The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  It was October, nearly our birthday, and Helen kept saying, “We must have a party. My god, how often have you been together on your birthday?” On the day, Jenny was in the house only a moment before she left again, apparently thrown out. Maybe she told Helen whose window she’d climbed in, or maybe her eyes were not looking right: I don’t know. Voices rose, and I opened the door just as Jenny strode past, staring ahead with that Corinthia smile, looking pleased at having been thrown out again, as if she wouldn’t know herself otherwise. She didn’t look at me or say good-bye, her heels leaving a trail of pocks in the floor.

  When I headed back to Sydney, Helen warned me that Jenny would call and want money, and she urged me again not to give it. I didn’t know what Jenny wanted money for and wouldn’t ask. In Sydney I dragged my bags from the station to a hotel in King’s Cross, maybe the same hotel I was told the four adults had stayed in twenty years earlier. My father was to join me the next day, but meanwhile I had the man I’d met in the bar, who lived in Sydney and followed me up. Every night I’d have dinner with my father at Italian restaurants, and now that he’d erupted once, we both drank hard and gave it free rein — at least at night; our slow fights over garlic prawns and wine always vanished by morning.

  I’d slowly revolve my glass of red wine and say again and again, “But you’re not listening. What I’m telling you is that not only do I not love you, but I don’t even like you. I don’t care about you at all.”

  And he’d laugh through his trim beard and tell me that of course I loved him, I just didn’t know it, I had to love him because he was my father, I had no choice in the matter. Which only made me drink more wildly and go blacker. Then he’d return to the hotel, and I’d go meet my man with the car. We’d go to clubs, dance, do coke and fuck in bathroom stalls, then fuck again in the hotel, with Daddy two rooms down, all this fucking that was still utterly numb, I couldn’t feel anything, just had a man in my bed as proof. I’d sleep an hour and then get up sick to see the sights of Sydney with my father, until finally it was time to leave.

  When we said good-bye what always happened at that moment happened once more. He hugged me and smiled with blinking wet eyes, suddenly seeming to see me for the first time, and as I walked down the gangplank to leave him and Australia, I felt that tug in my stomach and couldn’t believe I’d ruined it, I hadn’t even known what I’d come for but was losing it again.

  Flying over the Pacific for a day and a half, to or away from home. I’m just telling you one thing. Don’t ever leave yourself behind. It’s hard to keep track of time in the air, only gassy deep sky above and glinting sea below, and somewhere the invisible date line and time zones. Sick from drinking and coke, I focused on not throwing up or crying and kept trying to fix what time it was in that tube of air, kept trying to fix anything in all that dissolved. A pull in my stomach, that gravitational pull, as if all those loose tubes would just slither out.

  Somewhere down there was the equator. Once, on ships like Cook’s and Humboldt’s, there had been a ceremony upon crossing it, as the known world turned upside down, and maybe it’s when we’d crossed the line ourselves that Maggy and I took that cocoa bath and put on grassy hula skirts. That line lay somewhere, and if I could only calculate the time zones and fix where I was in the sky, I’d know when we flew over it, and this seemed so important, knowing exactly when I went back to the other side.

  The Qantas’s shadow flew far below on the water’s surface, and watching it I imagined I was down there, too, inside the little shape flitting over the waves, a shadow no longer bound to my foot but free. Maybe this is the original act of imagination: to marvel when you see an image cast on the wall of a cave by light, then to make an image with the shadows of your hands or with pigment, an image animated by your absent yet projected self. In one stroke, you extend yourself but also slip out, out of that skin, that jar, that impossible house, and instead make something that’s worthy.

  9

  A man on a motorcycle, a man in a car. Speed has something to do with it, being borne away anywhere else. Being held in that space has something to do with it, too. But most of all it’s the man. Just take me. I want to close my eyes and not be here, I want to disappear and dissolve into you, I do not want to be my self. Just take me wherever you’re going.

  After William, because there always had to be someone, came Anthony. He’d been an architecture grad student at Princeton and was thirty-seven to my twenty-four, tall and lined, with dark silvering hair and an arrogant walk, part Irish, part Lebanese, all Baltimore, elegant and artsy in a beat leather jacket and motorcycle boots, scarred from a crash and a knifing, full of stories of his rock-and-roll past and bad-boy behavior, all the beauties who’d come before me, and the intricate ways he’d betrayed them. As of Princeton, he’d been remaking himself.

  He had a prize to study Islamic architecture and on a first date drove me up Massachusetts Avenue to the mosque. In blue espadrilles and orange pants, he parked wherever he wanted, no rules, and strode around pointing out details of screens, pools, geometric decor. He drove me through Rock Creek Park, he drove me to Rehoboth, he drove me to Baltimore, Boston, New York. I was the golden girl, he said; he’d been watching and hoping forever. His hands always trembled, the lines he drew trembled. The idea of his face drawing near mine was too much, but drinking always helped; I disappeared until it was over. Then eight years after the night on the lounge chair with Sutter, on a pair of twin beds that kept sliding apart in an apartment on East Eighty-third, I finally broke open and acquired knowledge of that famous thing the girls had taunted me about so often a few blocks north.

  I wore Anthony’s shirts, drank his espresso, slept in his bed, spoke his words — fascist, hip, aesthete. I stopped shaving my underarms because he liked it, let my hair go wild because he liked it, wore little tight leopard-print dresses. I walked out of my own place and moved into him whole. I’d applied to graduate school because I didn’t know what else to do, and when I packed my books and clothes and dishes and moved to Providence, Anthony got a job in Boston and came, too.

  But the Iliad seemed so remote, with its ancient betrayal and exhausting battles: so many words for shinguard to look up and forget. It was much easier to climb into Anthony, lie in there dreamy, and turn off the light. Golden girl: I lay like an odalisque on a futon on the dirty floor, and he would look at me with eyes so hungry that without moving I drew him to me, pulled him on a current I felt silky in my hand. No need for anyone else, not friends or a mother; no need for any other man to see me, and dangerous if one did. I lived among his Persian rugs and Bauhaus stools and neogothic prints. He was more in love than he’d ever been, he said; he’d never loved anyone like this, he said; it just kept getting better.

  I abandoned classics and moved on with Anthony, to Boston, Washington, Miami, following his jobs teaching architecture or designing. Like foreign posts, always starting new. My grandfather Albert started his letters Dear Meandering Jane. My father wrote, Come out of hibernation. Remember me? If nothing else I come through once a year around your birthday. I saved whatever letters found their way through the change-of-address stamps and didn’t fly out of all the beat boxes and vans. But my father seemed as remote as the Iliad, a painful, numb thing locked back in the chest, except for once a year, when I saw him. Yet when my grandmother Maisie died, right after my father had left Australia on one of his trips to the United States, and he had to fly straight back upon landing, my awful first crestfallen thought was: Now I won’t see him this year.

  Jenny occasionally called Albert for money, but I didn’t learn why she needed it until later. She was living in Sydney, sometimes the most together in history, otherwise smashing herself again. I heard little of what she was up to. She had a monstrous boyfriend who would not sit in chairs and couldn’t in my father’s house, anyway, because evidently he was not allowed in, being, among other things I didn’t know at the time, a New Zealander living on the Australian dole.

  What Jenny ne
eded money for: I could have known if I’d listened. Helen cared continually and tried hard, wrote my father, but you would need to be a saint.

  I still didn’t know what to do with myself. What are you going to do, Jane? What to do, what to be. I found work whenever Anthony and I moved, jobs as a production artist or editor. What I kept was drawing, getting lost in that fabulous current between whatever I looked at and my eyes, my hand. With colored pencils I drew emus and parrots at the National Zoo; in Miami, I sat on the tough grass of South Beach and drew tropical fronds and modernist curves. I rewrote and illustrated the story of Amor and Psyche, a girl listening for a rustle at the window, obsessed with unclaimable Love; I put Psyche in a Miami world of coral rock and sea.

  Beauty exists in the air between the object and your eyes and makes you want to dissolve, be what you see, have the beauty you see, although there is no having other than looking. Ancient ideas of beauty and love: Both enter through the eyes and undo you. I drew Anthony, his sleeping, oblivious foot resting on an elegant graphite calf. I could draw anywhere; so why not follow Anthony? So much easier to climb in that car, close my eyes, and open my mouth to the rushing breeze.

  That a father would be home is built into the language. But any man can be home, be the source of a pull as strong as the pull toward home, when you are away from him.

  You drew yourself to be Psyche, wrote Paul. Are you? In your myth, Psyche has no influence over her own destiny. Do you feel that way?

  _______

  After we’d been in Miami two months, when I’d just started work as an editor, Anthony was asked to teach a term in Venice. Follow him again? What to do, what to be! My father and Helen were living in Italy. You are mad not to come with Anthony, Helen wrote. Italy is the perfect place to develop and expand tastes … You simply mustn’t allow yourself such pedestrian thoughts as that you are somehow losing 5 months.

  When I see myself now following Anthony to Venice, where I’d go out every day with my sketchbook and pencils, I see myself stepping into Helen, stepping along a line she had drawn. Trailing after her over the years, staying near: as she moved through a gallery and with magic persuaded a guard to unlock a secret room so she could stand before a Grünewald, before its gorgeous, hideous colors, and have me stand beside her, and together, whispering, we explored its layers, and I managed to notice something unusual, and she turned to me with wondering blue eyes and said, But I’ve never seen that! Yet it’s perfectly true. Edward, come here. Darling: Jane’s just said something so interesting.

  Trailing after Helen, staying near: as she moved through markets, past stands heaped with ice and tentacles and gleaming blue fish, or through wooden stalls bearing quilted greens and saffron flowers. Then watching in the kitchen as she performed the magic of frying a flower gold, although in my own kitchen later I produced a floppy mess. Following her through narrow streets to places where you could buy not only the best shoes, not only such ordinary objects of desire, but specially made parchment and pigments: She led me to a small shop like a Wunderkammer, a smell of mineral intensity when we stepped through the door, wooden tables with boxes of waxy or powdered pigments that filled my nostrils with the urge to make. She chose what she wanted, and we left with packets of substanced color with which she would create paintings that were inscrutable, although I tried hard to read them, although I understood the ideas of the Golden Mean and illegible languages, still they were inscrutable, and she shrugged my puzzling away and gave me instead a painting I could read, as she has given me banksia cones whose tiny barnacle mouths she has painted coral, as she has given me etchings of the Tomb of the Baker and of Lady Godiva ringed by nude men in trees, because she knows my tastes and fascinations. She knows because she’s helped me create them.

  So, leaving my editing job, paycheck, daily bus ride to work, flying after Anthony to Venice, I stepped into Helen. I’d shop in the fish market at the Rialto, walk to a different church each day, stand in the frigid air, ice breathing into my boots, and draw grotteschi, caryatids, marble mergirls, copy the rose and gold damasks of Bellini’s saints. Or I’d find a shop that Helen had told me sold the drawing board I needed, with a certain crisp finish, perfect for grinding in bright color. And as I did these things I’d see her figure lightly moving before me. A pattern of life Helen had shown, not my mother; this life had nothing to do with my mother, and as I stepped into it I both wanted it and felt sick, as always, at the betrayal.

  Although also this — with another shift of the moiré silk, another lovely della Francesca smile: I understood, didn’t I, that the drawings I did were just illustration? Of course they weren’t properly art.

  After Venice, Anthony and I moved to New Orleans, where we both worked at Tulane; he taught, I wrote proposals and speeches. But the following semester, he won a fellowship for a year in Italy, across the river from my father and Helen, and once more I would quit my job and go, too. Jenny would also be there a few months: Another rescue operation, my father said. So, five years after our birthday nonparty in Canberra, Jenny and I were to see each other again.

  Anthony flew to Europe ahead of me to get settled while I finished a project, found someone to take our apartment and care for the cat, and applied for a visa as his “wife.”

  Whenever he left, it was terrible exposure: insulation gone, skin stripped bare and too soft in the scalding world. Our apartment was the second floor of an old yellow house on the edge of the Garden District, lopsided, leaky, a listing ship, rattling and shaking whenever trucks barreled past. The windows had no screens, so anoles darted in and ran up the walls, and palmetto bugs tumbled in at night. One planted her eggs in the silverware drawer, which I learned when they hatched one night and the forks began clinking. There was a gunshot hole in the living-room ceiling, and when it rained, which it did every day after Anthony left, water sputtered in.

  I got my visa and packed and gave notice at work. But just as I was about to leave, Anthony called to say maybe I didn’t want to come, maybe I should wait.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You might not be happy here. It’s cold. I don’t think you’ll like it.”

  Yes, my father said when I called, he and Helen thought they’d seen Anthony going about town with a woman. A very attractive woman, in fact. An artist, as it turned out.

  The same question, the impossible question: What makes one woman, one packet of flesh and the being inside it, so drenched in value as to make a man leave a woman he loved, leave even his own daughters? I don’t understand what love is, how its object is contained in a single skin, how that object exerts irresistible pull. Or: I understand it when I feel the closest thing to love I feel. It’s this: That other person has become home, and to be apart from him is to be in exile, helplessly gravitating toward wherever he is, having no center of your own.

  And another question, one I keep asking myself, and as I grow older the problem only grows worse: Why is jealousy obliterating? Why is the vision of another woman taking your place ruinous? You don’t die. You’re still there. Your forearms are there with the light hair on them, your stomach sucked in at the jeans, your bruised knees. You haven’t been obliterated. Yet it feels as if you have. You’ve just made the mistake, again, of granting your existence to someone else’s eyes.

  Between writing speeches, I stood in bathroom stalls at Tulane and cried, tears actually dropping at my feet. At home, rain streamed around the windows and doors; it dripped through the cracks and gunshot hole in the ceiling, and when the grass outside turned to water, the place seemed to keel. The windows didn’t lock or even close right, anyone could slide them open from outside, and at midnight I’d go from window to window to make sure no one was climbing up the sides of the house. I’d stick my head out and crane around in the dark, then close the window as hard as I could. The apartment had sixteen windows plus a porch door out back, and by the time I’d checked them all and returned to the first window, I’d realize that something might have happened since the last round, someon
e might have slunk down Louisiana Avenue and ducked into my dark yard and might be out there right now, peering up, so I’d do the whole thing over. Finally, at 2:00 in the morning, I’d have to give up, so I’d lie down on the futon on the floor and pull the sheets up to my neck, run my eyes without blinking from one corner of the ceiling to the other and down to the floor and then from one corner of the floor to the other and then back up to the ceiling until everything was as sealed as it could be. Then, still without blinking, I’d turn off the light. But within a minute I’d turn it on again, to make sure nothing was crawling toward me. Not a palmetto bug, or an anole, or even a murderer, nothing simple like these, but a hand. I was a grown person who wrote speeches for the president of Tulane, but at night I switched the light on and off and on and off and on and off, sobbing, afraid a severed hand was crawling toward me in the dark.

  When I finally made myself go to a therapist, it took her just an hour to see that perhaps this new split was reopening the others, opening up all sorts of old mess. The blackout sex, the crawling hands, the bedtime rituals, the disappearing, the dissolution because of Anthony — clearly it all wound back to the split, to the situation with the fathers. And I’d just had a bad Pap smear, and everything felt like utter black ruin. But this therapist was kind and found the family story so much more compelling than her usual fare that she charged me only half price. Which helped save money for my trip.