Peter Carey - Bliss

Bettina, as she explained to Harry later, no longer found Joel sexually desirable. (Harry didn't listen. He found it painful that she ever had.)

Joel was no longer admirable and it was admiration (she called it love) that made her want to fuck people. It was a cold brilliant sort of emotion, this admiration, and was backed up, invariably, with the unpalatable tastes of self-doubt and inferiority. She had worried all her life that she was cold. She had never felt for her children what a mother is meant to feel. She had despaired at this coldness and criticized herself for it while at the same time she hated (literally) mothers who dis-played their maternal qualities in too obvious a way.

But now, although she would never have used the word, and would have denied it vigorously if anyone had dared to suggest it, she loved Joel. She had not begun to love him until he had begun to fail and then, she believed, he became automatically sexually uninteresting to her. But it was only after he crashed, after he began to do these stupid, dangerous bizarre things to gain her respect, that she actually began to love him.

He was her responsibility. She had pushed him too far and now she would have to look after him. She rubbed the analgesic cream across his back. The burns were not too bad:

'Ah, Betty, you think I'm a schmuck.'

'You try too hard, baby.' Physically they were alike, stocky people from peasant stock.

'You didn't have to say it was bullshit.'

'No, no, I know. I'm sorry.'

'Fucking suit. My best suit too.'

'Never mind, never mind.'

Harry watched this and felt jealous. It was the sort of jeal-ousy a man can feel towards a child at a woman's breast. Sitting at the table by himself he was able to see the emotion clearly and know exactly what it was.

When David Joy arrived home with his two Big Macs at eight o'clock, his father was sitting by the fire. The sight of Joel's blubbery body stretched out at Harry's feet was as disgusting and terrible a reproach as any he had encountered in his nightmares. It was David's fault that Palm Avenue was like this. It was because he had paid money to have his father committed.

Yet he was struck with contradictory desires about his crime, for although he was remorseful he was also proud. He wanted to confess, be forgiven, chastized, admired, under-stood, sympathized with, everything at once. He-wanted his father to see how grown-up he was but also to forgive him as only a father could.

He was hurt, immediately, by Harry's lack of effusion in the greeting.

'Which one is mine?' his father asked, leading the way to the kitchen table.

'Both,' he said, although he had bought one for himself. He was starving.

David imagined his father looked at him suspiciously. Certainly he was opening the Big Mac box distrustfully. But now he lifted the hamburger to his mouth, bit it, and, 'Oh, Christ!' spat half-masticated food all over the table.

He was madder than when he went. There he was, his mouth half-full of old food, trying to smile at him.

'It's poisoned. I nearly ate it.' Harry tried to explain. How could he tell his son that he had thought of Honey Barbara.

'I didn't.'

'It's not your fault.'

'I didn't poison it,' David yelled, that dark hurt look all over his face.

'I didn't say you did,' Harry yelled back and started laughing.

'But I wouldn't do it to you,' David screamed. 'Don't you understand? I'll never do anything to you again. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.'

Joel shut the door.

It was after the war. It was a strange time. People's nerves were all shot to pieces. Harry stood and embraced his son who wept ecstatically on his chest.

'Oh God,' he said. This was not an Actor. This was his son, in pain. He could feel the pain as keenly as any he had felt in Mrs Dalton's hospital. And he knew something like jagged glass was slicing at his son and hurting him, not some little boy's cut finger, but some great gaping wound. 'I didn't think you were poisoning me,' he said.

'I didn't. I didn't.'

'No, no, I know.'

Everywhere the world seemed full of wounded.

'I had you put away. I had you committed. It was me.'

Harry heard him and believed him but it no longer mattered. It was the nature of Hell that Captives were made to hurt each other.

'It doesn't matter,' he said, 'I don't mind. I forgive you.'

Somehow the forgiveness seemed too off-hand to David who had yearned for something stronger. His father under-estimated him. He would not imagine, for a second, that his son had spent five thousand dollars of his own money, had taken risks, been more businesslike than Joel. His father did not know him.

'So tell me,' Harry was saying, 'about this job.'

'You're disappointed?'

'No, not at all.' And it was true. He was even pleased that his son would not be a doctor. Doctors in Hell did evil work. He was pleased that his son wore a well-cut suit and that he could choose a maroon tie like that and wear it with a soft blue shirt. He liked the way his son held a wine glass and when he poured wine, as he did now, that he turned the bottle in his hand as he finished pouring so that it would not drip. His son was emotional, too full of pain, but that was probably a good thing too and it seemed more honourable to be like Nurse than to be like Mrs Dalton.

David did not know how to tell him about the job. Looked at in one way the job did not sound very splendid at all. The idea of a Sales Representative for the Hughes Poker Machine Company did not exactly glitter in anybody's mind. It involved driving around the suburbs in a car and learning how to drink and not get drunk. But it was also a foot in the door of the da Silva organization. They had marked him, they hinted, for something big and it did not occur to him that what they had in mind was training for management in the organization's legitimate businesses. It still hadn't.

It was the bigness he wanted to talk about, the ill-defined promised land of his future where he would not be afraid any more and where there was South America, New York, wide rivers, a future as dazzling and complicated as a Persian rug. And in its magical pattern there was now a new element, a new glow, a cast of a golden colour which suffused everything, the source of which was a character in a book he had read half of and would never finish. He was not interested in what happened to Jay Gatsby. He was only interested that Jay Gatsby should exist. And in all his dreams about the future he had added this element of Gatsby with his big house, alone, looking across the bay at night to the island of East Egg and the woman he loved. Yet in his dream, in its pinkest most sensitive comer, there was not a woman across the water at all: it was Harry Joy.

'So tell me,' Harry said again, 'tell me about the great job. Do they give you a car?'

To his eternal chagrin David told his father all about the car. He told him all the boring, predictable everyday details about the car. He even described the damned upholstery. And he talked about his salary, his boss, the machines he sold.

'Wonderful,' Harry said, 'wonderful.'

It was difficult not to be cross with him for being so excited at all the most banal things. This was nothing to be proud of. This was a car. A fucking Ford. These were things to be dis-gusted with, reasons to throw him out of the house. These were not reasons to be sitting there smiling and nodding.

This was dross, dreck, brown paper camouflage.

Yet they talked about this damned job for two hours, through two bottles of wine and now, as the second bottle finished, David teetered on the brink of telling him.

'Well,' Harry said. He yawned and leaned back.

It was not yet too late.

'I think I'll go to bed.'

'O.K.,' David said clenching his fist, 'Goodnight.'