The Engagement Read Free Page A

man and I were alone, I tried to show him any bedroom quickly, but even so, often something basic—a shared apprehension of illicit possibilities—passed between us. He would look at me and sign a contract, then a check, and I knew he wished he were paying for something else.
    At the first places I presented to Alexander Colquhoun, he was in a hurry to leave, as though we were trespassing, and gazing into other people’s closets, even empty ones, was shameful.
    We were in a district where, as far as I could tell, a whole cul-de-sac of apartment buildings had just the week before sprung out of the dust of reclaimed industrial land. My uncle, who had bought a number of one-bedroom units off the plan, now needed to sell them, and I wanted to broaden my repertoire; it would be thrilling to make a sale. Each apartment had been decorated neutrally, stylishly, so buyers might step into their very own fantasy. Everything in the manner of a four-star hotel—sparkling surfaces, bedspreads pulled taut, hand towels no one had touched fanned under expensive soaps—but in each was a photo frame with the same generic image of a bride revirgined, posing amid flounces of white in a horse-drawn carriage.
    These were the kind of places which in my old life I’d drafted. Back in England I’d trained as an interior architect, hoping to create airy, modernist dream houses. Instead I spent years designing boom apartments with sleek surfaces to be erected quickly and cheaply. At home this work had slowed right down, but here there had been no bust. As my uncle put it, the locals just pumped minerals over to China, then stacked higher and higher 1 BR or 2 BR boxes for assholes making a killing in resource stocks who needed to diversify their portfolios.
    We saw three apartments on that first morning, none of which was to Mr. Colquhoun’s liking. Nevertheless, I smiled and continued smiling as we visited new addresses in the afternoon where, with an almost regal air of bemusement, he coughed into his fist and conveyed that such characterless places were beneath him.
    Standing by the floor-to-ceiling windows of a twenty-seventh-floor apartment, he looked out at a shrunken Melbourne, with toy skyscrapers and toy trains running by little patches of garden no one had watered and said, “Modern cities are all the same.”
    “I think old ones are.”
    “Is there a building out there that’s in any way original?”
    Sighing, I thought, He’s probably right. What am I doing here?
    This was a place to while away a life, not to find oneself—if that wasn’t too dated an ambition. Self-discovery was meant to happen in the Third World, surrounded by others’ squalor. A surge of dissatisfaction came over me at not being somewhere more exotic, more testing. Even these buildings seemed content to not be very interesting.
    “No comment?” He seemed eager for conversation, yet his mode was to play the curmudgeon.
    A wall of plate glass was an inch in front of me, then the sheer drop. I felt vertigo and some other tension: my shoulder happened to be touching the side of his bicep. “It’s not a fair sample. Plenty of contemporary buildings are as exciting as any Gothic cathedral.”
    He smiled as though moved by my naïveté.
    As I stepped from the window, my reflection shimmered—I straightened my shirt, pulling it smoothly over my bust, aware Alexander was watching. I was more curvaceous than suited my personality; carrying around all this pale flesh seemed indiscreet, like I’d made some lewd genetic choice. Each morning, to counteract it, I pulled my hair into a tight blond ponytail and wore very little makeup, hoping to be fetchingly wan without looking tubercular—an exotic in a place where everyone else was tanned.
    I brushed at a stray hair and turned toward the apartment’s kitchen area. “So what do you think?”
    “I’m not sure that’s actually for cooking.”
    “Have you seen the restaurants around here?” I stayed close to