Affection (27 page)

It was a train then a bus then another bus. Then, at the end of this marathon of public transport, there was a climb, all dank-sock sweat and uphill trudge. I could see the beads of moisture forming on Jessica's forehead, bubbling up from under her makeup. Her lipstick should have been called open-wound red. Her mouth looked bloody and swollen. Vulnerable. I reached out and linked my fingers between Jessica's and her hand was slick with sweat. Our fingers slipped away from each other. A fat drip made a slow trail down my back and I felt it nestle between my buttocks.

“Should I have worn makeup?” I asked.

Jessica shrugged. She was still gorgeous. Her hair was windmussed, ripe with body heat and perfume. I hadn't worn perfume. I didn't own perfume, but I could have worn some of hers. I had
never thought to use her techniques of seduction, her scents and her shampoos, her blush and her berry lipsticks. There on the hill, catching my breath in the dry-roast of suburban Runcorn, I began to wonder about that.

“You look fine,” Jessica told me, by which she meant: you look sweaty and unkempt and not particularly feminine.

“We're almost there, aren't we?” Hopeful, staring up yet another hill, checking the map to see if there was an easier way around. There wasn't. We flapped the damp fabric of our shirts. A whiff of her perfume.

“Sweaty is fine,” I told her. “Sweat is actually sexy.”

We continued to climb.

 

 

I didn't know what we were expecting, but this wasn't it. The boy was too young, no more than twenty. He was wearing boardshorts and a Hawaiian shirt. No shoes. The flat was small and smelled faintly of mold. The carpet was threadbare in places and there were several empty XXXX cans crushed onto a breakfast bench dividing the lounge room from the kitchen. By the time I had stepped into his apartment I had decided that I didn't want the job but I had no way of communicating this to Jessica.

“We saw your ad in the paper,” Jessica turned on the charm, a thick dollop of it, oozing out from under those heavy eyelids. Flirtation was her weapon. She aimed it expertly at the boy. I saw him waver
under the onslaught. All his Christmases standing at his front door, with me as a distraction.

“Yes indeedee,” he said. I glanced at the slight tenting of his boardshorts. “Glad you could come, ladies.” Double entendre intended.

“How does this work?” Jessica asked, eyelashes stuttering low.

I had rarely heard her speak so many complete sentences in a row. I watched her working the situation and I bit my lip. We had made a mistake. I wanted to tell him up front and get it over with. We had made a mistake.

“Well,” he was nervous. He scratched his elbow and I noticed a wide patch of scaly red where the skin was scraped raw. “After the audition, I just take bookings. Get this thing rolled out. How's that sound?”

Audition. The word fell with a hollow thud. It was the kind of word I remembered from undergrad, a word that sounded like panic attacks and had the acrid reek of phobia. Jessica was nodding.

“It's a double act,” she cooed, her bedroom voice tickling his already attentive scrotum.

“All things are up for negotiation.” He grinned. Leered.

She was nodding, but I was already shaking my head. I had my hand on her elbow, my fingers pressing into the soft skin. The audition was well and truly over.

 

 

At home in the lounge room, slipping off our shoes, I told her that I didn't want to work for the pimple-faced boy and she told me that
she already knew it. I didn't really want to be a sex worker at all, even if it was just touching her with other people watching. She said that she had an audition at a strip club where she would wait on tables in her underwear.

“Make a cup of tea and bring it into my room?” she said to me.

I watched her slump off barefoot and heartbreakingly beautiful, up the stairs and into her bedroom.

 

 

Lying side by side without touching, I asked her if I smelled bad, like a wild animal, a bat, or a possum. She giggled and shifted so that her fragrant hair fanned out over her pillow the way I liked it.

“Don't be silly,” she said, which wasn't really an answer.

“You only hold hands with me in public because you think that men find you more sexy if you're a lesbian,” I said, not expecting an answer.

“You can sleep in here tonight. I don't mind. Go to sleep now,” she said.

And eventually I did.

Brian's car was parked out in front of our house and I found that I was angry. I wasn't sure how he'd found me, but Brisbane's a small town and someone told someone who told someone else and here was his car parked outside, a little askew, all of his bedding folded neatly on the back seat the way he liked it.

I wanted him to go away. I wanted to walk round the block once and come back and see that his car was gone. I thought about setting off, but it felt like the kind of pacing I associated with my dark times. Restless, a little off center. This was our house now. My house. I fitted the key in the lock and walked straight inside.

He was there at the table with her and she had one of her legs propped up on the edge of the chair and I could see she wasn't wearing
underwear. Probably he could see that, too. She was laughing at something he had just said, giggling. Her flirtatious little laugh.

Have him. I thought, harshly, but I didn't think she would have him, really, not in that way. She didn't seem to sleep with anyone except her boyfriend unless she could pretend that they were sleeping with me and she was just close by, accidentally falling into the action, letting them worship at her flesh.

He turned when I entered the kitchen and I remembered his shiny eyes, all puppy-dog attention, the pretense of warmth.

“Back?” I asked him.

“It would seem so.”

“How are you?”

“Thirsty.”

I poured myself a vodka and put an olive into it. I felt like a martini but I knew we didn't have any vermouth. I measured the vodka left in the bottle against the light from the window—about an inch—and settled it back on the windowsill.

“I've brought a bottle of wine.”

I nodded.

I wasn't going to drink his wine. I might if I finished the vodka, which seemed likely.

“Brian hasn't got anywhere to stay,” Jessica told me. I already knew it.

“I said he could stay here if it's all right with you.”

I thought about her boyfriend's brother; the man in the vacant lot who had wanted to sleep with her more than with me. I took a large sip of my vodka.

“If that's okay with you,” he said to me. “I can sleep in my car if you like.”

I shook my head.

“You can sleep in my room,” I said.

I should have said no. I should have told him to sleep in his car. But if Jessica had told me to walk off a cliff I have no doubt I would have done it.

So he moved into my room, and I lost my skin. He slept with me that night and for many nights after and he listed my failings one by one.

“You still rely on that vibrator for an orgasm? The girls I like are fully in the moment. I'll teach you how to do it. Just be patient. Don't rush at sex like that. Women who are feminine know how to be patient, to wait, to time it. You know nothing about foreplay. Has anyone ever taught you about foreplay? Let me teach you about foreplay.”

I watched him at the dinner table, entranced by her. I knew that he would trade beds in a second; I would, too. I still wanted her and I could see how obvious she was, how everybody wanted her.

I reveled in his ugliness. I made love to him and in my head I repeated, mantralike, “You are ugly and you are old and no one wants you except me and that makes me special.”

I found a temporary gig at a restaurant but I was confused too easily. I miscounted tables, delivered the wrong meals to the wrong people. The bosses were kind to me but I knew I couldn't do the job effectively. Didn't want the job. I had to finish my thesis. I had to at least graduate from honors. I had to work out what I wanted to do with my life.

I had a key cut for him.

“One key,” he said. “One key.”

But by then I knew it was a line he had stolen from a movie and I made him take it anyway.

“I'll be up at the computer labs at uni,” I told him. “You'll have to let yourself in.”

“Jessica will let me in.”

I didn't like him saying her name out loud.

“I'm still angry that you left last time without saying goodbye.”

“You can't own a person,” he said. “Everyone in the universe is free to move their energy where they please.”

I knew then that he had been to the Living Game. He had been there with Jessica.

Sometimes at dinner I watched the two of them. Him watching her, her lowering her eyes shyly and giggling. I wondered if something had happened between them while I was in the computer lab. Perhaps at one of their sex seminars before he moved back in with me.

He went with me to a party. It was something a friend from university had organized, and although I rarely mixed my home life and my university life, I decided I would go and that I would bring him with me. We fought in the car on the way to the party. He closed his eyes and put his foot on the accelerator and said he would kill us then and there.

“For fuck's sake get it over with. Kill us, go on, kill us.” He had been staying with me for weeks and it had begun to fall into a familiar pattern.

At the party, I sat in a corner and watched Brian making friends with all the beautiful girls from university. I knew I could never compete. I drank quietly by myself and when anyone came to sit with me I let them, and I nodded politely and answered in one-word sentences.

“I'm ready to go,” I said at some point in the evening.

He had been flirting with a beautiful girl from the honors course, a girl I was quite fond of. He was filling her drink and engaging her in conversation. She was smart and sharp and they were deep in their banter.

“I'm not ready to go yet,” he told me.

“All right. I'll walk home.”

“All right,” he said, although he knew it would take me an hour at least.

 

 

I liked walking in the dark. I liked the night. I liked the cool quiet of it. I liked the way the walking calmed me. I had been furious, I
realized, as I turned into our own street. I wondered how long this anger had been percolating inside me. I was certain it had been longer than I would have admitted; I was furious still.

I can't afford this house, I thought as I walked toward it. Jessica made enough money dancing on tables and bending over groups of drunk men in her underwear with trays of overpriced drinks. I was flat out struggling with the rent every week. I spent hours at the markets, selling paintings I whipped up in minutes. I waited tables. I gathered my last few Austudy payments and waited for the day when I wouldn't be able to withdraw enough for my rent.

I let myself in quietly. Jessica was awake. I could hear her music drifting ethereally down the stairs. She might be alone; I could have climbed the stairs and said hello and made us a cup of tea, but these would not be the actions of a furious person. I slipped into my room and shut the door and lay down. There was no sleep anywhere. I stood up and I paced. It was eleven o'clock. I had left the party just before ten. I wondered what Brian would be doing. I wondered what Brian had done. Specifically I wondered what Brian had done with Jessica. If she had done anything with him it would be because he wanted her and because he was sleeping with me. I imagined that she wanted to prove that she could win in everything. I remembered her thing with her boyfriend's brother and no matter what I had done, I would never do that.