A Short History of Richard Kline Page 8

  It wasn’t a grand passion; in truth he had never known one, and for all that he had had his share of infatuations, they tended to dissolve with intimacy. But Zoe and he were a fit. Whenever he saw her he felt a sense of relief, as if, at last, he was where he should be: in the right place. And there was trust. Zoe was straightforward, honest in all her responses, unlike Jo, who had been avid one minute, cool the next, always nurturing some unspoken resentment. The fact that Zoe seemed uncomplicated was a large part of her appeal. After all, wasn’t he complicated enough for both of them? Jo had been soulful and highly strung, and what at first had seemed fascinating and romantic had become, in the routine of day-to-day living, both enervating and unsettling. The ground was always sliding out from under him in tiresome and hysterical ways. Zoe was more fixed. She was practical, well organised and athletic. She would be loyal and dependable, and in the protective aura of her common sense he would be relieved of his angst.

  Summer came early and they began to spend their weekends at the beach. He found himself basking in the mindlessness of it: this was how life should be. In the past he had wanted too much, made things too complicated.

  And there was something else. Zoe had a warm family who welcomed him into their comfortable home, and he was especially drawn to her father, Joe Mazengarb. Rick had never met an older man who was so engaging and demonstrative, or such a vibrant and energetic talker. Joe was also a great and cynical reader, a kind of wily littérateur who liked to quote from the classics.

  The two men began to play squash together every week in an edgily competitive way. Joe was small and lean and fit, with cropped hair and a black, close-trimmed beard with so little grey in it that Rick wondered if he dyed it out of vanity. For Joe was vain, meticulously tailored and, unlike many men, not afraid of colour, being especially fond of a bright red cardigan that Zoe had given him.

  In some ways Joe was the kind of man Rick had once aspired to be: prosperous, successful, comfortable in his cynicism. His worldliness was seductive. Joe had a way of taking liberties with any room he happened to be in. If he dropped in on Rick at his office (they worked within a block of one another), he would stub the butt of his cigar out in the paperclip tray on the desk. At home it would be the tea tray, sometimes even the soil of his wife’s bonsai maple that sat in the middle of their coffee table. If they met in a restaurant, Joe treated it as his private club. He had a kind of man-of-the-world ease and assumption of privilege that Rick envied, and he wanted to fathom it. No-one, he felt, could be that sure of himself. Beneath that suave surface there must be some self-doubt.

  The rapport between the two men had been instant. Each recognised in the other a common apprehension that life was absurd, only in Joe’s perception it was comically absurd, in Rick’s more gloomily so. Joe was particularly fond of telling stories of idealists who had got it all wrong, utopian dreamers who had made a mess of things. In this way he liked to demonstrate his superiority as a hard-nosed thinker and rationalist. As a litigation solicitor, he was full of stories so preposterous they could only be true, but these amused him less than the follies of those he thought of, and tended to disparage, as ‘dreamers’. When Zoe and Rick came over for dinner on a Sunday evening Joe would wait until Zoe and her mother, Sally, were exchanging confidences in the kitchen, and then he would get out the whisky and draw Rick into some long and rambling narrative that only ever had the one moral point: to illustrate the comic pathos of that absurd animal, Man.

  On one of these occasions, Joe was keen to discuss a book he had just read, a biography of Byron. He relished the story of Byron’s efforts to bury the body of his friend Shelley on a beach in Italy, for it had proved to be exactly the kind of absurd theatre of delusion that excited him. Shelley had drowned at sea when his yacht was caught in a storm, and, soon after, his body was buried unceremoniously on the beach where it had washed up. But his friends, Byron among them, wanted to stage a burial befitting a poet. In imitation of the ancient Greeks, Joe explained, they had a pyre made by a blacksmith in a nearby village. They carted it to the beach, where they erected it on the sand and stacked it with wood. Next they dug Shelley’s corpse up out of its sandy grave, and it was a gruesome sight, for the face had turned dark blue from the effect of the lime. They laid the body on the pyre, poured oil and wine over it, and lit the flames. Then they stood and watched as it burned, and Joe was graphic in his description of how the skull had cracked open and the brains had boiled as if in a cauldron. (Byron proved to have a weak stomach and rushed into the sea to throw up.)

  Finally, when the body had been reduced to grey ash, the onlookers found to their great surprise that the heart had refused to burn. Reaching into the fire, one of them snatched it from the coals and put it in his pocket to preserve for posterity. This, said Joe, gave rise to a romantic legend that the poet’s heart was indestructible, but the joke was on the onlookers. It couldn’t have been the heart that wouldn’t burn – it would have been the liver, gorged with stale and useless blood and too liquid to ignite.

  ‘All that palaver about the liver,’ Joe exclaimed with satisfaction. ‘How romantic is that! These men of letters, they weren’t anatomists, they got things wrong.’ And he banged the coffee table, lightly, with an open palm, so that the bonsai trembled. ‘It’s a category mistake made by all romantics. I call it the liver syndrome.’

  This story gave rise to one of Joe’s scornful epithets. Anything deluded he would dismiss by saying, ‘We’re dealing with liver syndrome here,’ or, ‘Sounds a bit liverish to me.’ Rick was not entirely in sympathy with this line of thought, but on the other hand, he asked himself, how many fathers-in-law read biographies of Byron? At least Joe didn’t talk about his investments or his golf handicap.

  As Zoe and Rick spent more time together, he resolved to tell her about his black moods. It would be a test of their relationship because in essence he would be owning up to who he really was, and this was tantamount to issuing a warning: if she decided to love him, all was not going to be sweetness and light.

  Her reaction pleased him. She told him how as a girl of fifteen she had been troubled for a whole year that her life would never make sense. But in time she had found her role as a manager. She could create order, it was her gift, and if nothing else, she could make her part of the world function from one day to the next. It was as if something clicked into place. She had no trouble giving orders and exercising authority; it came to her naturally, and others accepted what she said. Rather than her father’s flamboyant and somewhat theatrical displays of conviction, she had her mother’s steady self-possession, a quiet authority. And she’d learned that the thing to do was not to ask the big questions – what is the significance of this in the evolution of the universe? – but to concentrate on the small. How can I fix this problem in front of me now? And more often than not, she could fix the problem, or fix it enough for things to work, or go on working until, as she put it, someone came up with a better idea. She was, in short, free of the taint of perfectionism.

  He decided she was the sanest person he had met.

  A year later, they were married in Joe and Sally’s garden. The ceremony was simple and there was an unlikely last-minute guest at the wedding – Jim Hagen. Jim had emailed to say he was flying in for a lightning tour of the outback – ‘keen to see your big red rock’ – and maybe they could meet up.

  Rick was pleased to hear from Jim, and curious. He wondered how Jim would look: would he still bear the marks of grief? But no, there he was, his old self, lean and manic and accompanied by his fourth wife, Birgit, who was Danish. Did he still have the villa? Rick asked. No, said Jim, he had sold it after Leni’s death. The villa was for Leni. But he knew how much Rick had ‘loved the place’ (where did he get that idea?) and as a wedding gift had brought him a valuable eighteenth-century engraving of the villa, which Leni had acquired. ‘You always took an interest,’ he said. And Rick was touched; until the day he died, Jim would be a surprising man.

  Lat
er, as Zoe examined the lithograph, she turned it over and found there was some writing on the back: ‘As close to heaven as heaven can be.’ Rick recognised the handwriting; it was Jim’s.

  ‘What does he mean by that?’ Zoe asked.

  ‘We never figured that out,’ he said. But the engraving of the villa spooked him, and he wrapped it in an old yellow blanket and propped it against the back wall of the garage.

  In the early years of marriage to Zoe he felt normal. Often the words would come to him: this is how life should be. At first the fires of the body burned bright, until in time the sex became more or less routine, as it always did, the flames reduced to gently glowing coals. But that was okay; he was older now, he had a more mature perspective on things, and he knew better than to think an endless pursuit of the flame, the hot flaring moment, was going to lead him anywhere new. And he loved his wife, and trusted her in a way he had not been able to trust any other woman. She had grown to know of his black moods, of the brooding and withdrawn silences that cast a grey blanket over the house, but she was an active woman and at these times, instead of badgering him, she simply got on with her life and left him to it.

  And then something else came into the equation. His son was born, stirring in him an attachment he had not been able to imagine. For years he had resisted this yoke, but when it came his surrender was sudden and complete. He knew the moment he set eyes on that bloodied little body that he would never leave Luke, and that some new configuration of odds had come into his life. Clearly not all men felt this way or they wouldn’t abandon their children, but something else must be going on there, some other kind of pain or blight on the soul that he had escaped. There had been moments before Luke was born when he had asked himself: how do people bear their lives? Not only their own misery, but also the misery of the world they looked out on? Then he became a father and the answer was given.

  Not that he had wanted to have children: on the contrary. He knew that once he had a child, things would never be the same; it (the child) would become painfully wedged in his psyche like a troublesome diamond, a golden thorn in the heart. But he had been able only to imagine the drawbacks: the responsibility, the relentless presence, the constraints, the anxiety, the potential for loss. What he couldn’t imagine was the sheer animal pleasure of cradling that little body, the smell of him, the early perfection of the bud – and he was perfection, he was unmarred, which was just as well, because Rick knew he didn’t have the generosity of spirit to love anything less.

  Perhaps because his son was the only person he loved more than himself, some of Rick’s melancholy and boredom fell away. Luke became a lens, a refracting prism through which things he had once scorned, or been oblivious to, acquired meaning. His son gave him pleasure in the ordinary. Not that this was a cure for his restlessness; from the time of Luke’s birth his discontent was always there, like rising damp, but never with the same degree of hollowness. With a child, you always had a reason to get out of bed in the morning. There was something more to your life than the seductive phantoms, the metallic aftertaste of your own ego. And a child had a way of making the mundane seem enchanted. Take those wintry Saturday mornings on the soccer field: the glittering white crust of frost on the grass, small boys and girls breathing gusts of steamy vapour into the air, a line of bare sycamores along a creek, the list to one side of a Japanese maple behind the goal, its perfect tilt of asymmetry. And the magic circle around the playing field, parents and grandparents stamping their feet behind the white chalk markings to relieve their chilled toes, clapping their gloved hands together, shouting at their children, earnest prodigies in floppy shorts. The skinny, awkward bow-legged kid who seemed hardly able to walk without tripping over his feet but could run with jagged speed and who scored every week, sometimes twice. The stocky boy who tried hard but miskicked so often he would beat his head with his fist, over and over, until his mother sang out, ‘It’s okay, Stuart, it’s okay!’ (Someone needed to explain to her that having your mother sing out from the sidelines was no consolation. Where, Rick wondered, was his father?) At the end of the game the two coaches would shepherd their charges into the centre of the ground, and there, massed in a weary huddle, the kids would stand awkwardly to give the opposing team three cheers. No matter how half-heartedly they were offered, those cheers could move him.

  Yes, in the years following his marriage it seemed as if he were on a roll, as if he had crossed a frontier. He was head-hunted to set up the project team for innovation in a prestigious software firm, while Zoe and he eased into an affectionate groove of mutual understanding. He felt at last that he was maturing, settling equably into early middle age and that the brooding demon of his youth had migrated to another planet. At odd times he would find himself thinking of Sarah Masson, and talking to her in his head. It had been years since he last saw her, although for a while after meeting Zoe he had continued to visit intermittently in a natural diminuendo of contact, until one evening he wrote out his last cheque.

  It was May 17 (he remembered the date because it was the day before Zoe’s birthday) and he had brought with him a bunch of flowers and a bottle of champagne. Sarah had smiled enigmatically and said, ‘Any time you feel the need for a booster, I’m here.’ And he had thanked her again and kissed her on the cheek and said, yes, he knew, and he really appreciated all that she had done for him. But in his heart, he knew, he just knew, that he’d never be back again.

  He had fallen into something called normality.

  He had grown up.

  Then came the drop, like a trapdoor had opened beneath his feet. Everything at work began to jar, to shudder and crack under the pressure of the recession. He had to shrivel his team from eleven into five, an impossible number, and the hours they worked were insane.

  He knew that his protégé, Jason, had a coke habit but was shocked to discover he had moved on to heroin. Someone left an anonymous note on Rick’s desk, someone perhaps who wanted Jason’s job, or envied his preferment. What could he do about it? He was struggling to manage his own stress, in the office all day Saturday and sometimes Sunday morning. And drinking more at night. Sometimes, at work, it was as if pieces of him and everyone else were strewn around the floor, and they scarcely had enough energy to pick themselves up, like broken tin men, and put themselves back together for the evening drive home.

  Anger began to fester, slow and insidious. In his sleep he ground his teeth from the strain of it and woke in the mornings with his jaw clamped and aching; that is, if he slept at all, for he was working long hours and was over-tired, and even when he did sleep it was as if he were cursed by an underlying alertness for which there was no off button. He was a machine in sleep mode, in a state of low-power readiness, a body apparently at rest but really only in a condition of diminished operation.

  On the drive home, stuck in traffic, he would bang with a loose fist on the steering wheel of the car, robotically, over and over. Often now he was late, and Zoe and Luke would eat without him. Sometimes Zoe waited but he was too exhausted to talk much and wanted only to slump with a glass of red in front of the idiot box. And this was all for what? In his twenties he had thrown himself into his work in a gung-ho way and it had been not been difficult to cover his tracks during the black periods. But now the future was no longer an ocean of possibility, more like a river where the waterline was slowly receding in the face of recurrent drought.

  He was forty-two and he was stalled. Too often, mostly around three o’clock in the afternoon, he felt as if time was standing still. And he wondered: was this a mid-life crisis? There were days when his mortgage felt like a leaky barge, on others a concrete bunker. There were mornings when he was fuggy, late afternoons when he was brittle.

  And then it happened, the thing he feared most: his work began to bore him. He saw that there was just work and more work, the next project and the next, and the one after that. They were all just marking time until they died, pretending that the game was important, that the game could no
t do without them.

  His old ennui returned, only now the torment was worse. There was no longer the future to look forward to; he was in it. The back end of the future had arrived and it was no different, no more satisfying than the rest of his life. As for the front end, he could read the projections. He hadn’t even got there yet and already it was failing him.

  He began to have night rages and would wake in the dark with fists clenched, or an aching jaw from grinding his teeth. He became increasingly sensitive to noise, and the least thing would set him off into a hair-trigger tantrum.

  One night he was disturbed around 3 am by a shouting match below the bedroom window. He thumped downstairs, threw open the front door and shouted at two men and a woman who were arguing drunkenly by the fence. One of them moved threateningly to open the gate, and that gesture of transgression sent him over the edge. Instinctively he moved towards the stranger, ready for whatever might be coming, and gashed his toe on the edge of the brass sweeper, which had begun to come away from the front door. He could feel the blood trickling over his toenail as he kept his eyes on the stranger, who at that moment was backing off, retreating in an aria of screamed obscenities.

  He closed the door and turned back for the bedroom, only to find Zoe at the bottom of the stairs, furious.

  ‘You idiot!’ she seethed. ‘They could have worked you over well and truly! You don’t know what they’re on or what they’re carrying. Or if they’ll come back!’