Payment in Full

- a story by Darcy Moore

        I felt a sharp pain in the area of my kidneys that surprisingly, considering my attitude, had nothing to do with the painting before me on the wall.
        "What the hell ..!" I swung around cutting short my curse at the sight of yet another middle-aged woman.
        "Now mind your manners Mr Eastman. I'm just collecting payment, modestly too." She spoke with a forced levity, obviously rehearsed.
        I studied her quickly. I decided that even if she was mad she wasn't particulary dangerous. She stood there with an amused look on her face, as of one in the know. She was in that indeterminate age between forty-five and sixty, I guessed closer to the latter. Straight impossibly blonde hair pulled back in a pony tail set off a lean face with a polished, taut tone suggesting a facelift or two, and a pale complexion. She meant nothing to me. Just a crank, or an ageing literary groupie, the kind that surfaced and thrust themselves upon you, annoyingly, at luncheons, book launches, workshops. One learned to be polite and indulge them to a point. But this bitch, I decided, would get a taste of my cultivated spleen. I could afford to do without one avid book buyer.
        I held her gaze, steadily, then spoke with a whiff of mild disdain, "I've never been with a prostitute. I've not fathered any children on naive teenagers. I relish attempts at blackmail. Anything you have to reveal will only make me a more enigmatic personality to my readers."
        Her mouth fell open a little. Clearly either the script was not reading as written, or she hadn't thought past the first line. The eyes were green, very green, and far too lively for the face. They flickered in a spasm of panic. The cheeks rose, and coloured under the light makeup. Her left hand rose to her hairline in a gesture that stirred me. The whole combination sent a jolt through me. Somewhere, sometime in my life I had know its owner well. I was suddenly sure of it. But it was so out of context in that lived-in persona. I think she had been about to turn and leave my life and her life had put me beyond any claim she might have had on me I guess she figured. But she either sensed or saw my hesitation, dropped her hand, composed her features and hope soaked back into her eyes. She said nothing, giving me as much time as I wanted. When I shook my head in frustration she smiled faintly, and unveiled another familiar attribute.
        "Ok, I know you from somewhere. But nothing gives you the liberty to stick your thumb into me!" I ended a long silence defensively.
        "You make your living from stories." Having established a personal connection, got recognition, she spoke with a bold friendliness.
        I had no intention of playing her game, whatever it was. I remained silent. It would have to be a monologue. So she went on.
        "Mr Eastman, Gerald." Now she was assuming a familiarity. Well let her, for the moment. "You get paid for writing about people. Most of them are real people. You change a few things round names, places, appearances but they're real people. Don't you think they're entitled to a commission for providing the raw material?"
        Of course I'd had this put to me before and, in my time, had shelved out money for the odd round of drinks, put up with an occasional curse, and even got a bloody nose one night. But that particular story was worth it. Having never bothered with pen names, and having also become rather popular, I was a high profile target for people with imagined or legitimate claims on my slightly dependent imagination. Most people, I found, took great delight in their doubtful immortality. I'd endured many whacks on the back from the most unlikely characters who should, if their self esteem was shakey, have taken to me with a piece of four by two. But notoriety raises the meanest from obscurity. They would enjoy a season basking in the recognition of their workmates whom they invariably told and who, invariably, bought their own copy of the offending book. They probably only read one story, but my ego could handle that now. It was soothed by a healthier bank balance.
        In my more self-indulgent moods I thought of myself as a modern day Geoffrey Chaucer, except that my pilgrims could all read, and had money in their pockets. No one had ever touched me for money before, at least not for inspirational services rendered. I was curious.
        She was waiting. "So who are you, and what do I owe you?"
        She laughed, a little girl's laugh I'd heard before. The voice was deeper, and corrupted by smoking. The huskiness wasn't sexy, just hard.
        "Anna. Anna Sharpe." The last name I may have known once. But when you're young the first name of someone who burns you reverberates so hard in your skull it drives out such mundane things as last names. Besides some women trafficked rather ferociously in last names, I should know. However she'd given me the key.
        "Anna," I echoed simply, gently, instinctively, before I could craft a reply fashioned in the present. She blushed.
I stared at her or, rather, through her, for some moments. The feeling was soft and sharp, sweet and bitter at the same time. I gave it its head, in glad and rare indulgence. When I focused again she hadn't moved, nor her eyes. Did we live for such seconds, I wondered, for those few heartbeats saturated with imaginings, leaping blood, promises that flooded over time itself? They had no root in logic; magic rather. And there I gladly leave them and will not tamper.
        So we found ourselves smiling; adults, children, adolescents intertwined. But the face I saw was not the one I wanted to see, not one I could relate to or draw any adolescent giddiness from. I withdrew my smile, slowly.
        "So Anna," I said looking at the middle-aged woman with most of her possibilities spent, and her unfamiliar shell.
What had she planned next?
        "Well, I, I haven't ...", she stumbled. I felt sympathy, empathy even for this stranger with just a few glass baubles fashioned in the likeness of the jewels that once adorned her. She was aware of the path of my thoughts. Who isn't affected by half a lifetime? And women paid a much higher price for their early sheen, because of expectations - ours and theirs. But I had learned to loathe, actively cultivated my distaste for, immaculate corpse-like humans for whom everything is off pat, including their beauty. Like most people she aspired to be together and in control but hadn't made it. She broke into an uncertain giggle. I could screen the smoke-filled years now, see past the heavy makeup, the too tight skin.
        "Yes, I suppose I do owe you." I looked around, remembering other people. But ours was a sedate, hushed melodrama played out most discreetly. I was disappointed. The Anna I remembered wasn't discreet. She had been called many things, but not that. She wasn't about to leave me dissatisfied.
        "Why didn't you write a book? You knew enough about me to fill a book. It was a long story, sure, but there was more to me than that!"
        I laughed aloud. A grasping self-esteem, or a belated cry for as much recognition she could squeeze out of the world, by whatever means? So, should I lecture her on the ordinariness of most people's lives? The emotional dramas, the sexual theatrics that, they hoped, gave their existence some shock value, some greater substance merely took on the quality of a soap opera when put under the microscope. should I launch into a dissertation on the risks of stretching the reader's credulity? No, I'd ignore the cerebral half of my brain. It was due for a vacation.
        "You did alright Anna. A chronicle of sorts, to jog your memory, to show to your grandchildren, if you want to."
        Having got this far she wasn't to be put off by a glib answer. She spoke angrily. "And what would you know about my grandchildren? You don't know," she hesitated, "you only know this much about me, my life." She held up leading finger and thumb, feather thickness apart. A pinch of shit. She would have said it once without hesitation. "You're no, no .."
        "Oracle?" I suggested blandly.
        She looked at me blankly, then found her word. "No astrologer." She was triumphant here. Headlines: Unknown grandmother shows up ignorance of prize winning author. I laughed, noiselessly.
        "I haven't even got any children." It was said quietly, after a pause, in surrender, with the painful regret I found in so many women her age who had forgone that part of their lifecycle, for whatever reason. A generation of barren wombs -made arid by who knows a hedonistic lifestyle that left no room for what they considered as little parasites, the outcome of the reproductive act left too long, too many drugs and foreign devices leading to the surgeon's knife, loyalty to a spouse, himself alive merely through twentieth century technology, too mush indiscriminate, incautious sex? What was she? I remembered.
        "Yes, I had an abortion." She was eighteen, a year before we met. It was voluntary.
        "I didn't know .." I trailed off. She understood.
        "No, neither did I. It didn't suit me to have a child then. And my father paid good money, for a reliable backyard specialist. So we thought. So I didn't know, not until I tried 8 years later. And I tried, and I tried, and I tried." She laughed bitterly. "And as you said I was out to get my revenge on males. Pelts on my belt, wasn't it? " It had been a comment of mine she'd seized on and recounted with relish. "But I didn't get yours."
        I was caught by the sudden change, and uncertain as to how to respond to this volatility.
        "I wouldn't worry about that. It was no big deal," I answered cautiously, and honestly.
        "Not then, no," she smiled to herself. "But looking back now it would have meant something to me. The rest are dead or middle-aged nobodies." What little account some people make of their lives I thought sadly. She cut across my thoughts.
        "Do you want to know how many?" This was getting a little heavy, and I didn't consider us long lost friends.
        "Not really," but I answered too quickly.
        "One hundred and fourteen." I wasn't surprised. From my recollections of our short acquaintance she could well be telling the truth. And she could have retired some years ago.
I bit back on a sarcastic remark it was cheap and too easy. I shrugged instead.
        She was disappointed by my reaction. "You're a cold bugger. You always were." I smiled at that, which drew a half savage, half pleading response.
        "Why didn't you want me?" Hell, it must be 30 years ago. The question annoyed the worldly perspective I like to cultivate, but involuntarily I found myself in a darkened room, a girl standing beside my bed talking, talking, and waiting, waiting.
        "I don't know," I lied, cursing myself for making the effort.
        She picked up on my evasiveness. "Was it your girlfriend at the time, the one down in Melbourne? Your childhood sweetheart?"
        No, it wasn't that. I breathed the musty air of the flat, and looked out over the rooftops in the outer Sydney suburb. It was a foreign land, exotic. And the girl was pretty, a complexion of milk, had laughing eyes, long blonde hair that lost nothing for being dyed. I would watch it; it begged to be touched, stroked, tangled and pulled fiercely with a temporary lover's pain.
        "Did you think I had something, that I'd give it to you?" she spoked coldly as if I'd already judged her as unclean.
But no, I'd never thought of that angle, thaough perhaps I should have. I was too enamoured of her to consider such inconsequentials.
        I saw her again, kneeling on the floor next to an old record player, crying in self pity, playing the record she always played when she wanted a good weep. It was comic really, so contrived. Still I wanted to kneel beside her and comfort her, and myself. Could have offered her more than a few sympathetic words even though, I realised now, it was her second level of seduction. So what. I should have.
        "No Anna," I could say sincerely, "it wasn't VD or lice, or AIDS that wasn't even thought of."
        "No," she said nostalgically. A moment's reverie. Two survivors from what, our deluded memories told us was a Garden of Eden. The good old days before the Devil, or God, had unleashed yet another harpoon to shake our sexual equanimity. That guiless, mad spawning season between the safe treatment of VD and our emergence form the puritanism of the 50s on the one hand, and the sexual armageddon of AIDS on the other.
        But she pressed on, insistent on an answer that would satisfy, what, her vanity? "Were you a faggot?"
        I laughed with relief, and at the old vernacular. "You're liable to start a riot in here using that language. There's so many socially conscious people about you'll get youself arrested, probably by a rugby player out to prove he cares about our gay citizens."
        "Well, are you?" She was insistent.
        "No," I sighed, "I'm sure it wasn't that." I'd never been even slightly interested in male bodies, apart from my own. To me the bisexual revolution was about as significant as the current prime minister. It just meant I could skip large sections of the literary journals I read to develop my myself.
        "You know you were funny when you left me, remember." My humour was drowned by wave of ancient jealousy. The car trip with her, the strange men in strange towns she gave herself to without a second thought, with no value on herself. Listening to the same silly popular tunes that she could hear and knowing she was using them in the next room to conjure a mood, to stand male hormones on their head, to leave a salty impression, blown away with the next summer's nighttime gleanings. Then moving on with me, with no inkling of my turmoil, my agony. Love always meant too little to her. I kept my pain to myself, as always. I guess it gave me a perverse sense of pride.
        She was not altogether blind, but she assumed I was fretting over my teddy bear. And one day I'd had enough, given her some money for petrol, then got out on the road on the pretext that I wanted to reach Melbourne quickly. It hurt. It hurt to stay, and even more to go. But I went in a frenzy. Yes I remembered.
        I measured my vision again, 50 years deep and wide there in front of me. I could stay in control, easily. The shade before me held no fear. "We sorted that out at the time Anna. No. I liked you, Anna. I was attracted to you. I was just, shy. A slow mover." I was the experienced man, reflecting passionlessly. I was comfortable with this role. She'd swallow that one, I was convinced. It would fit in with her perceptions of men.
        "Bullshit!" The eyes flared. It was loud enough that a few heads turned from their educated and boring analyses of paintings. Drama in the flesh was a bigger drawcard any day. My agent, who was paricularly attentive as I was in the glow of recent success, moved towards us protectively. I raised a thumb. Like a well-trained mastiff she stopped, but within striking distance.
        And Anna, surely she was bluffing. I'd never thought of her as being sensitive to anyone else but herself. And how much sensitivity could she have left? She bludgeoned herself with as many male organs as she could find. She liked to be in control, Shiva the destroyer. She gave a quick look about now, in familiar territory, then turned to see my wrecked equanimity.
        Having provoked the occasional scene myself over the years I was not to be cowed. And it was unlikely she had a gun in her handbag, I surely wasn't that important to her psyche. I grinned, but spoke icily, "Think whatever you like then."
Who can comprehend instinct, or human nature? It is my livelihood, yet I blunder along in as much amazement as the dumbest brute.
        Anna then confused me by responding in a warm voice, "I'm sorry. I thought it might have been more than that." The members of our intellectual elite withing hearing distance turned away, disappointed. My guard relaxed and began talking to one of her lesser charges, confidence restored in her meal ticket.
        "Well, what else do you want? You ought to know men like clockwork. We're simple devices aren't we, impulse driven, insensitive, immoral by nature, rapers and despoilers, as faithless as a hungry cat." I laughed having said it, feeling quite chaste compared to the Messalina before me. But I had shown too much thought, used too many words.
        She was serious. "I deserve that." Then she looked at me sadly. Commiserating? "And you've had what, three wives?"
        "Yes," I said guardedly. It was none of her business, but it was no secret either. Depending on my moods I felt a failure, or much loved. So, she'd been keeping tabs. I was not about to encourage any empathy with her. Besides was currently on a personal high, and needed no sympathy on that score. "I'm on sabbatical at the moment."
        "They were all young, and very pretty." She stated it as a fact with no undercurrent I could detect.
        "It was by mutual agreement. In each case both parties profited."
        "So I heard." Then quickly, still seeking common ground. "But I take young lovers too, if I can." I grimaced, but she ignored it.
        "Well, why shouldn't we. As you said, if we're willing to pay the asking price!"
        "I didn't say that, but have it as you will."
        She smiled again, considering it a win.
        It was still her rainbow then, but surely one with less colour each year. How did she support her habit?
        "I own a travel agency. It gets me by." A wry smile. I smiled in return, before I could stop myself. Her shoulders relaxed now, and she dropped her voice. I felt sorry for her again, for all the games. It also helped me feel superior.
        "And have you ever married Anna?"
"Yes, I tried it once. But you know me. I broke his heart. It nearly killed him, and.." She rolled back the collar of her gown. I could see the faint remnants of a long scar that started above her left collar bone, ran low around her neck then swept up into her hairline on the same side. It wasn't from cosmetic surgery.
        "We agreed to separate. Yes, I know men have got feelings too. Some men." She spoke with no regret. I had the feeling it was a price she had happily paid to scratch what she perceived as a communal male veneer. It is a pity she saw her success only in such dramatic mannifestations. If there was a celestial being keeping score she wouldn't be far off the top; for a woman not in the game. I had had to console more than one sorry and weeping male, abandoned abruptly when she found a new prize to chase. I'd kept my pride, which is more than most males got out of her. So I'd come off cheaply really.
        "Would you like to come for a drink, to my place?" I was taken aback. This conversation was full of quantum leaps, not of my making. I said nothing and thought nothing. "I'll call it payment in full," she added with meekly. It was her baby voice, which was cute coming out of a nineteen year old, but ridiculous now.
        This woman was bad news. Her moods swung dangerously from one sentence to the next. She was still on the make, a female praying mantid.
        I tried to judge her from a sexual perspective. She appeared to have a still youthful figure, probably an incessant exerciser to whom the mirrored flesh was all. Amen. But under the clothes I knew the body, pale and lustreless. Dried out nape, breasts that sagged, flattened, over her lower ribs with a floating nipple. Belly slightly rounded, ripples on her thigh that would survive any amount of self-inflicted pain. Buttocks far beyond the tone of youth. I was no frequenter of matrons, I could indulge myself with young bodies; but I knew my own, and had a few foul weather friends.
        I stuck her quickly in a box in my mind, and began to close the lid. I was about to say no, with relish. I felt neither desire nor revulsion.
        She was watching me closely. She guessed at my intention and, involuntarily, her left hand rose again to her hairline, the brightness ebbed out of her face and her eyes went into the wilderness. A night she had sobbed uncontrollably, I don't know why. Maybe she didn't. And then at the end the same thing. She sat clutching at her forehead in some land beyond emotions. Strange, but she'd never looked more desirable, or beyond reach of the spirit, my spirit.
        I had the same feeling now, and the other feelings too, and sharp memories. Nights when the devil clawed my vitals as I endured noises, smells that were a madness. Pinings that spun finally to nothingness under the comforting fabric of time and other passions.
        Now, in retrospect, I know it was a man claiming something, finally, that he should have claimed when the world was a richer, more sensual place, when each night forged a new galaxy from the fermenting stuff of human emotions and was light years from the next night, the next galaxy, when inside those galaxies, worlds rose and shattered frenetically in white heat. Actions were beyond control charged as they were with that white heat, and consequences were damned. Oh yes, I would stand there as a cautious onlooker. And so I have remained largely intact. She was a crippled participant, burnt scalded, and largely unrepentant.
        "Yes," I said, taking her arm and guiding her past my agent, towards the door to the gallery. "Your place. Let's call it payment in full."