Not Your Ordinary Housewife: How the man I loved led me into a world I had never imagined (8 page)

Paul showed me the two sheets of paper with the hotel restaurant letterhead on them. There on the first sheet was Richard’s poem in Paul’s writing.

4

Paul was keen to get married. He talked of little else and gleefully told everyone how in love with me he was. Under Dutch law, a nineteen-year-old required parental consent to marry. Given that this was impossible we decided to elope to London, where Paul could use his Canadian passport.

Our main problem was what to do with the rat: I wanted to leave Chaimie in Holland, but Paul insisted we take him with us on the ferry to England.

‘You can’t—it’ll be illegal. It’s like . . . vermin,’ I said. I knew there were very strict laws about that.

Paul called me a worry-wart, saying he’d just put Chaimie in his coat pocket. ‘After all the stuff I’ve smuggled out of the Eastern Bloc, this’ll be a piece of cake.’

I knew that Paul liked to smuggle things, but this was crazy; he was refusing to see reason. I was nervous after he showed Chaimie to some soccer hooligans as we were crossing the Channel.

‘Are you nuts?’ I said. ‘Just chuck the bloody thing overboard.’ I told him in no uncertain terms that if he got caught, he was on his own. He laughed it off, telling me that I worried too much, probably as a result of my Jewish upbringing.

Paul was cool as a cucumber as he carried the rat, concealed in his coat, through customs. We found a hotel in Earl’s Court and set about organising our wedding. We would have to wait a week before we could marry, and we needed a residential address, which would zone us to a particular registry office.

‘You’ll just have to call someone on that list of Dory’s friends and ask if we can use their address.’

I was aghast—I couldn’t just call up people I barely knew, asking to borrow their address so we could get married. But Paul’s powers of persuasion had me perusing the list under ‘E’ for England. There were several London addresses, notably Dr Arthur Fleischmann, a sculptor friend of Dory’s. He was renowned for his official portrait busts: the Queen—for her Silver Jubilee—and, remarkably, the last four popes, all from live sittings. I’d seen photos of the unveilings he’d sent to Dory, showing him with Queen Elizabeth and with Pope John Paul II.

I called and spoke to Arthur’s wife, requesting the use of her address for our marriage. Naturally she was puzzled by my call.

‘I can’t believe I did that,’ I said afterwards, shocked at my own behaviour.

Still, it was all arranged and we had an address. It meant we would be zoned to the Marylebone registry office in Westminster. ‘That’s where Paul McCartney got married,’ said Paul cheerfully. I remembered seeing footage of it swamped by Beatles fans.

All that was left to do was buy the rings; Paul suggested Oxford Street.

I was dreading calling Dory to invite her to the wedding. I knew she wouldn’t accept, but I wanted to do the right thing. When I finally phoned to tell her of our nuptials, she’d already been informed by Arthur’s wife. Needless to say, Dory was horrified: ‘Paul’s much too young for you. It’ll never work.’

I countered by saying that his mother thought me too old for him, but that we happened to think age didn’t matter. Since he was old for his age and I was immature for mine, we were in fact a perfect match.

‘Oy . . . What would your father say? Nikki-le, Nikki-le, I’m sick with worry.’ When she was emotional, my mother would add the German diminutive ‘le’ to my name as a sign of affection. I told her it didn’t matter what
he’d
say; what was important was what
I
wanted to do: ‘I love Paul and he loves me. That’s all that matters—so stop worrying.’

In a depressed voice, she wished me luck and promised she’d be thinking of me.

Paul wore jeans and his lumber jacket; I donned my Phantom T-shirt, my black-and-white-check jumper and black pants. We took the Tube to Marylebone Station, joining the morning rush hour; Paul bought the wedding bouquet—six limp carnations— en route from a flower vendor.

The celebrant plucked two witnesses out of the typing pool. They guessed we were eloping; one commented on how lovely it was to see two people ‘so in love’. As it happened, our marriage day fell on 11 November, Remembrance Day; so at 11 am precisely, we walked out as Mr and Mrs Van Eyk. We were ecstatic and took photos outside, posing with the lion statues on the steps.

Our reception was in a hot-potato takeaway called Spudulike. We had eaten there several times before and the food was excellent. Paul proudly showed our marriage certificate, with the ink barely dry, to the disbelieving manager. Immediately and generously, he offered to put our meal on the house and threw in a bottle of champagne—no-one had ever had their wedding reception in his Spudulike before. So we ate our hot potatoes and drank champagne through straws from polystyrene cups while sitting on park-bench-style seating. We thought it all incredibly romantic and couldn’t wait to get back to our room.

Paul was tender and passionate, telling me it was the happiest day of his life.

‘We’ll grow old together,’ he said, smooching me.

I in turn told him how he fulfilled all my needs. ‘I’ll never want anyone else—you’re perfect.’ I’d taken my wedding vows very seriously and intended to always stand by him.

Suddenly Paul produced my wedding present: a new vibrator— with clit tickler. Using assorted items from the room, such as the belt from his jeans, he lightly immobilised my hands and feet so I was spread-eagled on the mattress.

‘Lean back and enjoy,’ he commanded. ‘I’ll have you begging for more in no time.’

With a makeshift blindfold, I let him transport me. He told me not to resist; his kisses and caresses covered my body. He focused at first on my nipples, flicking them with his tongue, then twirling and pinching them; later, my clitoris, manipulating it with his fingers and tongue. However, as I’d climb towards orgasm, he’d stop abruptly, telling me he loved me but I’d have to wait. After a pause he’d recommence, using the vibrator to maximum effect—inserting, removing and re-inserting it as the tickler buzzed playfully on my clit.

And then he took out the vibrator and entered me for a bit, before stopping again. Then re-entering, doing this over and over (as I vascillated between agony and ecstasy), all the time staying hard. He was right—I wanted more. He was driving me wild. And finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he thrust into me, pumping me in a frenzied fashion as he shoved the vibrator into my anus.

We came together almost instantaneously and I lay gasping in his arms. ‘I always thought you’d like a bit of B& D,’ he snickered.

Our debauched afternoon in bed continued with more sex and champagne. Later we lay on the mattress in a state of post-coital exhaustion. We had left the rat with food and water on top of the wardrobe, the wooden cleating around the perimeter providing an enclosure. But suddenly Chaimie launched himself from the wardrobe. He must have taken a running jump, because he landed on the bed covers, narrowly missing our faces.

‘Holy fuck!’ said Paul. ‘Chaimie can fly.’

I was in hysterics. Admittedly, it had felt funny having sex with the rat scurrying around on top of the wardrobe. There was no point putting him back there now, though, because he’d learnt how to escape—I knew how smart rats were.

Paul was laughing too. He said we had no choice but to let him run round the room. ‘Be careful if you open the door though—he might escape.’

‘But there’s going to be rat shit everywhere,’ I said, realising that we were going to have to take him with us whenever we went out. I told Paul I flatly refused to carry Chaimie around, since it was his stupid idea to bring him.

Later that night, there was a fracas in the street below our hotel room. Paul went to investigate while I stayed put and took photos of the disturbance. Soon after, two bobbies turned up and arrested someone.

We spent the remainder of our wedding night in conjugal bliss, with the rat running around the room and periodically making squeaking noises. It was without doubt a most unusual wedding day, but we were happy.

Ever since reading Bruce Carter’s
The Children Who Stayed Behind
, I had wanted to visit Brighton. We now had the opportunity to travel there for the briefest of honeymoons. The pier and foreshore provided excellent subjects for colour photography using Paul’s camera. I’d been having trouble with mine and was devastated to discover that some black-and-white negatives had been destroyed— including my photos of Dachau and Richard Brautigan.

It was with some relief that we finally arrived back in Amsterdam. Again Paul carried Chaimie through Customs as I nervously watched him. There were letters galore waiting for me; among them was one from Dory, complete with
The Age
crossword puzzles. I was thrilled, because Dory wrote that a friend of hers had seen one of my glass sculptures in an exhibition at the Sydney Opera House. Apparently, there was even a photo of it on the cover of the catalogue. Paul was particularly impressed.

Dory had also received a photo of Paul I’d sent her. She said he had an ‘expression of defiance’, but then she qualified this by stating it was only her impression. And then she wrote, ‘Oh, I forgot to say: he’s good-looking.’

‘Well, I can’t wait to meet her,’ Paul said. ‘I’ve always wanted a Jewish mother-in-law. I’m gonna write and ask for her chicken soup recipe.’

I was practising my new signature when the phone rang. It was Richard Brautigan, wanting to catch up. He invited himself over, offering to cook a spaghetti dinner for us. He told us the last person he had made this meal for was his friend, Francis Ford Coppola, and we could get the recipe from the book he had given us.

Indeed, on page 69 of our galley proof was a delightful story with the requisite list of ingredients. Entitled ‘Cooking Spaghetti Dinner in Japan’, it was about Richard in his friend’s kitchen with a bucket of live eels nearby.

The story was masterful and I told Paul he should read it. ‘He says he’s prepared this meal dozens of times over twenty years, so it should be edible.’

Paul set about writing the shopping list: ‘There’re no eels in the recipe, are there?’

‘No. But it says we need two bottles of red wine. You don’t think he’s gonna put them in the spaghetti?’ I joshed. Knowing Richard, anything was possible.