Tales of Mystery and Romance Read online

  About the book

  ‘I love airports. I love the opera of airports … Families with high-gloss airport emotion, a linkage of smiles, tears and touching. A moratorium on malice, air-conditioned goodwill. When the airport sanctuary is left, the automatic doors open into the sweaty heat and blown litter, and they also re-open the wounds of the family and the dust blows into the lacerations.’

  In an odyssey which moves across a world stage, Tales of Mystery and Romance touches high comedy and low farce - the non-event of the Jack Kerouac Wake, the dispute over the exact form of secular penetration achieved by Milton, an argument with an ex-wife over ‘motel sex’ - and much tender and perceptive observation.

  You will come away from this book at least knowing something about belly dancers, the intricacies of homosexual sex, and even life after death.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the book

  Title Page

  Preface

  The Alter Ego Interpretation

  Letters to an Ex-wife Concerning a Reunion in Portugal

  The Jack Kerouac Wake – the True Story

  The Mystery of the Time Piece

  The Airport, the Pizzeria, the Motel, the Rented Car and the Mysteries of Life

  The Loss of a Friend by Cablegram

  Milton Turns Against Champagne

  Desiderata

  The Oracular Story

  The Ritual of the Still Photograph

  The Commune Does Not Want You

  A Pertinent Diagram

  Milton Rebutted – Intellectual Tricks and Accusations

  The Chain Letter Story

  Notes

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright Page

  Preface

  Following speculation surrounding some of the stories when they first appeared, the author states that no identification is intended with living people. The events, characterisation and locations are used fictionally and to seek identification would be unjustified and a disservice to the book.

  THE ALTER EGO INTERPRETATION

  The Malaya restaurant, city of Sydney, my mouth burning with sambal, splashed with chilled beer, tasting only hot and cold. My psyche, also, running hot and cold. They are back. Milton and Hestia are back from the States.

  Milton’s hand on my shoulder. Our first physical touching since his return. It rings through me. I can’t hear the message. It’s a confused line.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you’re both back,’ I say suddenly, pleased with my spontaneity and my correctness.

  A fish restaurant, laminex-ed, plasticated. Milton doesn’t like ‘class’.

  A friend with a PhD said the restaurant was OK. A waitress speaks to us with the bevelled vowels of an Aborigine. Milton with his new mistress, Lydia.

  ‘Speaks like an Aborigine,’ I say. Her skin is only faintly dark.

  ‘Does she?’ Milton asks. He is probably earning virtue by not recognising distinctions in race. As if that were part of ‘acceptance’.

  ‘Not that I’ve had much experience with Aborigines,’ I say.

  ‘Tell us about your experience with Aborigines,’ says Milton.

  A closed circuit joke. He is seduced into my callous humour against his socialist principles. He is playing outside the fence of his commitment. He knows I’ve slept with two Aboriginal women.

  ‘My experiences with Aborigines …’ I say, ‘now let’s see …’

  He chuckles.

  Lydia’s smile runs behind the joke trying to catch up.

  The first a prostitute in a brothel. I paid her to strip. Big spender. A half-caste with the fullness of a white. Not spindly – dark teased hair. She asked me, after, to go get her a packet of cigarettes. Perhaps she wanted to know me better. Perhaps she wanted me to be her pimp. I’d be better off. I’m not sure I know how. The second Aboriginal girl I picked up in the street with a smile. Spindly, from the Territory, high-starch diet, new to the city. In transition from seeking friends on the streets to doing business on the streets. It puzzles me that the behaviour of a person who does something for payment, tip or bribe is often as congenial, and as cooperative, undetectably so, as that of a person doing it for good will. I didn’t hold her prostitutional inexperience against her. It made the procedure uncertain, the roles unclear – was I lover? customer? favoured customer? customer-acting-as-lover? maybe lover-acting-as-customer? She would’ve fucked without payment. I made her take it. Talked to me about the white man’s hang-ups with sex. Our hang-ups? What about their initiation ceremonies? I didn’t say it. She was determined to show me how, and to give a demonstration fuck – an advertisement for the primitive sexuality of her race. I was passive, self-indulgent, as well as being my usual crippled self. Perhaps she was trying to prove she had soul. The white people can learn our dances; but we are the dance. She talked too much, lying there in that room, greasy from the fifty years of transient occupants, talked too much, that is, for a prostitute. I told her I was camp to explain my careless performance; to get her to arouse me; will you love me though I fail as a man; the search for lost passive moments of infant sexuality. I have seen her since, from a distance, dressed for the evening in the morning. Obviously more professional – probably has an accountant. And is probably, or surely, avoiding sexual bums like me.

  ‘Tell us about your experiences with Aborigines,’ repeats Milton in a tone which tells me he now thinks it will turn against me in Lydia’s eyes, become not a private joke but a public indictment of me.

  ‘I’ll get the wine first,’ I say.

  I go for the wine. I ask for white Burgundy as the basis for a racial joke (which is really just heretical humour in our circles). Does the café have wine at all?

  ‘Which do you prefer?’ she asks, knowledge ably, running through a few labels. She is proud that she knows. Service ethic.

  Back at the table I tell them of my surprise at the café having wine and then I tell them, ‘I once organised adult education classes for Aborigines,’ elaborating the private joke with Milton, keeping it private. Lydia is oblivious, she has withdrawn to the safe, alert feminine posture – taking an interest in the life and work of the men – quietly attentive – showing only acclaim, amusement, and asking the deferential question – but way down, critical, supercilious. Inside the doe – the panther.

  ‘The tutor called them “boys and girls”. It was a public speaking class. The tools of politics and duplicity. It’s called Doing Something for the Aborigines.’

  ‘You asked me to give a class to railway workers,’ Milton says, ‘I said I couldn’t spare the time. It’s on my conscience.’

  ‘Tell us about your experience with the working class,’ I ask Milton, holding him in our private joke, away from Lydia. His lust is complicated too. He laughs.

  ‘It’s called Doing Something for the Working Class,’ I say.

  We’re halfway through the bottle and the meal hasn’t been served. Lydia is hurling it down, uneasy with the undertones.

  ‘What are your politics, Lydia?’ I ask, feeling guilty now that she is not fully in the conversation, and also feeling, because of upbringing, socially obliged to include her in; also wanting to please; also flirtatious, competitive; also from curiosity; also wanting to use her answer to play with Milton in our private channel, knowing that what she will say will have a twisted meaning for us, linking into a thousand former conversations, feeding into our grinder of analysis; perhaps putting her down, knowing that the politics of a twenty-year-old can be so fervent and so weak, putting her down, to put me up in Milton’s eyes. Maybe the ultimate victory of winning her through flattering attention and winning Milton through private, under-the-table in
tellectual hand holding.

  ‘I would always defend the communists a few years ago,’ she says, ‘now I have no politics. I’ve seen through the sham.’

  Why does she detest innocence.

  ‘I voted Labor. I know that’s probably wrong.’

  ‘You should say that your art is your politics. Milton does.’

  Milton laughs darkly, I laugh heartily. Milton says the opposite. Lydia’s glad that line of questioning is ended.

  The whole-cooked flathead, me saying, ‘What a spectacular flat head for a flathead.’

  Milton has the whole-cooked bream.

  ‘I wish they’d remove the head before serving,’ Lydia says, ‘it reminds me that life has been taken away – the eyes.’

  We meet Brooks in the Vanity Fair Hotel among the city middle-class rejects, fringe whites, standing together out of the way of life, in their hotel, together for flickering companionship, the warmth of sexual play, though sometimes there’s only the alcohol to keep out the freezing howl of anxiety. They look out of their hotel at the bastards of the world through a pained intelligence.

  Brooks says that both the Kennedys are still alive, vegetables under armed guard in an under ground hospital. Jackie visits the hospital every week. He says we should spread the story.

  I ask myself why.

  I see Milton lusting after the barmaid who speaks disciplined Australian and is dressed more for a middle-class social occasion than for work in a bar. Daughter of the publican?

  He knows I’m watching him. He performs.

  He smiles. ‘We’re accepted here,’ he says to me as if that was ever commercially in doubt. But, of course, he means at another level, his crazy illusion that inside the acceptance of ‘the group’ by the publican (and his daughter) is acceptance of, by reduction, him, and acceptance is ‘love’.

  ‘She loves us,’ he says, ‘the barmaid really likes us.’

  I chide him.

  ‘I need the warmth of public love,’ he says, exhaling a cry, now becoming alcoholically untied, eating the candy of many illusions. He’s moving to raging self-exposure – look at me, this is the true me. Somewhere under the adult voice, husks of provincial pronunciation, is a cry from this exposure, and it whimpers up from a child’s bed. I should take his hand, put him to bed, pull down his pyjama pants, gently suck him off, pull them back up, so that he can sleep that deep sleep, satiated sleep.

  When he drinks he sometimes relaxes his frantic heterosexuality (as long as he’s sure of a fuck somewhere in the night) and we sometimes touch and carry on. Sometimes it’s done as a way of clowning the possibility, parodying homosexuality; sometimes to sham independence of women; sometimes to confuse girls that he’s interested in, as a test? as sadism? or because he’s basically not interested in women? sometimes to outrage associates; sometimes just for the kick, maybe! Can I be sure? Can I be sure he feels any of these ways or that we operate from the same motive at any given time?

  The many times, when from my own physical solitude and from occasional gladness of my femaleness, which straggles about my personality, from my own need to rest in submission, I unobservably twitch with unfulfilled, blocked impulses, to touch him, to say put my head against him, touch his hair.

  He says that to have a full sexual experience of the way we feel would mean the end of our friendship within three weeks (why three weeks?). He believes a number of folktales about homosexuality. Does she tell him these tales? Hestia? But it would, I guess, be tough on him now, he’s no longer a youth. Heterosexuality can be just as crummy at first. But that mustn’t be said.

  Sitting in the sun at the Gatsby House, Milton, Hestia, and me. Me as the indefinite house guest.

  ‘Look here’s a pedestal for you,’ I say to Hestia. Finding some stone stand in the nursery.

  ‘I don’t think I’m ready for the pedestal yet,’ she returns.

  Me being generous, though privately ironic, or perhaps not that damn private. Perhaps Hestia shares the irony, because she must know she’s far from, if not fallen from, the pedestal, Milton’s pedestal. I stand on it. Not that I have securely achieved it, Milton’s pedestal. But that it invites standing on.

  ‘Here’s a pederast for you,’ I joke, flirtatious, to Milton.

  He laughs, blushes. Hestia doesn’t.

  Visitors. They come down the path while I am still standing on the pedestal.

  They raise their eyebrows, look at each of us, wanting to be let into the joke. I jump down. Not one of us feels safe enough to tell the joke.

  After they’ve gone, Milton and I spy on the naval installation in the harbour with binoculars. We discuss radio-activity because the barges carry yellow triangles and red flags. We think that’s what they mean. Radio-activity was the Great Plague of our political youth.

  I say to Milton, ‘The Five Discover a Radio-active Dump.’

  ‘Their fingers fall off.’

  We laugh. Milton and I.

  ‘We must write it together,’ Milton says.

  That would be great, I think, but we have to be about our own separate business. The idea of marriage on the typewriter is an affirmation, but the impossibility of it is another truth too. Roll of drums.

  In my maroon tracksuit, exercising on the swinging bar and the swinging rungs we’ve erected in the garden. Milton is a hobby welder. He sits on the old outdoors deckchair at the end of the verandah of The House. I swing, savouring the narcissistic odour of my own sweat. Our morning conversations, Milton and mine, tell us that we are still here together after the other life of the night, when we are not together. Showing ourselves that we can still reach across to each other if only with the bleary words of morning. Milton and I have, though, a stumbling rapport at any time. Uncertain about whether we are really under standing. I’m too conventionally feminine with him at times. I can’t help it. By this I mean that sometimes I respond solely to pleasure, to reassure, to pamper, and this response, when it flaunts itself, gets in the way of intellectual equality and exchange. Or vice versa? And sometimes vice versa.

  ‘I’m going to make a statement to the inquiry,’ Milton says, ‘– if I haven’t already been summoned.’

  ‘You should hold a press conference,’ I say, beginning a fantasy, ‘you should have your own stenographer, a lawyer, a spokesman and a body guard.’

  He likes the flamboyance. He giggles into his tea.

  ‘Complain,’ I say, ‘about the venue, about the seating, the ventilation and the acoustics.’

  Seriously, he says, he is frightened by what might happen at the inquiry – to him and yet also frightened of becoming conservative – because of his recent promotion.

  ‘Already I feel the pressures from inside me.’ He frowns. ‘I must wear coloured shirts more often – I feel unspoken pressures to have my hair cut.’

  ‘When you take a position in the establishment,’ I say, boringly, ‘pressures come, I guess, from the new type of person which surrounds you – they all present themselves as examples of what you should be like. They are models.’ I swing, upside down. ‘You’ll conform eventually just for the comfort of it. Always surround yourself with the people you wish to become.’

  ‘I depend upon my counter-suggestibility,’ he says, ‘to maintain my resistance, my radicalism.’

  Hestia cuts Milton’s hair, not too short, but shorter.

  ‘A new man,’ I say, accepting defeat, glad that it’s not too short.

  ‘I feel I’m selling out,’ he says, giving me an histrionic scowl.

  I’m afraid for him, us, that he might be right.

  I see the hair on the newspaper on the marble table near the tennis court. We should all take a lock. But the hair is greasy. It looks gruesome – dead. It is dead, I suppose. The hair smells of Sapoderm, although antiseptic belongs with disease. The hair reminds me of shaven heads. Traitors. And then I think Hestia has somehow taken him back to normality, away from me. She’s dragging him back. She has left the hair there to show me she controls the hair. I
would’ve cut it – if I knew how.

  Another thing. We are now beginning to belong in the Big House with its tennis courts, swimming pools, bedrooms with bathrooms. The three of us in an eight-bedroom house. At first we were the negroes who had ousted southern gentlemen and ladies, and camped in the mansion. Now we are becoming the gentlemen and the ladies.

  Milton sits in the chair opposite my bed.

  Hestia has left. Because of emotional neglect? She may be back.

  He is rejected, or has rejected, but I am the one in bed with nervous anxiety.

  The house is so big. Sometimes we can’t find each other and there is a frantic shouting and opening of doors, turning on of lights.

  I lie under the army blankets. Tranquillisers beside my bed. A glass of red wine spilled in the corner. A loaded shotgun beside the bed. The Portrait of a Lady beside the bed. Me hardly the portrait of a lady.

  My hands behind my head.

  ‘I dream of my ex-wife,’ I say, ‘it’s recurring. Seven years, and I dream of her constantly.’

  ‘You use that fact,’ Milton says, but says nothing explanatory or illuminating.

  ‘I guess I’m a haunted house.’

  ‘All you need are football pennants on the wall,’ he says, looking around.

  Our conversation is not meeting.

  ‘Psychiatrically, she’s my brother’s wife – the wife of my dreams – the sibling I competed with. I couldn’t win – he was much older than me. I could never win. It’s the David–Goliath complex.’

  ‘You might, you know, be dreaming about your ex-wife – Portugal, I presume.’

  ‘Of course it’s Portugal. London was different.’