He ordered whisky and found a table at the back in the path of the overhead ceiling fan. We began to drink together in the dark.
You almost didn’t talk to me earlier, did you? I asked.
He thumbed the rim of the soap-stained glass.
I really thought about it.
I’m glad you did.
So am I.
I’m sorry for the way things were last year.
He shook his head. We are the victims of the stories we tell ourselves, he said. Even when they might be true.
____________
I had met Lachlan for the first time at the beginning of the year before. We were in an Honours seminar together, studying neglected Australian books written by highly strung misanthropes. There were two men in the class and five women.
I was not sure of his name for the first month of the semester, so he came to seem only half-real. Always a stranger, he was a kind of blank canvas I could paint on at will. Eventually, of course, I did learn his name. By then I had determined that I had never met any man as vivid or as compelling as him. Lachlan had read everything, and although he was only twenty-three he already spoke with the weary authority of an old man. He had won every award, had published poetry and essays, had his plays performed by middle-range theater companies. He spoke about the prose of Patrick White in a way that made me want to read every one of his novels, and I did.
Because there were so few of us studying in the Australian literature stream of the English department, we were together, in all of our classes, all of the time, and quickly close although none of us had known one another before that year. I met Maeve at the beginning of that semester, fresh with her tattoo, Cate the neatly dressed poet, and one or two others whose names are lost to me now, figures who have faded into the slipstream like so many minor characters. Every Friday morning we would all file into the dark, vaulted seminar room at the top of the Woolley Building, and every Friday Lachlan was late. Twenty minutes in, there would be a pounding of footsteps coming up the stairs, and he would slip in, flushed, holding a cup of coffee, and take a chair closest to the door. He looked as though he had recently returned from having spent time in the desert. Forearms still brown from the sun, he had blue eyes and sand-colored hair and a peculiar grace to the slope and curve of his torso when he sat.
One afternoon, one of the five women, a dull, linnet-colored girl whose name now escapes me, complained about having to read The Night the Prowler for the following week. At the end of the class, slipping our things back into bags, I defended White, who I allowed was dense and serious and unfashionable. But his books are beautiful, I told her.
Yes, Lachlan said, very quietly, from behind my shoulder. He was looking at me with all that quiet and focus, although I did not know then whether he agreed with me or not.
I was always very attracted to you, he would tell me later. From the start.
The smell of cigarettes followed him out of the room, as well as something else. A warm, deep thing I couldn’t quite place. A promise. Through the open windows I could see the leaves were turning. As we reached the staircase Lachlan turned to me and asked if I would like to get something to eat.
We bought coffee at Ralph’s by the university gym and walked outside to sit on the steps of the Old Teachers’ College. We had an hour, and I did not know quite how I would fill it. I thought that his body gave a nice shape to the staircase, but that was not anything I could have said. I had been rendered temporarily wordless. He told me about the play he was rehearsing, using his cigarette to emphasize the point he was making. It was about fathers, and bloodlines, and the burden of inheritance. His own father had died when he was twelve, and that fact made Lachlan more romantic and sympathetic about fathers than my own life has ever allowed me to be. Weeks later, he would let me read the play. It was good. I think now that if he had been a bad storyteller, I could never have gone on with him, or at least not for as long as I did.
He told me once about his childhood. From the age of five to twelve Lachlan went to a school where there was chapel twice weekly and prayer before class. Stained-glass windows lined each side of the chapel, and each one depicted a saint. Beyond the school fence, and through the colored glass that obscured the surroundings, grew a grove of paperbark trees. It had seemed self-evident to him, for the longest time, that this was where paper came from. That adults simply stripped the paper off the tree and walked away with it. He could never try it out because the trees were on the out-of-bounds side of the fence, and by the time he got a scholarship to the more elite school an hour’s train ride away he had already forsaken the belief that what he needed might grow on trees, and he had lost his belief in the sanctifying power of the stained-glass windows and their saints.
I remembered the paperbark tree that had been on the edge of the playground in my primary school, half a city away from his. I would sometimes spend the length of the recess break alone, stripping the tree of its bark and shuffling the pieces together in neat piles, wondering why I could never get them as thin and rectangular as the sheets they handed out in the classroom. I assumed that it was my deficiency. I wasn’t doing it right. I hadn’t learned to tear the bark off in the correct way.
That’s cute, he said when I told him.
We had both believed in paper coming from paperbark trees, and at the time this felt important, and perhaps I mention it now because it still does. It is not often that such sad, strange children find one another as adults.
In the first week of Honours classes, I had walked home with Maeve, and she had mocked Lachlan. The way he smoked, the way he spoke, the things he spoke about. She thought he was affected. Because Lachlan was from a place in Sydney where the men became construction workers and the women became hairdressers, but he sounded for all the world like he’d been plucked straight out of Oxbridge. How he learned to speak that way in Engadine was a mystery never solved.
Maeve was right about his speech. But where she saw affectation I found comfort. He had a deep, smooth timbre to his voice. Like a mid-century newscaster, some formative father. It was Home. When he spoke to me, I found that his voice could unify every disparate formless thing, everything that caused me anxiety, everything I didn’t understand. As he spoke the rivers swelled, the water tanks refilled, the pollutants and the sea snakes were cleansed from the storm surge, the Maldives rose above the waterline, the melting glaciers were restored to their rightful form. It seemed, as he spoke, that with him I was safe.
Getting windy, he said that first afternoon on the steps of the Old Teachers’ College.
Yes, I said, it feels like it, looking at the trees, as though I had just noticed that the leaves were moving.
Yeah. It’s strange weather.
I nodded. And then we stood up and walked back to the Woolley Building to our next seminar. We sat separately, at either end of the room.
____________
We found ways to be around each other. I’m here, come by if you’re close. I told him about the songs I liked. He bought bottles of wine for the two of us to share. He texted me photographs of interesting passages from the copies of books he kept by his bed.
“Perhaps because a rare commodity, water played a leading part in my developing sexuality. I was always throwing off clothes to bathe, either at the artesian bore during a pause from mustering, the water ejaculating warm and sulphurous out of the earth, or in the river flowing between the trunks of flesh-colored gums, to a screeching flick-knife commentary of yellow-crested cockatoos.”