Jarvis’s gold tinsel zombie figure got selected as a finalist in the McClelland Sculpture Survey Award. It was his first breakthrough. The piece was larger than life and had taken over eight months to complete. I was the first person he shared this news with, in an email littered with exclamation marks and with the word ‘excited’ used an overwhelming number of times. I owe this to you, Luisa. You’ve given me the confidence I’ve needed for years. When I’ve been tired and feeling hopeless, it’s like you’ve been sitting at my shoulder, whispering sweet encouragement in my ear. You’ve been such a positive force in my life. Things are starting to happen for me. For us. For a moment, I did feel like his Sunday Reed, even if I was just a virtual one that sat at my laptop and pressed the ‘send’ button once in a while.
I wished in vain that I could have been right by Jarvis’s side at the opening. I would have liked to have held his hand and shared that amazing experience with him. Luke was working at the Patch that Saturday afternoon, so I had to take Max along. He found the speeches boring, and he was right: they were too long and too pretentious. We hovered up the back, hardly able to hear a thing, and I kept on looking around, wanting to spot Jarvis’s face in the crowd, but I couldn’t find him. Max was restless, and I couldn’t even keep him occupied with games on my smartphone. He kept complaining that his legs were feeling tired after playing footy in the Under-nines that morning. He was starting to have his own opinion about things, and it wasn’t so cool hanging out with his mum anymore.
The judge announced the winner: it wasn’t Jarvis. Nevertheless, it was still an honour to have been selected for the show. They opened up the pathway so that we could all go and have a look at the sculptures. Eventually Max let me put my smartphone away in my bag and he walked along with me, still complaining about his legs as though he had the greatest sporting injury of all time.
The leaves and twigs on the bush path cracked under our shoes. Max played with a few of the interactive sculptures; he danced in front of some sensors that played music or the sounds of chirping birds, he pulled on different levers and crawled under a spider’s web made from fabric suspended between trees. He finally forgot about those aching legs.
We discovered Jarvis’s work, tucked away between two gum trees, halfway along the trail. I’d only seen photographs of his works before, so it was nice to finally see one in real life. I couldn’t say that I liked it any more than the pictures I’d seen, but I guess I got a new 3D perspective. Max ran his hand through the gold tinsel, as if he was playing a harp. I could see that this piece was going to be a magnet for kids. A strand of tinsel fell to the ground and I cautioned like a commonplace mother: ‘Don’t touch.’
Just then Jarvis stepped up beside us. ‘Hi there,’ he said, so normally.
I think I blushed. I had not expected to see him right at the moment when my son was running his fingers through his work.
‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘This is fantastic.’
‘Thanks for coming along,’ he said, repositioning his glasses on his nose.
‘This is Jarvis, Uncle Chris’s friend,’ I said to Max, in a strangled voice. ‘He made this sculpture.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s sort of a zombie,’ Jarvis said.
‘Oh’ was all Max could say, looking it up and down again.
The three of us stood awkwardly on the path, Jarvis with his zombie creation and me with the boy I’d created. Jarvis put his hands in his back pockets and stood with his feet stepped apart, as though he was waiting for a revelation. He looked timid, unsure, innocent and slightly dazed. My heart felt as though it had been dropped in a brown paper bag; crinkly, rough, shaken. Everything felt wrong.
I noticed a woman with his parents. Was it his sister? I couldn’t remember what his sister had looked like. Who was this ’fifties pin-up model with them, with her thick eyeliner and mascara, and a push-up bra heaving up her cleavage in that bright red dress? Her arms were thick and her hips were wide, but she wore her extra weight as seductively as a model in a Titian portrait. Her skin was pale like marble and her faux-burgundy hair was pinned in a side-part victory roll.
Someone else came along, a bald guy with a black t-shirt and tattoos all up his arm. He shook hands with Jarvis with such vigour that his veins almost erupted from his forearm. This guy and that girl were too edgy for me. I felt drab in my loose navy-blue smock dress with white polka dots. And I sure didn’t have makeup on like that girl over there. I felt like plain Jane, like I didn’t belong here with my eight-year-old son. I felt something close to panic. ‘We’ve got to go,’ I blurted to Jarvis. ‘Well done again.’ And I took Max’s hand and we high-tailed it out of there. I wouldn’t even let him stop and look at any more sculptures.
I was silent and distracted on the way home, weighed down with a feeling of impossibility. How were Jarvis and I going to make all this work? How were we going to fit each other into our lives, lives that seemed so completely different? My life was so tame, it was school drops-offs and pick-ups, sports games, picking Max up from play dates, wiping up milk spillages on the carpet, parent–teacher interviews, preparing shopping lists for weekly shops; there was nothing glamorous about it.
Yet somehow Jarvis saw my banal life as sexy. He once wrote that he would like to be a fly on the wall and watch me do the vacuum cleaning.
Seeing him with those two people, whoever they were, I was filled with doubt. He said that he found me so fascinating, so smart and intriguing, but could I compete with people like that? I was intimidated just looking at those two. What would I have to say to them? We couldn’t talk about the Mathletics app for the iPad or new ideas for school lunches. I felt as though I wanted to crawl back into my little motherly burrow where I was safe and comfortable.
I wanted to shut down this whole thing with Jarvis, it was all becoming too painful, and the pain was outweighing the pleasure. I could unfriend him from my social media accounts, block him from my email, delete his number from my phone. It was simple. I could shut it all down.
Yet I knew in my heart I couldn’t do any of that. I was too curious, and too scared to miss out on the rare, beautiful opportunity I felt him to be.
As painful as it all was, he did make me feel like a better woman, a smarter, sexier version of myself. Even if I felt drab alongside his friends, in my own world he made me walk around feeling smug about my beauty and desirability — he’d reawakened a sleeping giant, and I loved him for this.
Back home I checked my email and text messages at less than ten-minute intervals. I could hardly make dinner that night; my head had been transported elsewhere. I remember having two glasses of wine and spilling one over the bench while stirring the risotto. Instead of grabbing the tea towel to wipe it up, I grabbed my phone to check whether Jarvis had messaged me in the three minutes since I’d last checked. We ate our dinner, Luke and Max bantering as usual, but I couldn’t so much as utter a word in the conversation. I felt this kind of drained feeling, as though I was living an abstract reality, stuck in no-man’s land, between one place and another and I didn’t know whether either of them were any good.
After dinner, I cleaned up with a sense of urgency. I scrubbed the sticky rice off the bottom of the red Le Creuset cast-iron pot. It had cost over $300, and Luke and I had rationalised that it was a great investment: it would last our lifetimes. But who would get it if we split up? And that set of three silver pots, would we split them up, or would one person get the whole set? That lime-green carpet I loved it so much, I never wanted to leave my lime-green carpet. Or that deck that Luke built. Or our silly little kitchen. Fuck it, I should call it all off, I thought. All of this was far too hard. I should just stay in this house, love my son and put up with my husband.
I’d made up my mind to stop all this nonsense, but then finally Max was in bed and Luke was working on some accounts for the Patch. I made my usual excuses about an urgent project that I was behind on and escaped to the study. By then I was certain there’d be a message from Jarvis, because I hadn’t checked in at least twenty minutes. I often felt this drumming in my chest, like we were connected, and I telepathically knew that he had written to me. I entered my password, logged into my email, and there it was: his name in bold in my inbox.
Today was wonderful and fabulous, but I felt as though something was missing without you by my side. I wish I could have had your fingers intertwined with mine like lattice today. I wish we could have been there together, like a true couple, not just secret infatuates.
I wanted to reintroduce you to my parents, and you could have met my family friend Paula. Do you remember her? She came and saw the band once, years and years ago. I think Chris had a thing for her back then. It was a shame you had to go so quickly. You would have liked my friend Anthony. I had a couple of other friends there, too, from art school and I was desperate for you to meet them. It’s like the greatest thing is happening to me and it’s so hard living this secret life with you, when I want to tell the world how happy I am. We’re meant to be together, I know this more than anything. None of it’s going to be easy, but we’ll make it work. Everyone will be happy in the long run, I promise you.
I could breathe again, and I felt like such a fool for running off like that, letting my insecurities get the better of me. Although I had promised myself less than half an hour before to end it all, I sent Jarvis back a gushing email, reassuring him of the happiness that would be ours when we got together. I may even have mentioned how much I loved that sculpture of his, how the gold tinsel swayed in the wind, how it reminded me of parting curtains at the theatre. I was genuine about everything, except for that sculpture of his.