On Lust and Longing Read online

  During a trip to the Central Javanese kratons I realised I was pregnant. My desire to submerge myself in the mysticism of Indonesia had to be put aside for mundane issues: moving from Jakarta to Canberra, and on to Kuala Lumpur; deciding in which country to give birth. On the embassy doctor’s insistence I had stopped horse riding because I’d fallen off going over a hurdle; a first taste of confinement had arrived. Silently, in my deepest heart, as fine as a shadow, the tightly closed bud of love’s true power was taking shape.

  Make love not war, we used to say, talking about Vietnam.

  It was a sexually free and joyful age, those twenty years between the Pill and AIDS. I had had many lovers, had been in love often and had once cried over a man. I loved my husband, whom I’d met when I was seventeen, and felt fiercely loyal to him. In the decade we had journeyed together we had both taken side trips, but we were mindful of each other’s feelings, and discreet.

  I had no trouble with pregnancy but just as we were leaving Jakarta I contracted a fever that had been going around the foreign community. In those days, Jakarta had diseases that could scare you to death: dengue (my husband had had it), malaria (I had had that), bubonic plague (an Australian military attaché had had that). The mother of an Indonesian friend, in rude health one day, died from cholera sixty hours later. Back in Australia I went for a medical check and ran into a woman from the embassy who had suffered the same illness months earlier, while pregnant. She had now given birth, and carried her baby wrapped in a bunny rug: it was grey, skinny, its face was pinched and it was too weak to cry. ‘It was that bug we all had,’ she said. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  At home I collapsed in tears, in my mind seeing a dying baby. I found myself crying as I drove to the Fyshwick markets, picturing tiny hands too weak to grasp and a face with mauve half-moons under its eyes. About a week later, when I was still thinking of my poor, damaged baby, I found myself flooded with a sensation of light. It was as if my heart were expanding and opening, wider and wider, a huge rose blooming, growing bigger—until my chest cavity surged with wild, thankful love and the unshakable conviction that whatever the state of my baby when it was born, I would love her or him unconditionally.

  Some months later, in Kuala Lumpur, I gave birth to a perfect, healthy boy.

  But another year after that, back in Canberra, in a small suburban house, with no vast tropical garden, no domestic staff and no sense of transcending purpose (no cobras sliding under the kitchen cupboards, either), I found myself adrift. A steamroller of banality and domesticity, that brick-veneer Canberra workaday world of bureaucracy, acronyms, backstabbing and mowing the lawn on Sundays flattened the charm out of life. My husband had made a career decision with consequences he had not foreseen, and he was miserable. I had joined the women’s movement, which gave all women a psychological weapon with which to defend themselves, but it was a two-edged sword: while it strengthened one’s sense of self, it sharpened one’s dissatisfaction with life-asit-is—and that, invariably, meant one’s male partner. A million silent longings revealed themselves in consciousness-raising meetings, then rose up, flew off and transformed into divorce statistics.

  I was not keen on taking a job, because of our young son. I decided instead to write a novel set in Jakarta. After twelve months’ work I had a completed manuscript and twenty rejection slips (including one from Richard Walsh that said ‘this is just a straggle of events’. He was right, but I felt like pulling out his tongue and feeding it to the cat). I had wanted to share with my countrymen what I knew, to give concrete form to the effort of trying to understand another culture. It had been futile. But I had discovered the pleasures of writing and wanted to do it again.

  It’s always hard to get a first novel by an unknown author published, and it was very hard in 1974, when the first oil shock had sent inflation through the roof. It was relatively easier to persuade a publisher to take on a serious biography—for which I had a willing and appropriate subject, a friend, Sir Richard Kirby, the former head of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. Kirby had assisted in the birth of the Republic of Indonesia. In writing his biography I could write about the beginnings of an important country, a country that fascinated me and had changed me from an ordinary little ignoramus into a woman eager to exercise the authority of experience. Indonesia, however, was only a small part of Kirby’s life, which was mostly concerned with law, lawyers, arbitration and trade unions—all subjects about which I knew nothing. Merrily, merrily, I set to work. And then, a couple of months into the research, I met an acquaintance from Jakarta. I did not initially recognise him as the man passing through town with whom, six years earlier, I’d spent an hour tete-a-tete at a party (to which I’d worn, I remembered, a new white dress my mother had made). Nor did I realise what he would do in my life: I did not know when I encountered him again that the Muse had arrived. I did not know that, old, young, black, white, as himself or masked, I would draw him or some characteristic or saying of his in book after book.

  With mutual, wordless consent it was agreed we would become lovers as soon as possible—which happened to be in a different city, the following night. He was late, and arrived wearing pancake makeup. Did he enchant me with flowers, chocolates, sentiments? On the contrary. He was charming, funny and straightforward: he liked me and enjoyed talking to me; what he loved was sex. He was a busy man; I was a playmate. That suited me. I wanted a playmate, too—and I was also busy, but my busyness wasn’t quite as weighty as his. There were nights when we were together when the phone never stopped ringing, or there was someone downstairs whom he needed to see. Sometimes when I arrived for an assignation half-a-dozen serious men in drab suits, some without ties, were seated in the room; ‘Hullo, Dear’ they’d say and return to their discussions. I recognised them from the television news. Sometimes the Muse would shout at them. Sometimes they would shout at him and at each other. When he finally showed them out he would be tense, and need another scotch. Sometimes we would meet straight after he had given a speech, and his hands would be cold from adrenalin. We were able to see each other every few weeks; in between there were no phone conversations, no notes, messages, nothing. I longed for contact with him but he would simply vanish somewhere, into his huge, feverish, demanding life. He was an out-of-sight, out-of-mind kind of man. But he was rarely out of my mind. I tried never to mention his name, although I could not stop thinking about him. Everything seemed to evoke his image, and all of it shimmered with life, and more life. My interior world of thoughts was alight. Researching was a joy; writing was a joy; everything was a joy. The energy for writing was constantly replenished by my enthusiasm for the Muse.

  But slowly, dreadfully, I came to realise he was having affairs with women all over the country, that his love life was a kind of freewheeling, decentralised harem, with four or five favourites and a shoe-sale queue of one-night stands.

  The longing that pushes sane women to murder was a wispy cloud on my horizon.

  Oddly, I was not jealous of the one woman my Muse discussed with me, speaking of her always with admiration and respect, recalling she had introduced him to the poetry of Schiller. She had been his lover for quite a few years, lived in Europe and was as beautiful, sophisticated and civilised as he’d described her when, a few years later, she and I met for lunch in Switzerland.

  I finished writing the Kirby biography and returned to the Indonesian novel, which I rewrote from first to last in six weeks. But in this version I changed a friendship in the original draft into a doomed love story between an Australian woman and an Indonesian man. The book opens with the woman half-awake, willing the man to come to her bed that night.

  . . . from the dark outside the hut came distinct words, and Alex became conscious once more of her servant’s morning prayer. It ended with an exhalation, the submission of mind and will. ‘Submission,’ people said. ‘Islam means Submission.’

  Submission was the last thing on Alex’s mind, however. The novel ends with her broken-hear
ted.

  Incredibly, in retrospect, I had no idea while I was writing, or for years afterwards, that the story referred to me—that it was prophetic of the end to which my longing for M (as I will call him, for short) would propel me.

  I had drawn the sociopolitical background of the novel from personal experience. I had a friend, the famous left-wing Indonesian poet Sitor Situmorang, who, during the 1960s, had dropped by our pavilion for lunch several times a week. He and I had a running gag that if he were jailed for his politics I would smuggle him a file in a cake. One day he did not turn up. The following week his photograph was on the front page of the army newspaper: he was under arrest.

  I was nauseous from shock. I went for advice to the head of the Secret Intelligence Service in our embassy. This man was a craggily handsome, sardonic character with an anchor tattooed on his wrist and the calm, menacing demeanour of someone wearing a concealed weapon. I asked, ‘Can I visit Sitor? Can I take him food and cigarettes?’ He regarded me with unfriendly, greenish eyes. ‘You could,’ he said. ‘But you’d be leaving the country in twenty-four hours.’

  A decade later, when I began writing, Sitor was still in jail.

  My fascination with M made it easy to write a love story. But as the work progressed I began discovering contradictory feelings about love of which I had been unaware. I found myself writing that my heroine’s fascination with her Indonesian lover was mixed and corrupted with anger and tension. In real life I had fits of jealousy over M that verged on nutty: one day I found myself glaring at the picture of a luscious minx on page three of the Daily Mirror, suspecting, without any reason, that here was another of his petites amies. We write out our sicknesses in books, Hemingway said. Well, yes and no: Hemingway shot himself.

  Professionally, all was going well. The Kirby biography was published and was a critical success. The Indonesian novel, prickling with my unconscious confusions about M, sold to a good house (and won a literary prize). I began thinking about another novel. M and I were still seeing each other as often as we could, but the tenor of our relationship was changing. It was more intense. He was more intense; he was drinking heavily, and in his cups he was an irritable Dionysius. He was becoming unreliable about meetings and reckless about ringing me at home. My married life had turned cool and thin. I longed for everything, except my work and my son, to be different, but had no idea what I wanted. Each time I met M I told him I loved him; he said the same to me. I upbraided him for drinking too much. He was seesawing between rationality and impulse, set on a course of fame and ruin.

  One evening in November 1978, after M had drunk a lot of brandy, he rested the back of his head against the raw bricks of the wall in the unusually ugly place in which we happened to be meeting that night, closed his eyes, and told me he was very unhappy domestically. Silence about one’s spouse was an unstated rule for us. I knew he was married, but he never mentioned his home life. He and his wife were separating, he said. This came as a shock. He had another shock in store: he had been battling within himself, he said, over his love for me and for Paradiso, the nickname of his lover in Europe. A few nights earlier he had had a vivid dream. In it, Paradiso and I were standing on a roulette wheel. The wheel spun, and came to rest at me. It meant, M said, he must choose me: to marry.

  I was simultaneously astonished, thrilled, flattered, appalled—and swept away. We lived in different cities. What about my son? What about writing? Writers lead routine-driven, uneventful lives when they work. Meeting M sporadically had been perfect. But every day? He lived a noisily extroverted life, steered it like a surfboard on a wave of crises, events and decisions that affected hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people. And his heavy drinking I found frightening. What’s more, I thought, because of the clandestine nature of most of our meetings, and because I tended to be a listener not a talker, he knew little about who I was. He mispronounced my surname. He did not know if I had siblings.

  But I was slain with delight.

  At least I had enough wit to tell him I would think about it and give him an answer in the New Year.

  I began work on a second novel set in Malaysia, about Indo-Chinese refugees. Meanwhile, I asked a psychiatrist friend to interpret the roulette dream. He laughed aloud at my obtuseness. ‘It means throwing in his lot with you is a gamble.’

  The trouble with being a writer is you have time on your hands, and you can spend all of it thinking about your love life. I did, for weeks—but at last I worked out that my real problem was I was unhappily married, and that M, with whom I was more deeply in love than ever, was a secondary issue. But still. But still . . . In the hours I spent looking at a blank sheet of paper, images of the bliss of being openly with M danced before me. Clandestine affairs are exciting. They are also degrading. The deceits, evasions and pretences become disgusting and hurtful. I was aware of a feeling of degradation, but protected myself against its frost with a cloak of warmly idiotic faith and longing. It would all work out somehow. M telephoned me at least once every day. I felt safe.

  I went to Malaysia for research, and on return, moved out of the marital home. This made it easier to meet M, but our relationship was still clandestine, now for other reasons.

  I began to wonder when he would take the next step in his own separation, and move out too. He said there were problems to be overcome first. Besides his private life, he was under attack professionally and had serious career decisions to make that year. It was this that we talked about; somehow, domestic issues faded into the category of unimportant. I was dimly aware that I really knew as little about him as he did about me: I knew something of his personality and habits, but I had few clues to his circumstances. I had met and had dined with a couple of his most trusted friends; he had met one of mine (the psychiatrist). We were enigmas, peeping at each other through keyholes. I felt confounded about how to reconcile my life as a mother with a commitment to M, who was not the kind of man to leave on his own in a different city for long. I could not take my son from Canberra. Nor would I leave him. As well, I worried that married to M, I would not have the psychological freedom to write and publish. I feared I would self-censor and end up diminished by the relationship. In those days of handset type, a manuscript turned into a book at tortoise pace, and at the time I had only one book in print; the Indonesian novel was not due out for another year.

  My new book focused on a Vietnamese refugee woman who has left her children and who inflicts an obsession to be reunited with them on her new husband. An Australian woman, having troubles with her own marriage, tries to help her. All this, I realised years later, was also unconscious autobiography. While I did not relate the characters’ problems to my own, turning them into a story released, I think, the pressure cooker lid on my emotions. M, meanwhile, was trapped inside his own pressure cooker of ambition, unravelled marriage, disaster with one of his children and heartache with the others, battles with colleagues and out-of-control drinking.

  In the latter part of the year his mother died. It was a punishing blow.

  Not long after, M did not make his daily phone call. He did not ring for a week. I stopped writing. He didn’t ring for a second week. Then a third. I couldn’t think. I could barely breathe. I spent hours walking around Lake Burley Griffin. I made enquiries and discovered he was still going into his office. Everything was normal.

  Eventually he rang. His diction, usually clear, was jumbled. I couldn’t understand what he’d said and had to ask him to repeat it: ‘. . . not getting divorced’. He had been so off his head, his doctor had ordered a brain scan to see if he had a tumour. (He didn’t.) The conversation lasted half a minute.

  I hid in my bedroom and wept for twelve hours. The next day I did the same. Sometime during the afternoon I decided to kill myself. I saw that my life was intolerable now, nothing more than rubbish-strewn mud. My son would be better off being raised by somebody else. But then I couldn’t bear the thought of the scar on his mind if I suicided, and decided to create the impression
of a fatal accident. As a family we had often driven to the coast via Brown Mountain, all hairpin bends and terrifying drops. Driving my VW off the side of Brown Mountain would do the trick. Or there was a lonely stretch of road outside Canberra where a stone quarry ended in a rock wall. The front of the Beetle would crumple like paper. Blood loss, if not head injuries, would end my misery.

  For a third day I wept. I pictured my small body, of which I was inordinately fond, lying in a coffin.

  The next morning in the bathroom mirror there was a red balloon where my face used to be. I gazed, panting with anxiety at the ruin staring back at me. A shard of vanity stabbed into my chest.

  I fetched an icepack.

  By the afternoon I’d washed my hair, walked to the shops, talked to other people for the first time in four days, eaten lunch and begun reading the manuscript again. The story had arrived at a moment where Minou, the refugee, is about to be reunited with her children, who are being smuggled on a boat to the Malaysian coast. I didn’t know what would happen next. As I read, I pictured the beach on the South China Sea, its slight surge of waves, and a feeling of hellish despair washed over me again. The next scene began to move into focus: while all the characters are uncertain and confused, the refugee boat sails towards the beach, but local Malay villagers arrive armed, ready to slaughter them. Minou, beside herself with fear for her children, jumps into the sea and drowns.