Down Under Page 5

  “Valrhona” was a holy word to Heidi, and not to be taken in vain. Nevertheless, she swallowed her rage and pretended to accept these lies. It was better than fully knowing the details of her partner’s revolting new life.

  Though his given name was Daniel, Heidi’s husband now presented himself as “Dante,” without the Italianate second syllable, and thus pronounced “Dant.” Earrings? Yes, of course: two on each side, studs and janglers, to show he wasn’t taking it anymore, “it” being the bourgeois life and all its discontents. For no apparent reason, after a spring in which he pretended to be on vacation, Dante had gone on strike and wouldn’t return to work. He was finding himself. His life, he announced, had been a masquerade and a sham. From now on, it would be authentic. In this, Dante found honor and a rare sense of reclaimed manliness.

  It was now nearly September, formerly the beginning of the year, but now, for Dante, just another month in the whirling gyre others called life. What was at the center of the center of that gyre? Dante aimed to find out before existence had fully crushed his testicles.

  He and his wife had a daughter. For years, Heidi had been barren, so she’d had the treatments, from acupuncture to injections, and finally resorted to donor eggs. After years of effort, months of nerves, and hours of wrenching labor, Heidi gave birth by Caesarean to a ten-pound, shrieking baby girl who now glared at her with malice. This child, Delaney, had just entered Jude’s tenth-grade creative writing class, an elective to which only the most talented or troubled were drawn. Delaney, six feet tall and glowering, was of the latter camp.

  Delaney idolized her teacher. Ms. Ewington truly seemed to understand Delaney’s unmet needs and poetic rages. Each week, when the class was asked to compose a story, Delaney wrote about her mother. All her stories went like this:

  Deena’s mom is such a lying bitch. She whores around like a prostitute. She is mean to my Dad. Because she herself has eating issues, she thinks her daughter is fat and hides all the food. But the daughter finds it.

  HA! HAHAHAHAHA!

  Deena puts poison in her mom’s special herbal tea. Her mom drinks it. So pathetic. She thinks she can taste everything so well, but she doesn’t.

  Slurp! Her mom drinks it all.

  Her mom gets poisoned.

  She dies.

  Deena is happy. Then she runs to her father and says:

  Dad! Dad! Dad!

  We are finally free of the wicked bitchy witch!!

  Delaney gave Jude stories like these, asking if they were good. She wanted to know if she should become a writer. Jude placed check marks here and there, although it was hard to find a place to show such assent. For example, near the phrase “we are finally free,” Jude wrote: “Yes. The search for freedom is indeed very important in our lives!” On the bottom of the essays, she added, as mothers and teachers of our day often do: “Good work!!” She wanted Delaney to have high self-esteem.

  Jude said this even though she knew that the writing was not “good,” and not even the product of “work” (as the word is commonly meant, with the intimation of energy expended). It was the result, rather, of a kind of instinct, like gagging. Just as newborn babies are capable of the Babinsky reflex when the bottoms of their feet are tickled, many teenagers could spew out the sort of lines Delaney did without the slightest effort. Usually, these hostilities were tamped down and civilized. Delaney, instead, was proud of her words. She thought (at least partly because of her teacher, Ms. Ewington) they were “good,” and would not write about anything but her mother, and how much she wanted her to be dead.

  If the class assignment was “Write about a color,” Delaney would compose an essay about her mother turning purple as her throat is relentlessly squeezed.

  If the class assignment was “Write about your favorite moment in your favorite day,” Delaney would respond with a view of the near future, when her mother will lie unusually still, having taken her last breath. HAHAHA!

  Jude thought of talking to Delaney’s mother, who was, after all, her neighbor. But Heidi seemed willfully banal—a dangerous type that was prevalent in these parts. “Think positive” was not merely a helpful cliché out here, but a fiat. Like keeping a tidy lawn. Or not having an old above-ground pool remain, like an eyesore, when your kids have outgrown it.

  Jude sensed that Heidi would not react well to the implication that any aspect of her life—much less her only child—was flawed. Her lawn was not only tidy, but organically so. Like many a college-educated suburbanite, Heidi applied fierce deliberateness and intense consideration to the most mundane tasks. Soignée and petite, she was like a housewife from the fifties, or rather a show about a housewife from the fifties. In pumps and a double-row of pearls, she baked cakes and made soups from scratch (the base carefully brewed from chicken or beef bones, the vegetables cut and blanched just so). Her pots were always aboil and bubbling, and the kitchen smelled as intimate as a barn of sows and sucklings. On the sill one could find homemade kefir, to be added, later, to homemade preserves.

  Heidi’s full name was Heidi Dorcas Kunst, a series of clacking sounds that are hard to say. It was hard to be her acquaintance, harder to be her friend, still harder to be her husband, and hardest of all to be her mannishly tall and broad daughter. Heidi was, in fact, both the blessing and bane of striving womanhood, for anything she did was sheer perfection.

  Heidi’s domestic arts were proprietary; she would not trumpet her secrets to the world. She would not share her womanly arts with the common viewers of television or readers of magazines. No, Heidi’s province had begun in the small and leafy town in which she lived, and was only now beginning to slowly expand. The town was West Salem, an upscale enclave ten miles from the one in which Jude lived in confusion, metamorphosis, sexual longing, and sometimes squalor. (Jude and Sam could live there, by the way—his income was rising—but there would be less money left over then for luxuries like Heidi’s food and other suburban word-of-mouth necessities.)

  To illustrate with “compare and contrast” examples:

  Jude often left dishes in the sink overnight. True, she’d “pre-soak” the odd plate or saucepan, but . . .

  Heidi washed her dishes, saucepans, blenders, cutlery, zesters, and sieves by hand, lovingly, with an organic cleanser that not only smelled like lemon, but did, in fact, contain lemons, cruelty-free lemons (not plucked, but coaxed, from the tree) that were grown especially for her, and which she added, in her spare time, to the nontoxic cleanser base.

  Jude, after many years of nagging and cajoling, had let her sons quit playing the piano. Joey now played guitar, but it was the electronic kind, in which one of four buttons was pushed, each in a bright color, as badly drawn bands rocked out on the screen, and for which imaginary points were won and lost. Davey, the social misfit (piano would have helped him make friends), merely listened to music, alone in his room. Usually power ballads, sung by women.

  Heidi’s daughter, Delaney, had been hammering her piano for years. Not only had she gotten to a studio within Carnegie Recital Hall (with a humorless Juilliard teacher) by practicing, she was now composing her own concertos for clavier and tympanum.

  Jude wore yoga pants and monotonal cotton T-shirts all the time. Her nails were short and the most she did with them was file them. Her long chestnut hair was pulled back into an efficient plastic barrette. She wore ballet-style flats whenever possible, this despite the fact that she did no barre work. In fact, Jude practiced neither aerobics nor Pilates, nor did she (or would she) “spin” on an anchored bike, pumping her fists in victory.

  Heidi was fit and tight from power yoga (she did not just wear the pants). Her flowing asanas were performed in a room so hot that, had the temperature been the same outdoors, it would send sane people fleeing into an air-conditioned room. Heidi could stand her whole body on one of her hands and wave calmly at you with the other. She wore ensembles and yet was far too knowing to have them match. Instead, her color schemes harmonized and “popped,” the proportions allud
ing to each other. Her pants, often in light colors, were made of easily wrinkled fabrics, yet were never wrinkled. She wore blouses that possessed patterns of great and subtle interest, patterns that did not break unevenly at the seams. Her shoes always had a heel, be it a high one or a wedged platform (often of cleverly woven sisal). She especially favored the delicate “kitten” heel. Many of her shoes had peep-toes, which meant that they revealed the perfection of coral-colored toenails. Heidi exercised daily on a difficult elliptical machine, weighting her ankles with blue plastic shackles. Besides the hot yoga, she did advanced ashtanga, a practice so extreme as to involve the perineum.

  Jude’s furniture was simple and “modern.” The boys slept on single beds they’d had since they graduated from cribs. Their room was often impassible with clothes and junk, and the bathroom equally repugnant, displaying such habits as uncapped toothpaste and lidless, unflushed toilets. One could often find a pump-bottle of body cream and an assortment of balled tissues on the gritty tile floor. Jude’s living room sofa was leather, and black. It faced a large, old-fashioned television set. Deep within the sofa cushions, there were crumbs, attesting to a slovenly history of eating (worse, snacking) outside the kitchen or dining room.

  Heidi’s home paid homage to the countryside of France. Delaney slept in a full-size bed, covered in bright Provençal prints. The duvet matched the “window treatment” (and coordinating pendant curtain ties), and both matched the cloth shower curtain in Delaney’s bathroom. The toilet seat was oak, rhyming visually with her bedposts and capacious desk. That desk was covered with a blotter, although little blotting was required (Delaney used a laptop). That blotter matched the paint on the wall, artfully mottled by Heidi herself. The living room (or “sitting room,” as Heidi termed it) displayed Persian rugs, brocaded chairs with curved wooden armrests and legs, and an elegant, mushroom-colored sofa. Guests might enter this room and feel the hushed graciousness that is so often missing in modernity.

  Jude ate pre-cooked food, often from the supermarket’s freezer section. Lately, she had begun to order Heidi-food on an almost daily basis, and not just meals, but juices and condiments. She hated to cook, and considered it a demeaningly earthy chore, like being a prostitute or charwoman. The peeling, poaching, plucking, and stuffing of bagfuls of produce and carcasses seemed endless and unnecessary. Her sons ate processed foods and many dishes seasoned with hidden MSG. The spices on her rack were far from fresh.

  Entire neighborhoods dined off of Heidi’s gourmet cooking. In her immaculate, professional caterer’s kitchen, she prepared salads and grills, gelées and croutes, purées, potages, and dainty, peaked meringues.

  Jude could be very pretty on a daily basis if she tried, which she didn’t. She was once the cutest girl in town. Her skin shone and her eyes glowed, and to see her smile was to hear the first birds of spring.

  Heidi was plainness transformed by sheer force of will to a durable and lasting attraction. She wore a full, round do of beige-blond hair like a halo around her face; she acquired this look in the 1980s, during which curls and roundness in the coiffure were last permissible. She centered her tonsorial arc with a hair band, usually grosgrain, often with stripes that recalled the boating world, in which she was comfortable.

  Heidi Dorcas Kunst was, in fact, one of the West Salem Dorcases, which meant something in her part of the world. It meant that she was wealthy and well-born. But unlike most members of her class, she felt an inner distress, a constant feeling that the best one did would never be enough.

  It was simply not enough for Heidi to be a good mother to her daughter, which meant packing balanced and varied lunches and snacks, with caloric and other nutritional information attached. It was not even enough to feed everyone for miles around, to make a go at a culinary business. It helped; it distracted. But it was not enough.

  Nor was it enough for Heidi to keep an immaculate home, constantly upgrading its surfaces, some to make smoother (from wood to marble), and others to roughen (from latex to impasto to textured coir walls).

  It was also not enough to have a white flower garden as well as a stony Japanese garden with pagoda and water features, or even to have a built-in, walk-in wardrobe that held fashionable clothes, color-organized on padded hangers and all in the proper size (zero or XS).

  It was not even enough for Heidi, surrounded by foods, to eat only what kept her body small, and to exercise vigorously each day so as to keep her body hard, with little balls of muscle here and there, not to mention the taut perineum.

  It was just not enough.

  So Heidi, feeling inadequate, was never happy enough. In this way, Jude sensed, her friend was dangerous.

  Collum the Cowboy

  Collum, once in pursuit of a tangible goal, was not easily deterred. Here was a man who had sired a dozen children, whose face and form had conquered the world entire. In movies, he had played many roles and learned many dialects and even languages, some dead. He had learned to juggle and Jet Ski and fake a dead man’s fall from a tall building. Now, all he needed was that horse job; he must have some work to do during the weekends, a cover for himself as he sought his long-lost girl. And yet, there were obstacles.

  He’d costumed himself with great care as the quintessential American cowboy, with a blackened moustache that ended in handlebars, a red bandana, and a white Southwestern hat (covering his darkened hair) that tied under the chin. And yet, wherever he now went, no one seemed to appreciate how much he knew about horses. Collum had worn this very outfit in an early Australian film about the Wild West, so why were people laughing at him? Yes, he was currently in the Tame East; he understood that, but didn’t they get the iconic aspects of his getup? Could they not read his intentions?

  Or was there something wrong with the way he rode?

  Each stable Collum-as-cowboy had visited requested that he mount a horse and show them what he could do. He had learned to ride on the Australian saddle, traveled countless acres on that virtuous armchair with poleys for the knees, could sleep on it drunk and not fall off, even if the horse broke into a gallop. And in films he had ridden Western over and again. He had always known how to hold his seat and show them who was boss.

  But here, the horses wore something quite extraordinary on their backs. He’d heard of the English saddle, of course, but was this what the Poms had actually sat on for all these years? That explained a lot. It looked like a thin, worthless pad, something you’d find on a girl’s push-bike. But OK, he’d thought—riding’s riding. Park your bum on something or other—saddle, blanket, throw pillow—smack the bloody beast, get on with your day, and no worries. If these snooty toffs in the North Atlantic wanted to prance around on wee leather cowpats, so could he. No spurs? No problem. Nothing in the front to wrap your leathers and gear around? Fine. A girlish whip to tickle the geldings? Whatever you say. It’s your dollar, mate, so you can call the tune.

  His manager had taught him that he who pays the piper calls the tune. That was supposed to mean that those who paid you owned you. And Christ, had he been paid, thanks to Sydney, master teacher in the care and handling of the almighty shekel. But did that mean they owned me, Sydney? Collum smiled as he thought of his keeper, who was surely now wondering where the star was, and how he’d seemed to vanish off the face of the earth.

  How do you find the balls to disappear? Syd would be thinking.

  Because I call the tune, my Levantine business partner, and it ain’t the hora. Because money is not everything, and I would burn it all up in a pyre to have one night alone with my girl, Judy. She needs me and I need her, whether she admits it or not. We have a lot of catching up to do, a lot of scores to settle.

  And if she lacked the courage—well, he had played the hero enough times. He could take the lead. And here he was, so close already! With his taste for disguises and mastery of accents, he would not be easily discovered. He could bide his time, if he could just manage to get a job and blend in.

  But that was the trouble—he couldn�
��t blend in. It was like his first days in Australia, when everything about him was wrong—his language, his taste in foods, even his Catholic practices. They had laughed at him then, and he’d never forgotten it. They were laughing right now at these ranches.

  They laughed when he’d fallen off a huge gelding, trying to “post.” The minute his arse (in chaps) had left the whoopee cushion they called a saddle, the minute Collum had tried to mimic the weird up-down up-down of riders (nearly all sheilas in this part of poofterland), he had slipped out of the stirrups and slid earthward. And no horn to hold onto to get you back up! He’d wanted to sling his leg over but instead fell back to the dirt. The snickers! He had almost turned and smacked one of the cheeky looky-loos who’d mocked him. But attracting notice now was not an option. At least no one recognized him for now, in his western gear. He could have the last laugh, in time.

  Toward the end of the summer, his persistence finally paid off. Collum found a suitable place to work, right in the town where he needed to be, East Plum. (Thank you, Facebook.) Close enough, but not too close. A man could drive from there to Plum Grove in no time, but few could walk it in less than half a day. Perfect.

  His final job interview, though, was odd (like everything else around here). He tried to impress the jackaroos with how tough he was, how wonderfully quickly he could break down the meanest horse’s will. By now, he could even post; hell, if they gave him time, he could have learned the sidesaddle. But they were not impressed. The titters again! (Were they laughing at his bolo tie?)

  The manager of this farm asked Gretchen, one of the hands, to take Collum over and show him the stables. And slowly, then, he began to understand the kind of place this was. It was the kind of place Collum had never seen before, nor even knew existed.

  A place of gentleness, where force was unknown. A horse’s paradise, in fact, and in that sense a very Eden.