The Life to Come. Michelle De Kretser

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СКАЧАТЬ Cassie took out her notebook and wrote:

      The Problem with Shirley Hazzard

      1. She is a woman.

      2. She is a great artist.

      3. She is fearless.

      4. She has stayed away instead of coming home to be punished for 1–3.

      When she reported her conversation with Leanne to Ash, he replied that he wasn’t surprised. “Every Friday afternoon, Leanne shuts herself into her office and reads Who. Cover to cover, every week without fail. She’s a perfect example of a type in the humanities, caught between theory and trash. Of course Shirley Hazzard’s beyond her.” Hazzard was the one Australian novelist Ash had read (under the impression that she was American).

      “How do you know what Leanne reads?” asked Cassie, thrilled.

      “A library meeting got shifted to Friday lunchtime at short notice. Leanne sent apologies. I bumped into her later on, and she confessed why she hadn’t turned up.” Ash went on, “The problem with Leanne is that she’s invented a story about Asians and wants to stick us in it.”

      Cassie was about to tell him that Leanne had objected to Hazzard’s depiction of a North African country, not an Asian one. Then it struck her that it was the first time she had heard Ash refer to Asians as “us.”

      He said, “You mustn’t repeat what I’ve told you, obviously.”

      She wondered which disclosure had alarmed him.

      It was summer, a season that lasted from the beginning of Novem-ber to the end of March. Light fell in yellow sheets. The true Sydney weather set in, damp and hot. Cassie’s velvet dresses had given way to denim miniskirts and limp floral shifts. She told Ash, “Summer Hill’s a size-twelve suburb. All the women there have two kids, and the secondhand shops are full of the clothes they can’t fit into anymore. That’s where I come in.” The shifts, and the sleeveless cotton tops that showed her bra straps, were easier to remove than the lilac blouse but made her seem ordinary. Ash spent November marking essays in his tower. A student quoted Marx: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” It was an observation that had long exercised Ash. It was self-evidently true. But did it matter?

      Pollution veiled the city in brownish gauze and obscured Ash’s view of Botany Bay. But if he craned his neck he could see a jacaranda flowering in a park. By the middle of the month the tree was exactly poised between fullness and decay. Ash saw a pillar that ran between a carpet and a cloud, both the color of Cassie’s blouse. There were jacarandas in his street as well; Ash’s shoes slipped on petals after a storm. One day he saw a wondrous thing: a car made out of flowers. Drawing closer, he realized that fallen blooms had covered an old Holden set on blocks under a tree. Ash had received an interesting e-mail that morning. At the conference in Canberra, he had met an Iranian-Canadian anthropologist. She had skin like an apricot. Now she had wangled him an invitation to a symposium in the States. Ash was thinking about that.

      Cassie was thinking about Christmas. She was sure there would be invitations for Ash: to Yukkendrearie and the Hunter Valley and an assortment of celebrations in Sydney. Cassie hoped that he would go north with her to her parents. Pippa, to whom she confided this wish, said, “Parents and Christmas—sounds like the full catastrophe.” Pippa’s aura was invariably the muddy green that signified professional resentment and low self-esteem. She had met Ash at last, at a harbor bar one evening. Ash and Cassie got there first, and Ash ordered champagne: the real deal, French. Pippa arrived alone, perfume-first. Her hair, newly styled, was combed over her forehead. “It’s a pixie cut,” said Pippa, touching it in answer to Cassie’s compliment. Ash kissed her on both cheeks. Cassie knew that Pippa would remember this display of middle-class pretension; an evil teacher in her first novel had been in the habit of campaigning for animal rights and kissing everyone she met. The Moët, too, would be a black mark.

      Pippa said, “Matt says hi and he’s so sorry. He got his dates mixed up—he has a school concert on tonight.” For Ash’s benefit, she explained that Matt was a music teacher. Pippa was wearing dangly earrings, and an intensely pink dress with straps that crossed at the back. Whenever Pippa got dolled up, Cassie was reminded of weddings in their country town: the frocks, hairstyles, and makeup that aspired to the social pages of provincial newspapers and whispered of tightly banked-down fear.

      Ash informed Pippa that he intended to buy her novel and read it over Christmas. “Oh, please don’t feel you have to,” said Pippa. “You’ll probably hate it.”

      “Why do you say that?”

      “Well, you know. It’s a small book about a family. No one could call it a masterpiece.”

      Ash was flummoxed by this, Cassie could tell. He had spent the best part of a year in Australia but still couldn’t read the signs that shouted, Reassure me, please! He said, “Tell me what I should read to really get a handle on Australian fiction.”

      “Patrick White,” Cassie heard. “Christina Stead.” At the next table, backpackers were shouting with laughter and drinking beer. Cassie turned her head to look at the view. The view, like champagne, amplified every emotion that was offered to it. When Cassie turned back to the others, she saw that Pippa looked superb. Her neck and arms glowed. Ash mirrored her resplendence: his teeth gleamed, and his shirt. Pippa was telling him that she always kept a notebook to hand in which she recorded observations and snatches of conversation. “It’s a way of keeping my writing honest.”

      “Do you know Cassie’s theory that handwriting is dying out?”

      “The world is one amazement after another to Cassie,” said Pippa with airy treachery. “You know she was homeschooled until the age of twelve, right?”

      That night, Cassie told Ash, “You’ve never asked me for suggestions about books to read.”

      “Darling Cassie,” said Ash. He had recently begun to address her that way, she noticed, not just saying “Darling,” which might have suggested affection, but “Darling Cassie,” as if soothing a cantankerous child. She also noticed that the reflection from the bedside lamp hung in the window in a disturbing sort of way. It occurred to her that she had ended up drinking quite a lot of champagne. “Darling Cassie,” Ash went on, “did you hear me trying to talk to your friend about the elections? She said she couldn’t bring herself to vote for the Greens because the guy handing out their How to Vote cards looked like her father. Every conversation led back to her. A narcissist, like all artists.”

      When Cassie called Pippa to find out what she thought of Ash, Pippa said, “If I found him in my bed I wouldn’t sleep in the bath.” It was a formula taken over from a young Frenchwoman who had taught at the girls’ school for a year, and still carried a corrosive charge of teenage contempt. Cassie could remember lying on her bedroom floor with Pippa’s head in her lap while they agreed that they didn’t have the same taste in men. By this they meant that Pippa was in thrall to the surly, pretty countenances of Duran Duran, while Cassie had discovered the Cure.

      Cassie told Pippa, “You made quite an impression on Ash. He calls you an artist.” Early on in their relations, Cassie had hit on the strategy of dousing the envy that flickered up in her around Pippa with a stream of compliments. Even when the compliments were more or less fabrications, it worked. There remained the stark fact that Pippa was an artist and Cassie was a student. “Student” brought to mind something squidgy and malformed like a snail without a shell. Cassie took her phone into her СКАЧАТЬ