We have done the wrong thing: after the wedding, an awful truth dawns
Day One: The Tulips
They enter the room and its silence enters them. The predictable motel furniture is unnaturally and watchfully still. This is one of several honeymoon suites in the long west wing that faces the sea. There are two plastic-sealed slices of dark fruit cake on a tray with a half-bottle of champagne. She goes across to the vase of tulips courtesy of the management and touches one flower so that it shivers on its stalk. He closes the door and puts the cases down. It is as if the wedding, its dinner, speeches, dancing and drinking, tears and hugs and bad but sweetly affectionate jokes have all sunk into a cold black sea. The two of them might be a couple married for more than half a century and now close at last to the end of it all.
He sits on the bed. He tosses his tie across the room and loosens his shirt, pulling it out from under a too-tight belt. He feels bloated and tired. He wants to lie down against the weight of her body and sleep like a child. They do not speak and do not look at each other but he is acutely aware of her movements. She bends over the basin in the bathroom, wetting her face and glancing at herself in the mirror. She touches her hair, pushing it back, and tilts her face, her long face with such a neat chin and such red lips. Her dark eyes seem to understand everything about him. Yes, it is her eyes he seeks out first, then it is the thought of the weight of her body afloat on him on their anonymous bed. It is her smoothness, the reassuring resistance of her muscles and flexing bone that he wants to feel when he lies with her.
He speaks: What was Ted asking you? He was interviewing me for the video. I know that, but what did he ask you?
He wanted to know what colour bra I had on and what sort of nightie I'd wear tonight.
What did you tell him?
Nothing. I laughed. I'm so stupid. I'll look so stupid on that video. I don't know why I let him do it.
He is bending down now to take off his shoes and she looks at the back of his head. The flat back of his blunt head. There is something about the way his thick neck meets the skull, something that's not brutal but could be. Might be. He is like someone who should not be provoked. Ever. Ever after. She remembers the way her father would always bend the endings of fairytales: "… and the prince and princess lived relatively happily ever after," he would say, grimacing at her. The best anyone can hope for.
Did you know that yellow tulips stand for hopeless love? Or is that red tulips? I can never remember.
He shrugs in response to her and almost smiles. There is a pink flush on each of his cheeks giving his face an overexcited glow. He looks as if he might have run up 10 or 20 flights of stairs to reach her; or he might have just sailed through a sea storm to be here with her.
Her stomach turns over again and her dry mouth opens. This is panic, she knows it. The sort of panic a child might feel before being beaten. She wants to step through a doorway to another place where she had not done this and had not even thought of it. She looks out the motel window, across the road and past a grassy verge to the unnaturally brilliant surface of the sea. She wants to say, We have done the wrong thing.
We could tape over it. What?
The video.
Oh, yes. And have no copies. No one would know how stupid I am then.
Not even a copy for your father. No, nothing for my father.
This is an edited extract from The Swimmer, published in Meanjin A-Z: Fine Fiction 1980-now edited by Jonathan Green, MUP, $29.99, ebook $13.99.