ON 2 NOVEMBER 1990, JIM BOLGER’S National Party defeated Mike Moore’s Labour Government in a landslide. On election night I was a comments man for TV3 in its Auckland studio. Afterwards I ended up at a party in Neil Roberts and Karen Soich’s townhouse on Parnell Rise. I briefly toyed with the idea of throwing an armchair out of their lounge window, but it would only have landed on their patio and that wouldn’t have been anywhere near dramatic enough to justify the damage.
At this party a striking Māori woman arrived late. She was wearing a white blouse, a natty black bolero jacket, a tan, knee-length skirt and stunning high-heeled black boots. She was lovely, quirky and charming. I didn’t catch her full name. It was Eliza something. Back in Wellington I thought about her a lot. I rang Neil asking for her full name, phone number and advice.
‘Yeah, Eliza’s lovely. Dude, don’t ring and tell her you’re coming to Auckland to see her. That’ll freak her out, man. Say you’re gonna be in town next weekend and it would be cool if you could catch up for a drink. Keep it casual. Rock on!’
(A true original and a charismatic force of nature, Neil was cut down by cancer in 1998. He was just 50 years old. The night before the funeral I met up with Bob Jones and TVNZ’s Richard Harman for drinks. Bob was trying to tell me about his latest project, but I was more interested in what Richard was telling me about his last visit to Neil in hospital. ‘His last words to me,’ said Richard, on the edge of tears, ‘the very last words he said to me were, “Harman, Harman—”’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake!’ interrupted Bob. ‘Stop going on and on about Roberts. He was a good bastard. None of us dispute that. But he’s dead. He’s dead! We all live and we all die!’ There was no disputing this either.)
I followed Neil’s instructions to the letter, sounding as relaxed as I could. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. She would love to catch up. She laughed at my jokes. She nominated a time and a place—6 p.m., CinCin On Quay, on the waterfront. I got off the phone feeling lighter than air.
I was still lighter than air boarding my cheap flight to Auckland. I had arranged to have lunch with some friends at Prego on Ponsonby Road. I have a theory that lonely guys in need of female company have a flashing sign above their heads saying ‘desperate for sex’. Only women can see this sign and their first instinct is to turn on their heels and walk briskly in the opposite direction. Their second instinct is to turn on their heels and run like the wind, never looking back. Men who are fully sated sexually have a sign saying ‘Not in service—testicles empty’ and women hurl themselves at them. It is one of the cruel ironies of nature that the best way to get invited to an orgy is to look like you have just come from one.
So I hit Prego brimming with confidence. I don’t want to get too technical here, but I was exuding pheromones like I had extractor fans in my armpits. My self-pity gauge was low and my smugness readings dangerously high. I was sitting outside in Prego’s courtyard when a tall, strikingly attractive woman came striding in. She was six foot in her boots, wearing a black leather jacket and tight denim skirt that came dangerously close to breaking my friend Kerre McIvor’s cardinal rule that a woman’s skirt should never be shorter than her tampon string. Heads swivelled, men’s mouths gaped and women’s lips pursed. Her eyes met mine. She joined our table. (It wasn’t exactly random. She knew someone.) She sat next to me.
‘You are a Scorpio, yes?’ I confirmed this.
‘October twenty-nine, yes?’ I confirmed this as well. Her delighted laughter pealed out and she nestled into me. She was Katia Pavlak—a Polish actress who had been to a Polish film festival in Melbourne, decided to defect and had escaped her minders. What Churchill had famously dubbed the ‘Iron Curtain’ was still in place. Poland was under the cruel yoke of the Soviet Union. Fearing that Poland’s secret police, the hated SB, were searching for her and would abduct her if they could, she fled to Auckland. She’d been in New Zealand a few weeks and was looking for work.
When she heard I was doing nothing that afternoon she invited me to come with her to play snooker. I don’t play snooker. I went. Trying not to look when Katia bent low over the pool table was agreeable torture. When she asked me what I was doing that night I told her I was going to CinCin to have drinks with a woman friend. Clutching her throat, she exclaimed excitedly, ‘Oh my Got! This is amazink! Katia going to CinCin tonight also. I start my first job. I am maître d’ and waitress at CinCin. I wheel see you!’
When I arrived at CinCin, Katia was at the door looking absolutely stunning in a figure-hugging, ankle-length jade green frock. ‘I miss you! I miss you!’ she squealed, kissing me lightly on the cheek. She seemed to know intuitively who I was there to meet and led me around the corner to where Eliza was sitting at a high table, also looking gorgeous. Katia lingered longer than was strictly necessary, looking wistful. ‘I will see you later.’ She smiled shyly.
Eliza cocked a quizzical eyebrow when she had departed. ‘Who is that?’
I explained nonchalantly that it was just someone I had bumped into recently, as if beautiful women were constantly attaching themselves to me. As my good friend Mark Sainsbury says, ‘Hey, they’re only human!’
Eliza was every bit as lovely as I remembered. She reached out to take my hand. She had booked a table for two at an Indian restaurant in Ponsonby. We were due there in an hour’s time. My heart skipped a beat. But first she had something important to tell me. She was getting married in a few weeks’ time. I tried to be cool. ‘Congratulations, that’s wonderful …’
Before devastation had time to sink in, Katia, who must have had hearing that could give sonar on a nuclear submarine a run for its money, was at my side.
‘Getting married?’ she hissed. ‘You are having drinks with Tom and you are getting married? This is not right. You should not be doing this. This wrong!’ She shot away again, watching us like a hawk when we ordered more drinks, unnerving Eliza.
‘I think we should split this funky scene …’ she muttered. ‘Let’s take off now.’ Out on the footpath she hailed a cab. As we were opening the rear door Katia, minus her white apron, raced up. ‘I tell manger I haff to come weeth you. I have to look after my friend, Toma Scott. He famous writer. He innocent. Toma need looking after.’ She squeezed in between me and Eliza, who was too shocked to say anything.
At the restaurant Katia sat between us again like a stern chaperone, asking Eliza pointed questions about her upcoming nuptials. Before the food arrived Eliza rose, smiled tightly and said she would leave us to get on with things.
I wasn’t hungry. Nor was Katia. She took me to a friend’s party. They were all in their twenties and thirties, dancing frenetically and passing around joints. I felt out of place and told Katia it was great meeting her and I would just slip away. She insisted on coming with me. Under a starry sky we walked through narrow Ponsonby streets to Sam and Barbara Pillsbury’s beautiful old villa on Beaconsfield Street. At the back, nestled in palms, they had a hot tub, a swimming pool and guest cottage where I was staying. Katia looked at the double bed and said she would sleep with me, but nothing would happen. I had to promise. I promised. I would sleep below the top sheet. She would sleep above it.
Sam and Barbara had exquisite taste. Separated by fine 600-thread-count Egyptian cotton, Katia lay beside me in just her bra and leopard-skin knickers. In the morning the movie star kissed me lightly and stepped into the shower while I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t suffering the effects of second-hand cannabis smoke.
We had breakfast with Sam and Barbara on their deck overlooking the pool. Sam could barely contain his excitement. ‘You tinny bastard! She is so beautiful!’ he grinned when she had left. I assured him that nothing had happened. He took this as absolute and irrefutable proof that it had and was stricken with envy.
I called in to see her at CinCin on my way back to the airport. The manager had forgiven her and she was back at her post. She hugged me when I was getting back into my cab. ‘I miss you,’ she said with tears in her eyes. We arranged to meet again in Wellington. A few weeks later she came down for an indefinite stay.
SHE MOVED INTO A CUTE little attic room at the top of the stairs. We went to a Miles Davis concert together. Miles was frail but with surprising force and great delicacy played classic tracks from his Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew albums. We walked on beaches. We went to art galleries, museums, movies and Wellington City Library—an embarrassing first for me. She wanted me to read the translated works of her favourite Polish playwright. She had read some of my journalism and urged me to write stage plays—something I had never previously considered. I took her to a supermarket and she got enraged in the fresh fruit section. Holding up an orange plucked from a huge bin of the same she cursed loudly. ‘FUCKING FUCK! FUCK! CHRISTMAS PRESENT IN MY FUCK! FUCK! FUCKING COUNTRY!’ It was the same feeding Lady, my black Labrador dog, sausage. Katia would wave it like a shillelagh and swear, ‘THIS IS WHAT HUMAN BEINGS EAT IN MY FUCK! FUCK! FUCKING COUNTRY!’
All that passion, I noted ruefully to myself, should not go unrequited. I turned to Chris for advice. ‘Thomas Joseph, as a gentleman and a scholar it behoves you to make the first move.’ That night, after she had gone to bed, I waited a decent interval then crept up the stairs with a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream, which she loved. She was fast asleep. I didn’t want to startle her, so I placed the bottle by her bed and tiptoed away. I was making coffee in the morning when she came downstairs wearing one of my shirts as a nightie and waving the bottle, puzzled and alarmed.
‘What is theees? I don’t remember …’ I mumbled an explanation. She smiled softly. ‘Oh, so you want Katia to come to your room tonight?’ I stared at the floor. ‘Yes please …’
She did, and rarely left for the rest of her stay except to bring me avocado and Marmite on Vogel’s toast, ‘To build up your strength, my darling.’ Or to fetch red wine, which she swigged straight from the bottle before thrusting the neck at me. It was different. ‘If you want, my darling, Katia will marry you.’ She said this often. It was both exhilarating and terrifying. I had already failed at one marriage and the shock waves from my break-up with Helen were still radiating across the universe like X-rays from the Big Bang. I adored Katia, but what if the relationship evolved into something enduring then fell apart further down the track? It was heartbreaking enough living across the city from Sam and Rosie, just as it had been torture with Shaun before. How would I cope with a child living in Łódź if homesickness pulled Katia back to Poland?
And there were already signs. She was a gifted pianist. She loved Keith Jarrett’s free-form jazz classic The Köln Concert and could play a little like him. Some nights I woke to find myself alone. When I went looking for her she would be at the piano in the lounge in the dark, naked in spite of the chill, a half-drunk bottle of red wine on the floor beside her, playing Chopin pieces with tears streaming down her face. She did some modelling for the fashion pages of the Evening Post and Sharon Crosbie wrote a terrific piece on her for the Sunday Star-Times, but she was unable to get much acting work and began missing her family terribly. With the Soviet Union fragmenting into its constituent parts and the authoritarian Communist regimes of Eastern Europe facing collapse it was safe for her to return, so she did. From time to time she sent me letters and postcards from Łódź sweetly imploring me not to forget her. ‘I miss you, my darling. I hope you are having a good life.’
One package included an alluring black-and-white photograph of her in lingerie. It might have been a publicity still taken on a movie set. She was back with her husband Charles and working in films again. She looked gorgeous. I collected it from my Kilbirnie P.O. Box and quickly smuggled it into a bottom drawer in my office desk. I had to. Helen had moved back in.
She said the children missed me and she was willing to give it one more try. I owned the house on Kotinga Street by now. When Chris and Ruth decided to sell it they very generously gave me first option. With my share of the sale of Emerald Glen I was just able to afford it.
One of the first things I did when it was mine was get council permission to cut down the tall, aging pines leaning menacingly over the house. It was lucky that I did. A wild storm later that year toppled giant trees like skittles. Every year winter storms send more and more sullen conifers crashing to the ground and a soft green native forest is slowly taking its place. The transformation is transcendent. Sunlight filters through where shadows used to fall. There is more birdsong, and slithers of the inner city are visible through gaps left by retreating trees.
Carol Hirschfeld always felt there was something tapu about the house. When I cleaned out the basement I found a marble cherub with a broken wing. Was it stolen from a cemetery or did it belong to one of the pregnant nuns? There was no way of knowing, but it was mine now. I cleaned it gently as though I were bathing a child and placed in the back garden, surrounded by the flowers and warmed by the sun. I could be imagining it, but the house felt lighter and happier after this. I restored the broken chook house and we got hens. It was a joy collecting eggs in the morning with Rosie. Projects were Helen’s thing—she was good at them—and we set about renovating the attic rooms, adding bigger windows, a dormer and a skylight.
For a time things were great. Then they weren’t. The old demons that we both hoped had been exorcised for good returned. We went back for more debilitating, depressing rounds of counselling. Sometimes Helen came into the front room where I was reading, stood in front of me and said accusingly, ‘You have nothing to say to me, do you?’ It’s hard to think of anything when you are put on the spot like that. I could hardly tell her that just before falling asleep I thought often about Carol or Katia. I started falling asleep at night with my right arm hooked over my face—the way you shield your eyes from the sun when you are lying on your back. It was a return to how I fell asleep most of my childhood—using the crook of my elbow to block out the world.