Replacement Wife Page 3

  ‘You should visit my husband’s garden,’ I said to them both, switching back to less work-related stuff. ‘It’s called Green Patch. It’s a rooftop garden for city people to rent veggie plots in recycled apple crates. Luke helps them out with advice and sells them seeds, and there are tools they can borrow in a shed. You should see the sunlight up there — everything flourishes. And they’ve recently opened up a café in a converted shipping container. They managed to poach the barista who used to work at Max’s in Carlton.’

  They were both looking at me a little strangely.

  ‘My husband’s going to grow a beard,’ I said, as a last-ditch effort. ‘They’re sexy, don’t you think?’

  Clean-shaven Dave didn’t seem to think so. The conversation turned back to the production process, who was doing what. Which was like, yeah, yeah, by now we’d all worked on three books together already, we didn’t need Dave telling us how to suck eggs.

  7

  I looked forward to every message Jarvis sent me. He introduced me to Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and taught me about the birth of masochism. He said he would like me to treat him as my slave, that there was ‘no equality in love’. He sent me a file of The Velvet Underground’s version of ‘Venus in Furs’ and an image of Titian’s ‘Venus with a Mirror’. He wrote: ‘Listen and look at this, my own goddess of love and beauty. I will do as you ask, but treat me kindly and we shall always have Cupid by our side. He has already pierced me with the golden arrow of uncontrollable desire.’ A message like this was a shot of adrenalin straight to my heart.

  I had so much to learn from him. He was my teacher in art, in life, but most of all in love. He wanted to be my slave and I wanted to be his student. In this relationship of ours, in the way we worshipped each other, it did feel as though there was no equality in love.

  He sent me a postcard in an oversized yellow envelope. He wrote no message, but the postcard featured an artwork by the South African artist William Kentridge. It was a black-and-white drawing of a man standing at the edge of the Earth with a black cat beside him. In capital letters along the top were the words HER ABSENCE FILLED THE WORLD. When I received the postcard, I held it up to my lips, then clutched it to my heart. I finally owned something Jarvis himself had touched. That postcard became more precious to me than my own wedding ring. I hid it where I knew Luke would never look — in the current book I was reading. In the evenings, I would open my book at the marked page, and there would be the postcard — proof that I filled someone’s world — and my heart would blossom with certainty.

  The intensity of how Jarvis and I were feeling for each other kept on rising. He sent me Leonard Cohen tracks to listen to, full of lust and yearning, songs such as ‘Take This Longing’ and ‘Ain’t No Cure for Love’ and ‘In My Secret Life’. There were all these mentions of thighs in Cohen’s songs, and then Jarvis wrote that he liked to imagine his chin on the hinge of my thigh. All of a sudden I had a fascination with a body part I had never so much as thought about before. Jarvis made even the ordinary seem magical.

  He created an image of an enduring passionate love I had never experienced in real life before. Luke and I got really comfortable really quickly. Before long, he took me for granted. But women need to be nurtured. They’re sexual beings, and they reach their peak in their thirties, just at the time men start to crave sleep more than they crave sex. Or at least that was the case with Luke.

  Luke worked hard at the Patch. It was physical work and he’d built the business up from nothing. He’d turned a concrete rooftop into a lush garden among the skyscrapers. I truly was proud of him and what he’d done. He’d had a beautiful vision, and he’d managed to achieve it. But the truth was he fed those herbs with more love than I got.

  I was like a plant with no water — withering, drying up, yellowing — and here was Jarvis offering me some fertiliser. He really dug me. His messages to me became more frequent and my thighs cried out for his touch. He once wrote that we would be like flesh-and-bone Lego together. It sent me wild. I feared seeing him, because I didn’t know if I would be able to control myself, I didn’t know what I was capable of. But I was also dying to see him.

  So my head was in turmoil. I would sit down to work in the study at home and I wouldn’t be able to make a start. I always had deadlines weighing heavily on me. But even the deadlines couldn’t make me start working. I’d get up and make another coffee — I wasn’t sleeping well, I would wake up at 1am, 3am, 5am, with exciting, racy scenes in my head, keeping me awake. I started listening to music as I worked, which I’d never done before, and it meant I could only work at about half my normal pace. I was trudging through the mud of love, a true sickness, a disease, a total distraction: it slowed me down and wore me out.

  I wasn’t my usual self. Tired, I became more impatient with Max than usual and less tolerant. Where before I used to sit down with Max after school and draw, or kick the footy out the back with him, now I found myself plonking him in front of the television so I could get some peace, and reread messages from Jarvis and listen to Cohen licking up some thighs.

  When I realised what I was doing to Max, I was devastated. He was the love of my life, the one who had brought goodness into my world; it was he above all others who had shown me what real love is. When Max was a newborn, I remember thinking that love for one’s child was far superior to any romantic love. So I wasn’t sure where I had gone wrong along the way, and why these feelings for Jarvis were overshadowing everything else in my life.

  I was lovesick, and it was unsustainable. Something had to happen. I couldn’t go on like this forever. So I emailed Suzi to see whether she wanted to meet up with us at the Patch with her boy the following Saturday. She took two days to reply to me. I thought perhaps I’d come on too strong and overstepped the mark. But finally she replied and said sure.

  8

  In preparation for Saturday, I talked up Suzi to Luke and cleared up the redhead question.

  ‘What do you think of redheads?’ I asked him, while he was reading the paper one morning.

  ‘Redheads?’

  ‘You know . . . ladies with red hair. If I’d had red hair would you have been into me?’

  ‘I guess so. I don’t mind them.’

  ‘Did you like the look of Nicole Kidman when she had red hair?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Do you think they have red pubes or brown pubes?’

  He was ignoring me now, totally immersed in the sports section. I could have laid my breasts out on the table and still he would have ignored me.

  I was just an annoyance to him. He would get in bed and turn his back to me. He would wriggle as far over to the other side of the bed as he could. Once upon a time, he’d stroked my back and rubbed my shoulders as we lay in bed talking about our days. We’d fallen asleep most nights with him holding me around the waist. But now, it was as though he was repulsed by me. A couple of times I’d found myself lying in bed, frustrated by images of Jarvis flashing in my head. I’d reached out for Luke, just to feel someone else’s skin, any skin, against mine. He’d swiped my hand away and told me he was tired. Romantically, we were fucked.

  And we were stuffed in other ways, too. Conversationally, for instance, as this talk about redheads showed. And when I’d talked about Suzi, about this amazingly bright writer with all these great ideas for a Martin Bryant book, all he’d said was ‘I thought you hated all those authors.’ He was like a tree-chopper in the forest, cutting down all my ideas for conversation: a knight with a silver shield, blocking any attempts at affection.

  ***

  So we met Suzi at the Patch. I’d managed to convince Luke not to shave that morning because I got the feeling that she liked rugged men. Suzi brought her son Brodie along, and I was keen to see how Brodie and Max would interact.

  I’d been at the Patch a lot when Luke was setting it up, but I didn’t go there that much anymore. It had been open for two years and perhaps I was bored with it. Six months earlie
r, I’d been excited by the new café in the converted shipping container. But after a while it felt like a bit of a trek into the city, and Luke was always busy and distracted when I got there. There was plenty of good coffee around Fitzroy, so I stopped visiting.

  I sat with Suzi and the boys on the red and green milk-crates, and we drank our coffee. I watched Luke talking to some visitors to the Patch. He had a natural, unforced charisma. I’d forgotten what he was like. At home, he walked around looking tired. He wore grey tracksuit pants that sagged around his bum. Even his face looked grey most days. He’d lost his animation, buried it in a pot of dirt somewhere. But watching him at work that day, I realised that this place, the Patch, got the best of him, and I got the worst of him.

  He made some time to come and sit with us, looking around distractedly, making sure that he wasn’t ignoring anything that needed to be done.

  ‘This is Luke,’ I said, ‘And this is Suzi, true-crime writer extraordinaire, single mother to Brodie.’ Luke looked at me as though I’d said something rude.

  ‘I like this place, it’s great,’ Suzi said. I knew she’d be impressed by it.

  ‘Luke went from working at a nursery for some asshole for almost ten years, to doing this,’ I said. ‘He planned the Patch for years. He knew exactly how he wanted everything to look, and it’s turned out just as he imagined.’

  Suzi tucked some curls behind her ears. The boys had finished their chocolate milkshakes and were getting restless on the crates.

  ‘Go and play some hopscotch,’ I suggested. They went and played behind the large water tanks, leaving the three of us alone.

  ‘Suzi’s a very talented writer,’ I said to Luke. ‘A great researcher. She certainly knows her stuff.’ As I was saying this, I remembered how much I’d bad-mouthed Suzi in the past about her incomplete material, her perverse interest in crimes against prostitutes, and her inability to recognise when a manuscript was complete. I even recalled the first time I’d received one of her freshly printed books from the publisher: I’d thrown it in the fire, saying ‘Burn, baby, burn.’ It had been a particularly difficult project, and Suzi had wanted to make big changes to the text right up until the end. I’d had to argue with her: ‘It’s going to print tomorrow. Tomorrow, do you understand? We can’t make another change.’ And even then she’d sent through another image of a raped and battered female corpse that we simply had to include. I think that I’d also told Luke that she didn’t know her theirs from her there’s, that she never provided captions, that all her dates needed triple-checking since she often wrote ‘1861’ instead of ‘1961’, that she had almost no care for detail. Yep, in the past, I hadn’t spoken very highly of her. But now here she was in all her fresh-facedness, sitting on one of his milk-crates, sipping one of the Patch’s coffees.

  ‘I’m just going to go and check out those patches over there,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you say that Movida had come on board and planted Spanish licorice? I’ve heard it’s the elixir of life. It’s supposed to increase sexual vigour.’ I stood up, leaving the two of them looking embarrassed, confused and somewhat anxious at being left alone like that. Perhaps I’d hurried away a little quickly, but I didn’t know how much time Luke had to spare. I snuck over to the rows of patches prospering in the heat of the city, cursing myself for saying ‘sexual vigour’. Of all the herbs to have chosen, why that one? It just slipped out of my mouth. Now she’ll be thinking Luke’s sexually inept, when I’m trying to seduce her on his behalf.

  The old wooden apple-crates were overflowing with tomato plants, pumpkins, basil, parsley, oregano, thyme, mint and chillies. I weaved my way through the crates, looking at the labels of some of Melbourne’s best restaurants and cafés and green thumbs that lived on the twentieth floor of a city apartment building. Down below, I could hear trams rattling down the street and the blended sounds of street performers, buskers and the ticking of a pedestrian crossing.

  I stood midway along the row, poked my head over a tomato trellis and watched Luke and Suzi in the distance. Their lips were moving, but they were very still and I couldn’t identify any attraction from their body language. But at least they were talking. And they were alone.

  It was quiet at the Patch that day. Usually, there were more people around, tending to their plots. They would bring along their own garden gloves and seedlings, and borrow small spades and pruners from the tin shed.

  An apprentice chef, dressed in his whites, was picking oregano and Continental parsley and putting them in a basket. The guy was pimply around his hairline from the oil in the kitchen. He looked sulky, like he’d been sent there against his will. He looked so Gen Y, organic herbs on a rooftop garden probably appeared passé to him.

  I wondered how many attractive female visitors Luke had here. I’d never thought much about that before. One of his employees, Jess, had been rather pretty. She was only in her late twenties, though, and she hadn’t lasted long. I wondered whether he’d ever flirted with her. I found it strange that I’d never thought about these things before. But then I felt utterly safe with Luke, so far from feeling any sort of jealousy. I cast my mind back to boyfriends in the past, and recalled feeling insanely jealous at times with them, yet I’d never felt that with Luke. I wondered whether he felt the same about me. Perhaps jealousy was a good thing. Perhaps if you felt insecure with someone it showed that you really cared about them.

  From afar, I watched Luke talking to pretty Suzi, and I felt nothing. I willed some sort of tugging at the heart, but it didn’t come. It almost felt as though I could have thrown him overboard from some ship and felt only relief and some sort of excitement over the life insurance I would get.

  I wondered whether I would miss him. He was the father of my boy, the one who had watched me give birth, holding my hand and narrating what was happening down at the business end, when Max poked his head out into the world. We’d been so close to each other in those early days; we’d been best friends, taken on everything together, we’d finished each other’s sentences. It made me so sad to think about how far we had travelled away from each other since those early years. We’d been two seeds in a pod once upon a time, but had been dropped on the ground, and a bird had taken off with one of the seeds, and the other seed had gotten stuck under somebody’s shoe. We’d both ended up in entirely different destinations.

  I wondered whether maybe it was me. Maybe I was the sort of person who should be alone for life. Perhaps Luke was right when he said I would never be satisfied. Maybe I would end up feeling bored by whomever I was with. How long can one maintain their spark for someone? Not long, I suspected. Perhaps long-term relationships were a crazy idea. I liked the thought of having someone in my old age to mow the lawns for me, but would I want to sleep next to their wrinkly body and smell their root canal breath? Would there ever be anyone who wouldn’t end up annoying me eventually? Would Jarvis end up irritating me, like Luke did?

  And what if Jarvis fell out of love with me, like Luke seemed to have? I think Luke still loved me, in his own way, but it wasn’t mad, passionate love: it was dull, lifeless companionship. What if this happened again? I didn’t know whether I could face a dying love again, it was soul-destroying.

  ***

  Later that night, after Max was in bed, Luke muted the television, turned to me and said, ‘What was with you today, running off like that and leaving me with Suzi? What was I supposed to talk about with her? It was awkward.’

  ‘I just wanted to check out the patches.’

  ‘You can’t stand the Patch,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I can. I love the place. I’m always talking about it.’

  ‘I know. You love telling everyone else how fantastic it is, but you never like talking about it with me. If I mention the Patch, you basically roll your eyes as though you’ve had enough of the whole thing.’

  ‘That’s not true. I’ve supported you with everything. I’ve let you follow your dream. Not many wives would take the sorts of risks that I have, with this huge b
usiness loan hanging over our heads. We haven’t had a holiday in two years. And you’re never around on Saturdays.’

  ‘What bullshit. I’m finished by 3pm every day so I can pick Max up from school. You’ve got it better than most women — I completely share the load.’

  Luke loved telling me that I had it better than most women. But I often wondered whether those women with the lousiest husbands were having the most amazing sex.

  ‘And maybe once in a while you could tell me that you’re proud of me,’ he continued, ‘instead of telling everyone else. Maybe you could make me feel good.’

  ‘I do make you feel good,’ I said. ‘And what about you? When do you make me feel good about myself? You can’t even stand to touch me.’

  ‘Not this again.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you? When are we going to talk about this? I’m looking the best I’ve looked in years. Some other men wouldn’t be able to keep their hands off me. I’m wasted with you, completely wasted.’

  Yep, we were pretty much fucked, and I couldn’t even feel it in my heart to care much, because I knew I was on the way out. In the past, if we’d had an argument I would have turned on the waterworks and lain face-down on the bed until he came to soothe me. But I didn’t even care enough to let it escalate to that level of intensity. I decided not to waste my energy; it was the same old discussion over and over again. I lay down on the bed and read Lady Chatterley’s Lover instead, and left Luke — grey-faced, grey-panted, grey mood — watching TV in the living room.

  9

  I was envious of Hattie. She’d joined a bi/lesbian meet-up group and was going out most nights of the week, exploring this new sexuality of hers, pashing new women in dark bars. It sounded as though she was a fish swimming in a sea of passionate sharks.