Let Us Go Then, You and I
Athena, 39
Perth, 2013
There was a missed call from Sally. Athena called her back as she pushed the wet laundry damp from the washing machine into the tumble dryer. What did people do before these appliances were invented? Her mother didn’t have a tumble dryer. She must have painstakingly hung out to dry on the washing line every single item of clothing and linen for their whole family growing up, including Athena’s two sport-playing brothers with millions of changes of clothes. How was this possible? How had this Sisyphean task of family washing not driven her mother completely mental? Perhaps it explained her behaviour. Maybe it was the washing that had made Koula the way she was. Would Athena end up like this too? It was possible, even if she was the first person in her family to use a dryer.
‘Hi, Athena,’ Sally said over the phone. ‘What are you up to?’
‘Oh, you know, living the dream. Today I went to the bathroom and when I came out, the contents of three cereal boxes were emptied out onto the carpet.’
‘Right.’
‘It’s actually quite satisfying to hear half a kilo of rolled oats being sucked up into a vacuum cleaner.’
‘Soooooo, apart from that – did you read the uni alumni email today?’ Sally asked.
‘No, I never read those. I only read emails from my divorce lawyer.’
‘Athena, do you remember that professor from New York? The one you liked?’
Yes.
‘Athena, are you there?’
‘Yes, Sally. I’m here.’
‘He’s back in Perth! He wrote a book about that annoying poet you loved and he’s reading from his work and doing a book signing. Athena?’
Yes.
‘Sally, when is it?’
‘Next week.’
‘Will you come with me?’
‘I can’t, I’ll be in Sydney for work. But maybe you should go. Well, it’s up to you.’
‘I’ll have to get Mum to babysit.’
‘Of course you do. Now’s your chance, right?’
‘He was married. Remember how we talked it all out?’
‘I remember,’ said Sally. ‘We sat in the coffee shop. You were in a pretty bad shape after that. And then you met Richard—’
‘Yes,’ Athena said as she cleaned out the lint compartment of the dryer.
‘Well, maybe before you rock up looking all sexy, think about whether or not you want to go or whether the past should be – well, you know, in the past.’
‘Of course it’s in the past, it was twenty years ago and nothing ever happened, remember?’
‘Right,’ said Sally.
‘Mummy!’ yelled Clara from the playroom.
‘Sorry, Sally. I have to go,’ said Athena.
_____
It played on her mind for the rest of the day. David Chesterton. Twenty years later. Here in Perth. Would he find her email address and try to meet up with her? Would he be happy to see her? Did he even remember her? Maybe he had known many students like Athena. All over the world, with their big eyes and their beautifully written essays, thinking about him constantly. She imagined little máti-shaped lights dotted all over a globe of the world, pulsating.
Was Athena even the same person anymore?
She had already been officially cashed in for a twenty-five-year-old by her husband. Paulina didn’t seem very interesting to Athena, but who cared, right? Paulina’s body had not housed twins. When had a man, ever in the history of the world, chosen the more interesting and less hot woman? It certainly wasn’t up to Richard to be the first. Maybe Richard had been waiting to meet Paulina his whole life; maybe they would have a more traditional relationship.
And there was Athena, living in their old house, by herself with twins, trying to work out what the next steps were. Going to the reading of a professor she used to be obsessed with? Sure, why not. She looked at the email. There he was. Just a little greyer, but still David Chesterton of New York City.
‘Damn,’ she said out loud as she realised the máti on her bracelet had snagged on a thread from Clara’s favourite tutu and it was unravelling before her eyes. There would be tears.
Where was that book he had given her years ago? Did she have time to find it before Play School finished? The twins would want their morning tea. She had to finish the laundry.
Forget the laundry!
In the study, she looked through boxes of old uni notes in the cupboard that she was still deciding what to do with. And in a foolscap ring binder in a large envelope, there it was.
She smoothed her hand over its leather cover and opened it. The beautiful inscription. It still smelled like her memory of him – ink on paper, ideas, the promise of something else.
Perhaps she wasn’t done with men after all.
In that moment, Athena let the old feeling take hold of her completely. She was amazed how well she could recall it. That feeling of wanting him so badly. She wouldn’t be so coy now.
She had dreamed about him on and off over the years. She was at a formal dinner in a large ballroom with chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Athena was wearing a long dress, and there were people around her speaking all different languages. She recognised some French, and even Greek. All the tables were set with white tablecloths and silver cutlery and vases full of fresh roses. David had saved her a seat. She sat down at the seat he’d saved for her, but then he disappeared to get a drink. He didn’t come back. Athena was sitting at this grand dinner, with the empty seat next to her, just waiting for him. She wanted him to come back but she could not will him to, even in the dream. He wouldn’t come back to the table. She wanted to disappear with him, she wanted to leave the dinner together, but they never did.
She didn’t dream about Richard. He was right there, every day, singing in his band, meeting up with her after lectures. There was no longing or wondering what was going on. She always knew what was going on. There were other girls, sometimes, but she was the one he liked the most. Oh, Athena.
‘You are so stupid!’ she yelled out loud to herself.
‘Mummy!’ Clara was standing in the doorway, crying.
‘Oh no, darling. I didn’t mean you. I meant Mummy,’ Athena said, opening her arms to Clara’s red face of tears.
‘Mummy!’ Clara cried.
Sam walked in and as soon as he saw Clara crying, he joined in too.
‘Mummy!’ Sam cried.
Athena hugged them both, three faces of tears, clutched together. It took an hour for Clara and Sam to calm down. She promised them Princess Elsa and Olaf the Snowman squeezy pouch yoghurts if they promised not to tell Yiayia Koula.
They promised.
_____
The next day, after leaving both twins screaming for her at the front door with a neighbour’s teenage daughter, Athena wiped away the tears and walked to the bus stop. She would go into the city to buy a dress. That was what people did. Women who cared what they looked like.
As soon as she got off the bus on the Terrace and walked towards the Hay Street Mall, she remembered why she never came into the city for anything.
It was so underwhelming. Colonial-style buildings, high-street fashion and stores selling rubber shoes with soles that peeled off after a week. A little old Tudor-style lane that tourists might appreciate. The odd busker in dreadlocks. Lots of old people, smoking away. Sun beating down on bricks. JB Hi-Fi. What did they sell? Dymocks with its red-and-white sign. It was too late to start now and pretend she was au fait with contemporary fiction. She couldn’t even remember the last novel she’d read.
In London she used to buy dresses from little vintage shops in Camden and Shoreditch. But here the choice was David Jones or Myer. She wandered through David Jones, avoiding the gaze of the perfume-spraying girls in orange foundation with painted-on eyebrows. When did having thick black eyebrows become so popular? Even the blondes had them.
She could have gone to Claremont, where identical-looking women bought expensive clothes. Their foreheads all amazingly smooth, their breasts matching. The women who served in those stores had this amazing way of flicking their eyes up and down your body as if working out whether you could afford or fit into their overpriced clothes. If you weren’t a skilled receiver of these looks, you may not even notice them. But they were there.
She grabbed a couple of dresses and forced herself into a change room. There were two girls in the cubicle next to her recounting in detail their weekends and who said what to whom. Did she used to be like that? It was hard to remember what she was like. It was hard to remember anything before Clara and Sam.
And then she saw herself in five different angles of mirrors in the DJ’s cubicle. A former person, the woman previously known as Athena, standing in a badly made dress, wanting something. Some kind of second chance. Some kind of escape.
The dress had a cinched-in waist and a black-and-white geometric pattern. It didn’t look right.
The next one was softer. Rose print. Kind of deco. She took out her hair and looked into the mirror. She must be, in someone’s eyes and even her own, still beautiful, still attractive. Surely, it was not all over. She was only thirty-nine. She was a mother, but she was also a person who was entitled to happiness.
To choose her own path.
Yes, she was.
_____
Prufrock still drew a crowd. What was it about that poem? Athena was the last person to arrive after leaving the twins with her mother, after a suite of questions as to where she was going and who she was seeing and had she called that friend of Chrissie’s daughter’s husband who was a divorced accountant?
From the back of the hall she saw the nineteen-year-old version of herself in the undergrads. Versions of Sally. Maybe not Sally, because she never would have come to something like this. Not unless there was wine or Athena had dragged her along.
And there was David Chesterton, sitting on the stage.
There was nothing different about him, really, other than the fact that his hair was greyer. His energy and enthusiasm for the material was still the same. Even from the back of the room she could feel it.
The head of the faculty introduced him, and David spoke about Prufrock, his love of Eliot, the simplicity of the poetry in the language of the everyday, the introduction of modernism. How we have all become modernists without intending to be. Everyone goes on Prufrock’s journey. Everyone is in their own head, full of their own anxiety. Athena couldn’t take in a word. She could only hear his deep American voice. The same voice. The same person. She never really picked up another poetry book after he left. She did what Sally had suggested. She finished the course and changed her major and that was the end of it. She had moved on. She met Richard that first day she saw him playing in his band and it was all on with him.
And that part of her life had begun and ended in what seemed now-record time. Still, Athena and Richard were together for nearly twenty years. They tried. Well, she tried.
‘What more do we need to do, Athena? I can’t do this anymore. We can give ourselves the opportunity to start over now,’ Richard said in the final showdown.
‘Start over? How much starting over do you think I’ll be doing with three-year-old twins, Richard?’
‘I just can’t pretend anymore. I don’t want to be unhappy for the rest of my life. I think I could be happy with Paulina. You won’t get out of your own head. You’re miserable and you want me to be miserable too.’
‘I’m miserable because we left London and came back here and I’ve looked after twins every day by myself while you’ve been at work,’ she said. ‘And now you just want to move on.’
And so that was that. They had stopped two decades of pretending. Just like that, the masks were gone. He took a suitcase, stuffed with his clothes, deposited his wedding ring on the hallway table and moved in with Paulina.
It took the twins about a week to realise he was gone.
Athena waited until the last possible moment to tell her mother. It was, of course, the biggest I told you so in the history of civilisation, both ancient and modern, Australian and Greek.
_____
Athena clapped at the end of David’s presentation. People stood and formed a queue in front of the table where David was autographing books. Athena stood at the back of the line.
When she was closer, she tapped the lady in front of her. ‘Sorry, do you mind giving David this book? It’s kind of a private joke.’
‘Okay,’ the lady said, confused and raising an eyebrow.
The woman placed the book in front of David and he gasped when he saw it and then opened it to see his inscription.
‘Hi, where did you get this?’ He looked up at the stranger. She moved aside and Athena stepped out.
‘Athena!’ he said, jumping up. ‘You’re still here! In Perth, I mean.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Oh, sorry,’ he said to the lady. ‘An old friend. What would you like me to write in your book?’
‘It’s for my granddaughter. Her name is Beatrice.’
‘Athena, are you sticking around? Are you free for dinner?’ he asked, looking up at her.
She was pleased she had bought the rose-print dress.
‘Sure, I’ll wait for you at the back,’ Athena said.
She watched him. His charming self. He had a presence. Was it just the fact that he was foreign and well-dressed? Why was she attracted to him? What did she even want from tonight? Why was she here? Where was his wife? Did he still have a wife?
She started the descent into questioning why she was doing this, and for a minute thought that she would disappear into the night. Perhaps David would think it was a dream, that she had never really been here, that she’d just been an apparition from his past. But she had nowhere better to be. Athena forced herself to count the beams in the ceiling. She was acutely aware of his eyes on her. She looked at her phone and started typing a text to her mum, asking about the twins, but then deleted it without sending. Her mother would definitely let her know if something was wrong. She had no other setting.
‘So, Athena. Where shall we go?’ he asked.
‘What do you feel like?’ she asked.
‘Anything! You choose,’ he said.
‘Okay, I’m driving. I’ll take us near the beach,’ she said.
_____
Athena chose an Italian place that Sally had told her about. They sat outside and the waiter brought them the drinks list in a black leather sleeve. Athena declined a cocktail, and they agreed to share a bottle of wine. She recommended some wines from Margaret River. They agreed on a shiraz.
‘I was going to look you up. I mean, I thought of you. I remembered you were here. The dean offered me the opportunity to do a guest lecture with the book and I thought, yes, Perth. I had an interesting few months here once upon a time.’
‘How’s your family?’
He looked to the sky and then to the floor.
‘Well, my wife, Jen, she died.’
Athena put down her glass.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry, David,’ she said. She felt a little sick.
‘She had cancer, and it was very difficult. But that was a long, long time ago. She was a wonderful person. And my little boy is all grown up. He has a life of his own now.’
No wife. Athena took another gulp of wine. It tasted sweeter than usual. She felt its power swirl within her.
‘And what about you Athena? What did you end up doing? Something interesting, no doubt. Did you finish your English major?’
‘I did journalism and got married and ended up in London for a long time. Then we came back to Perth. I stopped working when we got back and had twins. I haven’t really left the house since. My husband has – well, he’s my ex-husband now – he’s moved in with someone else.’
He was watching her intently and she felt like she was on display. It felt so amazing to be watched, listened to. Even if he wasn’t really listening, at least he was pretending to. That was something.
‘In a way, it’s a relief,’ she continued. ‘It was all so difficult. In a way I’m actually relieved that he moved out with this new woman who is going to make him happy. Maybe I’m glad he did it so I didn’t have to be the one to end it.’
He was still listening, watching her.
‘Anyway, I knew about it very early on in the piece but I just thought I should stick it out. We were married and I…everyone takes marriage very seriously in my family. But then, after having no sleep and two screaming babies – it all just fell apart whether I wanted it to or not.’
‘I’m so sorry. I’m surprised. Well, if you don’t mind me saying so, you don’t look like you’ve got kids and haven’t left the house in three years.’
If she could have picked the exact words that she wanted him to say at that particular moment, those were the words. You still look amazing. Not like a mother. Not like the wife that has been discarded and replaced by someone younger and less complicated.
‘It’s so funny, sitting with you,’ she said. ‘I feel like I’m young again and yet now I feel older than you at the same time. Is that strange? Although I’m probably older than you were when you were here last time.’
‘I always liked you,’ he said and looked into his wine.
There was a silence and Athena reminded herself to breathe slowly. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and sat up straight.
‘David, I’m completely horrified that I can’t even talk to you about anything remotely literary. I’ve hardly read anything since the twins were born except for parenting books, which are all complete nonsense anyway.’
‘I know, aren’t they terrible? Jen hated them too. In New York we lived next door to one of those women who was a parenting expert. She had written one of those books. She was such a disaster. And you know the worst part? One of her essential tenets was attachment parenting – not to yell and not to get nannies. We heard her, all day every day, yelling and screaming at her children. I don’t think any of the nannies in our building would have worked for her even if she begged them.’
‘I find myself yelling and I hate it. I read that it’s very damaging and it’s all about how you were treated as a child.’
‘I can’t imagine you yelling, Athena.’
‘The thing is, it makes no difference. And I know when things feel they are spiralling out of control. I mean, the twins are still very young. I just need to get my life back a bit. Get some more help.’
‘You don’t have a nanny? You have twins and you don’t have a nanny?’
‘People don’t do that here. I did try once but my mother had an absolute fit. It wasn’t worth it and I – I just get on with it. When I go back to work this year, I’ll sort it all out. I will. Somehow,’ she said. ‘I’m going to move on with things.’
‘You know, I can’t imagine how your husband could have left you.’
‘You’re very kind, David. Anyway, let’s not talk about that. Tell me about New York.’
‘New York’s New York. It’s home. I don’t think I could live anywhere else now. Plus, I’m old.’
‘Do you dare to eat a peach?’
‘Good one, Athena,’ he laughed.
‘It’s great that you could devote your life to one poem.’
‘Yes, but the problem is sometimes I have these dreams – nightmares really – when I’m talking to him—’
‘To T.S. Eliot?’
‘Yes. He asks me to call him Tom, so I do,’ he said.
‘Does he tell you how much he loves your work?’
‘Actually he says, “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.”’
They laughed as if it was the funniest thing anyone had ever said. Athena wondered if her children would love poetry, specifically this poem. Or if she would be the only one who would appreciate this kind of humour. Athena and David. She wondered if she would ever laugh with anyone else about Prufrock.
‘I have devoted my life to him and to his work. I wonder if anyone will take up my work one day,’ David said. ‘But, yes, it does strike me that the dreams could be real and I may have got the whole thing completely wrong.’
‘Does it really matter if you did?’
‘I guess not.’
‘I’m sure you have a faculty full of willing students to take over your work,’ she said.
‘The thing is that I’m not sure really sure I can relate to the young ones anymore.’
She smiled at him.
‘Yes, well,’ he sipped his wine and consulted his menu. ‘But you’re right. I agree it’s like we’re back in those earlier years, sitting here with you. Remember when we saw that awful play?’
‘Oh, that night. Kind of,’ she said, and wondered if he knew she was lying. She still replayed that night in her head from time to time. That night from twenty years ago. It could have been a dream by now, a distorted memory of something that may or may not have happened. She still couldn’t get the order quite right. But she realised it was the feeling that she longed for. That it was so close, yet not. He had been so within reach that night, in one reality. But in another, he had been as far away as if he was on the other side of the world.
‘It’s really very far away, Perth, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘I was just thinking something similar,’ Athena said. Could he read her mind?
‘I mean, it’s not like you can get on a train and go to another city in a couple of hours. Or even fly to another city and be there in two hours and spend the weekend there.’
‘Well, it’s a long way. Everywhere is a long way. It’s a wonder Perth exists, really. There’s a very brutal history as to why there’s a city here at all,’ Athena said.
Their mains arrived and they picked up their cutlery.
‘Why is the Italian food in Perth so good? I remember that from last time. Oh, it’s the immigration, isn’t it? And your family was from somewhere exotic too, if I recall correctly. Greece, wasn’t it? Of course: you’re Athena.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know how to cook all those beautiful desserts?’
‘No. Not at all.’
‘Me neither. The other day I was thinking about this amazing apple tart that my mother used to make when I was younger and I cannot for the life of me replicate it. I have tried. But really, nobody I know cooks in New York. Everyone works and then picks up their favourite food on their way home from work.’
‘Sounds like the perfect place for me. I absolutely cannot cook,’ said Athena. ‘I’m really so terrible. I’m not a very good Greek daughter. But my mum is amazing at cooking. Her friends always buy her recipe books, but she doesn’t need them. She never opens them. She just cooks from memory. And my grandmother too. Mum has these days where she just cooks all day with her best friend. And her best friend’s daughters. Sometimes I go, but it’s kind of hell for me.’
Chrissie. And her daughters. Oh, she couldn’t stand them. Athena bet that her mother was on the phone to Chrissie right now.
‘I thought of you after I left, you know,’ David said in a quieter voice. ‘A few months after I got back to New York there was an exhibition at the Met. I went by myself, as Jen wasn’t feeling well. That was when she’d started to get sick. Oh, it was pretty bad.’
‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’
He paused and she looked at the crack in the wooden table.
‘There were some antiquities. And I noticed there was a painting with the blue eye – the máti – like your bracelet. The black dot and the blue all around. It was very beautiful. I thought of you. I hoped you were happy and experiencing life and not going through anything awful like I was.’
‘You actually thought “I hope Athena is not going through anything awful”?’
‘I remember thinking something along those lines. I wanted you to be happy. You had your whole life to look forward to. That’s something.’
‘Something that people don’t realise when they’re young.’
‘You’re still young.’
‘Sure, the nineteen-year-old me is in here somewhere. Only now I’m responsible for the lives of others.’
‘You’re exactly the same.’
‘So are you.’
She had this feeling of floating just above and outside of herself, as if her spirit was free from the everyday. It was, perhaps, that feeling of being desired. He had asked her to dinner to converse with her. Was there anything better than being wanted like this? It was nothing like her evenings of scraping pasta spirals (no sauce) from the floor and then bribing the twins to get in the bath, put their pyjamas on, stay in their beds. Scrolling on her phone for job ads as she sat on the floor in their bedroom, trying to convince them to go to sleep. Almost every night she needed to hold both their hands as they fell asleep. Sometimes she gave one of them a foot instead so she could have a free hand to use her phone. That was what she was currently reduced to. Pretty much every night.
She was trying to work out how she was going to figure it all out.
What was the step before figuring it all out?
_____
David and Athena had a minor dispute about who should pay for dinner.
‘You’re a visitor, I’ll pay,’ said Athena.
‘Athena, please. You can’t give a man the single mother with twins story and then pay for dinner.’
Athena relented.
‘Well, thank you for dinner,’ she said.
‘My pleasure.’
As soon as they stepped out of the restaurant, she felt like she was back in that night, after that play, all those years ago. She had been here before. She wanted a different ending. Had she waited her whole life to replay this night a different way? Surely not. That was a different time, a different place, a different life. Before marriage, before London, before children.
‘I can drive you to your hotel,’ she said, not giving him an opportunity to leave.
‘Thank you. That would be lovely.’
She drove along Mounts Bay Road, the black still river lit by the skyscrapers. She lowered the windows. The summer air whipped through the car. She felt his eyes on her and she never wanted the road to end. They could be like this, just driving, forever, into blackness.
‘So, what are you going to do next?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘In your life?’
‘Maybe I’ll move to New York with the twins,’ she said. ‘Get a nanny and go to the Met every day. Then get a serious job.’
‘You should! That’s a great idea,’ he said.
She laughed. What a beautiful fantasy!
‘Do you think you would miss living in Perth if you did that? Do you miss London?’
‘I miss everywhere. I never thought I would be here forever. I guess everyone says that about the town they grew up in. Except if you’re from New York.’
‘It’s very beautiful here, though. In a wild and slightly colonial way. It’s very English. When I came here for the university job, I thought, what a wonderful old-fashioned corner of the world with such stunning beaches and hardly any people.’
‘It helps if you are a sporty beach person. Or have a vested interest in the mining industry and enjoy capitalism. It’s not really the greatest place if you’re a quiet Prufrock person.’
‘That’s fair, I can see that.’
She turned off the Terrace and pulled up out the front of one of the business hotels. Athena started to miss him terribly, even though he was still sitting in the front seat next to her. She didn’t want this to be the end. She knew that she wouldn’t feel this way about anyone again. She would try to, but it wouldn’t be the same.
Athena imagined the next ten years – on dates with Aussie guys who liked boozing it up at the cricket and had never touched a poem. Worse still, she might end up with someone her mother had chosen from the Greek community whose first marriage had also failed but for different reasons.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
‘I don’t want this to be it for us. I mean, is this it?’ Athena asked.
‘What do you want it to be?’
‘I don’t know.’
They sat in silence in the car.
‘This may be presumptuous. I don’t really know if it’s…well… do you want to come upstairs?’
‘Yes and no,’ Athena said. ‘Mainly yes, but…’
‘Well, why don’t you just tell me what you want and we’ll try to make it happen,’ he said and faced her. ‘Don’t overthink it, just say it. Don’t be like him.’
‘Like who?’
‘You know who – J. Alfred.’
Yes, she was like him. That’s why the poem made so much sense to her. All her life she was living in her own head, too scared to act for fear of messing up. Trying to do the right thing but not knowing what that was, taking the path of least resistance. But she knew what she wanted now. Could she really make it happen?
‘I want to visit you in New York,’ said Athena.
‘Great! That wasn’t so hard, was it?’
Athena smiled at the simplicity of it in words. It was nice to finally have something she wanted that wasn’t abstract. This was an actual plan.
‘And what do you want?’ she asked.
‘Sometimes I think that I would like a time machine,’ he said. ‘I think about these things a lot.’
‘Sorry, I can’t do time travel,’ Athena said. ‘Not even the Greek goddesses could turn back time.’
He smiled and looked at her.
‘True. Well, in the absence of time travel, I want to see you in New York,’ he said in his American voice, reaching out to stroke her hair. She had imagined it so many times in her head that when he actually did it she didn’t register that it was really him touching her and not the inner workings of her imagination.
She recalled the Sappho line: Once again Love, that loosener of limbs, bittersweet and inescapable, crawling thing, seizes me.
And in that moment Athena realised the fantasy would shatter to pieces and everything from this point in time onwards would be real. He would be a normal man and he would disappoint her in some way, at some point. He would be everything and nothing like her ex-husband.
But for now Athena pushed that all aside as she leaned into him and let herself enjoy the sweet electricity of the moment under the stars.