Do You Love Me or What? Page 7

  You’re too old, I’m young and fertile, but you, you’re past it. How could it be that such a determinedly vibrant man had sluggish sperm?

  Perhaps she could claim she no longer craved a baby.

  I’ve changed my mind, I’ve got cold feet, we can build another life, we’ll be free, we’ll travel.

  But her baby craving had become so acute that when she saw a baby in someone’s arms, she held a phantom one in her own, closer and warmer than her teddy bears in childhood had ever been. She’d double over with sudden longing there in the street. Bob said he craved a baby too.

  She woke on the second morning of his absence, fuzzy with worry about what to tell him. She’d ask the doctor to post the report then she wouldn’t have to break the news to him. But she must. She must be the one to tell him. But how? Twelve days left before his return, in twelve days the right words would surely come, they must.

  But on the third day, two of the dogs were sick, listless, whimpering, not interested in food rattling into their bowls, not yapping, both lying together in an umbrella of shade from a tree, two tails moving plaintively on the lawn, sending up little puffs of dried grass clippings, two noses in her hand begging relief, saying, Make us better. The other three dogs were quiet, coming insistently to sniff her when she opened the back door, encircling her to remind her of their companions, saying, They’re over here, see, waiting for you to make them better.

  She squatted, patting them. They’d been Narelle’s silly pampered pets before but now they were fellow sufferers. She’d have to take them to the vet, but Bob had driven the car to the airport. Should she put them in a taxi? And which vet and where? She must call Narelle. Poor Narelle, staying in some hotel nearby, oddly not visiting her dogs. Of course poor Narelle could move into the house for a few days to tend to them, move in even for the length of Bob’s absence – after all, despite tedious chatter, she was Bob’s oldest friend.

  By late afternoon the sick dogs were too weak to nose her hand, so she’d rung Narelle’s office.

  ‘She’s not here,’ a voice at the other end said brightly, the eager voice of someone in an office full of filing cabinets, glad of a distraction. ‘Is anything wrong?’

  Diana explained.

  ‘Narelle can’t help you,’ the colleague said. ‘She’s away for a fortnight – no, eleven more days, ten days left tomorrow,’ she corrected herself at a prompt from another bright office voice.

  The thump at the pit of the stomach. Why, why the same number of days left?

  The way time slows, like that time when she was in a car accident, the slow slide of time across the wet road, the slow slippery skid of time till the crunch. Let there be no crunch.

  ‘Narelle’s away sick?’ she’d said, panting. The terrifying slide would, must, slow down, cease before the crunch.

  ‘Not sick. On holidays,’ said the bright voice.

  What strange knowledge in her stomach made her voice say:

  ‘In Tahiti?’

  ‘You guessed Tahiti! How funny you knew! Lucky thing, isn’t she?’

  The shame, that’s how Diana saw it. The horror. The shame.

  The three dogs yapping at the back door even now, the ones who weren’t sick, and the neighbours would surely complain. She had to end this shame, that’s how she thought of it, that he’d preferred the most boring woman in the world to her with her good mind. She remembered the rat poison Bob had bought years ago, insisting on killing the noises in the night. It would still be in the laundry, surely, on a high shelf. She found the box – she’d pleaded with Bob not to use it and he’d capitulated and the rat had moved out – and leaning on the grey tub, she opened it. The powder was an evil shade of yellow and came helpfully with its own little plastic spoon. She’d swallow a heaped spoonful or two even, she must do the job properly. She worked it out like an equation: she’d put out the rest of the dog food so the barking wouldn’t alarm the neighbours, then she’d take two spoonfuls of rat poison, perhaps three. The poison might take a while, and she mustn’t be found too soon. A story by Raymond Carver popped into her mind, where a spurned lover had taken rat poison, and his gums had separated from his teeth, so they became like fangs. Was that in the published version, or was it in the unedited version written originally by Carver, the version that included the entire story of the old couple who were taken to hospital after a car accident and were left for dead, but they pulled through because of their love for each other? That story, surely a true one, had been excised from the edited version – how dare anyone remove a love story so obviously true – maybe all editing was wrong – maybe she’d never set things to rights at all, maybe all she’d done was destroy truth. Suddenly she was howling on all fours, with the dogs whining around her and nosing at her feet and her fingers, for the plan to die from rat poison was wrong, wrong, wrong – if she died, her shame would go on beyond her lifetime. Bob had chosen the world’s most boring woman over her, and the preferred one would remind him all his life that her rival had died looking like a rat.

  So she had to resign herself to shame, and the dogs yelped with her, running between her and their sick friends, watching her dragging herself around on all fours like a dying animal desperate to find a patch of earth kind enough to receive her.

  Late in the evening, when they all were surely hoarse with howling, she thought to feed them or else they might howl through the night and a neighbour might come, even call the police. In the kitchen, the dog food packets were slumped against the wall, empty. Were the shops open? Could she go to a shop as if life hadn’t ended? Could she be with her neighbours, whose lives were orderly, could she walk amongst neat rows of shampoo and baby food and cabbages, pretending that living was a reasonable act, and could she smile at a checkout girl who’d pass her the dog food packages and wish her a nice day?

  She couldn’t go alone, she needed someone to go to the shop with her, someone who’d hold her upright since she didn’t seem to be able to do that by herself. A friend – but she’d neglected them all because Bob wanted her to himself, and she’d thought that was an assurance of eternal love. The kindly doctor of yesterday – it seemed last century but it was surely only yesterday – he’d said he understood her pain. He’d come with her and help her buy dog food. She found his number and clicked. It wasn’t his voice but she told the voice, any voice would do, about sperm that aren’t motile, and that rat poison is an evil shade of yellow, and that teeth could became fangs, and about Narelle’s tight silk blouses.

  ‘Have you eaten?’

  A question so unexpected, she paused.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ Diana said.

  ‘Get in a taxi, come here,’ the voice said.

  In a nightie with a coat thrown over, dressed in the careless style she now saw that Bob despised, she’d gone out into the street, found a merciful taxi, and asked for the hospital. Bob hadn’t cancelled their shared private cover, not yet – and she was led to a clean white bed, she was tucked in, and then she slept.

  In her dazed state, she became the dogs, howling in a circle of shade, unable to lift her nose. She was given food, pills, and a fortnight to talk to doctors who nodded their heads and went away after a measured hour. She just had to endure the pain, the doctors said before their hour was up, and then one day it would be over. Last it through. It’ll end.

  Bob had gone completely, not even a goodbye note when she went back to the house. An unopened letter lay in the box – the letter from the doctor about Bob’s sperm. So he’d never know. She ripped it up into tiny pieces like confetti. Slowly, day by day, she went back to work, and begged her friends to forgive her neglect.

  ‘You must feel so angry,’ they said, themselves irritated by her long silence.

  She agreed, floundering, not knowing how to explain the shame.

  She spent hours gazing at walls. She’d never noticed before how unblinkingly, how scornfully, they glare.

  She found all days lost to grief, but slowly, slowly, only some of her
days were lost to it, and there were other days with mere patches of grief, like pools drying up in the sun. Maybe grief was coming to an end the way the doctors had said it would.

  Her earnings had always been poor. She moved to a tiny flat of one room, and even that was more than she could afford. She was always falling behind in the rent, paying last month’s rent with the new payment that should’ve bought her this month’s food.

  A year later, he rang. She scarcely recognised his voice. She was astonished to hear hers answering it. The sort of astonishment she’d feel if they’d both died and met on a gust of wind above their graves. His voice filled the room, its tiny space, and all the vast space inside her head. She could see his large body bulging with that voice, and her head bulged with it too. He asked if she was well.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, almost inaudible.

  Was he ringing to ask her back?

  But he hurried on. He was in charge of a new mini-series, and was able to choose the writers. She listened only because he might say he’d made a mistake in leaving her. There were two conversations going on – his, and the one inside her. Say you’re sorry. Say you prefer me. He mentioned a name of a writer she knew – but would she also work with them?

  She decided immediately.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I want to leave things between us as they are.’

  He laughed. She’d always been so adamant.

  ‘It would be good for us both.’

  ‘How would it be good for you?’ she asked.

  She wanted him to say he was bored with the most boring woman in the world.

  ‘I’d get brownie points for discovering you,’ was all he said.

  She knew she should click off the phone.

  ‘It’s well-paid work I’m offering.’

  She stirred herself. He’d always said the money she earned from editing was foolishly low. ‘You make a stranger’s writing look good and no one knows,’ he’d said.

  ‘I have no experience,’ she said now.

  He knew her well, knew she was weakening.

  ‘But I have chosen you,’ he said.

  She moved to sit on a chair. She hadn’t been the woman he’d chosen.

  She managed a laugh, hoping it was ironic.

  He ignored the irony.

  ‘You’re smart,’ he said. ‘The series needs someone smart.’

  She knew that being smart didn’t make her a writer. She said as much.

  ‘You’d give us precious material,’ he said.

  Why hadn’t he found her precious?

  She said again she wouldn’t live up to his needs, she’d disappoint both him and the other writer, she’d be a drag to them. He listened to her.

  Then he told her the money he’d pay, a sum that would pay off her back rent and keep her alive for six months to come. Screenwriters got paid a lot. It was why he did it, rather than write real books, he’d said. One day he’d write real books, and she’d edit them.

  ‘Tempted?’ He laughed.

  He’d known she’d be in financial trouble.

  ‘Can I think about it?’

  ‘I need a decision now,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to put the names to the producers.’

  ‘I suppose I could have a go,’ she said. ‘Would that be okay, if I tried and failed?’

  He was pleased to have his way, and rang off.

  It was odd, the silence afterwards. As if the energy of his voice was like his arms held in the air, encouraging the world to turn in the way it should.

  She put on the jug to make a cup of tea, hoping to understand his motives by the time she’d drunk it. It was too much to expect of a cup of tea.

  The day they were to meet, she dressed in the usual loose clothes but brushed her hair till the curls slid into pretty places and, on the way, dawdled at a chemist shop to select a lipstick – the Summer Rose or the Cappuccino? The shop assistant helped her try both, painting her lips with a little brush and, stepping back, studying the effect. ‘You’re a natural for Summer Rose.’ It seemed to beam light into her face, but shame was there too. Should she have taken this trouble with her appearance before he left? Could a little greasy stick of Summer Rose have saved her from such grief? Loss swept over her again, doubling her up so she was still staggering when she entered the office. He leapt up, hailing her with his arms held high as if to elicit cheers from her, and kissed her on both cheeks. But he didn’t hold her gaze. And he didn’t seem to notice the Summer Rose.

  ‘Down to work,’ he said.

  They worked through the day, every day, never mentioning the past, never mentioning their lives. Together the three planned what would happen in the two episodes Bob allocated to each of them. It was to be a love story. They were to go away and write the episodes, and Bob would edit them afterwards.

  There were moments when he paused after the other writer left – he was always leaving early, picking up his child from kindergarten – and Bob would take a breath. His eyes would sweep the floor, as if trying to gather a thought shattered there like glass. But then he’d speak and it was always about work. Their collaboration was supposed to take a week, and Bob ran their sessions like clockwork, so that they finished promptly on Friday at five in the afternoon.

  When they were alone, Bob swept his eyes along the shattered glass again, vacuuming it up.

  Is he going to ask me back?

  And if he does, what will I say?

  ‘How do you feel?’ he suddenly broke his musing to ask.

  Half a minute passed in silence. She struggled but decided that the question was only about work.

  ‘I agreed to give it a try, so I will.’

  She began packing up her computer and notebook, carefully putting the top on her pen, the pen in her bag, when he suddenly said:

  ‘Don’t.’

  She froze, her hand in her bag, still on the pen.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you’re ready for this,’ he said.

  It was hard to breathe.

  But all he wanted was to sit together for another hour or so and work through some possible lines.

  ‘But that’s my job, you can’t do my job for me.’

  He insisted. She thought he might be playing for time, wanting to speak the words she most wanted to hear, so to give him time, she wrote down his suggestions. All the lines he suggested had the familiarity of lines from his old work that she knew so well, not the same words exactly, but the tone of them, the rhythm.

  He petered out.

  ‘That’s it then,’ she said.

  She packed up her notebook again, her pen again.

  All the time, he’d been facing her. Now he swung his body away.

  It’s coming.

  ‘Look,’ he said, almost over his shoulder, ‘I had to leave.’

  Somehow, she had to manage to respond.

  ‘There are more decent ways to leave,’ she said.

  His body was still turned away so his neck twisted like a corkscrew. She saw for the first time the reluctant lines of age around his neck, tired little wrinkles spiking out from big creases. His neck would’ve been like that all the time and she hadn’t noticed. Maybe she hadn’t noticed much besides what was in her own head.

  ‘It happened out of the blue. Narelle was so upset about her husband. She begged me to take her away from it all.’

  ‘And you didn’t imagine that I’d be upset?’ she managed.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ she added. It didn’t seem to be her voice.

  ‘I’ll get the scripts to you by the deadline, I’m good at deadlines – you know that,’ the voice that wasn’t hers said.

  ‘It happened so fast,’ he repeated.

  She put on her coat and buttoned it around her tightly, even though the day wasn’t cold.

  As if speed had anything to do with it.

  When she handed in her two scripts, she waited an anxious week. Had she failed? Surely she’d failed. Of course she’d failed, she was a rank amateur. Precious material can’t
take you far, especially when you’ve never felt responsible for it.

  Then he rang.

  He was delighted. Her work was as good as he’d thought it’d be. A few inelegancies, but that could only be expected, and would be easily fixed by his editing.

  ‘A lot of it is yours,’ she said.

  ‘Your precious material. We’re a good team,’ he said.

  So he had what he wanted: her mind, and company of the woman he preferred.

  A year later, two lonely years later, just when the shining pools of grief had dried up to only a few minutes a day, and some days had none at all, she met Peter. A year later again, The Baby.

  So the shoes. Peter minded the baby between breastfeeds while she rushed to the shops, just a kilometre away. They still called her The Baby. She seemd a miracle. There were many miracles: meeting him after three lonely years, the lovemaking they’d both wanted almost as soon as they’d met, the night she’d sat up in bed saying in her sleep, Someone is waiting to join us, the more eager lovemaking to create the someone, the night his motile sperm burrowed into her longing egg – she claimed till the end of her life that she knew the exact moment, the face on the exact tiny fish. All through her pregnancy she wished she could meet it, this tiny fish. And then the pain beyond any, but only physical pain, the moment when the air around them fizzed like champagne, for there was The Baby, moving and spread-eagled on her.

  ‘We’ve made a person,’ he’d leant over and whispered into her eyes.

  It was as if The Baby was teaching her how to live. One of the first lessons came on her first outing away from The Baby, as she strode down the pavement in her sneakers and track suit, pilled with white cotton wool. She’d been astonished that the air, unremarkable all her life till The Baby, now seemed to kiss her skin like sunshine and the sunshine warmed her rounded head so it glowed as if she were an angel. The blue sky sang above her, even the planes flying over hummed. But the lesson was that her arms ached, they had a heart of their own, a groaning heart, to hold The Baby again. She couldn’t be apart from The Baby. She nearly turned back. But Bob would report the state of her shoes to Narelle, or Narelle would be there to see, and how they would laugh, as Bob and she had laughed at Narelle. She was always pedantic. Inelegant. Awkward. The most awkward woman in the world.