Replacement Wife Read online

  One night she convinced me to come along to a No Lights No Lycra dance get-together, in the basement of a forgotten church. Not only were there no lights and no lycra, there were also no shoes and no teacher, so we could all dance like no one was watching. It reminded me of how I had met Luke dancing in a club in Prahran; how he’d swung me around the dance floor, thrown me back passionately in his arms and kissed me for the first time.

  But he’d fooled me: he actually hated dancing. That must have been the one night in his life that he’d actually been on a dance floor. Dancing freaked him out. He hated people watching him move. He couldn’t so much as nod his head at a gig or raise a shoulder to a beat of music. Way back in the early days when he’d played his guitar, he’d even done that frozen still, carefully avoiding making any movement that wasn’t absolutely necessary. Any wedding we’d been to, he’d sat at the table the whole time, hiding, not so much a stick-in-the-mud as a whole-damn-immovable-tree-trunk-in-the-mud. I’d always had to find a substitute dance partner (an elated father of the bride or a drunk uncle) or join the group of desperate single girls.

  That night with Hattie, feeling that beat at No Lights No Lycra, something reawakened in me: memories of how I’d liked to dance once upon a time, had gone to clubs, danced for hours, didn’t even care who I was with, it was just me and the music and ten years of dance training that hadn’t gone anywhere except for those sticky dance floors. It had been important to me, had been a part of who I was, but somewhere along the way I had lost all that — that freedom to move, to be sexy and carefree.

  Afterwards, Hattie and I went and had a glass of wine in a bar nearby.

  ‘All the clichés are true: lesbians like cats and have long, slow, beautiful love-making sessions.’ Hattie said, taking her first sip of wine.

  ‘You’re killing me,’ I said. ‘Maybe I need a woman.’

  ‘What about Jarvis?’

  ‘I can’t stand to see him; I’m too scared of what may happen.’

  ‘Really? I thought you might have at least moved on to first base.’

  ‘Nup. I’m going so carefully here, I don’t want to stuff things up, you know. But you should read his messages. When it happens, it’s going to be amazing.’

  ‘What if he’s lousy in bed? Are you going to give up everything with Luke on the off-chance that things are going to be better with Jarvis? Wouldn’t you want to know first?’

  ‘Lousy in bed?’ I laughed. ‘He couldn’t be worse than Luke and I. We’re never intimate. I can’t tell you the last time we—’ It felt so embarrassing telling someone how estranged we’d become.

  ‘Why not? Has he . . . you know, problems down there?’

  ‘No, nothing like that.’ I sighed. ‘I don’t know. We have different schedules. We never go to bed at the same time. He says he’s tired all the time.’ It sounded so absurd when I said it aloud. ‘It was all right in the beginning, I guess. I mean, it wasn’t mind-blowing or anything, but it was okay. But these days, I’m probably keener than he is. It’s like he’s almost completely lost interest in it.’

  ‘Maybe he’s asexual?’

  ‘Maybe he’s just not into me. I don’t know. It’s been this slow, steady decline into nothingness . . . like, it would almost be weird to have sex with each other now. And for a long time I was okay with that, I thought it was kind of normal. I’m only just realising that I want affection in my life again. I’m starting to think that, with or without Jarvis, Luke and I are over. Jarvis is just making me realise it.’

  ‘Wow, that’s full on.’

  And it was full on. I’d only just articulated that to myself, but having sounded out those words it left me feeling incredibly sad.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Hattie asked.

  ‘Well, I’ve got Annie, the tutor, coming over every Wednesday night. She’s got two girls . . . long brown hair, quite attractive, very smart, although more in a science-y way than a creative way. But science is creative, yeah? Like, people have to have wild imaginations to ask big questions like “what if?”, don’t they?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘And then I’ve also introduced him to Suzi. She’s one of my true-crime authors.’

  ‘I thought you hated all of them.’

  ‘Well, yeah . . . but not this one. She’s okay. She has a boy who’s nine, and she’s got blazing red curly hair. At least she’s a writer — that’s creative, yeah?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I want Max to have a creative upbringing. Jeez, if I can’t be around all of the time, I at least want him to be with good people.’ It seemed as though my endorphins were falling by the wayside. I’d felt so uplifted half an hour ago, but I was feeling really miserable now. ‘I’m a real fucking mess. I’m not sleeping properly, I’m not eating, I’m lovesick. I’m a bitch to Luke. I’m impatient with Max. I’m scared of everything that’s going to happen in the future. I’m scared of wrecking everyone’s lives. It’s all really, really fucked.’ I took another sip of wine. ‘And maybe I just lied a minute ago. Maybe I would have been happy to be with Luke for the rest of my life if I hadn’t fallen for Jarvis. Perhaps I would have been content for us to grow old together, to have been at Max’s wedding together, like an old-school happily married couple. My thoughts and feelings change from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. I’m completely screwed and trapped.’

  Hattie was my oldest friend. We’d met at kindergarten and gone to primary school together. We grew up five streets apart, and her parents were still friends with my parents. She had seen me through all the stages of my life. She’d seen me freak out, she’d seen me fall in love, and she’d seen me be dumped, dust myself off and start again. But I’d never had this much at stake before.

  ‘Be careful, sweetie,’ she said to me, ‘Don’t rush anything. You’re not being forced to make any decisions. So take your time, see how you feel. I tell you what: I’ll make you a new hat. You can always love a beautiful new hat. That kind of love is uncomplicated.’

  I smiled.

  ‘Tell me what you’d like. But we’ll have to wait until the Spring Racing Carnival is over. I’ve got a million orders coming in. I had three hats ordered the other day from Gai Waterhouse. She likes my hats. Can you believe it?’

  ‘Of course. You’re very talented.’

  ‘I’m seeing something sensible for you: vintage green, 1920s. Something that goes with your dark hair. I’m thinking Natalie Wood in that red hat on a boat.’

  10

  By the sixth Wednesday-night maths session, Annie had retouched her makeup, and I didn’t think it was for Max’s benefit. She came laden as always with her worksheets and textbooks, but she was wearing a floral day dress, with a pastel green cardigan, and she looked very pretty. I thought perhaps Luke’s charms were working on her.

  He came into the kitchen for his 7.40pm coffee. I was sitting on the stool with some page proofs laid out on the bench, making as if I was working, but actually I was just keeping an eye on things. Annie crossed her legs and leaned in to point at a multiplication sign on Max’s worksheet. Some marble cleavage fell out of her black bra. She was turning into a real seductress, our Annie.

  Luke, bless him, didn’t say a thing. He just eyed her the way one views an attractive window display. He stirred sugar into his coffee, loudly, as though he was a chemist mixing the world’s greatest cure of all time. He lingered in the kitchen longer than usual, like a child hoping that someone was going to offer them a sweet biscuit from the pantry. But when he wasn’t offered anything, he crept back to the study to pay some invoices for the Patch.

  So it looked as though my bait was working a little. But it wasn’t the ideal environment for them to take it further. Max was there, sucking up Annie’s attention, and I was around, stifling the mood. I had to find a way to remove both of us from the situation.

  Jarvis and I had been corresponding for a few months by then, and had grown so close that I couldn’t imagine life without him. Our messages had
become more frequent, sometimes two or three a day. He’d started sending me photographs of a series of sculptures he was working on. Being into Hollywood kitsch, he was creating crazy zombie-like figures, covered in dangling golden tinsel. He wrote me long emails, pages and pages, about zombies in African and Haitian folklore and how this related to our mainstream obsession with B-grade pop culture. Looking back, even though I wasn’t able to admit it to myself at the time, I felt in my bones that I didn’t really like those golden zombie works, and I wondered whether anyone would like them. But I wasn’t qualified in any shape or form to make a judgment. I’d always been interested in art, but I wasn’t an educated critic. I merely knew what I liked and what I didn’t like.

  When he wrote about his artworks, Jarvis’s writing was peppered with overblown adjectives and half-baked ideas that tried — perhaps a bit too hard — to put his works in a socio-historical context. Even after reading two thousand words, I was baffled and had no idea how to even comment on his zombie works.

  But despite all of this, I had this overwhelming urge to look after Jarvis, to nurture him, take him under my wing and help him achieve those big dreams of his. I wanted to see him succeed, and I imagined myself as some sort of muse. I was Sunday Reed and he was my Sidney Nolan. He could cry his frustrations into my bosom and I could pat his head and say, ‘There, there, you’ll make it someday. Just get rid of that gold tinsel — surely you’ve got other ideas you can work on?’

  There was something so romantic about the idea of life with a tortured artist. Perhaps it was the unfulfilled writer in me coming out in my dreams for a relationship with Jarvis. I had once wanted to be a writer, but I’d had no interesting ideas, so I became an editor instead. And yet I’d never even landed a proper fiction edit. I’d wanted to be like Raymond Carver’s editor, the controversial one who helped shape his writing. There have always been great editors behind great works of literature, and there have always been great partners behind great artists. If I couldn’t edit fiction, then maybe being the partner of a great artist would do instead. And if he wasn’t great yet, then I was going to try my hardest to make him great, with a bit of tinkering here and there in the background and a few subtle suggestions. I planned to educate myself in everything to do with sculpture and installation art, just as I’d had to educate myself on everything to do with true crime. With my help, I was sure that Jarvis was going to make it big. And all this — his poverty and all my sacrifices — was going to be worth it.

  Jarvis spewed his passion out to me. He wrote things like: ‘If my heart was to burst open, your name would pour out.’ And I would lie on my bed and cry, so happy that there was someone in the world who had these enormous feelings for me.

  I began to wonder whether I could have my cake and eat it, too. Could I just have a conversation with Luke, tell him where I was at, that I felt like I had fallen in love with someone else? Perhaps I could be honest and ask him whether we could go on living as we were living for the sake of Max, so as not to upset things, but couldn’t I just have a bit on the side? Especially since he wasn’t wanting any bit of me. We could still do family things and keep up appearances, but every now and again, I could have my artistic lover?

  Couldn’t he say yes to this? But then if I told him, and he said no, everything would be over. I would lose everything. My beautiful house in Fitzroy, which we had worked so hard to purchase, those lime-green carpets that I had agonised over, the curtains that I had hand-stitched . . . all of that would have to be sold to some piranha who would get a good deal because the sellers were selling because of divorce.

  And what if he said yes, I could have a lover? How could I respect Luke, then? How could we make breakfast in our small kitchen together without him wanting to stab me in the back with a steak knife? Because surely he would hate me after all? And what kind of an environment was I bringing my son up in? Surrounded by messy feelings.

  All these questions and no answers, and all of it was one freaking headache. I was better off before all of this, even though a year ago my therapist had said that Luke and I needed marriage counselling. She had seen this coming, she said. She was not shocked by anything I told her, because she said it was understandable, given the state of our passionless marriage. I felt like a walking cliché of an unhappy wife in her mid-thirties. I wasn’t even an original.

  11

  I had my eye on Rita at school. Single mum of two boys, six and eight. Evan was in Max’s class. They weren’t best buddies, but they liked each other enough. I’d chatted to her a few times at school assemblies and at a fundraising event. She was a passionate Italian who had her own successful handbag design label. She was very skinny (unfortunately), had short dark hair that she wore in a bob, and when she spoke her eyes were often searching for one of her boys. She wore a lot of eye makeup and her foundation was on the orange side of the spectrum, but she had a pretty face. She was very confident, a little over-critical of Max and Evan’s current teacher for my liking, but overall she ticked lots of boxes.

  I tried to find out more about her from the other school mums. My friend Stacey thought that Rita’s husband had cheated on her and was now living in Queensland with the other woman. But my friend Jacinta said that they’d broken up amicably, that her ex was living in Brunswick and had the boys every second weekend. Bianca told me that Rita didn’t even have to work, that her ex was still taking care of them financially. And Megan thought that Rita’s ex had moved to the UK for work and he only saw the boys some school holidays. Whatever had happened, she was definitely a single mum, but she seemed like the good sort.

  I observed Evan one morning in class while I was helping out with the kids’ reading. He seemed like a nice boy. His hair was brushed, his uniform was worn neatly, and he did what the teacher asked him to do. He wasn’t a rowdy kind of boy. He seemed to be able to concentrate when the teacher asked them all to read to themselves for five minutes. When I got the chance, I asked him to come and read his book to me, and I discovered that he was as good a reader as Max, which must mean that his mum spent time with him and cared about his learning.

  ‘Do you like books, Evan?’ I asked at the end.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What do you read?’

  ‘Zac Power.’

  ‘Zac Power’s great, isn’t he? So funny.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I work with books. I’m an editor.’ He looked at me strangely, as if the reading mums weren’t supposed to have conversations with the kids. ‘Would you like to come over for a play one day?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Is your mum a happy lady?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Is your brother a nice boy?’

  ‘Most of the time. Except he won’t let me play with the iPad. He’s always on it. He scratched me this morning.’ Evan showed me some nail marks on his wrist.

  ‘Is he rough much?’

  ‘Not really. Just sometimes. If he gets angry.’

  ‘What does your mum do if he’s naughty?’

  ‘Sends him to his room.’

  Well, at least there was some sort of punishment. She wasn’t one of those lazy parents who let their kids get away with whatever they wanted.

  ‘Is that all?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Excellent reading. Thanks for that. You can get the next kid to come over.’

  12

  It was my sister-in-law Melissa’s fortieth and I knew that Jarvis would be there. Even though I lived in the same city as my brother, we only saw each other at special events: kids’ birthday parties, Christmases or get-togethers with friends. It was as though our relationship was safer in numbers. We liked each other, but we also liked the protection of having other people around us, in case we ran out of things to say to one another.

  They had another barbecue, the same format and pretty much the same menu as Chris’s had been. I almost couldn’t stomach the idea of Jarvis and Luke eating meat off the same hotplate. It was going to be awkward. I fe
lt as though my face was going to give the whole thing away, that Luke would be able to read Jarvis’s messages on my cheeks: our sex juices will dry on our skin, sticking us together forever like superglue.

  That morning, I woke up and did my ten-minute pilates DVD stomach set, because that always helped to take the edge off when I was feeling nervous. I ate a big breakfast of sunny-side-down egg and bacon on a slice of toast, then washed my hair with shampoo twice, because I couldn’t remember whether I’d used the shampoo already. I had a wardrobe meltdown. I tried on four favourite outfits and hated them all. I threw clothes all around the room before settling on the first arrangement I’d tried on. When I squeezed the pimple on the lower left of my chin, it bled, and my fringe wouldn’t settle properly when I blow-dried it, so I hopped back in the shower and washed my hair again. Out of the shower and dressed once more, I argued with Max about brushing his teeth, then argued with Luke about the type of shirt he should wear. Suspecting that my blood-sugar levels were dropping and that was making me cranky, I topped them up with a muesli bar — but then I argued with Luke about what time we should leave. I sent Max to his room for speaking back, before arguing again with Luke about how he never cleaned out the kitchen bin and how there was always rubbish juice swimming in the bottom and why should it always be me who cleaned out stuff like that. When we finally did leave, I realised five minutes down the road that I’d forgotten the present and the bowl of potato salad, and we had to go back and fetch them.

  Thank God Hattie was there, as she was friends with Melissa, too. Hattie had brought along her special new lady friend, Briar. I was keen to get to know Briar, but I felt distracted and unsettled. She didn’t seem to be very easy to talk to anyway. Answering my questions mostly in monosyllables, she didn’t ask me anything about myself. Without me having the enthusiasm to drive the conversation fully, it soon got stuck in the traffic of her aloofness.

  Luke stood around the barbecue with a beer in his hand, chatting. Max was off playing ball games with his cousins, and I sat on the deck, heart in mouth, palms sweaty, waiting for the moment Jarvis would appear. When he arrived, forty long, drawling minutes late, he walked through the back gate, patted the dog that was tied to the clothesline, kissed Melissa on the cheek, shook Chris’s hand and said ‘hi’ to Luke. It was such an absurd moment.