At 14, Constance was a jumble of orange polyester miniskirts, plastic earrings, dirty words. Louise and Jaspar, hoping to raise her shabby self-esteem, also decided to let Constance choose a school. She’d be going into Sixth Form. Constance and Eric’s first revelation to each other was that they’d both enrolled at Wellington Trades and Tech. It was a decision they’d each made separately and perversely and to the horror of their parents so of course they bonded instantly.
Located at the edges of the city’s only slum, Wellington Trades and Tech had an impressive Latin motto carved above the door: Qui Servum Magnum. But no one there could read it since the school had not taught Latin for at least 20 years. “He Who Serves Is Greatest.” Well, the future was no secret: lifetimes spent in auto body shops and typing pools. So everybody made the most of those last three years of school, getting stoned and fingerfucking each other in Biology and Study Hall.
Unlike his parents, who were impressed by the Green’s Connecticut credentials, Eric knew straight off that Constance’s cultural pretensions were strictly trailer-park. Tough-talking Constance became Eric’s creature, his Pygmalion. Their first job was to get rid of her hideous American accent, replace it with the educated Yorkshire intonations he’d picked up from his Dad. Eric told Constance what to read and what to listen to. Sometimes they reviewed scenes from her past life for Eric’s judicious editing. Eric approved of Constance’s political transgressions—suspended from elementary school for reading Lenny Bruce and leafletting for the Black Panthers. But all the rest would have to go—the shoplifting, the biker gangs and blowjobs, the arrests for drug possession, breaking and entry—were just too tacky.
All summer long Eric and Constance had the most fabulous adventures, unfolding like the pages of an Enid Blyton storybook. Nights, they hung out at the Chez Paree. Afternoons they caught the trolleybus and rode out around the bays, scaling volcanic rocks to watch the sunset. One day they packed a picnic lunch and went hiking in the hills above Karaka Beach, scene of Katherine Mansfield’s famous story “At The Bay.” Eric did a wicked impersonation of Mansfield’s alter-ego, Kezia, and they laughed so hard they didn’t notice when a Tasman fog came rolling in. Cyril himself drove out to find them. He looked so Midlands-serious with his torch and oilskin parka, like the man in the Gorton’s Fishcake ads, that Eric and Constance punched each other in the ribs to keep from laughing on the long ride home. “What a Dag!” (New Zealand slang for laugh or sheepshit), Constance learned to say. Eric had a color photo of a hippie-gypsy couple hitch-hiking beside a wheatfield, torn out of one of Laura’s Vogues. Could this be him and Constance?
Cyril’s voice droned on in favor of the Diocese’s liberal stand against apartheid to general clucks and nods. “Let’s go to Butterfly Creek!” Eric said again. “You drive out through Petone, turn right on Moonshine Road, drive past the Eastbourne Cattery. Did you know it’s owned by Alexander Trocchi’s former wife? She moved out here from London. You park up in the hills, and for the first two hours walking it’s native bush, all dark and jungly. And then you come out to a clearing, a meadow really, and there’s a brook and waterfall. And everywhere you look there’s butterflies.”
They walked deeper into the bush, along a narrow track shaded by macrocarpa trees and kowhai. They’d left the meadow and its brilliant sun behind. The ground was cold and damp. Hardly any light penetrated the broad umbrella canopy of punga ferns. The boy stopped to catch his breath. He looked up in the sky through a tiny crack in the deep green foliage. And he was overcome with wondrous signs.
28. Your “previous engagement” Friday night, April 7, turned out also to be mine. And here things start to get a little strange. Our “previous engagement” was an opening of the Charles Gaines/Jeffrey Vallance/Eleanor Antin show at the Santa Monica Museum. The Antin piece, an installation called Ghost Story—Minetta Lane, had just been moved out here from the Ronald Feldman Gallery in Soho. Ghost Story was the piece I wrote to you about last January in Every Letter Is A Love Letter. The piece I’d Fed-Ex’d out to you in February before arriving on your doorstep in Antelope Valley. The piece that, if you’d read before I got there, might’ve made you be less cruel.
My stomach flipped when I saw your yellow Thunderbird in the Main Street parking lot. I moved closer to my friend and escort Daniel Marlos as we crossed the street and entered the Museum courtyard. “He’s here!” I said. “He’s here.” And sure enough, I saw you talking to a group of people as I crossed the room to buy a drink. You saw me too—threw up your hands as if to shield yourself from danger. Then you pointedly ignored me as you circled round the room.
The Gallery rocked back and forth like a drunken boat. I felt like Frederic Moreau arriving late and uninvited at Monsieur Dambreuse’s elite salon in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education—a paranoiac treasure hunt, incriminatory, clues planted everywhere around the seasick room. Everywhere I looked I found you, eyes turned away, yet seeing. I couldn’t move.
Finally I resolved to talk to you. After all, we weren’t enemies. We had a date for Saturday afternoon. I waited ’til you were alone with just one another person, a young man, a student. “Dick!” I said. “Hello!” You half-smiled and nodded, waiting. You didn’t introduce me to your friend, your creature. Waited for me to start some conversation, so I burbled on about the show. When this dead-ended I stopped short. “Well,” I said. “I’ll see you later.” “Yes,” you said. “I’ll see you very soon.”
That night your Thunderbird got broadsided and my rental car got towed. Coincidence Number Two. And isn’t schizophrenia just an orgy of it? You got drunk after the opening, spent the night at a motel.
29. Eric Johnson caught a Railways bus from Wellington to Ngaruwahia. It’s sometime in the early ’80s. Félix called these “the Winter Years.” Eric is now 34 years old. He doesn’t have a bank account and he’s carrying about 50 dollars. In desperation, after counselling, Vita-Fleur and Cyril finally cut off his allowance. “I’m looking for a job of work,” Eric says to anyone he sees. Voice rattling through his hollow chest and craggy body, he looks like Hamlet’s father’s ghost wandering the moors in King Lear’s storm.
Katherine Mansfield craved a slice of life so badly she invented it as genre. Small countries lend themselves to stories: backwaters where the people stuck there don’t have much to do besides watch each other’s lives unfold. Eric’s carrying an army surplus rucksack, an oilskin parka and a wool jersey knit by Vita-Fleur. The rest of his possessions are a sleeping bag, one extra pair of longs, a knife and a canteen. After 13 years of vagrancy, more or less, Eric knows a thing or two about survival. The bus lets out on the Main Street of Ngaruwahia’s downtown.
“Jerusalem! A Golden Land!” was how he’d described this place years ago to Constance. Ngaruwahia, with it’s wide river, rolling hills, was the scene of Maori legends about ancestors as mythic as Greek gods. There’d been a rock festival here 15 years ago, then a commune. But now at 4 p.m. with thunderheads rolling in across this late spring sky, Eric curses the very size of it. Walking, walking, past used appliance shops and greasy burger bars. Eric was back from travelling “overseas.” He’d got as far as Sydney, failed. Somehow he never caught the drift of what it was he was supposed to do. Social work? Ceramics class? He’d never met the right people. For every affirmation there were a hundred qualifying negations. Sort-of-raping Constance in the backroom of Bert Andrew’s country shack when they were two years out of school had been his only foray into heterosexuality. And yet he wasn’t queer. He’d figured that one out in Family Therapy. Voices spoke; they never told him what to do. Eric walks ten blocks down Main Street to the edge of town, sticks out his thumb to hitch a ride to Vincent’s, keeps walking. At least it isn’t raining.