“I know that, but even if they did, we’d still be okay.” A lover’s answer with a logic that might only have made sense to her, but it really didn’t matter because Toby had fallen asleep already.
The next morning he woke to find a note from Jennifer pinned to the pillow, telling him she’d gone out for a run. He sat up and noticed she’d left the window open; the bedroom was fragrant with the smell of damp eucalyptus leaves and a night of forgotten rain. Yawning, he pulled himself up, remembering that he was back in Australia, back in his own house. Suddenly there was a beep from his iPhone sitting on the side table. A text had come in and he immediately knew whom it was from. He decided to ignore it for the moment. His groin ached a little and the violence of the lovemaking the afternoon before came flooding back.
As he stared across the familiar terrain of his marriage he tried to remember why he’d fallen in love with Jennifer in the first place. It wasn’t just the combination of youth, beauty, and a lateral intelligence that seemed at the time to complement his own fixed, obsessive way of thinking; it was also that she always kept something back, like territory he couldn’t quite have or conquer, and this had been a new experience for him. He had wanted to break her, to possess her entirely like he had other women. He hadn’t succeeded. And now this, this new alienation between them . . .
Suddenly Toby became aware of a grainy texture beneath one of his bare buttocks. He stood up and examined the bed, finding grains of white clay—porcelain. As he rubbed them between his fingertips, the porcelain body parts seemed to float about him in the air, mocking him in their invisible omnipresence, and he knew then that he had started to hate this disembodied rival. He had to exist—he had to—and if Toby were to ever meet him he would kill him, destroy him for shattering the balance in his marriage. How dare he! How dare he even exist and be so handsome! Toby punched the pillow, then tried to calm himself down.
Was it possible that the clay man really was only a construct Jennifer had created? Was it possible for an artist to be in love with her work? He certainly knew about the allure of the film shoot and how most actors and some directors always fell for the seduction of both the plot of the film they were working on and also the illusion of intimacy such intense atmospheres engender. How many leading actresses had he seduced, enthralled with their performance on set? Many. But Jennifer seemed to be dealing in something far more ethereal and esoteric, so why did he feel so uneasy? He examined his fear as if inspecting the sides of a prism. It was objective logic he always returned to when uneasy, but Toby had also learned to trust his instinct, and the more he stopped thinking and just listened to the emotion reeling away under his rib cage, the more sure he was that his wife was having an affair. And then suddenly he thought he could see the man himself, a vision fabricated from jet lag, sunlight, fear, and guilt, standing naked and silent by the bed, Toby’s bed, his hand resting on the bedhead, that big dick of his defiant, erect and proud. . . .
“Fuck you,” he said, and the specter vanished. Feeling violated, Toby reached for his cigarettes, pulled on a T-shirt, and grabbed his phone.
The sensation of claustrophobia eased once he was in the garden. He lit up under the big ghost gum and exhaled, watching the smoke plume curl around the white-silver peeling bark. He was marking territory, because every time he came home lately, the house and the garden felt less and less familiar, as if the plane travel, the makeshift camps of the film sets, and the affairs had all started to claim his world.
Lifting his iPhone, he checked the text. It was in Italian, profusely emotional and indiscreet. Luckily Jennifer did not read Italian, but theatrics irritated Toby, and he was tempted to just delete it, but this new woman, as translucent as Jennifer was opaque, had burnt her mark on him and he couldn’t let her go, not just yet.
Leaning against the cool bark, he began texting back, but as he struggled with the correct Italian spelling a growing sense of being observed distracted him. He looked up across the small lawn toward the studio window. The white oval of a face stared back at him. Startled, he almost dropped his phone, then he moved closer. It was one of the masks, propped up against a modeling stand, facing out toward the greenery. Something in his gut tightened and he turned back to his phone to finish his text. Three minutes later his lover’s reply made him laugh, then gave him an erection.
Later, wandering through the rooms with a sandwich in one hand, he noticed that Jennifer had left her laptop in the study. It seemed to tease him with its half-open top, like a beacon drawing him forward. He walked past it twice, then drifted back, trailing breadcrumbs across the carpet. He glanced at the clock—he knew Jennifer wouldn’t be back for at least another half hour. Opening the laptop, he furtively typed in her password—he’d memorized it once watching her over her shoulder. He then trawled quickly through her e-mails, looking for messages from him: this elusive muse.
She’d only had about twenty messages while he was away; most of them were work related and a couple of his own, but there were three whose subject line said, “Hello darling.” Swiftly, trying not to dwell on the moral implications of his actions, Toby opened the first e-mail, his stomach clenching in fearful expectation. It was from a close girlfriend who lived overseas, as were the other two suspicious e-mails. There was nothing, not even any flirtatious messages from ex-boyfriends or old lovers.
“There must be something; there has to be,” Toby muttered to himself. He pulled open the desk drawer to find a blowup of the magazine illustration staring up at him. In color the man’s beauty was more disturbing. He seemed to look straight up at Toby, the heavy-lidded blue eyes defiant and challenging.
“Go away.” To Toby’s surprise he had almost shouted, and yet he found it impossible to shut the drawer. He had to look. He had to know. He pulled the image out to examine it under the light. It had obviously been taken from a magazine but Toby was still unconvinced. He walked over to the printer and made a photocopy of the image. Just then he heard the sound of Jennifer’s footfalls outside as she ran up to the front door. He pocketed the photocopy and quickly replaced the original in the drawer.
• • •
That afternoon, unbeknownst to Jennifer, Toby went to see Max.
“So . . .” The filmmaker prowled around the gallery like a bored tiger edgy for lack of prey—or at least that’s what Max thought, anchored firmly behind the reception desk.
“What do you think of Jennifer’s concept for the new show? I mean, this alchemy of coincidence?” Toby swung back toward the gallery owner with a lunge that gave Max a sudden urge for a drink, something to slightly fog the filmmaker’s intensity, a quality he shared with his young wife. Buying time, Max fiddled with a paperweight before answering.
“Ingenious, timely, and very contemporary. It’s all to do with the death of institutionalized religion, you know. This need to find meaning in the random. Like death, like quantum physics or string theory.” He threw in the last topics for the hell of it, because Max knew nothing about physics but quite a lot about death.
“Wanker,” Toby thought, while the gallery owner watched him warily from under his bushy eyebrows (once immortalized in an unkind cartoon in The Age). Max smelt marital trouble and was overwhelmed by a poignant desire to rescue his little artist, who was so ingenuous in her fey philosophies, so different from her street-fighter husband. But Max suspected he was being old and sentimental, and he couldn’t afford any upheaval before the show was safely installed.
Pushing his considerable weight away from the swivel chair, he waddled over to Toby. Up close he could sense an anger whistling around the filmmaker like wasps or static electricity. It was a wondrous sight to the older man, who pondered whether some of it might rub off and invigorate him—it had been so long since Max had actually cared about anything. He put out a plump ringed hand, which hovered uncertainly above Toby’s shoulder.
“Is something wrong, Toby? Trouble at home?” The uncharacteristic gentleness of his tone thoroughly unnerved Toby and made him imagine the horns of the cuckold poking through the sentiment. Bristling, he turned.
“Who is he? Do you know him?”
“Him?” Max was confused, wondering if Toby was asking about the identity of the current painter whose abstract canvases were hanging on the walls. Toby strode back over to the reception desk.
“Him!” Toby jabbed a finger down onto the flyer on the desk advertising Jennifer’s show, which was opening in two days. The blown-up face of the man stared out at them from under the exhibition’s title.
“Oh, him.” Now Max understood Toby’s coiled fury. He even recognized it, the infidelity of his wife being the cause of his last divorce. Now he was able to place his hand firmly on Toby’s shoulde
r.
“He, my dear boy, does not exist—at least, no doubt he does exist but not in our world, ergo Melbourne; therefore he is entirely irrelevant to you, Jenny, your marriage, even the show—unless, of course, he should mysteriously turn up and demand intellectual copyright to his own image.” Max laughed nervously, which only further infuriated Toby.
“Are you sure?” Determined not to be patronized, Toby shrugged off the hand on his shoulder.
“My dear boy, she adores you. You are her world.”
Toby crumpled the flyer without even realizing it, then with a sweep of his hand indicated the whole gallery.