Once or twice he popped in at lunchtime (yes, popped). On one of those lunchtimes we were in the front room with the curtains drawn, though obviously it was broad daylight, not to put too fine a point on it, when there was a major development.
He said, ‘I see the house is on the market.’
There was no wall anymore. You could fall through into the other side of the villa conversion, through one of the blocked-up doorways in the sunlight.
‘I see all of the houses are on the market.’
I told him about the fruit empire shares taking a tumble.
He said, ‘Oh, they took a tumble.’ As if he knew nothing. He knew I knew.
A key clattered like a maniac in the front door lock. The inevitable, I thought—and the client thought, and sprang up like a cheetah. Perhaps this was for the best. I realised I wanted the Truth, and the client did not, he wanted Lies and Beauty. Even at this point I knew this. However. Yes, however. Even in the first nanosecond the rattling didn’t have the particular timbre of Art opening the door. Next, multiple footsteps in the passage, a herd, then Prue’s Taranaki voice, Bert’s pleasant bleating, and another voice, a shrill rejoinder. We scrabbled, the client and I. Our eyes met briefly like a ding. A moment later the door was flung open as if by a poltergeist. The tail-end of wonder why this room is, and Prue’s blue stare followed (like Art’s, but it occurred to me in that moment she’d had her eyelids pegged back).
‘Oh, Megan! I didn’t expect to find you home. I’d forgotten about your . . . little business.’ Prue took in the scene and frowned as much as she could. Me sitting at the table pawing over an apron, the sun beating down on the mad garden. ‘Lovely to see you. We have rather unfortunate news.’
Bert waved from the passage and disappeared as if pulled by the clopping heels of the shrill woman. Master bedroom, if you wouldn’t mind.
It was a visitation.
As you’ve no doubt guessed, the house was on the market. Come to think of it, Prue looked dreadful. Blue, her skin. They tromped up and down the passage and in and out of the rooms again and again as if the spaces might have changed since the last time. I sat at the table pretending to be busy. At one point the real estate agent—bottle blonde, business-suited (the kind I’d like to wear, but never could), wound up like a spring—made a circumnavigation of the front room. She stood in the bay window and took in the garden. As I watched I saw the curtain beside her breathe in and out. Her polished brass head turned to look at it. It happened again, in out, like a lung. The real estate agent pushed the curtain aside and saw the client, standing like a sentry, if sentries were naked from the waist down. Prue and Bert were craning up at the Carrara ceiling. Ah, the ceiling, the ceiling has always been an asset. Prue wiped a tear from her eye. Bert told her not to be a silly sausage, they’d be alright. And Prue sniffled, Yes, it was just money, they had their health and their happiness. She might have just said health, on second thoughts. I might be embroidering a bit here.
The real estate agent let the curtain drop and turned back to the room. ‘The garden has potential,’ she said. ‘A little neglected, but nothing a bit of landscaping can’t fix.’ She caught my eye on the way out and I tried to smile my thanks, but she stayed in character, in her suit.
That was the day I ripped my teal blouse.
When they’d gone, the client and I had an episode of hilarity during which I thought I might have a heart attack. Then he went back to work, and I stood outside in the frying sun looking at the For Sale sign that had been stapled to the fence. It flapped in the tough little wind. The gully was quiet apart from the mechanic down the road and the building site. I looked up the street. There was a For Sale sign on each of the four villas. The whole blinking row was on the market.
I got to know all about the baht of course. Things were toppling like dominos through Asia.
Over the next few days, when prospective buyers came to inspect the house, I lurked in the garden. The house wasn’t at its best—ponged like a trench, carpets matted, though the real estate agent sent someone around with a carpet sweeper. Prue-short-for-Prudence and Bert were desperate. The thing is, the villa conversion was fading away anyway. It was light and flimsy.
The next time he came I reached out behind me for his fingers and we walked along the passage joined tenuously like paper dolls. On the workroom table he entered from behind. I reached back blindly to clutch his thigh, his hair, in my clenched hand. He was solid and silky.
It was urgent, no stories. I knew all about him.
Everything was gone.
Everything?
Everything except the couch, the floor, the table. I’d brought these with me. I’d moved, you see; I’d emigrated.
•
In the evening I washed clothes by hand in the bath while Art stalked up and down the passage, and outside, talking on the phone about the villa being sold, having to move and so on, with a succession of people. Villa-z, I heard him say. Not just villa, villa-z. He was stunned, I thought, the proverbial mullet, but was putting a good face on it, in true Woolthamly fashion. I lugged the clothes out to the yard and hung them on the line. They were dripping, but the heat would dry them. Art followed me in and out, still on the phone. I think one of the conversations was with Prue. I almost wanted to tell him about the funny incident with the real estate agent, because that was what we used to do. I didn’t, of course. Are you crazy?
We’d sort of stopped talking, we’d stopped our banter. I didn’t miss it. It felt like there were more urgent things. Banter had seemed like an excess, like a burn-off of oil.
Plus—to tell the truth—I couldn’t sit still. I was a bundle of nerves. When there was a bump, Art’s foot knocking the rubbish bin, I jumped like a firecracker. I imagined the client turning up out of the blue. Not exactly blue. He’d gone mad, and was knocking on the door, coming in and walking through the rooms until he found Art. I’m fucking your wife. Or even, I’m in love with your wife. There had been this fear or hope sitting there in my head all these weeks.
I loved the risk. I had a Wanted card. I had a Mass card.
When he’d hung up the phone, I turned from the line and said I was sorry about the house. I wanted to say something. Art said there was no need to be sorry on his account, he didn’t care. He was knocking back a glass of wine. And anyway, the house was mine too, he said. I said I thought it wasn’t mine, I thought we’d established that and he got all het up and said no, no, of course it was mine, that was just a silly argument.
‘What’s mine is yours. The house is yours,’ he said. ‘Or would be if we owned it,’ he sniggered.
There was a little banter, but I wasn’t taking part. I hung the dripping clothes.
•
On the day I gave him his yellow jacket, which I’d mended, things racked up a bit. He took the jacket and screwed it up unconsciously as we were falling backwards. Careful, I said. He said, Oh yeah, and laid it out like a body on the table before returning to the rolled arm of the couch.
This was during a period of rain—the house particularly zoo-like—two, three days’ worth. What am I talking about? It was two days and it cleared up on the third day. The rain applauded quietly at the window. I sat down in the front room to mend my teal blouse, all threaded up with teal thread. I stared out at the nutty garden. The old lady’s lavender looked like it was off its face at Woodstock. The blouse lay in my hands. Actually, I couldn’t be stuffed mending it. I sat there thinking. That’s the thing about thinking, it goes on all day and all night like a factory with a night staff. I wish it would stop sometimes. I thought about my clients whose best clothes were ripped and burned and snagged. I knew what they were on about. They wanted conflicting things, and it was exciting to want them: stability/fresh sex, responsibility/carelessness, family/freedom. Ooh, I hadn’t used a slash for a while! Tradition/modernity, not to put too fine a point on it. The thing is that these days—yes these days—it was possible, at least in the West (although the very term, the West, is melting in front of me, like the Wicked Witch). For a wild moment, with the rain spattering the bay window and me plumped there with my teal blouse, I felt like I’d picked up the essay I’d left unfinished on my desk the day I withdrew from university. What I thought: Having an affair was the most democratic, even-handed, racy, classy, gendery thing in the world.
The garden coming in the windows onto the table and onto the books, the shelves lined with books and the stacks of books teetering on the floor. I tossed aside my teal blouse unmended. I waited for him among the books. There were so many, always had been. They were like crutches, like built-up shoes. I looked at the books so I could stop thinking.
When the client arrived I said it was raining the first day he came to the house, and he said he knew that, he remembered.
It rains a lot in Auckland.
I found his hand on the cushion and pressed each fingertip with my own. I told him how he had felt that day, a gravitational pull and all of me, all my mass, pushing down on your fingers.
We fell asleep on the couch and he woke in a panic, sweating. He’d dreamed something. What? I said, smoothing his brow. Something. What? A colour that filled the room, he said, but then, like a glob of colour captured in glass, he would turn his head and it would’ve snapped into a fine line.
The things you say to people.
The power stayed off. That was good. The longer it went on, the more I wished it would stay off forever.
‘When the power comes back on, maybe we’ll keep going?’
‘Maybe we will.’
‘Do you want to?’
‘Yes.’
We kissed. Now it was not just sex and fun and elation, it was tenderness.
I remembered what he’d said. That an affair wasn’t exciting unless there was the risk of falling in love. Yes, risk.
I remembered my client with the indigo shirt.
I fingered his upper lip. ‘Would you leave her?’
He looked at me. ‘Yes. Would you? Him?’
My lungs pumped up like a tyre. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’
‘That’s settled then.’
I regretted doing the sleeve because it was deceitful. But if I hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have got to know the client, and I went around and around like this a bit.
•
Change of subject but not entirely: once I saw a group of people going to the church at the top of Newton Gully, young women dressed in the clothes of their mothers, their grandmothers even—floral polyester dresses, flesh-coloured pantihose and slingback shoes, cardigans. And the men in chain-store suits, white shirts, ties. They looked sexy! No wonder they had piles of children. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. The women dressed to look like women and the men to look like men. The women were like baboons with great red arses hanging out for the men, and the men were like big dark blocks of manhood with penises hanging down their front. These were their church clothes. There was no confusion. It would make the species go on.
Yes, but we don’t need to go on—well, not at this rate. Maybe that’s why fashion makes women look like men, and like interesting drug addicts. How I’d love to look like the women going to church in their polyester dresses. But it’s too late, far, far too late. If I put on a floral dress, a cardigan, Pakeha pantihose, I’d feel like a drag queen. There’s been too much splitting off, dropping out, ripping up, blowing up, boiling down, paring down. There’s been too much bloody theory.
But sex somehow struggles through. Chemistry can dissolve things like acid.
•
That day he came home while I was on all fours throbbing like a baboon, the rug scrubbing my knees. I heard the thud of his satchel on the doorstep. I looked up and saw that the door to the front room was open a crack, and felt the client’s breath still hard on my neck and saw Art walk past the gap in the front room door, not fast, taking his time. In fact, pausing there outside the room for a moment of almost meditative stillness, but not looking right, not turning his head the forty-five degrees it would take to end our marriage. Walking on. I pulled myself away with a pop and loped, as if I’d regressed several stages of evolution, over to the door. And taking the door knob in my hand and feeling it, weighing it, judging the effect turning it will have on the internal apparatus which will close the door, and only when I feel I have an understanding of the door handle’s relationship with the snib, rotating it and closing the door in absolute silence. Looking back into the room and smiling with the client in conspiracy but he isn’t smiling, he’s wearing nothing but an expression of lavish anxiety. Coming back to the rug and resuming position but he’s hopping around putting clothes on, stuffing everything into them, and shooting me looks to indicate I’m a monster. Me! He’s the monster. I try to smile at him, and wipe my brow in an exaggerated gesture of relief, urgently, as if it’s wartime, as if there isn’t much time left, and there isn’t. These are extraordinary circumstances, the Blackout. People are behaving like they’ve never behaved before. It’s wonderful. Why not me? I hiss at him that I feel like I’m coming home. That he’s home. He shakes his head madly as if to say, don’t do this. But all in mime, he won’t breathe a word aloud, and he’s still doing a three-legged race with his trousers. And I go quiet too, because actually I don’t do this sort of thing, I don’t fall in love, I don’t come home. But now, at this moment, I misremember. I do, I misremember, and I think I will never leave home again. I’ll know where home is, what’s possible. That will be enough, for a lifetime.
When he had gone, I sat on the red couch, alone, and I thought clearly. I hadn’t been thinking before, not at university, not as a mender—only blabbing and listening, blabbing and listening, like a glutton, a gourmand. And I thought now, I am not a liar, I want the truth, yes the Truth like Keats. That the client was a wonder, a glory, and I was in love with him, and that was the only Truth. The events of the past—the pole house, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, my hands, my hands, getting married, Rip Burn Snag, the costume—all had been leading to the moment when I would ruin my life. And I must ruin it. At the same time I am even thinking about an English teacher at school trying to teach us grammar who said, I will drown and no one shall save me, and I shall drown and no one will save me—which is the suicide? And I’m thinking and feeling I will ruin it. I will ruin it and it shall never be fixed. I shall ruin it and it will never be fixed.
I padded into the kitchen. Art was forking lamb steaks around in the pan. He’d thought I was out. I must’ve dozed off, I said. Lamb was on the list of superfoods on the fridge. It was the healthiest animal, until it was butchered, then it wasn’t in the best of health. But before that it had gambolled in the fields and eaten grass, a superior life to your average chicken, pig or cow.
There was nothing to say. We wrestled with the lamb chops on our white plates. Trails of blood glistened in the lamplight. Even laughed. I needed to end things. And he did, the client. Why didn’t we just call it quits with our respective spice? I don’t know. Yes, I do know. Because he’d told me everything. Because we were in paradise, down in the Pacific, and it was borrowed time, and it was the Blackout, and in the light everything would be revealed.
Later, I was in my workroom. A ridiculous hour. Art creaked by in the passage, his torch making the gap under the door into a thermometer—a bout of flu coming on and receding. He looked in at the door.
‘Couldn’t sleep?’ I asked.
I was sweating slightly. I’d just turned from the end of the rack.
‘What are you doing?’
‘It’s a full moon,’ I said.
‘Is it?’
‘No.’
‘Lunatic,’ he said. That was better. Back to normal. But it never would be.
In the kitchen he poured brandies and we sat down to keep each other company. Stewart had a new theory about Shakespeare.
The villas going, being sold from under our feet, but there was Stewart and Shakespeare. I sort of admired it.
‘Do people still do their PhDs on Shakespeare?’ I asked, kind of tiredly.
‘Of course,’ said Art. He was all animated, like an old Archie comic. Honestly, he was. I don’t know why I’d never thought of that before.
‘Anyway, what?’ I asked. I’d never actually met Stewart. That’s Auckland for you.
‘That Shakespeare was the son of Elizabeth the First, the Virgin Queen,’ said Art. ‘Which just about makes him Jesus.’
‘How did he dream that one up?’
‘Oh, he read it somewhere.’
So that’s what a theory was.
‘That’s not a theory,’ I said.
‘A turn of phrase—Jesus!’ said Art. Quite tetchy, for him. ‘He is a sort of Jesus, culturally, for the West, for the second millennium.’
‘Shakespeare?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is the West anyway?’ I said. ‘I don’t even know anymore.’
‘Us, you idiot,’ said Art. ‘It’s us.’
I looked at him across the kitchen table. He seemed to have gone small, like a landscape I was receding from—plains, cabbage trees, rocky outcrops, out the back window of a train. God, I was cruel. I even looked at that from a distance too, my cruelty.
This was almost the last gasp of the millennium, and we were spending it in the light of the hurricane lamp.