LUISA

Christina Lee

I lost touch with Louise after we left school. Yes, I know I should call her Luisa, but I still think of her as Louise. No, I never asked about the new name. It didn't seem polite, like bringing up some awfully embarrassing thing that someone did when they were 12. Anyway, she did Arts at Sydney Uni and I was going out to Lidcombe every day for the physio course, and we just never saw each other. When I met her again she was Luisa.

It was at Jacquie and Belinda's party. I'd actually met Jacquie as a patient. Lateral ligament, left ankle, quite a nasty sprain. It's a classic netball injury but in her case it was line dancing. I'd never even heard of line dancing then, can you believe it? Well, I'd led a pretty sheltered life. The physio course was pretty demanding, and then when you graduated it was all shift work and long hours and you tended only to socialise with other physios. That's how I met Mark, of course. Physios are very nice people but I suppose Jacquie would say we're a bit straight. Certainly, we seemed to live in a different world from her and Belinda.

I don't usually socialise with patients, but Jacquie was lovely and it turned out that she and her friend Belinda lived just around the corner. And the ankle had healed up beautifully, so she wasn't an ongoing case or anything. Besides, most of a physio's patients are about ninety. People tend to think we spend our days treating football players for groin injuries and massaging Olympic swimmers, and so on, but in fact it's mostly strokes, rheumatoid arthritis, and post surgical. So Jacquie made a nice change. She used to giggle if it hurt and tell me funny stories about her job and her flatmate, and so on. Which certainly made a change.

So I said yes, we'd love to come, although I was a bit doubtful about how Mark would take it, going to a party with a bunch of people we didn't know. But in the end he had a marvellous time; even though, well, I know I should have twigged after all the stories Jacquie had told me about Belinda this and Belinda that and the things they did together, trekking in Nepal and backpacking in Europe, and all the rest of it.

But as I said, I do lead a fairly conventional life and it really wasn't until we got to the party and they were standing there arm in arm that I realised.

I mean, it's not like I'd never met a gay person or anything. Now I come to think of it, I'm sure a couple of the girls in my year were lesbians. But you didn't talk about that sort of thing, so I suppose it never occurred to me. I don't really see why it should be such a big thing; I mean, you're there to do a job and what you do in your own time is your own business, isn't it?

Anyway, Mark took it all in his stride. He kissed them both on the hand and turned on the smile and in about two seconds they were running around finding him a glass of champagne and taking his new distressed leather jacket off to the coat heap in the bedroom and introducing him to people left, right and centre.

I turned around, and there was Louise. Of course, she'd changed a lot. When we were at school she had long bunches of fat white ringlets and lots of pimples. Now she was very tanned and athletic-looking, and she had a sophisticated cropped haircut and one of those short slim little dresses that just yelled at you that here was a girl who grew up on the North Shore and whose daddy gave her a monthly clothing allowance.

'Jane,' she said to me. 'What a surprise. Have you got a drink?'

So she got me a drink and we caught up on what had happened to us. For me, of course, it was pretty simple; physio, six months working in London, back here to marry Mark and a job at the Prince of Wales. For her, as you might have expected, there was rather more to tell, and I must confess that I never really did get the whole story straight. The arts degree, yes, but all the sailing in the Med with Jean Paul and skiing at Val d'Isere with Claudio and the study exchange in Padua and the part-time job in Seville; it all got a bit complicated.

Anyway, she said she was a freelance writer, which confirmed my suspicion that her daddy was paying her an allowance, and she lived in the flat next door and knew Jacquie and Belinda from a publishing party. Most of the people at this party were in publishing or writing, because Jacquie is an editor at a big publishing house and Belinda tutors in creative writing, so of course most of their friends are writers and such.

Well, after we'd got all that sorted out, she looked over my shoulder and asked me to introduce her to Mark because she was really looking forward to talking to someone who wasn't a friend of Dorothy's for a change. I didn't know Dorothy, either, and I was going to say so. But Louise was the sort of woman who, when she said 'someone', you knew that other women didn't count.

So I took her over to Mark and she held out her hand and said, 'Hi, I'm Luisa.' That was the first I heard of this Luisa business, and I was going to ask, but just then Jacquie came bouncing up and dragged me off to look at the knee of a friend who'd fallen off his high heels. And the friend's knee turned out to be perfectly all right, he just wanted a photo of himself in drag having his leg massaged. So we had a lot of champagne, and he and his friend kept taking photos of people doing outrageous things, which made them do even more outrageous things, and the next time I looked at my watch it was half past one and we had to go.

Mark was still talking to Louise, and he kept saying how wonderful it was that she and I had met up again after so long and we would have to keep in touch, and the friend with the knee took a photo of me hugging Louise and another of Mark and Jacquie drinking champagne out of each other's glasses. It wasn't at all the sort of party we usually go to.

Well, I dropped over to Jacqui and Belinda's a couple of days later with some flowers to say thank you, and Louise was there, sitting at the kitchen table drinking peppermint tea, and I wound up staying talking for hours. After that it just became a habit. I had an early shift most Wednesdays and Mark was hardly ever at home; he had a private sports physio business as well as the hospital job, so there was nothing much to hurry home for.

I would buy a few Hungarian cakes and then go to Jacquie and Belinda's. We'd have tea and cakes, and then they'd sit at the kitchen table writing or talking and I'd cook and then we'd all eat. Luisa wasn't there all that often after the first time, and usually she didn't stay long if she was. She said she was very busy on a writing project, but Jacquie said that she had been saying that ever since she moved in next door and as far as she knew Luisa had never published anything.

They talked a lot about books. Belinda wrote short stories and reviews and magazine articles, and she always had stacks of creative writing exercises to mark and, of course, both of them read all the time. It was very different from our place; we had a lot of books, too, but they were mostly anatomy textbooks and things like that.

One week, Belinda asked me if I'd read a story she had just had published in a short-story magazine. She'd never shown me anything she'd written before and I was quite flattered to be asked. So I sat there and tried to concentrate while she pottered around the kitchen making curry.

It was about a physiotherapist called Madeleine who fell in love with a patient, who's a woman, but the woman's got this great boyfriend and isn't interested. At the end, the boyfriend turns out to be the physio's ex-husband. So this woman she's become so keen on is the same person as the bitch who stole her husband.

It sounds rather ordinary like that, but it was a lovely story. The physio realises that she's been feeling sorry for herself, and she's been blaming the new girlfriend for her own misery, without even knowing her. And she realises it's time she got on with her own life.

The disturbing thing, though, was that it was about me. Well, not about me; I mean nothing like that has ever happened to me, but it was me, all the same.

When I'd finished, Belinda turned around from the stove and said, 'What do you think?'

I must have looked a bit shocked, because she said, 'Oh, no, I've upset you, haven't I?'

I said, 'It's me, isn't it?'

She said, 'Umm... in a way.'

And I said, 'But I'm not like that. I haven't got a thing about an old boyfriend and...' and I stopped, because I was going to say I wouldn't fall in love with a woman, but I couldn't think of a way to say that to Belinda without sounding rude.

She poured me a drink and said, 'But that's what writing's all about. You start with something real and you think, what if this happened, or that happened, and it turns into something else. You were telling me once about touching people who were very unattractive and how you coped with it. So I started thinking about how a physio would cope with having to touch someone she found very attractive, and it grew from there.'

I was a bit puzzled. I understood what she meant, all right, but I wasn't too sure about it. I suppose I'd never thought about where writers got their ideas from. But, of course, what else could they possibly do; they take incidents from other people's lives and turn them into something else. But when you read something, you don't think about the friend or whoever started the whole thing, and how maybe how they felt about it.

It did feel a bit uncomfortable, but I couldn't really see what she had done wrong. Anyway, just then Jacquie came in and we wound up having a really interesting talk about writers and how they steal events out of their friends' lives or things they read in the paper or conversations they overhear on the train.

'That's what creative writing is all about,' said Jacquie, pouring us all another drink. 'Taking things that you hear about and turning them into something different, something that expresses a new truth.' She talked like that sometimes.

I still wasn't too sure about it all, but when I told Mark later that night, he couldn't see what the problem was.

'She wrote a story about a physio. You're not the only physio in the world. What's the big deal?' he said. 'She met you, it made her think about physios, she wrote a story. She's a writer.' And he turned over and went to sleep.

Put like that, it sounded pretty reasonable. But it wasn't just a story about physios, it was a story about me. Once I got over the initial shock, though, I decided it was quite flattering. I mean, how many other people have had stories written about them? So the next week I took her a bunch of orchids. To say thank you, or sorry, or something.

 

And so life went on. Mark was working long hours, and I found myself looking forward more and more to seeing Jacquie and Belinda each Wednesday. Sometimes we'd go out together on a Saturday, too, to big raucous pubs or little jazz clubs. Luisa came along every now and then, but not all that often. I had a feeling that she saw us as a fall-back option, for nights when she didn't have a date with some man.

Anyway, it was all very settled. Like family, really. So when I came in to the flat one afternoon with my bag of sticky cakes and found the two of them just sitting there, in this awful, oppressive silence, with no books on the table and no drinks or snacks or newspapers or any of the usual clutter, I got this heart-in-my-mouth feeling and stopped in the doorway. At first I thought that somebody must have died, except that they were both looking angry rather than sad, so then I wondered if they had had a fight.

Jacquie looked up and I could see that she was making a big effort to pretend that everything was okay and that she was just about to offer to put the kettle on or something. But if they were upset about something then as a friend I should ask about it, so I put my bag down and asked what was wrong.

Belinda sort of groaned and ran her hand over her face as if she had to do that to stop herself hitting something, and Jacquie went over and picked up a book that was lying on the floor. That was odd in itself, because they were very careful about books. They certainly never left them on the floor. And there was something about the way this one was lying that gave the distinct impression that it had been thrown.

'What do you think of this?' she asked in a grim sort of voice.

It was a paperback with a sort of mediaeval-looking woodcut of four women dancing together on the cover, done in purple and green and with the two colours printed crookedly, so it was like seeing double. Pretty Maids All In A Row, it said, by Luisa Mayfield. And underneath, in smaller writing, "The book that lifts the lid on lesbian Sydney".

'Luisa's book,' I said, stupidly. 'She's finished it.'

I looked at the two of them, who glared back at me.

'But...' I persisted, dropping my eyes to the book again. The blurb on the back described it as a rollicking lesbian love story set in the pubs, clubs and back lanes of Paddinghurst. There was a black-and-white photo of Luisa sitting in a cafe wearing a grunge cardigan and smoking, which I had never seen her do, and underneath it said 'a witty, fast-paced tour de force'.

I looked back at the two of them. I didn't know what to say. I suppose I'd expected them to be pleased that Luisa had got her novel published, they were always pleased when their other friends had things published, but obviously there was something terribly wrong.

'Oh, Jane,' said Belinda. 'For heaven's sake. I know you're naive but you're not stupid. Can't you see how insulting it is? That girl is not a lesbian, she's got absolutely no understanding of what's important. How dare she write a book about it?'

'But,' I said, and then stopped, because I didn't know what to say next. Fortunately I had a bottle of wine in my bag, so I pulled it out, opened it, and poured us all a glass. We all drank and I thought they'd both calmed down. Jacquie certainly seemed happier; she got a bowl of olives and feta cheese out of the fridge and things started to feel almost normal again.

'Stupid girl,' she said in a dismissive sort of way, and I had the feeling that whatever it was about, was over. Boy, was I wrong.

'Explain it to me,' I persisted. They usually liked me asking dumb questions. 'Why shouldn't she write about lesbians? I mean, can't people write about whatever they like?'

Well, that was entirely the wrong thing to say. Or perhaps the right thing, I don't know. Belinda was still absolutely hopping mad, and I really set her off. The arrogation of the subjective experiences of an oppressed societal group by a member of the oppressors, a woman who spent her entire life chasing men while ridiculing other women, exploiting her few female friendships, using a false voice to give the wider public a distorted view of Luisa Mayfield and a distorted view of lesbian life.

'And the thing that really hurts,' added Jacquie, who had got steamed up again while she was listening to Belinda, 'is that there she is, right next door, and did she ever talk to us about it? Did she ever discuss her ideas with us? Did she ever tell us her plans? Did she even have the decency to show us a copy? Oh, no. This just turned up on my desk at work. In the recent-publications-from-rival-publishers heap. That's the first I knew that our precious Luisa was actually putting pen to paper instead of just talking about it.'

A few months ago I would have been really intimidated by the amount of anger that was flying around in that kitchen, but they were always telling me that society tried to control women by making them afraid of negative emotions and that one had to have the courage to face anger and learn to deal with it. So I gritted my teeth and kept right on going.

'Well,' I said. 'I can see you're both terribly upset.' Jacquie had told me that acknowledging another's negative feelings was often a good way of neutralising them, so I thought I'd give that a go too. 'And, I know you wouldn't be upset without good reason. But I don't understand. Isn't this what a writer does, taking what she sees and turning it into a story?'

'There's taking and then there's taking,' said Belinda. 'The thing is, lesbians, genuine lesbians, have fought for the right to have our voice heard. And now, here she is, never had to fight for anything in her life, calmly taking that voice and using it, not in solidarity, but to exploit an oppressed group of women, to use us to further her so-called career as a so-called writer.'

Well. It was one of those nights when we drank and talked until two in the morning. I could sort of see what Belinda was getting at, although I still wasn't sure how it was different from her writing about a physio when she wasn't one. Although, of course, physios have never had to pretend to be something else, or been insulted in public. Belinda talked a lot about what it was like, how hard it was, how her parents didn't understand and that some of her oldest friends wouldn't bring their children to visit. I must say I had no idea; I mean, why would anyone care about what other people do at home in private?

Anyway, we wound up deciding that Luisa could do whatever she wanted, why should we care, and I slept the night on the couch. When I got home at about eight the next morning, Mark was hopping mad. He said he'd been really, really worried about me, and how was he to know where I'd been, and he'd been that close to calling the police. So I told him all about it. I suppose it was bad timing more than anything - he must have been really worried and upset and obviously he can't have slept properly - because he called them a couple of stupid bitches and said he thought they were just jealous that Luisa had written something good enough to get published. Then he grabbed his distressed leather jacket and said he'd be home late, and pushed off.

Well, that wasn't much help, but it had been a bit stupid of me not to call and let him know where I was, so of course he would have been worried. But I had to get to work, too, so there was no time to think about sorting things out with Mark till later.

And then later that day I heard the news on the radio in the hospital cafeteria. I don't usually bother too much about the news, but the name Luisa Mayfield caught my attention while I was having lunch.

Louise had won a prize: the Voices of Diversity Award for New Literature.

Well. At least I had some idea what to expect when I got round to Belinda and Jacquie's this time, but even so it was a bit of a shock. Luisa had dropped in to see them; she wanted to borrow Jacquie's 'Reclaim The Night' T-shirt for a television interview, and Belinda had screamed at her, and Luisa had screamed right back, and now Belinda was sobbing quietly in a corner and Jacquie was planning some horrid revenge.

I didn't stay long. I don't think I could ever get to like that sort of atmosphere, whatever Belinda says about how liberating it is; and anyway, I wanted to be home when Mark got in. Only he didn't get in until midnight, which meant I wound up seeing Luisa on the television. She was wearing a pink triangle t-shirt, and the interviewer was gushing about her wonderful book and the film rights and the overseas rights. Luisa didn't get a chance to say much but she was looking pretty pleased with herself.

The next few days I seemed to see Luisa everywhere I looked. The bookshop next to the bus stop had a huge window display of her books, with big photos of her and blow-ups of the cover, and there were articles in the newspapers about her novel, which everyone said was daring and fresh and exciting. I started wondering whether I ought to buy a copy, since it did sound rather good.

I hadn't seen much of Jacquie and Belinda because I was trying to get things back on a better footing with Mark. He really couldn't see what Jacquie and Belinda were so upset about. He just kept saying that Luisa could write about lesbians if she wanted to; it was only a novel after all. He actually had a copy of the book, though neither of us read it. It was hidden away in his underwear drawer, which I thought was pretty odd, but I supposed that it was just his way of avoiding even more conflict. And it did seem silly for us to be fighting over something that Luisa had done.

The next thing I knew, there was this huge feature article in the Sydney Morning Herald. 'Will the Real Luisa Mayfield Please Stand Up. Written by Belinda.' It was brilliant. All those things she'd said to me about betrayal and dishonesty and bad faith and so on, all turned into this really good argument about how outrageous it was and how nobody should buy the book because it exploited lesbians.

I read the article in the cafeteria at lunchtime, and I went straight over that night to the flat and told Belinda how good it was. She gave me a hug and said, 'I'm glad you're back on our side,' which I wasn't too sure how to take, but I hugged her back and she cracked some champagne. Quite like old times.

Anyway, as you know, things really heated up after that. Louise just disappeared. The papers said she had gone to the Blue Mountains but of course I found out later that she was still around.

But lots of other people jumped in to the argument. The people who had decided on the prize said that they didn't care whether she was a lesbian or not; they couldn't see that it changed the quality of the book, and they thought it was a good book. And a group called the Sydney Attack Lesbians said that this just showed that the judges were a bunch of doddery old heterosexual fools and that lesbian writing should be read only by lesbians. And, some other people said that a novel is fiction; Luisa had the right to write fiction about people who were different from herself if she wanted, and at least it wasn't a boring, thinly disguised autobiography like most first novels.

And a couple of academics wrote articles saying that it was exactly the same issue as with B. Wongar, only since I'd never heard of B. Wongar, it didn't really shed much light on the situation for me. And, sales of Louise's book kept going up. They brought out a new edition with 'The most controversial book of the decade' across the front. I kept dropping in at Belinda and Jacquie's flat, which had become a sort of a nucleus for the anti-Luisa camp, and then going home to Mark, who kept saying that there was no such thing as bad publicity and that Luisa should dedicate her next book to Belinda, with thanks for all her help, and that Belinda was taking the whole thing far too personally. The book was being read by lots of people who didn't know Belinda from a bar of soap and didn't care whether Luisa was a lesbian or not, so what was she worried about. I was pretty confused.

In the mean time I actually read it, and I must say it was really good. Very funny, with lots of action. I didn't tell Jacquie or Belinda that. But of course that wasn't what they were upset about, anyway.

Well, after a bit, things started to die down. Novels aren't the most exciting thing in the world, and there was an election coming up and more stuff about police corruption, and it all sort of quietened down. Luisa's publisher sold the US rights to Pretty Maids All In A Row for some enormous amount of money but nobody except Luisa really cared.

Belinda still used to make comments about Luisa, but more out of habit than anything else. She was editing a book of poems to come out during the Mardi Gras, and that was taking up a lot of her time. Jacquie was busy, too. And I was worried about Mark, who hardly ever seemed to be home these days, and who always seemed really tired. I wanted him to ease off on the extra work but he said he was really starting to get somewhere with the sports physio and he didn't have time to ease off. He didn't seem happy, and I had this feeling that our marriage was going through a bad patch, so I was trying as hard as I could to be there as much as possible.

But tonight he was out, so I was cutting onions for a curry in Jacquie and Belinda's kitchen when Belinda walked in and handed me this magazine. There was a photo of Louise on the cover and the blurb said, 'Luisa Mayfield tells: My secret lesbian lover'.

I couldn't believe my eyes.

It was me.

There were two pictures. One was at that party where we'd met again, and there I was, looking pretty drunk, actually, with Luisa giving me a big hug, and some man dressed in feathers in the background. It was the other that really shocked me, though, because it was a photo of me at the beach, lying on my front with my bikini straps all undone and sort of laughing up at the camera. You could see about a mile of cleavage and I was looking awfully relaxed and happy. Of course, the implication was that I was looking at Luisa, only of course I hadn't been, I'd been looking at Mark.

I just saw red. How dare she? I didn't know what was worse, coming around and stealing my photos, or telling these terrible lies about me. I didn't even put the onion knife down, I just walked straight across the landing to her flat.

It's exactly the same as Jacquie and Belinda's flat, only mirror image. You walk straight in and turn left and there you are in the kitchen. She wasn't in the kitchen and I was so upset that for a moment I didn't even stop to wonder what Mark's distressed leather jacket was doing hanging over that chair; it was such a familiar jacket, and the kitchen was so familiar, that it seemed perfectly natural. In fact, it wasn't until I went down the passage and into the bedroom that I realised. A lot of things. Suddenly. Why Mark was always so tired, why he was out so late, why Luisa used to nip off as soon as I turned up anywhere, how she had got my photo for that filthy magazine article.

And now I've got blood all over my work clothes.