I looked forward to every message Jarvis sent me. He introduced me to Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and taught me about the birth of masochism. He said he would like me to treat him as my slave, that there was ‘no equality in love’. He sent me a file of The Velvet Underground’s version of ‘Venus in Furs’ and an image of Titian’s ‘Venus with a Mirror’. He wrote: ‘Listen and look at this, my own goddess of love and beauty. I will do as you ask, but treat me kindly and we shall always have Cupid by our side. He has already pierced me with the golden arrow of uncontrollable desire.’ A message like this was a shot of adrenalin straight to my heart.
I had so much to learn from him. He was my teacher in art, in life, but most of all in love. He wanted to be my slave and I wanted to be his student. In this relationship of ours, in the way we worshipped each other, it did feel as though there was no equality in love.
He sent me a postcard in an oversized yellow envelope. He wrote no message, but the postcard featured an artwork by the South African artist William Kentridge. It was a black-and-white drawing of a man standing at the edge of the Earth with a black cat beside him. In capital letters along the top were the words HER ABSENCE FILLED THE WORLD. When I received the postcard, I held it up to my lips, then clutched it to my heart. I finally owned something Jarvis himself had touched. That postcard became more precious to me than my own wedding ring. I hid it where I knew Luke would never look — in the current book I was reading. In the evenings, I would open my book at the marked page, and there would be the postcard — proof that I filled someone’s world — and my heart would blossom with certainty.
The intensity of how Jarvis and I were feeling for each other kept on rising. He sent me Leonard Cohen tracks to listen to, full of lust and yearning, songs such as ‘Take This Longing’ and ‘Ain’t No Cure for Love’ and ‘In My Secret Life’. There were all these mentions of thighs in Cohen’s songs, and then Jarvis wrote that he liked to imagine his chin on the hinge of my thigh. All of a sudden I had a fascination with a body part I had never so much as thought about before. Jarvis made even the ordinary seem magical.
He created an image of an enduring passionate love I had never experienced in real life before. Luke and I got really comfortable really quickly. Before long, he took me for granted. But women need to be nurtured. They’re sexual beings, and they reach their peak in their thirties, just at the time men start to crave sleep more than they crave sex. Or at least that was the case with Luke.
Luke worked hard at the Patch. It was physical work and he’d built the business up from nothing. He’d turned a concrete rooftop into a lush garden among the skyscrapers. I truly was proud of him and what he’d done. He’d had a beautiful vision, and he’d managed to achieve it. But the truth was he fed those herbs with more love than I got.
I was like a plant with no water — withering, drying up, yellowing — and here was Jarvis offering me some fertiliser. He really dug me. His messages to me became more frequent and my thighs cried out for his touch. He once wrote that we would be like flesh-and-bone Lego together. It sent me wild. I feared seeing him, because I didn’t know if I would be able to control myself, I didn’t know what I was capable of. But I was also dying to see him.
So my head was in turmoil. I would sit down to work in the study at home and I wouldn’t be able to make a start. I always had deadlines weighing heavily on me. But even the deadlines couldn’t make me start working. I’d get up and make another coffee — I wasn’t sleeping well, I would wake up at 1am, 3am, 5am, with exciting, racy scenes in my head, keeping me awake. I started listening to music as I worked, which I’d never done before, and it meant I could only work at about half my normal pace. I was trudging through the mud of love, a true sickness, a disease, a total distraction: it slowed me down and wore me out.
I wasn’t my usual self. Tired, I became more impatient with Max than usual and less tolerant. Where before I used to sit down with Max after school and draw, or kick the footy out the back with him, now I found myself plonking him in front of the television so I could get some peace, and reread messages from Jarvis and listen to Cohen licking up some thighs.
When I realised what I was doing to Max, I was devastated. He was the love of my life, the one who had brought goodness into my world; it was he above all others who had shown me what real love is. When Max was a newborn, I remember thinking that love for one’s child was far superior to any romantic love. So I wasn’t sure where I had gone wrong along the way, and why these feelings for Jarvis were overshadowing everything else in my life.
I was lovesick, and it was unsustainable. Something had to happen. I couldn’t go on like this forever. So I emailed Suzi to see whether she wanted to meet up with us at the Patch with her boy the following Saturday. She took two days to reply to me. I thought perhaps I’d come on too strong and overstepped the mark. But finally she replied and said sure.