Cosmo Cosmolino Read Free

me. He had mapped out the story of my life, and of the lives of everyone we knew, into a grid-like framework and nailed it down; and everything done, witnessed, dreamed, heard of or read he had lined up under cast-iron headings, those terrifyingly simple categories of his. Only Dissatisfied Women become feminists. Lesbians are Heavy Drinkers .Derelicts suffer from Human Degradation .Some women Lack the Quality to make a man A Good Wife .Ursula, for example, Became an Alcoholic and a Prostitute .
    Hostile, I objected: ‘She was drinking, for God’s sake. She got a job in a massage parlour.’
    â€˜I think you’d be hard put,’ said Patrick, squaring himself and whitening his nostrils, ‘to draw adistinction between “drinking and getting a job in a massage parlour” and what I just said.’
    When I stood next to you, Ursula, at your daughter’s funeral, you were still wearing the gold ankle chain, the Indian ring on the forefinger. You said to me brightly, from behind your sunglasses, ‘What a lot of people have turned up! You don’t often see so many people at a . . . gathering.’
    â€˜ You told me about her,’ said Patrick. ‘You were laughing and pulling faces. You told me that summer, remember? When you brought your new bike up here on the train and rode around in those silk shorts. It was an Italian bike with an unnecessary number of gears. You said you’d seen her at the swimming pool. Her face was red and coarse from the grog, you said, and she told you that the blokes she, uhm, serviced, that they all reckoned it was their wives’ fault, that they couldn’t get what they needed from their wives.’
    Did I say those things, did I grimace? Forgive me, Ursula, as you stumble into the traffic on St Kilda Road. I thought of you yesterday when I stood too close to the tracks and a tram, keeling fast, clipped the tip of my shoulder. Unlike you, I stepped back in time but I was shaking, because now I knew what you had already found out: the colossal weight of the thing, its dense rigidity, its utter lack of give.
    Patrick was by nature not a guest but a host, the kind of person who had his own chair and always sat in it.My houses and my life upset him because they were not fixed, as the past is: I was always crashing, picking up the pieces and moving on, and he could not afford to be curious, because curiosity and its results might cause a shift in his taxonomy. He came into my room on one of his rare visits, stepping gingerly to where I was reading at the table with my back to the door, and peered over my shoulder at some lines on a card that was pinned to the window frame: ‘ What are you waiting for? What are you saving for? Now is all there is .’He turned away with a tongue click, relieved and vindicated.
    â€˜Oh, how shallow,’ he said. ‘I’m disappointed in you.’
    I hung my head. I did! I was choking with indignation, but I hung my head and fiddled with my fingers. The words on the card, no matter who said them first, were what Balanchine used to shout to his dancers—a dare, a challenge, not a philosophical position to be argued; and yet Patrick went home again happy, furnished no doubt with a fresh subheading: hippy? grasshopper? clapped-out party girl? What do they say about me, when they lie alongside each other in their upstairs room, talking after midnight in their quiet, civilised voices? He is my oldest ,my most loyal friend ,who loves me and seems to want the best for me; but loyalty is not as simple as it looks, and the truth is that for the comfort of the contrast he needs to go onbelieving that my life is lonely, chaotic, wrecked, loose, without meaning: ‘a blasted heath’.
    On that same last visit to Melbourne I took him to a coffee shop and we sat up at the bar. Patrick looked round him with cheerful pleasure.
    â€˜It’s years,’ he said, ‘since I’ve sat on a high stool