SIX
The pay phone was ringing in short, sharp bursts. I roused myself and crossed the polished boards to answer it, thinking that the saavy receptionist Vanessa might have transferred a call from Jordan through to the billiards room.
‘Hello!’
There was a metallic clicking sound.
‘Who’s there?’ I was cautious.
‘Telecom technician.’
‘Is there a problem with the line?’
‘A customer registered a complaint. Seems to be working okay now.’
I was bemused. ‘But this is a pay phone. Why did you expect someone to answer?’
‘Oh, someone usually does.’
‘They do?’
‘Well, you did, didn’t you?’
He ended the call. Assuming the technician had fixed the faulty line, I dialled Jordan’s number but again there was no response. Someone up there didn’t want me to talk to Jordan this morning.
So why not give up your piffling struggle, Beth? Why not stand tall, as if you’re a winner, and see your wedding through graciously? You can split tomorrow if you need to. On a scale of serious offences, Jordan’s hardly rated. What misdemeanour was he actually guilty of?
Numerous checkout chicks would simper under his winsome gaze as they placed our fruit and vegetables on the weighing scales. There followed the suggestive appeal: ‘Would you like your meat in a separate plastic bag, sir?’ Sir indeed. My boyfriend, it should be emphasised, always left the supermarket with me, not with one of these seductive young girls. But what about his winsome gaze? Did he go back when I wasn’t looking? Did the separate plastic bags mount up?
You can’t turn away your guests, darling. I could imagine my mother’s response. And she would be right. I did not have the courage to turn away our guests, but I was cunning enough to elude them. As the child of divorced parents I have never assumed that marriage was for life, or that marriage vows were sacred. Still, I would feel a bit cheated if I went to a wedding and the couple parted after a few days, or even a few weeks.
I tried to imagine how I would feel if Judy left a husband after only a week of marriage. Would I judge her harshly for breaking her word? Yes and no – I’d actually think she was brave for admitting her mistake. Though of course it would depend on who she was rejecting, and whether the match seemed viable or not. If I’d been thinking — Judy shouldn’t be marrying this guy; he’s not right for her — then I’d probably feel she was justified in leaving him. Maybe she’d learned something really horrible about him in the days after the wedding. No, I wouldn’t find her action immoral (as long as she returned my wedding gift) but yes, I’d feel very angry that she’d wasted my time and I’d temporarily lose some of my respect for her.
If our guests proved anywhere near as lenient, I might not suffer too much of a backlash if I were to bail out in a week or two.
What was a wedding ceremony, anyway? At the rehearsal with our celebrant on Wednesday, I was actually reminded of the pledge I’d made in front of the Girl Guide pack when I was ten years old. Rather than making my promises to God, the Queen and Baden-Powell, today I would be making them to Jordan. Virtually the same old promises, too. And possibly as quickly forgotten. It was an outdated ritual, for sure. It was just like remembering a password. The sentiments had to be memorised and recited to get where I wanted to go. But a wedding rehearsal is not the real thing. Could this afternoon’s ceremony turn out to be very meaningful? Would it work on us like magic and heal our current rift? Could marriage change my relationship to Jordan profoundly?
Certainly, very few weddings are what they seem on the surface. I’ve known this for a long time, and my erstwhile friend Tracy Breeze has known it too, because on Saturday afternoons our eight-year-old selves would wait patiently outside St Andrew’s church for the ribbon-bonneted cars to arrive. Summer and autumn weddings were very popular in Sorrento. Tracy and I would read the church noticeboard on our way home from school and remember the wedding times in our heads.
We would wait under the church eaves, and smile at the bridesmaids and coo at the flower girls, who were even younger than we were. Tracy and I feasted on the brides who sat in the back seats of their limousines wrapped in tissue-paper veils.
‘Did you get to see the bride?’ Mrs Breeze would ask on our return home. ‘Yes, we did!’ we’d chime – it was as good as if we’d seen Santa riding down the street in his sleigh on Christmas morning.
‘And how did she look?’ Mrs Breeze would ask, and we’d catch our breath, knowing the appropriate palaver. ‘She was really beautiful.’ There followed questions about the bride’s attire, and the number of bridesmaids and attendants. Mrs Breeze loved it all as much as we did and she often promised to come along next time, though as far as I remember she never did.
There was one time when a bride failed to emerge from her shiny vehicle as expected. Tracy and I could tell something was wrong because the bride’s father was tapping on the windowpane, trying to coax his daughter out. ‘I think she has stage fright,’ he explained to the gaping bridesmaids. ‘You talk to her.’ But nothing helped. The groom had to leave his post at the altar and climb into the back seat of the Mercedes to reason with his fiancée. The lady remained defiant, clutching her veil tightly over her face. Guests came out of the church and stood around the car while the groom pleaded with his girl. And that petrified or stubborn bride never got out of the car. Her entourage poked and prodded and stuck their heads under her veil but she wouldn’t loosen up. I’m quite sure she never revealed her face. There might as well have been a stuffed dummy hiding under that veil, for all we could see. The whole congregation were looking on as the Mercedes drove slowly away with that baffling bride still trapped inside, like an insect wrapped in a spider’s cocoon. We might have been watching a hearse leave a funeral for all the solemnity we saw on the faces of the wedding party around us. The bride’s father said in exasperation, ‘I didn’t bring Kirsty up to behave like that.’
How could Tracy and I forget the fate of poor obdurate Kirsty? Never. We never would.
Then there was the wedding spectacle that trumped them all. The poor bride couldn’t wait for her limo to come to a halt. She opened the door while the engine was still running and leapt out with her veil thrown back. Her face was all buckled up and ugly. Turning away from the church entrance, she leant forward and spewed coloured vomit down the front of her immaculate gown.
Tracy and I were sent running home to fetch cologne and a box of tissues, please. ‘The bride was sick, she wrecked her gown, the bride was sick!’ we chanted to Tracy’s mum.
‘Maybe the bride’s in the family way,’ Mrs Breeze mused, which puzzled us no end.
By the time we got back to the church with tissues and a bottle of 4711 eau de Cologne, the bride had gone next door to have her gown cleaned and blow-dried. That’s what we were told by the chauffeur, who was smoking a cigarette and kicking old confetti off the paving stones. ‘Chucked up her lunch, poor dear, but now she’s over at the manse getting all dolled up again.’
Tracy and I didn’t need to be grown up to understand that some of the brides were not having the best day of their lives. We absorbed their anguish and distress and relished the dramas as they unfolded. We did not miss sitting on the hard bucket seats in the local hall among our schoolmates watching A Boy Named Charlie Brown or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory on a portable screen. We were wedding addicts from an early age, Tracy and I, and it was no surprise that we were among the first of our classmates to find ourselves engaged.
Having sworn our devotion to each other before a hundred guests, it would be fair to assume that neither Jordan nor I could put our costumes in the bin the day after and walk away as though the ceremony had been no more serious than acting in a school play. You tie a knot. It’s referred to as a knot, rather than a bow or a clasp, because you can’t pull it easily apart.
I would be a fool to marry Jordan thinking that I could untie the knot at the first available opportunity. Seeing him naked in the Bayview Room tonight will destroy any clandestine intention I might be harbouring of doing so. Jordan has slender, honey-coloured limbs, and his torso has just the right amount of body hair for my liking. Neither hairless nor too hairy was Jordan. He didn’t remind me that we’ve descended from the apes, as some naked men before him have done.
The first time he stood in the lamplight at the side of my bed, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. On that occasion, because I was a good deal drunk, total abandonment was possible. I stretched out naked in his presence. Suddenly it didn’t matter anymore that I wasn’t a baton-change girl. Those girls might be able to run fast, but it wasn’t proven that they could do sex any better than I could.
Encircled by Jordan’s warm limbs I was filled with enormous power. With his crotch pressing against mine, I threw my legs open invitingly. The exertion of lovemaking, the pumping blood and rising pleasure made me feel I was playing the greatest sport in existence. This was where it was at.
Afterwards, brushing dishevelled hair off my face, he said with wry amusement, ‘How many lovers did you say you’d had? You seem like a real pro.’
‘I am a pro, but only with you.’
‘That’s all right then,’ he laughed.
There was nothing prurient about Jordan. He would try anything in bed if I asked him to, but he never lost himself in the experience. And his reserve did not abate as we became more sexually familiar. I assumed it was a form of overconsideration on his part: politeness made him address my needs before his. That’s why he didn’t moan and grunt like the other men I had slept with had done. ‘Beth mightn’t like it,’ he would be thinking.
I couldn’t bring myself to consider that it might be due to a lack of passionate involvement.
I had reason to hope it was just the way he was.
To his dubious virtue, Jordan was driven by something higher than animal lust when he got into bed with a woman. I figured that out about him pretty quickly. He needed to feel loved before he’d bother with sex. Only when he was sure a girl was keen on him would his sexual urges fire up. And that was unusual in a young man. However, here was the rub. Jordan didn’t have to love the woman he was dating to sleep with her. Or it wasn’t his primary consideration. And this was never truer than in his relationship with me.
To give praise where it was due, Jordan had more love in his heart for the average person than I have ever had. He drew on this fund of compassion when he donated to buskers, doorknockers and pining or aspiring girlfriends. As long as a girl was in love with him, and she was presentable, he would have no cause to decline an offer or break a heart. Three girls in love simultanously was no bother, though he claimed he only had sex with one of us at a time.
Of course he never really said goodbye to most of these girls. How he stayed in the good books with the ones who’d had their hearts broken was a bit of a mystery to me. Perhaps it had something to do with his gently assertive manner and his physical charm.
‘If you really like someone, you always do,’ Jordan explained.
Flattered girls like me were easy to soften up for sex. In my case, Jordan didn’t make a serious move until the evening of the St Kilda Football Club family day, after we’d helped make a giant banner for the footy players to run through at the start of their pre-season. Jordan and I spent two hours with the fan club weaving crepe paper streamers into a letter pattern that was intended to read: SAINT STARS SOAR. However, our attention was divided, Jordan was prattling away, and we didn’t notice that the little tackers beside us couldn’t spell. At the night game, the unsuspecting players would run through a banner that proclaimed: SAINT STARS SOUR.
‘I was a cinch to seduce,’ I admitted big-headedly to Judy in the afterglow of my first overnighter with Jordan. And the same could happen later on tonight. It will only take two champagnes to activate my sex drive. And after some heavy petting from Jordan the rest would be a fait accompli.
If I listened hard enough, there should be a little echo chamber inside my heart, pulsing out what today’s true course of action should be. True, meaning true to myself, which girls of my generation believed it was our natural right to be. Moral compasses had been dispensed with: they had been made by men. All that mattered was that I consider what was best for me. I was receiving signals galore, but none that I could firmly depend on.
There was no denying that I was stuck fast to Jordan with the indissoluble glue of the past nine months. I couldn’t make a decision purely for myself anymore. I had ceased feeling like a completely independent person some months back. I had let myself get mixed up with Jordan and he would stay mixed up with me, even if I fled the hotel right now and determined never to see him again. Even if I went and lived with a mob of strangers in a mansion in Alaska, Jordan and the stigma of our aborted wedding would stay with me always.
At five-thirty our meeting with destiny would arrive and tick past, and either the ceremony would happen or it wouldn’t happen, but I’d not be in harmony with what came to pass. That was the tragedy of this day. Whichever decision I chose, I was not going to make the right one.