Desperate Husbands Read online

  I console myself with the thought: the Tennessee Williams phase might only last a couple of days. Jocasta is a fast reader. By midweek, she’ll be onto something else. It could be an Elmore Leonard thriller. An Emily Brontë romance. More hopefully, a cookbook.

  I quickly collect the plays, which she has left scattered on the coffee table next to an empty pitcher of mint julep. I search the shelves for something more robust. Maybe some Thea Astley or Fay Weldon. Some short stories perhaps, distilled and potent, so I can get the stuff into her real fast.

  Wednesday we meet up after work and she’s already found herself something new. It’s a biography of the Dalai Lama: complete with tips on living a virtuous life. She reads out a few bits about restraint and tolerance and love. It’s a wonderful book, she says. We head to a friend’s place for dinner, me driving, and Jocasta giving directions. She notices a car with a flashing blinker. ‘That fellow wants to turn into our lane. Why don’t you let him?’

  ‘Fellow’? Jocasta has never used a word like ‘fellow’ in her life. Jocasta’s normal patois is located somewhere between a Sydney wharfie and a Chicago mobster. I slow down and let the guy slip in front of me. Jocasta rewards me with a little serene smile. ‘Exercising restraint towards other road users can be a very pleasurable thing.’ She gives another Buddha-like smile. ‘Not that virtue needs any reward. It brings its own reward.’ In the rear-vision mirror I can see my own face. I can’t take much more of this. The car, for a start, has run out of sick bags.

  Mind you, Jocasta is not the only one who is suggestible. I’ve got the same problem. Thursday and I’m halfway through an Evelyn Waugh book and am behaving like a floppy-haired aristocrat. ‘Dinner, old chaps,’ I yell to the old chaps. I tighten my cravat in front of the mirror, then hasten to the table. ‘It’s pretty good tuck tonight, by all accounts,’ I say to no one in particular, the butler being unaccountably absent.

  Jocasta, meanwhile, is getting into some heavy-grade Dashiell Hammett and is draped over the kitchen bench like a trash-talking blonde bombshell, looking sensational. ‘What’s a guy like you doing with a dame like me?’ she purrs, uncrossing and then crossing her shapely legs. ‘I’m nothing but a pile of leaves that just blew from one gutter to another.’

  The thought strikes me: if I weren’t a homosexual Brit with a teddy bear obsession, I’d really go for her.

  Friday I walk in, wearing a pair of blue chinos, my muscles clearly outlined again my Buck Brothers shirt, a stain of sweat across my chest. I’ve been reading a lot of Pete Dexter, and I’m looking forward to sharing a meal with my woman. ‘You are one gorgeous babe,’ I tell her, to which she replies: ‘I am alive—I guess—but how cold—I grow.’

  I make myself a pledge: tomorrow I’ll burn all her Emily Dickinson.

  Saturday, I’ve shifted to a Tony Parsons book and stagger in, full of confused but rather delightful male energy. Plus a bottle of wine. Jocasta’s been reading the Sex and the City book—the one I thoughtfully put in her briefcase the night before. She commandeers the wine and pours two glasses. I wrap an arm around her and nuzzle closer, talking in an amusing, snaggish way about our life together. This, I tell her, is the real us: me charming her with bon mots and little self-deprecating asides; her laughing girlishly, while slowly removing her clothing.

  It’s taken some work, and a little subterfuge, but finally we are momentarily united. I lead her to the bedroom, grateful that we are both at last on the same page.

  When Sunday dawns the atmosphere has chilled. I’ve only just awoken after the frenzied delights of the night before, but I can see Jocasta is already reading. Inwardly I groan: it’s Tolstoy. Even worse: Sunday is a pretty busy day—we’ve got to do the shopping, clean the house and take our two sons to their soccer matches. I cannot imagine the combination with Tolstoy will be a good one.

  I ask her if she’s enjoying the book, but she shooshes me. She says she’s sick of having her brain full of the trivia of this family. ‘Everyone else seems to manage to concentrate on one thing, so I’m concentrating on Tolstoy.’

  It is a worrying development. For a start, the Tolstoy is very long. Even worse, its philosophical tone can stimulate far too much questioning in a person.

  Jocasta swings herself out of bed, her eyes fixed to the book, and wanders out to the back porch. Some hours pass. I send Batboy and his younger brother, The Space Cadet, to check on her. ‘She’s just sitting there, Dad,’ says The Space Cadet. ‘Reading.’

  I whisper to Batboy: ‘Go ask her what time your soccer is and whether it’s our turn to bring the oranges.’ With the right bait, there’s still a chance we’ll be able to hook her back into some sort of reality. I watch Batboy as he goes out and speaks to her. It’s good news. I can see she’s saying something back.

  ‘What was it?’ I ask Batboy when he returns. He grimaces. ‘She says Vronsky has decided to ride into St Petersburg, despite the winter snows.’

  It’s worse than I thought. I give The Space Cadet the empty Weetbix box so he can have a try. ‘Tell her you’re hungry and does she know if there’s any more cereal.’ I creep closer to the back door and listen into the answer. ‘If the Samovar is cold,’ Jocasta says to her son, ‘then one must reheat it.’

  I wonder what happened to my Tennessee Williams neurotic, my virtuous Tibetan and—most of all—my Sex and the City tart. I march out to confront her, only to find that a certain Russian weariness has overtaken her.

  ‘Here’s what it’s like in my head,’ she says, pausing midway through a page, her finger marking the spot. ‘I’m sick of thinking about forty-seven different things at any single time. I’m sick of thinking about really trivial and pedestrian stuff, like the way both the kids need new shoes. And that we need, by tomorrow, to buy a birthday present for Bryonii. And that nobody has rung up your cousin to say we’re sorry her dog died. And that the ironing has piled up so badly it’s spilling out of the baskets and onto the floor. And all this is before I even start thinking about my paid work.’

  In situations like these, it’s important to move beyond mere sympathy and to offer some practical advice. Luckily, I’ve been reading some Hemingway and feel I can channel his manly and straightforward response.

  ‘You’re organising things all wrong, that’s the problem,’ I tell her, leaning back against the back door in a way that allows the sunlight to glance across my chiselled features. ‘I’ll give you an example. We could go to the shop and buy a single present for Bryonii. Or, instead, we could go and buy a whole load of children’s birthday presents—say eight boys’ presents and five girls’ presents. Then just keep them in a box and dole them out when appropriate. Efficiency, you understand. And we should do more cooking in bulk and then freeze it for the week.’

  I slap the doorjamb and offer her a reassuring smile. ‘There you go—problem solved.’

  She gives me a look in which all the winters of Russia seem concentrated. It has the chill of a thousand snowdrifts, combined with all the merry bonhomie of a Siberian salt mine. I decide, much like the Germans in Stalingrad in 1942, to beat a hasty retreat.

  Through the back window, I see her settling down to another chapter. Things are getting desperate. I must try and re-engage her with reality. I shout out to her: ‘Do you know where the shin-guards are? Did we ever get them out of the car from last week?’ To which she responds: ‘In Moscow the trees on the boulevards are in leaf, and dust rises from the roads.’

  Even the Emily Dickinson phase was better than this. I decide to channel some Dickinson myself. ‘I fret—that we will die here—if this woman—will not move.’

  I’m going to have to think outside the square and embrace some radical options. The thought occurs to me: maybe she needs some time to herself. As when Tsar Alexander II freed the serfs, sometimes it’s just as well to let the pressure off a little.

  I round up the boys, and we stand in a tight semicircle around her. ‘Give us jobs,’ I say. ‘We’ll all do jobs. As many as you like.’ The boys
nod eagerly. Jocasta looks up and finally speaks, not of Tolstoy, but of home. ‘It’s not the doing. It’s the thinking. It’s the working out and the remembering. Why don’t you give yourselves the jobs?’ She shoots out a look in which is contained all the ice of the Arctic Circle, and all the joie de vivre of a midwinter potato famine.

  The boys and I creep away. We shall not only do jobs, we shall run her a bath so she may read her book in peace. We jump into action. Or at least we try to jump into action: first we need to locate the plug, a clean towel and maybe some matches so we can light a nice-smelling candle. Also it would be useful to know exactly when soccer starts and the location of the field, so we can figure out the timing on the whole project, but the sheet is missing and the street directory is in the car and I can’t find my keys.

  I don’t want to make any allegations, but someone seems to have hidden them.

  With the promise of a bath, Jocasta finally comes inside. She finds the plug, and the matches, and the soccer draw, and my car keys, and then climbs into the bath, while we polish off the other jobs. We shall be self-starters: identifying and completing the tasks before we have even been told what they are.

  Well, we plan to polish off the other jobs. To actually do them, we’ll need some additional information. Such as the name of my cousin’s dead dog. The age that Bryonii is turning. The location of the other street directory, since the one in my car has vanished. By the time Jocasta has finished her bath and empathised a little longer with poor, overburdened Anna Karenina, there should be quite a list with which to present her.

  I shout through the door: ‘Are you finished yet?’

  Jocasta shouts back. ‘Just a minute, if you don’t mind. Here in Russia, there’s a train on its way.’

  Batboy Elliot

  As you can imagine, Batboy’s mother has been in tears. We raised our boy well. We bought him books, we took him to the theatre, we even suggested dance classes. And now this.

  Jocasta was the first to come across the telltale signs in Batboy’s bedroom. I told her she shouldn’t have been snooping, but that issue was soon buried by the enormity of what she’d found. Crumpled in his pocket, there was an admission ticket to the rugby league. Then, in his cupboard, a banner for something called the ‘West Tigers’.

  ‘Maybe it’s some sort of ecological trust, to save the Bengali tiger,’ whimpered Jocasta hopefully.

  ‘No, darling,’ I said. ‘We must face facts. Our son has become a rugby league supporter.’

  ‘But where will it end?’ said Jocasta, letting loose a low sob. ‘I always imagined him settled down, with a DVD collection of great films and some wonderful books.’ A tear trickled down her face. ‘Not slumped in front of The Footy Show,’ she said, keening.

  I tried to reassure her. ‘Look, a couple of experimental games of league doesn’t always lead to The Footy Show. Let me talk to the lad.’

  Do children always do the opposite of their parents? If the father works for Flick Pest Control, does the son become an entomologist? If the mother is a world-famous violinist, is the daughter naturally tone deaf? And if the parents know nothing about sport—if, like Jocasta and me, they have zero interest in sport—is it inevitable the children will follow rugby league, the most sport sport of all sport?

  ‘We understand you need to rebel,’ I say to Batboy later that night, ‘but why not develop an interest in a sport such as ice-skating, or synchronised swimming, or even AFL? At least they’re artistic.’ Unbelievably, Batboy just rolls his eyes and walks off. Sometimes you just can’t talk to teenagers.

  In the typical movie storyline, the artistic boy is always trying to escape his sporty parents. It’s never the other way around. In Billy Elliot, for example, the child is a ballet genius, confronting a parochial and violent father. You’ll remember the harrowing scenes in which the brutish father forces Billy to learn boxing—the artistic boy clobbered as the stubborn father looks on.

  If it were our family, the whole story would be in reverse. In fact, I’m thinking of making just such a film under the title Batboy Elliot.

  Scene one opens with Batboy Elliot coming up the front steps of an inner-city house. Inside the kitchen his father is practising ballet steps with other members of his local men’s group. Tofu burgers, brought by one of the men, sit ready on the benchtop. A large pot of camomile tea sits brewing nearby. The camera cuts away to Batboy Elliot nervously hiding his new boxing gloves in his bag as he comes up the hallway.

  ‘Hi Dad, hi chaps,’ he says as he walks through the kitchen, willing his voice to sound cheerful. No way does he want to get involved in another argument. Boxing and footy are Batboy Elliot’s dreams. Why can’t this narrow and stultifying society of inner-west trendies understand that?

  Suddenly, the weedy voice of his father shoots out. ‘Batboy Elliot, what’s tha’ on thy chin?’ (Even though the father is an inner-Sydney trendy, he talks like a Lancashire coalminer for reasons that remain unclear.)

  ‘Nothin’ Da,’ says Batboy, speaking, inexplicably enough, in the same north-country dialect. ‘There’s nowt amiss, like, Da.’

  ‘Come ’ere, and let thy da look,’ says the father, his voice thick with concern. Reluctantly, Batboy walks towards his father, who gently angles the boy’s chin to the light.

  ‘Thee ’ave a huge bruise on thy face. Ay! Thee bin boxing again!’

  The two stare at each other. ‘Say summat, lad,’ the father gently insists, his north-country accent getting thicker the longer the scene goes on. Batboy Elliot is in agony. His father is using his ‘caring and sharing’ voice. Why can’t he just scream and belt you, like the fathers in the movies?

  ‘No, Da,’ says Batboy finally, the camera hovering on the bruise. ‘It was a ballet injury. I was trying for t’ high leap, just like Baryshnikov, un hit an overhead awning.’

  ‘I don’t believe thee, lad,’ the father says, a tear running down his face. ‘But ahl nivver let thee down, lad. That bruise is terrible, but it’s nowt that a camomile tea poultice won’t fix.’

  The scene that follows, in which the father uses his caring and sharing voice for three consecutive hours while the rest of father’s ballet group look on with worried faces, will be considered one of the most scarifying in the history of cinema. Audiences will hide their eyes as the father lectures Batboy Elliot on the limiting nature of traditional sport, and the need for him to express, if at all possible, a wider selection of masculinities—all while dabbing tenderly at the bruises with a weak solution of camomile tea.

  Viewers, though, will endure it all, just in order to see the uplifting final scenes in which Batboy Elliot’s father becomes reconciled to having a sports jock for a son, finally seeing him rise to become host of The Footy Show, his proud parents cheering as part of the live studio audience.

  And, as the final credits roll, we’ll see Batboy Elliot’s favourite team, the West Tigers, winning the NRL grand final. Needless to say, the film is set in the distant future and has some fantasy elements.

  Buying time

  It’s three in the morning and I’m considering purchase of the BodyFirm ToningSystem—a complete exercise regime which does not require you to leave your couch. The BodyFirm—according to the TV ad—consists of a series of electrical pads which you place strategically about your body. These send small electrical shocks into your muscles causing them to flex with an involuntary spasm. Voilà. Constant and slimming exercise, all achieved while you are simultaneously eating chips and drinking beer. In the wider community, I believe they call this multi-tasking.

  Even better, if you use your credit card and ring NOW NOW NOW, they send you the BodyShape belt—a sort of elasticised strap that vibrates whenever you stop sucking in your belly.

  Have you noticed how some men always have their chests puffed out and their stomachs held in? Until now I’d thought they were merely pompous gits, but—a revelation—under that suit there’s a vibrating girdle. I’d like to buy one—designed to hold everything in place un
der whatever enormous pressure. After all, I already own a pair of Levi 501s, in size thirty-six, which is operating in much the same way.

  I focus back on the TV. The next advertisement offers a system of tapes through which I can learn various things WHILE ASLEEP. It makes me wonder: what if I purchased both products and left them connected all night? I could go to bed a fat, ignorant drunk, and wake up thin, gorgeous and with a working knowledge of German. Sehr gut!

  Hope springs eternal at three in the morning, but questions do arise. I spot an advertisement for scissors, but why, exactly, would I want a pair of scissors so strong that I can cut through a pair of men’s shoes? The picture shows a woman armed with the scissors. She cuts through paper, then a cardboard box, then picks up a pair of men’s shoes and briskly slices off the toes. She smiles sweetly at the ease with which the task is achieved. Why does she do this? Has she caught him, the bastard who owns these shoes, sweaty and red-faced, with a twenty-year-old accounts manager perched naked on his knee? Has he stopped wearing his BodyShape girdle, and this is his wake-up call? Has he been learning Swahili at night just to annoy her? Or is she merely barking mad?

  On late-night TV, conspicuous consumption has given way to ridiculous consumption: the purchase of goods so useless they’ll need to be either hidden away or thrown away. There’s the Hot Dog Maker which, completely unlike a saucepan, can heat hot dogs. There’s the Bench-Top Pizza-Maker which, completely unlike an oven, can make a pizza. And there’s even a prawn shell remover which, completely unlike your fingers, can shell a prawn. Each device, the advertisers claim, is a significant advance on whatever preceded it. Indeed, hearing their claims, it is uncertain how the human race survived up to this point.

  Here, for instance, is the sales pitch for the Electric Omelette Station which, completely unlike a frypan, can cook an omelette: ‘Who knew frying eggs could be such a wonderfully indulgent activity?’ begins the advertisement. ‘Introducing the five gorgeous pieces of Electric Starr’s Electric Omelette Station, designed to impress you as well as every admirer who will suddenly become interested in the art of cooking.’