Fuck!
I had to do it. I would kill myself.
And I had an idea: maybe I should kill myself publicly. Why not fob off my suicide on one cause or another, pretending to die in protest over, I don’t know, the WTO’s wasteful agricultural policies, or third world debt, anything. Remember the photograph of that self-immolating monk? Now there’s an enduring image! Even if you’re killing yourself so your family will be sorry, pick a worthy cause, call the media, find a public spot, and kill yourself. Then even if your life has been a totally meaningless affair, your death doesn’t have to be.
The following morning by chance the radio told me that there was a protest on in the city around lunchtime. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a protest against the WTO’s wasteful agricultural policies or about erasing third world debt, it was about primary school teachers wanting a pay raise and more vacation. I tried to see the bright side. That was as worth dying for as anything, wasn’t it? I didn’t suppose any of the teachers themselves were passionate enough to self-immolate, but I imagined they’d welcome my contribution to their cause. I found an old canvas bag and threw in a can of petrol, a lighter in the shape of a woman’s torso, and some painkillers. I wasn’t trying to cheat death; I was hoping to cheat pain.
Sydney is one of the most beautiful modern cities in the world, but I always manage to find myself at the corner of Drab and Bleak Streets, and always in the section of the city where there’s nowhere to sit down, so I spent the morning walking and staring into people’s faces as I passed by them, thinking, “See you soon!” I was going to die now, but by the look of those triple chins, I knew they wouldn’t be far behind.
I arrived at the protest around twelve. It was a poor turnout. Forty or so people were holding up signs demanding respect. I didn’t think anybody who had to demand respect ever got it. There were a couple of television cameramen too. They looked young, probably cadets in their first year on the job. Since I didn’t require a seasoned journalist who’d ducked sniper bullets in Vietnam to film me, I took a place in the protest next to a couple of angry-looking women I wouldn’t want teaching my kid and psyched myself into the state I needed to be in to do myself in. All I had to do was think relentlessly negative thoughts about the inhabitants of the planet Earth. When I felt almost ready, I took out the painkillers but discovered I’d forgotten to bring a bottle of water. I walked to a nearby café and asked for a glass. “You have to eat something,” a waitress said, so I ordered a late breakfast: bacon, eggs, sausages, mushrooms, baked beans, toast, and coffee. I ate too much; the food in my belly made me sleepy. I had just ordered a second espresso when I saw someone famous coming out of a restaurant on the other side of the street: an old television journalist. I vaguely remembered that this journalist had been disgraced owing to one scandal or another. What had happened? It was nagging me. Did he wet his pants on TV? Did he lie about the state of the world and say on national television that everything would work out well for everyone? No, that wasn’t it.
I paid the bill and walked toward him and was just about to ask him to clarify the details of his public humiliation when a girl came out of the restaurant, flung her arms around his neck, and kissed him passionately. I thought: Sure, I’ve been kissed, but no one has ever flung her arms around my neck. Women have placed them there gently or lowered them over my head as if they were putting on a jumper, but never flung them. Then the girl pulled away and I recognized her too. Christ, I thought. What do these celebrities do, join forces to double their fame?
Then it hit me. She’s not famous! She’s my son’s girlfriend!
Well, so what? Why should I care? This wasn’t very big on the tragedy scale. It was just a teen drama, the type you might see on a nightly soap opera. But by being an eyewitness, I had become a character in the cheap melodrama; I had to play out my part to the end, to the dénouement. How irritating! I just wanted to peacefully self-immolate. And now I had to “get involved.”
I dropped the matches and the petrol in disgust and went home, enormously relieved that an excuse for staying alive had dropped in my lap.
When I arrived home, Anouk was in her studio, stretched out on the daybed she’d made for herself, propped up on a mountain of pillows. I could always count on Anouk for good conversation. We each had our favorite topics, our default topics. Mine was the gnawing fear of dropping so low in my own estimation that I would no longer acknowledge myself in mirrors, but would pass on by, pretending I hadn’t seen me. For Anouk it was always a new horror story from the chronicles of modern relationship hell. She often had me in stitches recounting recent love affairs, and I felt a strange pity for those men, even though they were the ones who left her. She was always creating complications for herself- putting the wrong people together, sleeping with her girlfriends’ ex-boyfriends, sleeping with her ex-boyfriend’s friends, always just on the line of fair play, teetering on the line, sometimes falling.
“What do you think of this girl Jasper’s seeing?” I asked.
“She’s beautiful.”
“Is that the best we can say about her?”
“I’ve hardly had two words with her. Jasper keeps her hidden from us.”
“That’s natural. I embarrass him,” I said.
“What’s natural about that?”
“I embarrass myself.”
“Why are you interested?”
“I saw her today- with another man.”
Anouk sat up and looked at me with bright eyes. Sometimes I think the human animal doesn’t really need food or water to survive, only gossip.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Not yet.”
“Don’t.”
“I think I have to, don’t I? I can’t sit back and watch my son be made a fool of by someone other than me.”
“I’ll tell you what to do. Don’t talk to him. Talk to her. Tell her you saw her. Tell her she has to tell him or you will.”
“I don’t know.”
“Telling him yourself will be disastrous. If nothing else, he won’t believe it. He’ll think you’re jealous and competing with him.”
“Do you think fathers and sons compete for sex?”
“Yes, though not in the Oedipal way. Just in the ordinary way.”
Anouk brought her knees up and rested her chin on them and stared at me as if debating whether to tell me I had something stuck between my teeth.
“I’ve had enough of relationships,” she said. “I want to take some time out. I think I’ve become a serial monogamist. It’s embarrassing. What I’d really like is a lover.”
“Yes, I think that would suit you.”
“A friendly fuck with someone I know.”
“Good idea. Do you have anyone in mind?”
“Not sure. Maybe someone like you.”
She really said this. And I really didn’t get it. Slow, slow, slow. “Someone like me,” I mused. “Do you know anyone like me?”
“One person.”
“Like me? I wouldn’t want to meet him.” Jasper? It couldn’t be Jasper, could it? “Who do you know like me?”
“You!”
“I’ll admit there’s a similarity,” I said slowly, starting to get the hint. It was coming to me now, as if through a dense cloud. I sat forward in my chair. “You don’t mean…”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes!”
“No, really?”
That’s how it began between Anouk and me.
It became a regular thing. Lying in bed with this young, beautiful woman, I felt a pathetic, adolescent form of pride- this is me kissing this neck! These breasts! These are my worn-out hands groping their way along the length of this sublime body! This liaison really saved me. I had begun to perceive my genitals as imaginary beasts in some epic fourteenth-century Scottish poem.
When you sleep with a friend, the trickiest part is getting started. You can’t just jump into fucking without kissing, and kissing is very intimate. If you kiss in the wrong way, it sends the wrong message. But we had to kiss, to get the engines warm, so to speak. We never kissed after sex, obviously. What would be the point? You don’t warm the engine after you’ve reached your destination, do you? But then we started doing it anyway. I was confused. I thought a friendly fuck was supposed to be passionate and revitalizing. I was all ready for that. Sex as fun- sinful but harmless, like chocolate ice cream for breakfast. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was tender and loving, and afterward we lay in each other’s arms, and sometimes we even caressed each other. I didn’t know what to make of it. Neither of us knew what to say, and it was to fill an awkward silence that I confided to Anouk my big secret, that I was finally actually dying.