I need to do a psych test on you, she said.
Darcy sipped his coffee, pushed the second cup towards her. Must you?
She dropped her small oval sunglasses on the table. It’ll only take a minute, she said. She extracted a set of ink-blotted cards from her satchel. All you do is tell me what you see, she said. She placed a card on the tabletop. The first thing that comes to mind.
Darcy was used to her talk of Chomsky and Jung, he usually just smoked and listened to her random diatribes, thought about where he’d go later for sex. Now he strained to examine the patterns inked on a card.
Monkeys playing drums, he said. He looked up at her, wondering what he was supposed to see.
Look at the cards, not me, she said. She flipped over a new one.
A wildebeest with wings, he said, trying to impress her. He drank more coffee. The face of a startled cat, he said next. Aren’t you supposed to take notes?
Fin stared at him through the smoke, kept turning cards.
Blood in the rain, he said, when he saw obvious lips. Two mirrored butterflies. She turned them faster. Purple lingerie on the torso of a man. Iguanas fucking. Twin vaginas, he said when they could have been more butterflies. She splayed the last card on the table. An orchid. It wasn’t his first response; he’d seen another vagina.
Fin shook her head as if disappointed, gathered up the cards and shoved them back into her satchel. She flattened her skirt and lit a Camel with her neon lighter.
What does it mean? asked Darcy.
She turned and dangled one leg over the other, a boot extended, as though feigning her version of a therapist. I’d say you live in your shadow, she said. She licked her top teeth as if they might be stained with lipstick, conjuring something more. You contain an inherent duality.
Darcy wondered if she’d been stalking him. Tell me something I don’t know, he said.
Okay, she said. I think I want to make art.
Darcy felt glad for the change of subject. He’d never heard the expression make art; it sounded American.
I want to do installations. Like Judy Chicago. You know, like ‘The Dinner Party’.
Darcy had seen a photo of the triangular place settings meant for the women omitted from history. Sappho to Georgia O’Keeffe, he said.
But I’m going to do my own thing, she said.
Darcy thought how little she asked or knew about his art. The series he was painting from photos he’d taken, the rain-slick streets around the back of Ascot Vale where the abattoir smell lay in the air like a transparent fog. That’s cool, he said. He had listened to her lectures about movements and struggles in places he’d barely heard of, Eritrea and Azerbaijan, the second wave of feminism, deforestation in Brazil, but she hadn’t yet told him where she lived. She refused to discuss their family. And now she wanted to muscle in on his territory. Make art. He watched her blow cigarette smoke into the hazy cafe air, off in her own thoughts. She reminded Darcy of his mother, the way she let her head fall back.
There’s something I think about, he said.
She looked at him, gauging him, the fuming green of her pupils.
Why did you really leave Mount Eliza?
She touched the corner of her mouth with the little finger of her cigarette hand as if there was something to flick from there. Then she cast her eyes over at the stoners with their bags and surreptitious bowls. Because I was pregnant, she said. If you must know.
Darcy felt the weight of their underlives, how they spilled over into each other, the memory of her through the sand grass, taking it deep on the beach at Flinders, the way one of her legs went up at an angle. Jostler? he asked.
A flush of pink under her eyes. Well, it wasn’t you. She laughed in a husky way that didn’t sound normal and then looked back to the veil of weed smoke that puffed above the next table.
Darcy was thinking about how she’d only been fifteen. Did you have the baby? he asked.
Yeah, right, she said. She pulled on her cigarette.
Where’s Jostler now? asked Darcy.
Here and gone, she said, but her expression altered at the mention of him, clouded. He’s become very political, she said. Don’t ask me where he is now.
I don’t even know where you live, said Darcy.
She pulled out a postcard and looped a telephone number on it. Darcy watched the grace of her white fingers as she handed it to him. I got this for you, she said. Large square letters adorned by a drawing of a penis with an arrow to a big, red heart. CONNECT YOUR GENITALS TO YOUR HEART.
Darcy stared at the card in his hand. Why? he asked.
Because you ask questions like you don’t have secrets of your own, she said.
Ulitsa Kazakov
Thursday morning
Darcy woke up alone, feeling strangely hung-over. He got up and stood in the bedroom doorway. Fin was watching the Winter Olympics, adjusting the wire coathanger she’d rigged as an antenna. His sketch sat on the easel but Fin didn’t mention it— she didn’t mention anything. On the television, a Soviet crosscountry skier with toes secured and ankles free, scooting through powder and into the trees. Sarajevo, said Darcy. He couldn’t tell if it was snowing there or if the reception was poor. Then a woman was poised on the ledge for the slalom. Dark pencilled eyebrows and wisps of dyed blonde hair sticking out from under her ski cap. Fin translated the commentary, stony-faced. Ida Bogdanova, nineteen, from Moscow, three months pregnant.
The skier covered her face with Carrera goggles and a foghorn sounded. She plunged amid whistles and ringing and Fin leaned forward on the couch. The figure hurtled, bouncing between the pegs and leaning, scouring snow, then hit a mogul sideways and flipped end over end, skidded into orange netting. Onlookers scattered and the coverage switched to curling. Fin sat back deep in the sofa. What would that do to a baby? she said.
A Soviet curler rippled his stone smoothly across the ice. It floated off-course then drifted back, stopped close to the tee.
Abortion is the most common contraception here, said Fin. They call it Three Nights in Sochi.
Darcy felt a sadness creeping about him. That he’d wanted to slip inside her as a twisted revenge. He thought of Sochi, a town on the map, on the Black Sea. A resort town. Darcy sat down beside her on the couch. Have you ever been to Sochi? he asked.
They both stared at the screen. No, she said, I had my afternoon in Brunswick.
He thought of her at fifteen on the Smith Street tram with Jostler, the set of her teenage face as they dug up inside her. Remnants of that face now watching the snow-blown trees in the televised forest. Another Russian langlaufer swished grimly by and then swung from sight, absorbed into the pine trunks.
Why didn’t you tell me, asked Darcy, back then?
Tell you what?
That you were pregnant.
You were only fourteen, she said. And I promised him I wouldn’t tell anyone. I keep my promises. She looked at Darcy as if for the first time. Let’s never mention last night.
Darcy felt an undertow of secrets held for those they were fucking or almost had. He found himself nodding. If you tell me what you’re really doing here, he said.
Fin stood as if drawn to the window. She pulled at the sheet that half covered it. Come look, she said. Your Cuban’s in the courtyard. And there he was, the telltale drape of his coat about his shoulders, his prints fresh in the snow behind him. He was headed to the building opposite but he turned, as if sensing them. Maybe he’s come for his coat, said Fin sarcastically.