‘Had they split up?’
Serena shook her head at my question. ‘No, but her husband had just confessed, and she felt gutted and in no state to make a decision. Anyway, she attends the reunion, gets drunk and ends up sleeping with a man she had a crush on when she was at school.’ Serena took a sip of her wine. ‘From what she told us he was a typical suburban jock, handsome in a blokey way, and now working as a tradie of some sort. His wife wasn’t at the reunion, she was back at home in the city minding the kids, so our friend ends up back at his hotel room and they fuck their brains out for two days before she goes home.’
‘Where was the reunion?’
The tip of Serena’s tongue slipped through her teeth and licked at her upper lip. It was a habit of hers, something she did whenever she was anxious or unsure. To this day this is the image of her I carry with me, the pink tongue worrying at her top lip.
‘I don’t know, I can’t remember.’ She giggled again. ‘Somewhere in the country? Anyway, that’s not important.’
‘Is that it?’ Vince rolled his eyes. ‘That’s not much of a revenge story.’
‘No, no, no! I haven’t finished.’ Serena had become so excited she was jiggling up and down in her seat. ‘So she gets home, tells her husband everything, they fight, they scream at one another, they cry, they make up and all is finally forgiven. .’
‘Yeah right. .’
‘Six months later there’s a short story competition in the Age,’ Serena’s words spill over Madeline’s objection, ‘and her husband submits a story that gets published.’ Serena paused, her eyes shining. ‘This is where it gets interesting. She opens the newspaper on Saturday morning, her husband hasn’t said a word to her that he’s submitted the story, he wants it to be a surprise. .’
‘Remember,’ Ingrid interrupted, ‘this friend of ours is a writer as well.’
‘Shut up, shut up,’ Serena wailed. ‘This is my story.’ She paused again, to make sure we were all listening. ‘So she starts reading her husband’s story. .’
‘Wait, wait.’
Serena frowned at Hande. ‘What?’
‘Where’s the husband?’
‘Jesus, I don’t know. In the kitchen? Taking a slash?’
‘But he is there?’
‘Yeah, of course. . will you all just shut up and let me finish? He’s there. So she begins reading and it’s a story about a man who on his fortieth birthday is told by his wife that she has been having an affair with a mutual friend. He’s upset — very upset. His high school reunion is coming up and he decides to go. He goes, he gets drunk and hits on a girl he used to have a crush on. She’s married, with kids, leading a very suburban life. They fuck like rabbits and then he comes home and tells his wife. They fight, they argue, they cry, they make up. Our friend finishes reading that story.’
We had all fallen quiet. Serena sat back with a jubilant grin on her face.
‘My God,’ exclaimed Madeline. ‘What did your friend do?’ At this point Serena started laughing so hard, so convulsively, that we couldn’t help but all laugh ourselves. She couldn’t speak. She pointed at Ingrid. ‘Finish it, finish it,’ she managed to stammer out. Ingrid wrapped her girlfriend in her arms and took over the story.
‘She doesn’t say a word to her bloke. Or maybe she says something like, good story, congratulations. She’s cool, pretends to be unconcerned. But she gets up and goes to his study, climbs up on his desk and proceeds to take a dump right over his keyboard and his computer. She shits and pisses all over his desk.’
There was stunned silence for a moment — even Serena had gone quiet, looking at all of us expectantly — then the moment was broken by Vince loudly clapping.
‘Now that,’ he said, ‘is great revenge.’
Hande was clapping too. ‘Good on her. Bravo, bravo. That’s exactly what the creep deserved.’
‘Why?’ It was Marie.
We all turned to her in surprise.
‘Don’t look at me like that. Why did he deserve it?’
‘Because the prick stole her story,’ Vince said through clenched teeth.
Marie shrugged. ‘That’s what writers do, they steal stories. She’s a writer, she knows that.’
‘No, no.’ Hande had crossed her arms. ‘He betrayed her.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Marie groaned. ‘What probably pissed her off is that she didn’t write the story first. Women do that all the time. We think that because we’re in a relationship we shouldn’t compete.’ I remember how furious she seemed as she spoke, how her voice rose, that she wiped away spittle from the edge of her mouth. ‘She’s an artist involved with another artist. She can’t run away from competition. She just can’t.’ Possibly aware that we remained unconvinced, she lowered her voice. ‘I understand her reaction. Her husband should have told her about the story, shown it to her before it was printed. But I’m not going to blame her husband for writing it. That was his right.’
I was looking at Vince while she spoke; I couldn’t read his face. He had no idea I was so focused on him. He was staring intently at Marie.
Serena reached over and took the joint from Antony. ‘But you have to admit, it is a great revenge story.’
Vince was now nodding his head slowly. Suddenly he looked over at me. His eyes were gleaming. ‘It is a terrific story, revenge on revenge on revenge.’ He nodded once more. ‘And I do believe that Marie is right.’ He raised his glass to her. ‘Everything is fair in love and art.’
His comment unsettled us all. I lowered my eyes to the floor.
Ingrid tittered nervously. ‘Who’s next?’
She looked across at Madeline, who shook her head violently. ‘Not me, not me, I can’t think of anything.’
At that precise moment I looked up and saw that Vince was about to speak. But before the words could come I heard Mark’s voice. ‘I’ll go next.’
Mark was on his knees, scanning the CD collection on the shelves. He pulled out a disc, slotted it into the player, then came and sat beside me. His knee lightly touched mine and as it did so I knew immediately the story he was going to tell. I knew it so well I could have told it myself.
He had first told it to me when we had just started sleeping together. It was in what is lazily described as the ‘honeymoon period’. But it is not a honeymoon, it is not a holiday. It is the ardour of love, it is sweat and labour and exertion, it is boundless energy, when lovers are consumed by the project of understanding one another, discovering one another, of forging union, when every inch of the lover’s body is new territory to be discovered and claimed, when their scent is as necessary to one’s life as air, the time when the rest of the world vanishes and all those things that once seemed important no longer matter: not friends, not family, not work, not study, not sleep, not food; when what matters most is their eyes, their smell, their skin. He had told it to me after a night of making love. We were smoking cigarettes in bed, waiting for sleep or waiting for the dawn. In that act of narration his story had become my story as well, one of those acts that bonded us to one another; but I am being honest when I write that his divulging it to our friends did not make me feel betrayed or jealous. They too were part of our lives, and it seemed to me that in telling it to them all, with me beside him, Mark was further cementing our union. I think this was what his knee glancing mine was all about. I had never loved Mark more than I did at that moment; I was never so proud of him.
Before we became lovers Mark had been living in a flat in North Fitzroy for three years. It was basic, one bedroom, with a tiny kitchen. But though it was poky and unattractive, he was loath to move out. It was, for all its shortcomings, home. The apartments were across the road from a park and in the middle of that park was a toilet block that was a notorious homosexual beat. Not long after Mark had first moved into the flat, a middle-aged man was viciously bashed in one of the cubicles. When he was discovered he was in a coma, a sleep from which he never recovered. The police found his killer, a young father in his twenties who was arrested and charged with murder. When the case came to trial the defence lawyers argued that their client’s assault had been precipitated by the dead man’s soliciting of him at the urinal. Mark became obsessed by the trial, took the tram into the city every day to sit in on the deliberations. It could have been me, he would always say, I used to go across to that beat on a weekly basis, it could have been me bashed and left dying on that concrete slab, it could have been me that bastard punched and kicked and pissed on. In the end, the killer pleaded guilty to manslaughter with diminished responsibility. It may seem strange now that such a cruel crime could lead to such a verdict, but it occurred at a time when sexual minorities had not long been demanding a space within mainstream culture; and the law, being the law, being slow and cautious, took pity on a father. The killer walked away with a suspended sentence.