Peter Carey - Bliss

The very smoothness of their skin frightened him, the per-fection of their fingernails, the sharp white lines along which they parted their perfectly cut hair.

When he sat across the desk from the local Managing Director of Helena Rubenstein he could easily imagine that this smiling cultured man ('You've never read Conrad? We must remedy that.'), that this urbane man could very easily torture him, not mentally, but physically, in an ordinary pale blue room on a sunny afternoon while the rest of the world went about its business. He saw fissures in their smooth exteriors and glimpsed the rage reserved for those who disobeyed.

'New York,' Bettina said, 'Imagine.'

He did not imagine New York. He imagined Honey Bar-bara. Holding her, he was destroying her. All the things he loved about her were slowly fading: her strength, her con-fidence, her belief in herself, her food, her body, her mind. They made fun of her beliefs and called them mumbo-jumbo. They doubted the power of an OM. Her calloused feet had grown white and soft and where they once had been hard and strong they had now become big and ugly, city feet with flaking skin.

Bettina screeched the Jaguar down into the basement car park, skidded across an oil slick, and arrived in her spot. 'What about it?' she said.

'Maybe,' Harry said thus removing the subject from his mind.

'Maybe Baby,' Bettina sang, and then stopped when she realized where Buddy Holly's words were leading her.

Honey Barbara drank Scotch with Joel. She didn't like the taste of Scotch; she mixed it with dry ginger.

While Bettina was away Joel became an expert on every-thing. He lay on his mattress eating Ken and Lucy's dinner and told Honey Barbara the best way to grow vegetables. He polished his glasses, rubbed his belly, wiped his ketchuped mouth with a napkin while she sat at the table and made patterns with the spilled dry ginger. She listed, for her own amusement, the things that Joel claimed to have done. He had edited a newspaper in Texas, run a trucking company and later a bus service, managed a rock-'n'-roll band, owned a travel agency, worked for McCann Erickson in Los Angeles and Caracas, imported brass goods from Pakistan, been a disc jockey, written a radio play which was performed by Orson Welles and spent five years at Day, Kerlewis & Joy. Although he was only twenty-six, Honey Barbara was prepared to believe him, but when he started to tell her how to grow cabbages she knew he was a fraud.

She yawned. He didn't notice.

The television was playing and he managed to look at this while he talked, occasionally pausing mid-sentence to let some hack comedian deliver a punch line and to join in the canned laughter. Harry and Bettina were hours away from rescuing her, and Ken and Lucy were out compiling their 'Directory of Positive Things about The End of the World'. She wished they would come home. She would rather argue with them.

The only things that kept her alive were the things she hated most: argument, discord, acrimony, noise. She was disgusted with herself. She was disgusted to sit here and listen to this battery fed man patronize her.

She was drunk when she stood up and that disgusted her too.

'Goodnight, Joel.'

'Kiss,' he demanded offering his lips like rose petals to be admired. Kissing was the social custom. When the others were out Joel would normally include a little fondling on his own account.

'Not tonight,' she said. She stumbled going out the door and he called out something which might not have been intended spitefully.

It was a house where she had learned to restrain noises signifying pain or pleasure. You choked them back, held them tight in your throat, buried them under blankets or drowned them in noisy water. But tonight the timbers of the house were saturated with the ultrasonic hiss of television and the canned laughter would drown her sobs as well as any pillow. She lay on the bed and cried. There was no pleasure or release in it, only self-hatred and the feeling that you might die from lack of air.

She had felt lonely before, and unwanted before, and even unloved, but she had never felt unnecessary. She was a dec-oration on a poisonous cake. She was like the great bloated whale of a Cadillac that sat on the front lawn and consumed energy and enthusiasm and interest, all for no useful purpose. It was refitted with pleated silk door trim while its body rusted.

She felt his hand and pulled away.

'No, Joel, go away.'

But it was David, his dark eyes full of sympathy, who sat gingerly on the edge of his father's bed.

'Here.' It was a handkerchief.

David had changed his mind about Honey Barbara the night she told the story about the amphetamines.

'This is a story,' she began, 'about a million dollars' worth of amphetamines.' She told the story, as seemed the custom, in the first person. Even Harry did this and it was sometimes confusing because he said 'I' when the 'I' in the story was Vance Joy and once even it was Vance Joy's father, but it was always 'I' in Bogotá and New York.

The story was not hers at all; it belonged to her friend Annette Brownlee, or Annette Horses as she was more commonly known, who had once been involved, so she claimed, with this hoard of amphetamines which lay buried still in a city in Europe. Honey Barbara, always cautious about such matters, had changed Europe into South America, and it was just this change of geography which had so enraptured David Joy, who knew by heart the old city of Quito, and when she described the little plastic bags of white powder and the damp underground passages, he went very pale and his eyes contracted as if he had heard someone recite his dreams.

Days later Honey Barbara knew that something had hap-pened, but she never ever guessed that it was Annette Horses' old story about the amphetamines which had caused it. After all, it was only one of the stories in the great repertoire of drug-paranoia stories, which were all a little too real to have any romantic interest for her.

Annette Horses, and therefore Honey Barbara, always ended the story with the claim that she was the only person in the world (only person in the world not in jail) who knew where these drugs were. Yet it was not avarice that made David change his mind about her – he had lived in Palm Avenue long enough to know that a good story always had a little extra romance than real life. ('Every good story should always have at least one tower in it,' Vance Joy had said and, typically, having made the rule to suit a story about a tower, abandoned it in the desert, a puzzling shard that was polished and cared for by his descendants.)

So slowly that it was not at first remarked on, David Joy became polite to Honey Barbara and, once polite, helpful. He helped her to wash dishes and even, on one occasion, weed the vegetable garden, although he loathed the dry too-smooth feeling that settled on his dirty hands and he retired as soon as was politely possible to wash them and rub them with Bettina's Oil of Ulay. He did not go for walks with her like Harry did, or brush (suggestively) past her like Joel did, and he was certainly far too inhibited to ask for Kissing Rights. But he did, in his strange tight whisky voice, talk to Honey Barbara here and there and, at certain quiet times when the others were busy, make some confessions of his plans, his ideas about South America.

She had not discouraged his dreams. Better, she thought, that he got out of that job and actually did something.

He showed her selected sections of his dreams and she saw something black and glistening like oil, but not without beauty. While Joel looked at television she and David some-times looked at the atlas together and she felt pleased that he liked her, for he had seemed so cramped, so tense, so unnatural that she thought about him in the way she thought about Bonsai trees which she always ached to liberate: to gently break their pots, unbind their roots, to take them back into the bush and let them grow. Her pride was that she was good with living things and she liked to see David Joy smile and she was proud to see him become calmer and more confident. At least, she thought, she could do something good at Palm Avenue, and tonight just when everything was so bleak he came and gave her a beautiful handkerchief made from yellow silk.