Retreat
I dreamt about Alexander and woke feeling peaceful, but when Ava cries from her cot, hungry and wet, my peace ruptures. I am falling into the gaps in my life and the gaps are getting bigger.
I have signed up to go away with fifteen strangers for three days and do nothing but paint. I told Dan that I need to rebuild my sense of self, that I am lost in nappies and sleep deprivation and I need to be away from it all for a while, and to focus on something challenging, something creative. With something that I took for understanding in his eyes, Dan agreed without hesitation. He cares enough to want me to be better. He said, ‘Whatever you need, darling,’ and took the Friday off work to be home with Ava. I’m sure I detect relief that I’ll be gone.
The retreat is in a bushland setting, and damn it all, there are trees everywhere, crowding up to the little barracks that we sleep and eat in. It’s supposed to be cosy, but it takes me straight back to the Drive, where the trees are like bars on my cell. I want to see the horizon, paint the horizon. When I suggest this to the instructor, a red-head called Maureen, she laughs and tells me, ‘I’ve seen your horizons, Jennifer. You need to challenge yourself. Paint a tree for a change!’ She’s right of course, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
In groups of four we are sent into the bush to choose a small detail of some kind and paint it. The plan is that we compare the four visions of the same object and examine how four people can create something so different from a single object.
Brock and I paint the burrow in the same terms. Our brush strokes are almost identical, the colours we choose cannot be told apart and the burrow looks as though it was painted by the same person. We share the same inability to see beyond the burrow and into its abstract nature. We are literalists. I feel certain that we see the world through the same lens and that we will have the most fascinating conversations. I feel completely exposed.
That’s when I notice: I’m feeling something other than fatigue and boredom and guilt.
That night Brock and I sit in front of the radiator with Maureen and the rest of the group, scrambling for heat like we’re on power rations, stomping our feet quietly to keep the blood flowing. Brock and I steal glances and smiles. I feel raw. My toes are tingling, the floor underneath them unstable and crumbling away with each stomp.
Talking to the group, Brock is earnest, restrained and intelligent. I can see him holding back when someone in the group says something patently stupid. There is something else I see in him. It’s something I saw in Alexander – he’s constantly constructing himself, proving himself to the world. With Alexander it was his foreignness that made him scared of himself. I don’t know what it is with Brock, but I see it in him too. He’s presenting the Brock Who Is Acceptable To This Group Of People. It makes me want to deconstruct him, shake him up, the way I wanted to shake Alexander up when I used to pick fights with him.
These thoughts are hazardous. I get up and walk to the kitchen. As the kettle boils a voice comes from behind me. Someone has followed me. I turn around.
‘What do you make of that “four painters four burrows” business?’ Brock says.
‘It’s nonsense. We like to think we are incredibly unique, but in fact our brains are pretty much hardwired by convention by the time we are three or four,’ I say. Brock is leaning on the kitchen bench that is between us.
The kettle boils and I pour my cup of tea, holding the kettle up to Brock in a question. He puts his cup down and plonks a tea bag in it. I pour.
‘And here I was thinking you and I were cosmically bound by mirrored thought patterns or something. But really we were just being conventional. Buzz kill,’ Brock smiles.
‘Yep, that’s what they call me. Buzz Kill Jennifer.’
I hold out my hand, a formal introduction. He takes it and we shake. We don’t let go. He holds my eyes and my hand and I feel perilously exposed.
‘It is a pleasure to meet you, Buzz Kill, and to finally find another person whose brain and brush understands my own brain and brush. I’ve been accused of being too literal, you know. Of not looking beyond the object and into its essence, but that’s just bollocks. The object is its essence, don’t you think?’
We are still holding hands.
‘So you’re not a surrealist, I take it?’
Brock laughs – throaty, deep, gruff.
He looks at my hand, turns it over.
‘You don’t have painters callouses. Or paint under your nails. Are you a fraud, Buzz Kill?’
‘Afraid so. I’m a filmmaker. Painting is...stress relief.’
I like how my hand feels in his. His examination of my skin is gentle, mostly done with his eyes. He traces lines with his left hand, which I notice does not have a wedding ring. His fingers find my wedding ring, a thin band of gold with a small diamond, and trace that too, then he lets my hand go.
I notice his hands are deeply stained.
‘You’re no fraud, that’s for sure,’ I say. ‘Do you ever wonder what it’s like to be totally free? Not to be concerned with convention or social rules. Just to be.’
‘No, I don’t wonder. You’ve just described my life from the age of fourteen to about...oh, last year.’
It makes sense now, the construction I saw as Brock talked to the group. He is creating himself, building himself up from the rubble of some kind of life.
‘What happened last year?’
‘I decided it was time to grow up.’
‘I’ve been grown up my whole life. Trust me, it’s too hard and it’s overrated,’ I say.
‘Yes, it is. I’m discovering that’s true.’
‘I could do with a little grown-down for a change,’ I say.
‘Grown-down? That’s a thing?’
‘Yeah, it’s what adults do when they are sick of rules and responsibility.’
Brock leans forward and takes both my hands and this time I know we are approaching a line.
‘I like the sound of that. Feel like being grown-down with me?’
Every sensation hits like I’ve been given a new body, one that’s never felt anything before, one that’s never been touched, never been hurt, and never been loved. None of this belongs to me. He flattens my fingers between his two hands so that there is no space between where we touch and where we don’t. He curls his fingers through mine. It is soft and careful.
I shut my eyes and when I look again, Brock’s question still hangs between us, papering his eyes. There are only two possible answers. He takes my wrist, where I have a small tattoo of a hummingbird that reminds me of being free, and when he kisses it, he snaps the last part of me that’s holding onto the reigns of my life. I’d never noticed before how intimate the inside of a wrist could feel.
Brock is untying me.
From around the radiator in the next room we hear the others rise and chairs scrape as they say their goodnights and go to bed. It’s been a long day of hard work, where we have all been eager to achieve more than we would normally achieve in a week, keen to prove that we are serious about our work, that the people who are waiting for us back home did not sacrifice their time with us for nothing. We are exhausted with the effort of proving that we are more than the sum of the parts of our daily lives.
We wait for the commotion next door to die down and skip our eyes across the room. My attention is on everything else.
Finally there is silence from the other room and we are alone. I nervously reach for my tea cup. Words are beginning to congeal in my mouth and the spell is broken. He searches me for eye contact, which I avoid. He takes my hand, fiddles with my wedding ring, and says, ‘See you tomorrow, Buzz Kill,’ before walking out of the kitchen.
In bed, I curl into the unfamiliar sheets and try to get comfortable on the too-soft pillow. Restless, I pick up the book that I brought, Tender is the Night. I read until Fitzgerald’s words swim on the page and my brain gets stuck on a sentence and won’t read any further: ‘I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight.’
Somewhere inside of me will always be the person who loves a man she cannot have, who time and circumstance and fear, mostly fear, conspired against.