On Lust and Longing Read online

  This, our final meeting, took place in his chambers. I had gone there to seek legal advice when I was in strife, in 1961. He was the only lawyer I knew and one of the few adults I believed I could trust to keep a secret.

  His room was impressive: wood-panelled, its glazed bookcases filled with legal works, its chairs and a chesterfield upholstered in dark red leather that had a pleasingly well-worn texture. His tipstaff had shown me in and invited me to sit on the chesterfield until the Judge arrived. He entered, straight from hearing a case. He was unaware he had a visitor and when he saw me, smiled with delight. It’s odd the details one remembers: I have a photographic image of my dress that day. It was made of black and white gingham, with a gathered skirt and a scooped neck which complimented my colouring and small-waisted figure (like a lot of pretty girls I never really believed I was, but worried about my physical faults). His Honour sent the tipstaff outside to make tea and, falling to his knees on the rug in front of the chesterfield, his black robe billowing around him, he dived his hands up my thighs. I was taken off-guard, for I believed that because I did not find him attractive now, he would not find me desirable either. But my ex-beloved persisted in trying to put his head under my skirt becoming, suddenly, grotesquely funny. Not world-weary, but bored to death with the narrowness of his life. Not passionate, but selfish. Not jaunty, just a fool. The wonderful being whose dark eyes had yearned for me was transformed into a silly old goat in a white horsehair wig.

  Three years earlier I had fallen out of love with him, but a feeling of tenderness had lingered.

  For months, I had been watching his behaviour without, as it were, seeing it. In his flat I saw him squeeze a woman’s backside as he walked past. Seconds later, he squeezed another woman. I went into his kitchen and saw him kissing a third one. I overheard my mother and a friend discussing him: he had made a pass at each of them. My mother was deeply offended. She and her friend were conferring on how they could stop social contact without hurting his wife. The sight of his manicured hand lingering on the silk taffeta behind of a matron was familiar enough, but I put it in a cupboard of ignorance and shut the door. There were unknowable influences in his life against which I felt that struggle, even the struggle to understand, was futile.

  Then one day on the bus to school the housekeeper’s son came and sat beside me. Somehow, we began talking without embarrassment. He had something he wanted to say, and after a bit of chit-chat, he did. It was that the Judge was molesting him. He did not know what to do. He knew, either because the Judge had told him or because he was savvy enough to work it out for himself, that I too was an object of His Honour’s attentions. He wanted to warn me. He wanted to share his secret. He found the Judge’s embraces repulsive but he feared for his mother: if he objected, he believed she would be given the sack.

  My anger at the Judge’s misuse of power and at his treachery to me was like fire. I thought, ‘If I tell Daddy he’ll fix—’ But immediately I realised it was far too late for that revelation: my father was protective of me and all weak creatures—he was the sort of man who would run into a burning building to save a dog—but he was also very aggressive and strong. He had been a New South Wales champion surfboat rower, lifesaver, and amateur champion boxer, middle-weight and light-heavy weight. Sometimes I saw a baffled expression cross his face when, tightening something carefully, as he thought, it broke in his hands. I feared he would break the Judge’s bones.

  A few days later His Honour was waiting at the bus-stop. He liked to call me ‘ma petite souris blanche’ (my little white mouse), souris blanche being a traditional character in school French texts. I still have somewhere a handsome book on archaeology inscribed in his spiky writing to ‘ma petite …’, but his pet white mouse was dead. I walked along Darling Point Road beside him playing the usual word games and feeling hard with scorn. As we approached my house I remember turning to snort, ‘don’t be ridiculous!’

  I had just ended my first affair. He and his wife are long since dead and I now remember them with fondness and amusement. I believed at the time—and still do—that, as far as I was concerned, it would have been tragic to arraign him for sexually molesting a minor—what he did to his housekeeper’s son is another matter. I was luckier than that boy. Although I was a rather sensitive child, I came from robust stock. We thought of ourselves as movers and shakers. I always felt that my relationship with the Judge continued according to my will, not his, and that he was doing me a favour in initiating me into the world of sin I was so eager to know. He encouraged in me a sense of equality vis-à-vis men. I learned from knowing him not to be awed by status, I learned that because a man wears tailor-made suits and people bow as he appears, he is not therefore sane, good, and sincere. Chances are he is mad, bad and dangerous to know, like the Judge. I learned from him too that sinners are often comic.

  I was soon to discover another face of sin.

  In the New Testament, the Greek word translated as sin literally means ‘to miss the mark’. It is a term from archery. Sexual sin, therefore, is the arrow that fails to reach love. But here’s the catch: as the arrow approaches, the target vanishes. It reappears later, of course. Only then can one see if one’s aim was true. I have often been in love and realised afterwards it was not love at all, but a bargain: you please me—I’ll please you. To love one who displeases, that is hard.

  In the summer of 1961, soon after I turned seventeen, I was in love and willing to make any sacrifice for it.

  My parents had brought me up with a love for intellectual liberty, tolerance, and perhaps unintentionally, with romantic ideals. We were a demonstrative family. My father gave his men friends smacking kisses. We were unembarrassed about showing love for others. By the age of seventeen, love for me included sex—and in seventy-five different flavours, all of them produced by one mesmerising being, a wild man from Warsaw. A defector, escapee from Stalinism, writer, drinker of vodka, dancer of Cossack dances (when drunk), speaker of outlandishly-fractured English, an enchanted being. But my family said he was merely a toad in toad’s clothing. I was their princess.

  Each birthday from puberty the dowager empress of our family, my great Aunt Blanche, had given me a piece of jewellery towards a dowry. From the same age, I had been forbidden to walk in my tennis dress in the street in case the King of Hell, in the guise of Abe Saffron whose throne was in nearby Kings Cross, should abduct me. I had attended the fourth-year school dance, escorted by a young man whom my father had chosen from among the cadet journalists in his office. My escort was required to collect me in a chauffeured hire car and bring me home again by 11pm. He arrived with a spray of gardenias that, pinned to my waist, filled the interior of the car with luxurious scent. For the end-of-school party the following year, the same routine was observed by the same very personable young man. I was not allowed out with any boy whose character had not passed the scrutiny of my father. The world was misogynist and a dangerous place for women, especially ones ‘of flamboyant appearance’ like me, he said. He had taught me basic unarmed combat—‘If one arm is free: index and middle fingers rigid, straight into the eyes. Hard knee jerk, up into the genitals. Head down. When he clutches himself his head will come forward. Lift your skull quickly hitting him under the jaw with the top of your head. That will knock him unconscious. Now, if you’re seized from behind …’. He was years ahead of his time, carrying all the baggage of the patriarchy and adamant in his conviction that women had to stand up for themselves not just intellectually but physically, and that they would be able to do this only if they could react fearlessly to attack.

  Out sailing, someone who had come along as crew for the day, finding himself alone with me in the confined dark space below decks, would sometimes grab me for a squeeze and a kiss, quick and watchful because up above, on deck, was he of the terrible fists. In the wide, sunlit, pagan world I inhabited Aphrodite danced across the beach of my imagination, leaving a trail of footprints I longed to follow. I did not respond by stabbing out the g
uest’s eyes, but kissed him—actually there were three or four kiss-stealers—right back.

  The month I turned sixteen, which was the age of consent in those days, I contrived to lose my virginity. It was a disappointing experience but I reasoned that, since so many great works of art, so many geniuses, raved about sex, it would improve with practice. A year later I met L.

  Between leaving school and beginning university I had a salesgirl job in Grahame’s Bookshop, then in Elizabeth Street, not far from David Jones. Grahame’s was one of the acceptable work places for eastern suburbs girls. A colleague on the gift-wrapping counter that year was the beautiful, stately sixteen-year-old Marie-Christine von Reibnitz, known to her friends, with only slightly derisory affection, as ‘The Baroness’. She improved on her title later by marrying Prince Michael. I did my best to have a bad influence on her, persuading her sometimes to accompany me to Lorenzini’s, a wine bar further along Elizabeth Street. It was a long narrow room with mirrors on one side and a bar on the other where artists, poets, sculptors and men working in shoe factories only until a commission for a mural came through, drank plonk sold by the glass, argued, ate octopus sandwiches and tried to seduce young women. In retrospect, I think they were mostly snakeoil artists, but at the time they seemed dazzling. I first went there with L.

  One afternoon in Grahame’s I was straightening a rack of paperback novels when, glancing up, I found myself looking at a man who was looking back at me in a way that was eerie. It was as if our glances, meeting, had chimed. He was a little less than six feet tall, with lank dark hair combed straight back from a widow’s peak and slicked down. There was a slant to his cheekbones and eyes. His skin was a sallow colour, like a northern Chinese person, and the back of his head was flat, which was also oriental, although obviously he was European. I thought he was dramatically handsome. He had strong even teeth and a broad smile. I don’t remember how he was dressed that day. His clothes always had a solemn artiness that I discovered later was Iron Curtain chic. He was twenty-eight years old.

  We kept looking at each other, as if in recognition. I think he bought one of the novels he was skimming and, while I wrapped it up, he asked me in hesitant English to have a drink with him when I finished work.

  With an entrée to Lorenzini’s I suddenly found myself inside the cake shop of the adults. But the exotic displays of the interior overwhelmed me, and I felt small, dim and inadequate in its rich atmosphere. Although I became a habitué for several months, I remember almost nothing about the place. The glasses of red wine I drank probably have something to do with poor recall. I met at least a dozen artists but remember only one, Joe Szabo, who seemed charming and kind and shocked me speechless by mentioning that, in order to eat, he was painting houses. I had never met an adult who admitted to being short of money.

  L had defected from Poland in mid-1960 while on a cultural delegation to India. I don’t know why he chose Australia as his country of asylum. I was too ignorant to know that the answers to such questions give an insight into character. I don’t think I was interested in his character. His ‘romantic’ life—fear, oppression, hunger as a youth during World War II—was just a glittery backdrop to the pleasure he gave me. One afternoon in a coffee bar he talked about the difficulties he was having writing in English. He was working on a collection of stories, allegories set in the Roman (read Soviet) Empire, thinking in Polish then translating. Since he had arrived in Australia he had had at least one book published in English, paid for, I think, by the local Polish community. He was struggling with the language and the realisation that he would perhaps never master it well enough to live as a writer outside his native land.

  I don’t remember how we became lovers, where, or what time of day it was. I was so out of my depth psychologically, intellectually and sexually that from the outset I was in a sort of trance. L was sexually experienced and took delight in educating me. These lessons were a lot more fun than the lectures I was supposedly attending as a student in the honours stream of Science I. From the late 1950s our household had been influenced by the ideas of Julian Huxley and Frederick Osborn on the problems of world over-population. I was to study marine biology and help feed the planet from the abundance of the sea. ‘As long as you have a career that gives you financial independence you can marry whomever you like,’ my father had said. ‘Even a truck driver!’ he added with a flourish. I’m not sure which truck driver that might have been. A family friend remarked later, ‘If Jesus Christ had reappeared to ask for your hand in marriage your father would have shown Him the door.’

  Eventually I had to introduce L to my father.

  L had been to my house during the day while my parents were out, and one night had even climbed up to my bedroom. The first time I took him home we stood alone in the drawing room and he looked around at the furniture and the pictures before going to the windows to gaze at the yachts in the bay below. I pointed out where ours was moored. L’s face became impassive. People from totalitarian regimes recognise authority the way English people recognise the pale delicacies and faint implications that define class. In Warsaw, as a young intellectual, L had been a junior member of the elite, but like poetry, status is often untranslatable. In Australia, he was L Nobody. He had a job as an attendant in the Art Gallery of New South Wales and, as I had been disconcerted to discover after we became lovers, he had been married for five years. His wife had got out of Poland a few months earlier and was living with him in Marrickville, an industrial suburb twenty minutes by car from Darling Point, on a different planet. As L looked around I felt the idea cross his mind that the antiques and the pictures and the yacht meant trouble, and he should cut and run.

  But he was already as mad about me as I was about him. After some tiff when he accused me of not loving him I had shown my devotion by pressing into the back of my hand a burning cigarette, holding it there until it was extinguished. I still bear a ghostly scar as a memento. I think it was the cigarette burn that alerted my parents to something alarming going on in the life of their until-now studious child.

  ‘Does he speak French?’ my father demanded. ‘Well-bred East Europeans all spoke French’, he said. ‘No’, I admitted. ‘Not French. But Russian’. My father consulted a Russian friend on the significance of this. ‘Poles were forced to speak Russian,’ he announced. Everyone looked grave: was it possible that the person I was seeing so much of, and therefore must bring home to dinner, was east-of-the-Moselle riffraff? After a hundred years in Australia, after lifelong friendships with all sorts of classes and nationalities, the family was up on its French high horse.

  My parents’ marriage had been troubled for years and by now, life at home was tense. The dinner was, predictably, a disaster. My father questioned L in slightly more detail than the KGB might if inquiring into the foreign contacts of someone discovered with nuclear secrets in his briefcase. Before coffee was served he had told L to leave the premises and never to return.

  About a week later I admitted that L and I were actually lovers. In the row with my father that followed, we came to blows. It was obvious that if he and I argued again one of us would be seriously injured. Next morning, with ten shillings and a few clothes and books, I bolted.

  I had nowhere to live and no way of making contact with L—for some reason I could not reach him at the Art Gallery, maybe he was rostered off. After two days of sleeping in a YWCA hostel and having eaten nothing except an orange I watched fall off a stall in Darlinghurst Road, I remember standing on a street corner and seeing the ruins of my life—my scholastic achievements abandoned, myself a disgrace to the family name—and thinking, ‘I did this. I have no-one to blame but myself.’

  I had just come from seeing the Judge, who had confirmed that legally I was old enough to leave home and L could not be arrested for his association with me. As I waited for the traffic lights to change I had my first experience of clear consciousness. I felt utterly content and determined. I had smashed the Paradise of childhood and now the g
ates of Eden were swinging shut. The dowager Aunt Blanche declared I was banished from her presence and was to be disinherited. This was perhaps meant as an encouragement for me to come to my senses and behave. But I was resolved never to turn back. Not that I could have, anyway: Eden had not just shut its gates, it was vanishing: three days after I ran away, my father left my mother to live with the woman he was in love with.

  I had about fifty pounds worth of textbooks which I took to Stern’s second-hand shop, where young Barry Stern bought them. Books for food! I was starving.

  I found a job in Grace Bros, Broadway, as a clerk. Later that week L and I made contact. He arranged a room for me in a house in Ultimo, a working-class suburb near the university. It had linoleum on the floors and no shades on the light bulbs, but it was clean. It belonged to an old Ukrainian giant with a shaved head who drank vodka and lamented his loneliness. He seemed delighted to have us in his front room, making love half the night, and made sentimental speeches about us being ‘his children’. A few months earlier I would not have been able to sit down in a room with naked light bulbs, let alone sleep in one. Now I did not mind. Poverty was strange and new, like everything else that was happening. I was in a world of erotic bliss. L was laughing and happy but sometimes had attacks of slavic melancholy, as if deep inside he had bumped against a source of unmoveable pain. He reported growing tension at home. Then his wife, whom he loved, discovered he was having an affair and they began to argue. To cheer up he drank vodka with our landlord. Squatting on the kitchen linoleum, his arms crossed over his chest, he whirled around kicking while the giant sang in a loud cracked voice. I began to see police cars often, and the police seemed to be looking at me. I started to think I was being followed.