly, until I found myself, for the thirty-fifth time, on the cusp of greeting another New Year. And in that faint tremor of time between dinner and midnight, I had journeyed on the road from tipsy to a state I would describe as grimly drunk. My powers of observation were just intact enough to see that Sam had made this pilgrimage with me. On this well-trodden path she had most effectively demonstrated her physical condition by spilling nearly an entire glass of red wine on an Alexander McQueen making its debut. Sam merely looked at its distressed occupier, shrugged, mumbled something that could have been ‘sorry’, refilled her glass, and walked away.
I had borne witness to this total absence of mens rea before, and knew that neither intervention nor chastisement were advisable. Give her a wide berth, don’t make a fuss, that’s the key.
I certainly gave Sam a wide birth when I saw her talking tearfully in a corner to Phillipa Woodman, a colleague and member of her inner circle. I knew what they were talking about. The imminent end of our relationship.
Pip Woodman had experience in breakups. At thirty-three she had already been through two marriages and was apparently in the early stages of contemplating a third. To her, breakups were inconveniences that had to be intermittently endured rather than scarring emotional traumas. I knew what Sam was saying to her. I could have written the script. He just won’t talk, I was sure she was saying. If it’s not something he’s interested in – I get nothing. And he certainly won’t talk about ‘it’. Not about how he feels, anyway. Or about what his plans are now. That’s why he’s in the mess he is. That’s the whole fucking problem.
Enough about Chris, I am sure Pip replied. Chris is history.
I could see Sam had started to tear up again at this point. Right when I became history. She no longer loved me, and it was well past the hour for moving on, but three years is three years. She had stayed beyond the point of duty. I am sure she emphasised this to Pip. And having to listen to all that bloody music, I know she’d say that. Fuck. Do you know what he listens to? Bob Dylan. Frank Sinatra. Dusty Fucking Springfield. Something called The Waifs. Work out the fucking theme in that lot. He’s not even forty.
From the look on her face Pip was counselling immediate separation. You need to end it. Tomorrow. Now.
I intend to, I am sure Sam said then. It’s always hard to find the right moment. You can’t if he’s listening to Dusty Springfield or Bob Dylan. Not if he’s watching some documentary on SBS about the CIA, or reading some biography of Che Guevara or Engels or some other clichéd leftie claptrap. And not if he’s focusing on the depressed, negative vision he has of his unhappy life.
Pip said nothing.
Sam wiped her eyes.
I knew just what Pip Woodman was thinking. Dusty Springfield? Che Guevara?
‘Get rid of him,’ she said, this time loud enough for me to hear with my ears.
11.55 pm. I couldn’t find her. All the other couples were outside, champagne in hand, arm in arm.
I wondered whether she had got so drunk that she was sick. I’d certainly seen that after a few 21st Century PR parties. How many of those had ended with her on all fours in the bathroom, head over the toilet bowl? So I checked both bathrooms, but still no Sam. After all her insistence that this was where we would be spending New Year’s Eve, here it was, five minutes to New Year, and she was nowhere to be found.
Next I checked the two main bedrooms, thinking that maybe she had put her head down for a while and fallen sleep. The door of the third bedroom was closed, but I didn’t need to check. She was in there. There was no one else it could have been. That little yelp. Unmistakably her. When was the last time I had heard that? And the first? Hell, that was long ago. When I was still on the way up, still a success. We met at a party. It was autumn, one night after the racing carnival, and we talked about travel and some drink called Caipiroska. Just the sort of thing she would talk about. A few hours later I heard that yelp for the first time.
And there it was again. Penetrating the door like an x-ray, exploding white light in my eyes. Next thing I knew the door was wide open, the lock swinging limply on one screw. It was her, all right. Perched on the bed, looking up at me, animal in a trap. And she was on all fours, like I thought I might find her, but not over the toilet bowl. Just on her hands and knees, skirt hitched up. And Scott the accountant was there, behind her, also on his knees. So, this was why she was so keen to come here tonight?
I couldn’t think of anything to say at first. No one could. I looked at Sam, and then Scott. Scott and Sam looked at me. I figured that they had been at it for a while, but were both drunk and had got their timing wrong, straying too close to midnight. These things happen. I knew, at least, what Sarah Byrne would say if she was standing where I was. Merde.
Scott finally broke the silence. ‘It’s not how it looks,’ he said. Not exactly quick on his feet. No trial lawyer, this one. Definitely an accountant. For Enron.
‘Really,’ I said. ‘It looks like you’re having sex with my girlfriend. How should it look?’
Neither of them answered. A few years ago, I might have hit someone. Probably Scott. I would have yelled out something, some obscenity, at least. Several. I shrugged instead. ‘Happy New Year,’ I said, and walked off.
I would not hit anyone. What homicidal rages I had left were fully extinguished on the door. I felt more ill than angry. I’d grown to despise Sam in the same way I despised myself. She had limped along with me as far as she could, and now here we were. At the end. Somehow this was as perfect as it was fucking awful.
Sam was good looking and funny. She was the life of a party. She sure as hell was the life of this party. It took me by surprise one day when I realised we didn’t really have much to say to each other. Whenever I raised something with her that mattered to me, something about the state of the world, one of the things that I was bound to raise sooner or later after discussing Caipiroska or any other drink of the moment, she would spend far too long expressing no opinion at all. She was politically neutral. This was all the excuse I needed to become emotionally neutral. To that extent our relationship was in perfect harmony. It was also already in free-fall when my professional and financial collapse sent it into its final kamikaze dive.
I’m sure I’m being unfair somehow. I must be more to blame than this. It’s just that after a certain point in time, which I can no longer precisely recall, everything she said was like an anaesthetic. I was never quite asleep, but I was not fully conscious either. I probably had the same effect on her. Finding her having sex with an accountant on New Year’s Eve was simply a glorious way to end this relationship.
I should have left immediately but, for no reason I can think of now, went back out to the balcony, passing a flustered-looking Sarah Byrne in the process.
‘Have you seen Scott?’ she asked me.
‘Yeah,’ I replied.
‘Where?’
‘He’s back there,’ I said. ‘Auditing Sam.’
A big ball of colour exploded silently in the sky in front of me, shooting white, then green and red, reaching towards us. Midnight. The next year. More light followed, splintering the night, arcing over the water, revealing boats in the distance with silver light. Everyone around me started kissing, and a vein in my heart contracted, squeezed hard. 12.01 am. Someone kissed me, someone shook my hand. It was hard to smile. This was stupid. So fucking stupid.
12.02 am. I saw Sam sobbing at the balcony door. Sarah Byrne was screaming somewhere, I could just hear that cultured shrill. Sam started yelling. ‘You think it’s all about you,’ she said. ‘It’s been hard for me too, Chris. Fucking hard. I can’t stand it anymore.’ She turned and ran inside, then disappeared out the front door.
The next thing I remember I was on a bed, not the bed, another one, and I was crying. Sometime after that, a few minutes or many hours, someone was sitting on the bed next to me, stroking my head. ‘You okay?’ I heard her whisper.
‘No,’ I said. Then I fell back to sleep.
I woke up not long before dawn. I got up, walked out to the living room. A couple was asleep on a couch, someone else in a chair. A few people were sitting outside on the balcony, still talking, still drinking. When I tumbled out of the building and down to William Street, the sky was starting to get light. I walked all the way home. With each step of my journey I imagined a new way how the evening should have turned out.
We are at Harry’s, in his backyard. Drinking beer. Drinking red wine. The barbecue smoking. The children watching the fireworks on TV before bed. Laughing, hugging at midnight. Drunk and happy.
But this is not what happened. Sam is gone. Gone for good, like everything else I once had in my life. Happy New Year.