I walked back along the path and took a seat on a milk crate in the back passage where Lachlan and his housemate Sean were smoking.
Sean had moved in over the summer, in the months when Lachlan and I had stopped speaking. I had known Sean in my first year at the university, but we had fallen out of touch. Back then, he and I had got into the habit of meeting every Tuesday afternoon at a café on Glebe Point Road to read each other’s writing. Sean had discovered the novels of Anaïs Nin. Erotica, he remarked once, is very interesting. At the end of semester he gave me a story to read in which a man walks into an empty church and has sex with a corpse. The woman, whom he had never possessed in life, was laid out on the altar, having died some gentle, nonspecific death. However she had died, it hadn’t ruined her body. It wasn’t suicide from a bridge, which would have liquefied her limbs, or a long drowning, which would have bloated her immaculate flesh. She was just a pretty girl, laid out in an empty church, and the narrator was there to fuck her. We didn’t see much of each other after that. Whenever I went to see Lachlan at his house and saw Sean now, sitting in the living room, I felt a physical repulsion. I could not talk to him without picturing the imaginary dead girl in the church of his head.
Lachlan knew I didn’t like him. Couldn’t stand to listen to Sean sermonize, at that moment, on Fanon. “Every citizen of a nation is responsible for the actions committed in the name of that nation,” he quoted at me, and I didn’t disagree, I just didn’t want to be told what I already knew to be self-evident. I stood up and walked into the living room to look for a bottle of wine.
Cate was in there, sitting on the sofa. Oh, I’ve been meaning to talk to you, she said. Come sit with me. I haven’t seen you in so long, I’ve missed you.
This struck me as insincere, given that we had never been friends, only friendly.
That week in Sappho Books on Glebe Point Road I had seen a flyer for an experimental poetry reading, with her name included in the lineup. But Cate was the sort of person who had no addictions—she did not so much as drink coffee—and this seemed to me to imply a level of fortitude and self-reliance that was unreasonable in a poet. Her fingernails were very clean.
I had seen Cate’s bedroom once, the year before when we were in Honours seminars together and she had organized a dinner party. Then, I had noted that she had cherry-print shoes in her wardrobe and prints of Degas’s ballerinas on her wall and prizes awarded by Pymble Ladies’ College still pinned to the corkboard above her desk. She never drank too much or stayed out too late or did anything to disgrace herself. I could not take her seriously as an experimental poet. She was a girl from a world of rhododendrons and cul-de-sacs and golf club memberships. Everything about her manner and her comportment in Lachlan’s unclean living room in Erskineville indicated that she was inhibiting more conservative impulses.
That night in Erskineville, when she asked me to sit beside her, I thought she was being cruel to me. I thought she was speaking with all the false sincerity of the North Shore private school girl she had once been, a false sincerity with which I was all too familiar because I had been a private school girl of the Inner West. I assumed Cate knew everything that had happened six months earlier, and that she pitied me. Now I understand that, in relations between her and me, Cate was never the cruel one.
I sat beside her and balanced a mug of red wine on my knee. The men sat together in the back passage, smoking, and I wanted to be out there with them, instead of inside, on the sofas, with no cigarettes.
A naked bulb hung from the ceiling. It swayed in the breeze with the windows opened, and it made the shadows swing with it. Somebody had thrown something brown or yellow against the wall. The color had dripped and hardened, drying in rivulets towards the floorboards. There was a crack in the wall below the staircase across the room. Years ago, somebody must have tried to seal it up with Spakfilla. Now it was crumbling, pockmarking the plaster, a whiter wound in the wall itself. The staircase led up to Lachlan’s bedroom. Cate’s things were up there. It was for her that he had ended things with me, for her he had wanted to be a good man. Good. With her clean fingernails and empty hands, I understood that she was precisely the sort of girl men might want to be good for.
Through the open window that let out into the outside passage where the men were smoking I heard Sean hold forth. Lachlan looked up. Our eyes met down the length of the passage. He was sitting on the red milk crate, smoking in silence. He looked at me sometimes, down the passageway. And then I could see it. His face. Saying it and then unsaying it. Wanting the thing that he saw when he looked at me.
On the table where I rested my wine sat a splayed copy of The Tree of Man, dog-eared, plastered with Post-it notes. The Tree of Man, originally titled A Life Sentence on Earth, was written with “no plot, except the only one of living and dying.” It was my favorite of White’s books. The novel’s female character is possessed of all the jealousy and restlessness of her author. She seduces and is seduced. “It is quite possible to be consumed by love for one individual,” wrote White, “and to be led to a fatal wallowing in something else at some point in one’s life. A kind of desecration of the noble ideal one can’t attain to.” Lachlan was not, so far as I know, writing his dissertation on love or wallowing or dashed ideals. I cannot recall precisely now, but I think he was writing on modernism and style and rhetorical subjectivity.
Cate had made herself hot chocolate. She clutched it between her hands. The mug, which was hers, looked cleaner than any other crockery I’d seen before in the house. Her face turned solemn as she sat. She put her hand on my arm. How have you been? You’ve not been around for months. I was beginning to worry. Have you been having a bad time of it?
I shrugged, and looked down at her hand on my arm.
I’m glad you’re here, she said.
As we sat there together in the living room of Lachlan’s house in Erskineville, I remembered, quite suddenly, traveling on a late-night bus from London to Paris through the Channel Tunnel when I was eighteen. The roads were slick with rain, shining in the headlights as the bus drove southwards. A girl sat in the seat in front of me. I couldn’t see her face, only that she had not taken off her coat and that she was probably not a lot older than I was. She had taken a phone call as we pulled out of Victoria, speaking in quiet, clear French to the person on the other line. After that she sat quite still as we sped along the M20. She had no book, and no headphones. And then, as we got closer to Dover, I realized that she was crying. The crying progressed quite rapidly into sobbing, her shoulders shaking and beginning to spasm against the window. Her hair hung down so that her face was hidden. The bus was nearly empty and she was smothering the sounds. I was the only person who might have noticed her. And I did nothing. Had no clue if I should. I watched her sob until her heavy breathing turned into exhaustion, and finally she fell asleep. She slept all the way through the Channel Tunnel and into the ugly concrete outskirts of Paris. And I was paralyzed. I did not know what had happened or how I could possibly hope to alleviate the grief that I could see very clearly, but did not begin to understand.
You can always come to me and talk, she said. About anything.
Cate squeezed my arm. I thanked her.
She looked, then, down the passageway towards where he was sitting. I saw her face fall into lines of gentleness. It was love, I suppose, but I didn’t think then that love was anything to take seriously. At that point in my life, I don’t think that I had considered that anybody but myself had the capacity to feel things with any real integrity. The idea that Cate might have had her own inner life with all its vividness and self-doubt and vulnerability simply did not occur to me. And if it ever occurred to me that she might love him, I took far more seriously my own moments of jealousy and fury, more seriously the thirst that I felt for him, which I might have called love if I was forced to.