global celibacy Archives | Naive Psychologist

Not Last Night, but the Night Before: The Esplanade

A summer storm is blowing in and now is the calm before. The air is heavy but not heaving, the wind is a whisper and the sea is not-quite calm. The water, the clouds, the sky are grades of grey and blue. They suit my mood which, at new year, is resolvant melancholy.

(no, you’re right, resolvant isn’t a word, but what then is a melancholic when she is resolved?)

In the houses of The Esplanade – town houses with sea views from front windows and neighbours’ clotheslines from the rest – BBQs are firing, sundowners are downed. I walk along the wide paved path between the houses and the sand. Around me, thin and sinewed runners take straight lines while children on their scooters turn and weave. Babies in prams, on hips, in slings. Men and women grown old together are walking hand-in-hand, arm-in-arm or three steps apart.

Below, in the sand and the sea, families and couples and tribes of young adults (through the eyes of middle age these last are grown up children, aren’t they, but don’t tell them I think that way – they’ll only roll their eyes). Mothers wrap first towels and then their arms around shivering children. There are rubber balls, tennis balls and frisbees. From here, there is no sound when they hit the sand, a splash when they hit the water and, when the throw is bad, the stinging slap against wet skin (ya fkn dkhd, what was that?).

A spotter plane (fixed wing, I know these things) flies close to the shore. This summer, sharks are spotted every second day (it’s the bogans on the jetty chucking the crab nets off the jetty down at Brighton; how shocking sharks in their own habitat what do u expect u moron – this is what I’ve learnt from facebook). I have heard the sirens sound and seen the water cleared while helicopters hover and rubber boats charge out from the shore. Cartilaginous beasts and their teeth are not welcome here.

Dogs, their owners walking in opposite directions, slow down, sniff, then chase. Their owners stand, facing each other, calling their dogs. The dogs run, first to one voice then the other, back and forth, splashing through the shallows and kicking up the sand. The human voices first are high, then as frustration grows they deepen. Who knows why but the dogs stop their frolic and part, running towards their owners.

I have been past the café, the storm water drain (a trickle now but it will gush when the storm blows in), the sculpture. I have turned and now I’m nearly back at the start. My children will be home from cricket and surf lifesaving and needing to be fed. But I’m not ready to go home, not ready to leave this place where the land meets the sea and we are, all of us – walking, swimming, running, calling our dogs, chasing our kids – together but apart.

I sit on an empty bench. It is dedicated by plaque to a man whose name I will never remember by a woman I’ll never know. Now that I have stopped I can hear the sea rolling in. The waves are breaking softly across the sand. That sound must have been there while I was walking but I guess I couldn’t hear it above my thoughts. At my feet are three cigarette butts that were pushed out of shape by smokers’ thumbs before they were flicked to the ground or flattened under shoes. I see smudges of black ash, chewing gum stains and ants on their well-trodden path.

Snatches of conversation sound behind me. I don’t know what she wants from me … I know and that’s the situation in Germany too … yeah but mate, who gives a fuck.

Another plane – a jet – taken off from the airport a few kilometres down, flies out, gaining altitude over the sea before it banks and flies back towards the shore. I have already told you that I love the sight and the sound of those jets, but every day I love them more. They take my love and then they bring him home to me. The goodbye is getting harder but it takes less time to find my equilibrium.

A woman and a man are together in the sea. They are facing the shore, and she is behind him, her arms wrapped around his shoulders while his cannot be seen. He turns his head. Her neck stretches forward.

They kiss.

I think, Who knows what goes on beneath the surface.

Perhaps their feet are buried in the sand and they are grounded.
Or maybe they are floating.
Weightless.

Sunday

The argument in the car starts the same way that it always does. One brother’s arm around another’s shoulders, the two are wrestling, both are laughing, the Floppy Adolescent uses too much force, and the The Future Prime Minister screams. It is as if it has been scripted, except…

‘It’s different with you here,’ I say to the mister. ‘Usually The Floppy Adolescent sits in the front. They can argue, but they can’t wrestle.’

This is how it has been since he arrived. He doesn’t know where to sit or where to stand. I have to take dresses from coat hangers so he can hang his suit. In Abu Dhabi I slept on the left and here I sleep on the right. I have chosen the plates, the glasses, the sheets. And now we are in my car. I did the test drive, negotiated the price (remembered to ask for the tow bar and capped price servicing), arranged the money, drove it out of the showroom. I didn’t notice the missing backseat arguments until they returned.

‘Can you change these lightbulbs while you’re here?’ I asked when he arrived. ‘Can you hang the cork board? Can you buy a rake and a broom and deal with the leaves?’

I can do all these things, of course I can. I can change lightbulbs, drill holes, rake leaves. But spending too much money makes me anxious and going up ladders makes me heave.

‘Have you got your passport?’ I ask now.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he says, ‘I guess it’s in my bag.’

‘You haven’t checked? I would have checked.’

‘You would have double-checked.’ A voice from the back seat.

‘She would have triple-checked.’ His brother.

Even airports are more relaxed on Sunday mornings. The place is full, but no one is running across from the carpark or pushing their way to the front of the queue.

‘Wish I was getting on a plane and going to Spain,’ I say.

‘Well,’ the mister says, ‘Come through Abu Dhabi on the way and we can go to Spain.’

‘Oh, no, I want to go alone.’

He laughs. It is a proper laugh and I wonder how he does it. How he loves a person who is so often absent, who so often retreats. It seems never to injure his love for me, never to bruise his heart.

Anyway, it isn’t true. I don’t want to go to Spain. The thought of that takes me by surprise, although the truth of it does not. It is time for me to be still. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? That’s why I’ve moved back to Adelaide. To bury my roots in something more than sand.

‘Coffee?’ asks the mister.

‘Is there a Subway?’ asks the Floppy Adolescent.

They line up at Cibo I go to the newsagent. I think of the many nights ahead and buy The Saturday Paper, The New Scientist, The New Yorker, The Guardian Weekly, and Adam Spencer’s Big Book of Numbers. I know, right? As if.

‘Have a good journey,’ the woman behind the counter says to me.

‘Oh, I’m not…’ I stop, because I don’t have the energy to explain and because she isn’t interested in my explanations. ‘Thanks.’

I go back to Cibo’s. The hot chocolate is as good as it ever is, the cheese in the piadina is melted the perfect amount, but the cafe latte is more of a miss than a hit.

And then we are standing at the gate and the final passengers are boarding.

How did it happen? How did we come to this place where we would be spending our lives together but living apart?

‘It’s not the life I would have chosen.’ I have heard myself saying it over cups of coffee and glasses of wine. It’s true to say it’s not what we planned and that even two months ago we didn’t know we’d be living like this. But it’s not the life I would have chosen? I don’t know if that’s true, because what life would I choose? Which decisions would I make differently? Which fingers of fate would I pray to change direction?

We watch as the mister crosses the airbridge. He does not look back. I watch as he lifts his hand, rubs it across his forehead and over the back of his head.

I cannot catch my breath.

‘It’s all right, Mum.’

The lads close in around me. The Future Prime Minister starts to talk and The Floppy Adolescent rubs my back.

On our way out, we pass a man the mister used to know. He has put on weight, his hair has thinned, his corduroy jacket is brown. I think of going to see him, but forks in the road and paths not chosen. Too exhausting.

The Future Prime Minister is still talking, the Floppy Adolescent rubbing my back.

We get in the car and partly because we have to take care of each other now, but mostly because there is one in the front and one in the back, there are no sibling arguments.

I drive and soon we are home.

The key in the lock, the door is open.

The cork board has not been hung.

The lightbulbs have not been changed.

Leaves, blown by the wind, scrape across the verandah and into the foyer.

My love is flying and I am still.

Mind you, not looking forward to the geographical celibacy (if that’s a thing)

‘Would you really leave your husband here on his own?’

At the time she asked, we were sitting at the entrance of the school waiting for our children to come out, and I wasn’t even sure I knew her name. That’s how well I didn’t know her. I was wearing a denim skirt and a cotton shirt I’d pulled off the sewing machine earlier that day. I hadn’t finished it, not properly, and a loose thread was tickling the top of my arm. I was wearing the blue leather sandals I bought at Grundy’s on Rundle Street on a trip to Adelaide three, maybe four years, ago. I like those sandals. They are soft around my foot and easy to wear.

The polish on my toenails had started to disintegrate. I’ve never had an actual pedicure, I just slap a bit of colour on my nails from time to time, scratching whatever is left of the last coat off before I do. Standing in a crowd here I’m often embarrassed when I look down and see the state of my feet compared to everyone else’s. I think that will be different when I’ve moved back to Adelaide. I don’t remember ever being embarrassed by poorly polished toenails when I lived there.

Not that anyone has ever said anything. No one would be rude enough to comment on my ageing, drying feet, would they? But more than once, more than twice, people I barely even know have asked me about moving back to Australia and leaving my husband behind. I won’t say it isn’t something to worry about. I mean relationships do need nurturing if they are to flourish. But really? I wonder. Would you really ask an almost-stranger that?

It happened when we moved here too. People making comments about the dent we would put in our mortgage, about the cars we would drive, the early retirement we would take. I was astonished by it the first time that it happened. In my mind I had always seen myself leaving Adelaide. We had already moved a little bit and travelled a lot. Living overseas with my children was something I always wanted to do. But person after person after person made comment (passing or otherwise) about the financial motivations of our move. So weird.

Certainly, it’s not something I ever envisaged. That I would live in one country and the mister would live in another. But it’s just how things have panned out. Temporarily at least. The lads and I – for reasons various and multiple, individual and intertwined – are better off living in Australia, and the mister’s employment situation means he can’t leave here. Not yet. It will resolve itself. He will find a job. But all the same and nonetheless, we will live apart.

None of my friends, no one who knows me, seems to be concerned about the state of my marriage. Like I say, I’m not sure it’s the most fabulous way to nurture a relationship, live half a world apart. But it is what it is and we aren’t where we aren’t, and step by step it will work itself out. And in the meantime, I am off to have a pedicure. Find out what it is that I’ve been missing all these years.