With Lucien
About to leave his house
for two or three days – to meet me as it happens – Lucien suddenly froze at the
sight of the ring on his middle finger, which had been forced halfway up by the
strange, almost painfully contorted hold he’d put on the doorknob, as if to
give it a secret handshake. The ring struck him in that moment as being insincere,
pathetic, and intolerable.
A harsh conclusion, of
course, to arrive at from nowhere. The ring was nothing but a piece of sterling
silver; unremarkable except for the way it had come to be on Lucien’s finger in
the first place. I’d been with him when he found it, in the middle of a chaotic
road in Bangkok a few years earlier. He’d nearly killed himself darting in and
out of traffic just to pick it up and had until now thought of it as a kind of
good luck charm by consequence. He’d even – this must’ve completely slipped his
mind – received compliments about it, albeit mostly from women who wanted to
sleep with him.
What the fuck am I doing
wearing this, he said aloud, it’s a nut off a fucking Thai screw. He pulled his
hand away from the doorknob and held it close to his face, then shut one eye
and used a thumbnail to jimmy the ring up just far enough to examine its
underside. He seemed to be looking for a thread that wasn’t there. A feeling of
worthlessness rose up in his stomach. He lowered his hand and slid the ring
back to its usual spot, a double image of sunless and slightly cracked skin.
But the feeling didn’t go away.
Lucien, I need hardly
mention, was given to fixations of this sort and knew that leaving them to
fester untended was like putting out a casting call for more severe problems.
Once or twice I’d caught him walking down Smith Street with his face locked in
a grimace that made no sense from the outside, from outside of him that is,
with strange emissions of effort coming from his mouth the way they might have
a Karamazov’s, his hands wilted together by his solar plexus as if nursing
fresh a gunshot wound. And then he’d seen me and gotten all embarrassed,
checked himself, smiled and straightened up and shook my hand and become what
ostensibly he was – a tall, athletic, intelligent, handsome, exotic-looking
dude – a maddeningly superior dude. He was the only person I’d ever known on
whom dreadlocks looked tasteful. There were other occasions, too, on which I’d been
careful to stay out of sight, so as to watch him in that crucible of his for
longer.
He tried to take the ring
off. On this cold July morning, however, it proved impossible. Even with hot
water – Amy had taken all the soaps and other toiletries, which he was yet to
replace – there seemed to be no way of getting it over the first knuckle. Had
it always fit so perfectly into the contours of the knuckles beside it? He
thought of plants grown so closely together that they’d been forced into
concessional shapes, forced into harmony. After a while, all but resigned to it
staying on, Lucien was lowering himself onto the old mustardy three-seater in
his lounge room when he stiffened, took hold of the ring with the thumb and
index finger of his other hand – as if it needed to be carried – and rushed to
his bedroom.
The bottle he found in the
draw of his bedside table was nearly empty and smelt of strawberry liquorice.
As the last vestiges blew into his hands, Lucien felt a chemical cold break out,
a sensation similar to but milder than that caused by the shit used to burn off
warts. Was it liquid nitrogen, the wart-burner? The artificiality of that smell
dominated all his other senses in an unnerving way, as if they were being stunk
into permanent submission. He ran his teeth along his tongue from back to front
and shrugged his shoulders a couple of times.
While pulling at the ring,
now lubricated and giving a little more than before, he wondered how Amy could
have not only found pleasure in such a weird sensation but actually sought it
out as a means of improving their sex life, or hers at least. It was just
another nuance of her personality, my friend would later tell me, which could
be added to the findings of the previous week’s postmortem – namely that so
much had been hidden, or partially hidden, from those faculties of judgment
that should have followed his awareness of who Amy actually was and who that
person was to him, for so long and intimate
a period of time. It was more than rose-coloured glasses, man, rose-coloured
glasses don’t stay on for four and a half years. What was it then? I don’t
know. A weakness, a complex, a longing, wanting her to be perfect, wanting her.
None of these answers satisfied him.
*
Sitting on the edge of the
bathtub, Lucien let out a clipped laugh. He’d stained his good jeans, which would
usually have rattled him – the way he looked, as you might have guessed, was a
source of inexplicably deep anxiety – but this time everything began and ended
with the ring. At least until evening, it wasn’t going anywhere. Then he washed
his hands, but, owing to the lack of soap, that chemical cold persisted right
up to when he was seated at her piano and his fingers were caressing the keys
like the small of a beautiful woman’s back, or, if he’d had a daughter, her
hair.
Willis of Montreal,
Vertical Grand. Three more days and it would be gone too. Amy was having it
‘professionally moved’, whatever that meant. At least, he thought, he wouldn’t
have to put his back out, as he’d done upon moving it in.
Have a look at this thing,
will you?
Cheap in its time, plain worthless
now in all but the most sentimental currency. Dusty, out of tune,
mahogany-coloured stain faded so badly in places that it looked intentionally
spotted. The lathwork on the legs and on the two supporting columns for the
oversized box above the keyboard were, however, still more or less immaculate.
Amy’s grandfather, a French Canadian whose lineage could be traced to one of
the earliest settlements in Québec, had brought it with him when he emigrated
in order to live happily ever after with his new Australian bride.
It came as a surprise to
Lucien that he not only remembered a scattering of tunes from his childhood
lessons, but could play them almost perfectly. I’d play like shit tomorrow, he
said to himself. He was thinking of the way a golfer or tennis player might
come out after a long layoff and swing thoughtlessly, freely, impressively,
only to find that the real rust caught up with them on the second or third time
round. Because this, in fact, was the first time he’d ever played the Willis. Amy
had never played it much either.
He tried to think of the
most difficult song he’d learned before giving up and figured that it must’ve
been Satie’s Gnossienne 1. Collecting his thoughts for a moment, he started to
play. But midway through the raspy, not altogether bad rendition, Lucien became
so lost that he felt a genuine panic set in, a feeling of being alone in a dangerous
wilderness of some kind, a hunger, a disorientation, an awesome helplessness.
For a long time – I’m talking hours – Lucien settled on the last note he could
recall correctly, with his fingers and, in an effacing way, his mind. He wasn’t
looking at the keys at that point but at the ring. When at last I got the phone
call explaining that our camping trip had to be delayed, Lucien told me
gnomically that he was halfway up a mountain and halfway to the bottom of the
sea. A mountain I could somewhat understand, since we were about to climb one,
and so I tried to limit my understanding of the phrase to its first half.
Tomorrow morning, then? Seven o’clock I’ll be at your place, with coffees.
*
We took another narrow
switchback in single file. A skink darted across the trail. The gradient was
increasing and there were no more birdcalls, or virtually none. Nor were there
any other hikers; it was a Tuesday morning in July. I could hear Lucien’s
breaths, Lucien’s footsteps, the shifting contents of Lucien’s overloaded pack.
Depending on our position – it felt like the trail had been etched into a
landmass that changed shape, so frequent were the twists and turns – I could
also hear the Taglia River. But I couldn’t see it and, amazingly, had yet to
see it at all. This wasn’t so much the fault of the trees, which were
arrow-straight and spaced out almost geometrically, but of the massive granite
boulders strewn everywhere. We’d been hiking for four hours and, Lucien
approximated after checking the map, had four more to go before reaching camp.
Then, moments later, a sign appeared; from the distance, the actual time to
camp was closer to five hours.
Lunch? I suggested. The
trail had flattened out and a big grey log on the shoulder of the hill seemed
as good a place as any to sit. Before Lucien had answered I walked over,
dropped my pack, felt that the log was dry, or dry enough, and sat down. I
picked a branch off a little fern that overhung the right side of the log and
ground it down to a paste in my fingers. The smell of ground-up ferns or
tussocks was like a double shot of adrenaline and ecstasy for me. Then I wiped
my hands on the log and took another long, indulgent breath and stretched out
my legs. Blisters had started forming on the balls of my feet. Come on, man, I
said to him, fifteen minutes. Come on. Alright, he finally replied, but I’m not
all that hungry yet.
He really was like an
ascetic or something on camping trips, Lucien – it seemed as if he only spoke
because I spoke to him and only ate because I ate and made sure he did the
same. His dreadlocks were tied up high on his head, covered with a plain black
bandana. The long, wispy hair on his neck blew in the breeze. About to sit
down, he noticed that there were some fairly large and sharp nodes, maybe where
branches had once been, on that section of the log, and so I moved right to the
other edge, the little fern all but in my lap, to make room. We were sitting
shoulder to shoulder. Maybe because of that closeness, or because it was the
first time we’d been still all day, I thought it was a good time to ask him
about the previous morning. As I handed him a sandwich in a snap-lock bag, and
an apple, both of which he placed beside him disinterestedly, I said, so what
exactly happened yesterday to put you up that mountain?
To tell you the truth, I
wasn’t expecting much of a response. Only a handful of times in our friendship
had Lucien opened up to me, and even
then in such a way as to leave me perplexed as to who it was I’d really been
speaking to, if that makes any sense, with an invulnerability that seemed at
odds with what we was telling me, as if he had a persona reserved especially
for the purpose of relating the innermost parts of himself from an
informational standpoint, but which was completely detached from those parts
emotionally. It had made me wonder, before scolding myself at the thought,
whether Lucien might’ve been abused as a kid, or witnessed something truly
horrible, or even been some kind of sociopath.
Sitting shoulder to
shoulder, however, I felt that the strange events he recounted were coming directly
from him and I knew Amy’s decision to end things must’ve had a hand in that. Of
course, we’d spoken about her since the breakup, but only briefly. Given how it
had all gone down, how fresh it was, and the nature of the man, I’d treaded
carefully, affirming my love for him and restating that I was there
unconditionally for support if he needed it, rather than asking too many
questions. He hadn’t reached out at all except for raw companionship – a couple
of quiet coffees and an even quieter dinner at the pub.
But now and with dramatic
flourish he narrated the whole fiasco with the ring, which he’d managed to
wrench off in the evening. Clenching and unclenching his fist, he described how
it had made him feel to see the ring on his finger, how it had immobilised him and
how farcical and desperate his attempts to remove it must’ve looked. Then he
did the same with the piano. A little rain fell; it rattled through the near-unbroken
canopy above with the noise of a torrential downpour. Mosquitoes would be a
problem that night. And, so close to meekly asking why, why had Lucien suddenly
turned on the ring and why had he gotten lost at the piano, and was he feeling
better without it on his finger and without his fingers on those keys, in the
end I managed to ask him the real question – how are you doing without Amy? He
threw the last crust of his sandwich into the bush behind us and it disappeared
without a sound. I’d been listening to him so intently I’d forgotten to eat
mine.
*
Just below the footbridge
I counted eight rainbow trout suspended against the current, running out of the
lake they were trying to enter and up the crystalline river from which they’d
come. Lucien took out his phone and tried to take a photo. Can you see them?
Nah, it’s all a blur, the water’s moving too fast. It must be the Taglia, I
recognise its voice, I joked. She’s singing. She was serenading us from afar
that whole time. I loved her before I saw her face. Maybe let’s cook a fish
tonight.
We crossed the bridge,
both pretty weary by that stage – I also needed to shit a lot worse than I let
on – and headed towards the campgrounds. To our slight disappointment, there
were more tents already set up than we’d anticipated. Nonetheless, we swapped
cheerful hellos with a few people, all of them men around our age, and found an
unoccupied space right by the lakeshore. It was a raised timber platform with
six posts nailed to it for attaching guy ropes. I threw down my pack on the
slats and ran to the nearest toilet, only to find it out of toilet paper, ran
back and took some from the front of Lucien’s daypack, returned to the toilet,
lurching in desperation this time, went, washed my hands in the lake, which was
colder than I’d expected, and found our tent fully erect and our gear stowed
away in the vestibule by the time I got back. Lucien was sitting on the edge of
the platform, looking at the water, or more precisely the wall of mountains
beyond it.
See there, above that
escarpment, where that plateau’s so high and empty and big? Yeah. If Australian
winters were about twenty degrees colder, that’d be the most spectacular
glacier you’ve ever seen. It’s still beautiful though. Of course it is, I
didn’t say it wasn’t. I know. You can say something could be more beautiful, or
beautiful in a different way, without affecting your appreciation of how
beautiful it already is, can’t you? Or is it neurotic and reductive and all
that shit to even think about those other states while you’re supposed to be in the present one? I told him it was a
question I’d given some thought to myself, but mainly with regard to food. No
matter what I’m eating I’ll always think about how it could’ve been improved,
or what I’m going to eat for dessert. That’s interesting. I guess. Do you still
enjoy food? Absolutely. Do you want to catch a fish?
Sunset had come and gone
by then, but we didn’t need much light. I brought a small head torch back to
the footbridge while Lucien carried the fishing net, a long stick he’d found at
our campsite, and a roll of duct tape. Locating the trout in the glare of the
torch wasn’t easy, but I managed to get a good visual on two adults swimming
side by side, all but paralysed by the ceaseless current. Meanwhile, he’d taped
the net, which was far too short to reach the water on its own, to the stick by
its handle. It reminded me of a splint and a broken, swollen limb. Will that
hold? It’s almost rapids down there. We should be all right.
He lay down prone on his
belly and dangled his contraption over the side of the bridge. We both fell
into complete silence like predators about to pounce. I felt my heart pounding
in my chest. I felt that Lucien and I had never been closer but that I had to
seize the opportunity, while his guard was down, to go even deeper, to accompany
him to the places where those judgments
he’d spoken of were stored, and to find out what else was in there. On the
second leg of the hike I’d realised, inarticulately of course, that I wanted
this because I was convinced and had always been convinced that by revealing
himself my friend could somehow reveal me as well. When the net hit first hit
the water I could see the flimsy plastic flex with the force, but its
connection to the stick seemed tight enough. And it was; under my torchlight,
barely ten minutes had passed before Lucien eased our thrashing dinner onto
land.
Opposite our tent, by the
water, I killed, gutted, roughly scaled, and filleted both fish with the
Leatherman my brother had given me one Christmas. Lucien was beside me and also
had his head torch on. After assembling the camping stove and checking that the
fuel bottle worked, he rifled through a plastic bag and took out the olive oil
and a few jars of seasoning. Then he chopped an onion. The sound of laughter
rang out from the nearby picnic tables. It was probably drunken laughter. There
must’ve been a fire, too; I couldn’t see it on account of the bend, and the
density of the trees between us, but smelt it. Fires aren’t allowed in this
reserve. Should we tell the ranger tomorrow, if he’s around? Let’s wait and see
if we need anything off them first. Seems to be keeping the mossies away, too.
Have you been bitten yet? No.
I left one fish floating
in a shallow pool, separated from the rest of the lake by rocks, and made small
incisions at either side of the other fish’s tail. Then I dabbed my fingers in
a bowl I’d filled with some rock salt and used my fingertips to tease away the
skin. Strands of different thicknesses and lengths broke away, silvery in the
moonlight reflecting off the water. Some of those strands clung to me as if
they were charged with static, and when one wrapped around my middle finger
like a ring I winced and said to Lucien – with my back to him – what did you
mean earlier when you said that none of those answers satisfied you? If it
wasn’t a weakness or wanting her or wanting to be perfect for you and so on,
what was it that clouded your judgment so badly? With dangerous speed I cut off
both fillets and put the carcass in a rubbish bag in a flick that struck me as
heartless, and did the same thing with the other fish, the one that’d been
floating. Impossible as it is to explain, it somehow felt as if our places had
suddenly switched, that I was the one who’d acted irrationally and who was now
trying to come down from the mountain, or come up to the surface, or maybe it
was both after all.
*
The piano movers were early
– doubly so considering Lucien had originally expected them on Friday
afternoon. Upon getting back to my place at half past eleven on Thursday night,
exhausted after the long drive, I suggested he crash on the couch and join me
for recovery brunch at Milkwood the next day, maybe even drink a beer or two,
before returning home. At that stage he didn’t know if Amy would actually show
up to oversee the moving. But when his phone was charged enough to turn on there
was a message from her, stating, like a business memo as he put it, that the
movers now needed to do the job at nine instead of four and that she was definitely
going to be there, and so after mulling it over he decided to sleep on the
couch and set an alarm for seven thirty. It was just after six when I was
woken, first by Lucien’s voice and then by the sound of him leaving. I seemed
to be all the more aware of the noise because of his attempts to muffle it and
found myself wide-eyed with curiosity about what exactly the sounds I was
hearing were. I also expected him to call me, which of course he didn’t.
He walked home. Nicholson
and Lygon streets were busy but uninhibited; it was still too early for peak
hour. A few hot air balloons dotted the clear, whitish sky, all of them branded
with telecommunications companies. Only one of the balloons was firing, rising.
He felt as if he hadn’t slept at all. Sorry to wake you, Luce, but they have to
do it at seven now. You’re at whose place? I mean, you don’t necessarily need
to be there. I would appreciate it, yeah, just because you and Anders moved it
last time, you know how to get it out the front door. I know they’re
professionals, they’ll obviously be fine without you, but also, you know, it’s
not technically my house anymore, I’d feel strange. I’d rather give you the key
back in person as well. Of course I’d like to see you, why would you need to
ask?
The door was ajar. Amy was
about to knock when it swung open. Startled, she saw him walk back to the piano
stool and sit down, as if he’d already been sitting there for some time, as if
he’d been playing that Satie note for three days on end. When he turned around
it was clear that he’d been crying. His facial expression bordered on total
despondence. She bit her lip, uncomfortable and – deep down – a little afraid, hoping
the movers would be there sooner rather than later. The smell of the place
struck her as empty somehow and she couldn’t smell Lucien at all. You’ve taken
your ring off, she said following an almost filmic pause. I decided I didn’t
like it anymore. Well, it’s good to see you. It’s good to see you too.
A while afterwards I would
have a dream in which my friend explained that those tears and that
anti-greeting were the result of a horrible train of thought – just before
she’d arrived he imagined wrecking the piano right before her eyes, threatening
to break her nose, maybe breaking it for real, reasserting himself as her equal
through intimidation and violence. And in my dream he said he’d found a perverse
pleasure in those thoughts the way people did the thought of their parents
dying and it was this, the pleasure of devastating himself so manifestly, that
brought on the tears. But in reality there was nobody less inclined to such
thinking – I now feel certain of this after our conversation by the lake – and what
saddened him was that in spite of how patently wrong for him he realised she
was and in spite of not being in love with her, he would still have taken her
back in an instant.
*
We ate in silence. I
didn’t repeat my question and began to feel as if I’d never asked it. For the
second time that day, Lucien finished his meal before me. I ate mine slowly,
deliberately, chewing each piece away from my tongue. The truth is that I’m
good at preparing fish but I don’t like the taste. I almost hate it. Then we
did the washing up in the lake, stowed the equipment, brushed our teeth,
bemoaned the heavy cloud cover keeping us from what was surely a spectacular
night sky, and went to bed. We were lying shoulder to shoulder on our backs and
it was so cold that our breath steamed. The smell of the campfire still
lingered in the air, on our clothes.
I’ll tell you what it was.
What? He must’ve known my surprise was feigned. Now I understand, she was
irrelevant, completely irrelevant.
That’s why I misjudged everything, because I was looking at her and she
didn’t matter. Why didn’t she matter? Some people find relationships easy but love
hard, maybe even impossible, even though they don’t know it. And for other
people the opposite is true. I’m one of them. Amy didn’t matter because it was
the process and not the person I was living with. It seemed to me as if he was
not only verbalising all of this for the first time, but thinking it too.
Adlibbing, in a way. Are you saying you never loved Amy? There was a pause. No,
I never loved Amy. Then why did she end it and not you? I said I never loved
Amy, not that I could live without her. Another pause. Or someone like her. Do
you see now?
How could he have expected
me to see? I realised I was bracing for him to squirm with unease in his
sleeping bag, but he didn’t move a muscle. What I think you’re trying to tell
me is that you’ve changed sides, and you’re upset about that. But what’s
stopping you from changing back again? Or finding some kind of middle ground?
If you’re worried about having become dispassionate or too settled, which is
the sense I get, you can just fall in love and be passionate again. He remained
silent and so I added, can’t you? No, I can’t, because I have no patience
anymore. And I hate myself.
Although I’d suspected
this for a long time, his admission left me filled with sadness. But also adrenaline;
I thought I could be candid as I wanted and he wouldn’t shy away. A face
appeared on the tent ceiling; not his, not mine, not anybody’s. Why do you hate
yourself? What possible reason could you have for hating yourself? I’ve always
wondered this about you, Lucien. It’s never made any sense to me. You make no
sense to me and I want to understand, you’re like my brother, I babbled,
immediately embarrassed by the corny sentiment. I brought up Smith Street,
including the times I’d observed him in secret. I told him how incredible I
thought he was. I even asked, what happened to you? I was genuinely close to
tears. And then almost unconsciously I blurted out, you loved a girl and she
broke your heart and you’ve never recovered, is that it? What I thought I heard
in response were a series of deep sighs, but this turned out to be the
breathing of somebody who, apparently, was already fast asleep. We wouldn’t
speak again until morning.
*
The piano was out and
loaded in fifteen minutes, although, ridiculously, the movers themselves had
shown up forty-five minutes late. While waiting for them, Lucien made Amy a pot
of her favourite tea, a berry tisane he didn’t like at all, and they were
friendly, even relaxed, despite not saying a lot. Asking her to take him back
was on the tip of his tongue more than once; the opposite sense that it was she
who was trying to seduce him also came and went a few times. When they finally
heard the moving truck back into the driveway, Amy was in the middle of
relaying a riddle she’d been pulling her hair out trying to solve. Not even
Google had been any help. Although he’d forgotten the riddle itself by the time
we next spoke, Lucien’s response to her, right before the forceful knock on the
door, was that even the most complex ones had simple answers – that was how you
knew they were good.
Amy and her grandfather’s
Willis Vertical Grand left at more or less the same time. Once they were gone,
Lucien spent a little while looking at the impression left in the blue
carpet. The pile was all flattened to one side like hair combed down with gel
and it was paler in colour than the rest, as if sunless. Dust and cobwebs had
accumulated on the wall; the dust was especially thick in the curve of the
skirting board. He knew that the impression in the carpet would linger
stubbornly – maybe it would never fully leave. And, at a loss to remember how
that space had been furnished before, he decided there was nothing for it but
to buy another piano and cover it up again, when he got some money together.
**********
