Читать книгу Darling, impossible! - Eva Novy - Страница 8

I have the whole day off. The whole day, that is, except for an early brunch with my mother at the Tea Gardens in Watson’s Bay. This is Mama’s idea of refinement: a salad sandwich on multigrain bread followed by Devonshire tea prepared painfully slowly from scratch by a brother-sister team whose family has owned this house for a million years. She’ll make a point of asking for extra milk with her tea, of noting how the scones and cream are a luxury her hips can’t really afford, and of casually mentioning the fact that she herself was born right here in Sydney. We’ll spend the hour arguing about what we’re wearing, what we’re reading, what the Prime Minister should and shouldn’t be doing, and then she’ll empty out a purse full of silver and spend the next ten minutes excruciatingly assembling the total of the bill from ten and twenty cent coins. I’ll head back home drained, hungry and irritated with no energy left to paint.

I’m working on a set of portraits of women. Their faces have been haunting my thoughts now for what feels like an eternity, but it’s only in the last few weeks, since I quit my medical course, that I’ve had the chance to start bringing them to life on canvas. Most are still rough sketches with smatterings of colour, and two of them are still just eyes. I always start with the eyes: the centre, the window. My inspiration comes from those two little sparks. If the eyes don’t work, the rest of the face will never see the light of day. I’ve been practising, playing with colour and depth and highlights. Now I look at an eye and see the person, not the vitreous, sclera, cornea and how they all relate to the optic nerve. Gone are the days of learning a person by parts.

This morning I feel like painting, like taking bits and pieces from the world of the real and rearranging them on paper to please my imagination. I’m not bound to anyone’s vision of how things are but mine. I can take an eyebrow from here, a wrinkle from there, and create the look of how I’d like things to be. Mostly I paint the women of my family how I see them, not necessarily how they look. I paint my mother and my grandmother, I even paint myself – but I am not happy with those. The times I try to faithfully reproduce what I know, I am left dissatisfied. It is never enough.

My bedroom wall is plastered with eyes – scraps of photos, magazine cuttings and sketches: the beautiful, the interesting, the plain, the absurd, images I’ve liked and images I’ve hated, techniques I’ve mastered and those I’ve yet to explore. They are all there, staring at me while I paint and while I sleep. They make me feel less lonely. But they see all. Sam says it’s creepy, but I don’t think so. I like their company. They just watch; there’s no advice, no opinions, no judgement.

The telephone rings. I can’t find the phone. I scramble out from behind the easel and almost knock my head on the side of the internal archway separating my bedroom and the kitchen. It’s just two rooms, my flat: a decent-sized bedroom with a huge window looking out onto Blair Street and a combined kitchen/dining/living/entertaining room. From up here on the third floor you can see the line of red-brick apartment buildings go on forever and the all-day traffic jam at the roundabout outside the butcher. The kitchen is big enough for a table and a washing machine, and the cabinets hold all my cooking stuff with room to spare for my paints and brushes. The floor is faux-timber and the walls are painted pale yellow but it’s in pretty good condition for the measly three hundred and fifty dollars a week I pay for it. It is still North Bondi.

The phone keeps ringing. I finally find it. It’s under my pillow.

“What’s up?” I say.

It’s Sam.

“I need you,” he says. He is huffing and puffing and I wonder what inanity he has turned into the crisis of the century this time: his favourite café took the bread-and-butter pudding off the menu or Stephanie from The Bold and the Beautiful found out the man she thought was her real father was in fact her brother. Maybe Britney Spears is back in rehab.

“Don’t be a bitch,” he says. “I’ve had a fucking accident.”

“Fuck.”

“I know.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“What about Jackson?” Sam has names for all his important tools. His Jeep is Jackson, his phone is Monkey, his penis is Phoenix.

“Oh, he’s fine. A little scratch on the bumper. Nothing serious.”

“That’s a relief.”

Silence. I hear a faint rustling, a click, and then a deep exhale.

“Sam?”

“I don’t think anyone saw me. But I can’t be sure.”

“Sam – Sam, don’t tell me … Oh my God, what happened?”

“Don’t worry, nothing bad. It wasn’t my fault. I had a hideous migraine.”

“Well?”

“He had it coming.”

“Who?”

“The guy! I don’t know who! I just know he had it coming.”

“What happened, Sam? What did you do?”

“I was parking in the lane in Darlinghurst, you know the one, the tiny lane where I always park off Darlinghurst Road. He was in the way, an ugly blue station-wagon. Not a big deal. I had a headache and I couldn’t really concentrate. It was just a little tail light, that’s all. The guy must have had it coming. I mean, it must have been karma.”

“What?”

“Karma. I was just delivering his karma. Not my fault.”

“Are you nuts?”

“Jesus, Lily, why are you in such a fucking bad mood all of a sudden?”

“I guess you didn’t leave your number.”

“It wasn’t my fault, Lily. I mean, don’t shoot the messenger and all that. I told you it was karma. God knows what the other guy actually did.”

I pause for a minute. I don’t think I have an appropriate response.

“Are you okay?” I say, eventually.

“I’m a mess. I can’t face work. I’m calling in sick.”

I invite him to come with me to Watson’s Bay for scones and cream with my mother. I feel he needs something sweet to get him through the rest of the day, and I need a buffer against the advice I’m sure Mama has prepared to pile on me so she can get through her day.

“Pick me up in fifteen minutes,” I say.

When Sam arrives, we check out the damage. Jackson looks completely fine. The hairline scratch on the bumper isn’t obvious even when he points it out to me. Sam, on the other hand, is a mess.

“You haven’t been home yet, have you?” He is still wearing his party clothes: a tight black T-shirt and even tighter black jeans. His suit, business shirt and purple tie are hanging in the back seat. “Give me the keys,” I say. “I’m not in the mood for dodgems today.”

In the car on the way to brunch we talk about guys. Sam tells me how he spent the night dancing with pretty strangers, but didn’t get lucky with any particular one. We pass through the leafy Rose Bay streets. It’s another glorious spring day in Sydney. Mercifully, the temperature dropped ten degrees overnight, and the cool, crisp air carries hints of sea salt and diesel fuel. The footpaths are peppered with squashed petunias and the purple confetti of jacaranda petals.

“I still had a good night,” he explains. “What about you?”

“I thought it’d be a quiet one, but Jeremy called up at midnight.”

“Jeremy? Oh Lily, no, not again.” Jeremy and I are each other’s backup plan. Whenever either one of us is bored or lonely we call the other for an easy lay. It’s not a particularly passionate affair, but it’s reliable. And it’s all we both have right now.

“He’s not that bad,” I say.

“He’s a dag.”

“He’s around.”

“He’s boring.”

“He calls.”

Sam and I are the only ones of our friends who are still single. We always joke that we have each other, but it’s not really that funny. Even if Sam wasn’t gay, we’d probably kill each other within a week. Monogamy is Sam’s idea of a nightmare, but I guess I’m open to the idea. I’m still not sure what it is I want more, the boyfriend or the peace having a boyfriend will bring me: no more anxious monologues from Anyu, no more random set-ups from Punci and the gang, no more pathetic grooming advice from my girlfriends. They say it’s all about love, but one thing I know is that a steady relationship would be a gift for those who love me the most: Sam, who loves the drama; Mama, who wishes for me the relationship she never had; and Anyu, who simply can’t stand the shame.

We’re almost there. They are digging up the road again on the S-bends leading down to the water. Five fluorescent-clad workers hover around a fractured hole, smoking cigarettes and talking on their phones, as one lone man jackhammers away at the bitumen. Sam motions for me to slow down so we can catch a glimpse of their gleaming, sweaty bodies. He sticks his fading chewing gum briefly on his index finger and lets out a strident wolf whistle, met equally vigorously by whoops and jeers from the troops. I quickly check the rear view mirror to make sure they’re not following us with a sledgehammer. Sam smiles. He’s feeling better. But I’m worrying about whether or not we’ll find parking and how we can avoid the hordes of toddlers and geriatrics in the park on their precious day out and the busloads of Japanese tourists who will cram up the boardwalk in front of the café with their ever so polite murmuring and shuffling, blocking the view of the city skyline and the only reason to sit at that café in the first place.

As we get closer, I catch Sam mouthing a silent prayer to the God of Parking.

“Pray with me,” he says, reaching for my hand.

“You know I don’t believe in Him,” I say.

I slow down and pull up in front of the white, knee-high wicker fence bordering the Tea Gardens. I scan the lawn while Sam looks ahead for a parking miracle. Mama is already there, her nose buried in the Sydney Morning Herald. She is wobbling on the rickety wrought-iron seat whose legs sink unevenly into the sparsely covered lawn. The café is uncharacteristically quiet. An elderly couple sips tea from paper cups near the fishpond. A skinny, rat-like dog noses around in the flowerbed. A bored waiter slowly wraps cutlery in serviettes by the counter. A car pulls out of a space right in front of us.

Sam grins.

“Screw you,” I say.

Mama is excited to see us. She has news.

“Did you read about the monstrosity they want to build over at Darling Harbour? That place is getting uglier by the day.”

I didn’t read anything. I haven’t read the paper for years, instead trusting Mama to wade through the news for me and filter out the important from the trivial. Sam’s ready for a discussion; he loves any kind of drama, but she’s not really interested in talking more about it.

“Aren’t you kids working today?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“I’m not in the mood,” Sam says.

“What time do you start?” Mama asks.

“Oh, I’m not going to the gallery. I’m working at home.”

“You mean painting?” she says. It is unfathomable to Mama that I dropped out of university to paint. “Oh Lily, if it’s painting that you really want to do, well, nothing is wrong with that – you have plenty of time on the weekend for colouring in! But giving away your hard-earned place in medicine to draw pictures all day, well that’s insanity.” She turns to Sam. “Even he has a respectable job, right Sam?”

A respectable job for a poof, she means. A project manager, he sits in front of a buzzing computer screen all day and then has to drink and snort himself to oblivion each night so he can muster up enough strength to do it all over again the next day.

“You know I would have given anything to have gone to university. You don’t know how lucky you are.” Mama is the most educated person in her family even though she left her home economics high school when she wasn’t quite fifteen. “Us girls weren’t even expected to get our Leaving Certificate, darling. What for? It wouldn’t be long before we’d find ourselves husbands and in the meantime, we had better earn our keep.” It wasn’t that Mama was stupid. Not at all. That was the problem. If she had been, there wouldn’t have been a story. It’s that she knew exactly what she was missing out on. “You see, Sam, you probably don’t know this about me, but when Lily was a little girl, I went back to night school to finish high school, but then her father got sick again and it was all over. I had no help. We couldn’t afford it. I had to go back to work and keep us going.”

Sam nods understandingly. “Well, I think she’s talented. Have you seen what she’s done lately? What about talent?”

“What about talent? I’ll tell you about talent. Talent schmalent. If it were all about talent, then I wouldn’t bat an eyelid. But darling, it’s a business. And a bad one at that. She’ll never make a cent, that is, until she dies, so she’ll be working at that silly little gallery for the next million years.”

“She’s gonna make you proud one day, Judy,” Sam says. I’m glad he’s here. I’m a ball of fire in front of the canvas, but I can never put two words together in front of my family.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Proud? I was proud the day she was born. I was proud when she was dux of her class. I was proud when she got into medicine. I’ll be proud again when she’s a doctor.” For weeks now Mama hasn’t been able to face her friends. For what? To chat with Susan (whose son just got into Harvard Business School) or Cathy (whose twin girls will be the youngest barristers in Sydney)? It has become unbearable for her. Even Elizabeth’s boy has a PhD. How’s Lily doing in her studies? When is she due to finish? When will she be a doctor? They used to ask. And now they’ve found out I’ve dropped out, they ask again. Only louder.

It is hard for Mama. She has her private disappointment and her public disgrace.

And then she has Anyu.

According to Anyu, my failure, like our financial situation and my father’s death, is Mama’s fault. So was last weekend’s bad weather, the traffic jam this morning and the fall of Rome. That’s what happens, Anyu says, when you marry peasants. I know Monologue Number 14 by heart: Peasants. Jewish peasants. That’s what they were. You know, there were a lot of them in Hungary. Butchers. Tailors. Shopkeepers. Couldn’t read or write, didn’t know Nietzsche from their neighbour. And every now and then, one or two of them had the luck to make it big. Not your Mama’s parents, of course. Don’t be silly. But you know the Berger family from next door to the Lowensteins? Like them. Struck gold making belts. Can’t read or write. His father was a schlepper for a tailor in Budapest, but when they came here, they made a fortune from little strips of leather. Well, everyone needs to hold their pants up, no? Good for them, I say, lucky break! But peasants nonetheless.

Mama’s father was a baker’s assistant, a far cry from the professors and doctors littering my father’s pedigree.

“Come on, Judy,” Sam tells her. “Where’s your sense of romance?”

“You think I don’t know about romance? You think I don’t know about art? I’m not an idiot. I’ve been taking Lily to galleries since she was a baby.” Mama loves the idea, in principle at least, of someone being a painter. There is something chic, something civilised, about being an artist, and in that affected, small–l liberal way of hers she fancies herself a bit of a patron of the arts, a member of the avant-garde. But while it’s terrific for others to live that kind of life, who would wish it on their own child? “Do you know what it takes to be a success? You think it’s about hanging around, smoking cigarettes, arguing politics and painting pictures? Come on, kids, don’t be so bloody naïve. Without an education, a woman is nothing. Trust me. You’re going to marry the first no-hoper who walks through the door and all of a sudden, your dreams are gone. And then when the kids are all grown up and out of the house, when the husband is gone, what have you got? Hey? What have you got?”

“Nothing.”

Nothing.

Just like her.

The food arrives and Mama spends the next few minutes complaining to the waiter about the scones, which are too hot, and the tea, which is too cold.

“Sorry,” I tell him, “we’re Hungarian.”

Sam throws him a knowing wink.

I’ve found my voice.

“I took Anyu to Frankie’s funeral,” I say.

“I know. I know. I just hope she bloody behaved herself. You’re a saint, Lily, did you know that? A saint. I’m sorry I didn’t come with you. I couldn’t, you know, you understand?”

“Sure.”

“He was a bastard,” she says from a mouthful of crumbling scone.

“I know.”

“I bet Anyu was awfully mad! Who else was there?”

“Everyone.”

“Mmm.”

Sam excuses himself. Out of the corner of my eye I catch him on his way to the bathroom, leaning on the counter talking to the waiter.

I take a deep breath. I reach for a cigarette. I change my mind. Not now. Just say it. Another deep breath.

“Mama …”

“Yes.”

“Mama, well …”

“Yes, Lily, what?”

“Umm, Mama …”

“For God’s sake, what is it, Lily?”

She picks up her newspaper and flicks through the sports pages.

“Never mind,” I say.

I reach for another cigarette. I see Sam flirting with the waiter. He looks across to me and winks. He gives me courage.

“Eva was there,” I finally tell her.

“Who?”

“You know. Eva. I think she used to be Anyu’s friend. You know. But Anyu got really upset and we left.”

“God, it must have been hot out there. Can you believe the air-conditioner stopped working Wednesday morning? Can you imagine the heat in the office without air-conditioning? I should have called the bloody union. That’s what I should have done!”

“She recognised me, you know, after all these years.”

Sam sashays back to the table waving a phone number on the back of an order form. He sits down triumphantly.

“No, wait,” Mama continues, mainly towards Sam. “I should have gone to the funeral! That’s what I should have done. It would have been cooler than that bloody furnace of an office, you know. But Anyu, oh Lily, I can just imagine how Anyu must have been in a shocker of a mood in that heat.”

“I’m sort of … you know … kind of interested, you know … I’m sort of curious about Eva …”

“I probably should have sent Mrs Symonds a note. She probably thinks I’m a terrible person. But what was I going to say? Huh? Oh, I’m sorry your bastard of a husband finally dropped dead. No, it’s better this way. I’m sick of bullshit. I’m sick of all these charades.”

“And then, you know, as fate would have it, we … we sort of bumped into her at Dr Horvath’s surgery.”

Sam joins in. “Imagine, Judy, not for fifteen years, and then Lily bumps into her twice in one day! I think it’s a sign.” He smiles.

“A sign? A sign? You know what it’s a sign of?” Mama puts down her cup of tea and throws her serviette on the table. “It’s a sign of you being an idiot! You want to talk about fate? I’ll tell you about fate! It’s nonsense. Bloody nonsense. I don’t want to hear about it. Lily, you’re starting to sound like your father. You’ve been spending too much time with your grandmonster. You kids are going backwards, you know that, back to the dark ages. Why would anyone want to go back to the Old World? What the hell is wrong with you people?”

I smile. I know how Mama thinks. It’s ideas like fate that made her decide never to teach me Hungarian. The bullshit stops here, she always says. But things are more complicated than that. You can’t just cover up centuries of paranoia and superstition with a university degree, a different language and a new country, even one tucked away at the end of the world. The truth is this: bullshit runs in families, like curly hair or big noses. For some, it may be a recessive gene, but I feel the Hungarian-ness in my blood and I need someone to decode it for me before it becomes too toxic.

Mama suddenly gathers up her purse and keys. She glances quickly at her watch and stands up. She mumbles something about having to go and turns away.

“And stay away from that bitch Eva,” she says, already halfway to the gate. “She’s bad news.”

Too late, I think. My fate is already sealed. Tomorrow is Saturday, the day I am to meet Eva at eleven am in a café in Double Bay for my very first Hungarian lesson.