Nothing can happen
The words ‘Nothing can happen’ detonated in his head like a mosquito buzzing over his ear. He sat next to her in that dark, airless jazz club, gasping in the dense meld of sound, perfume, beer and body sweat. He wanted to feel the cold again.
“It’s a greenhouse in here,” his lips sputtered in her ear.
She nodded, pretending to hear, but not hearing.
Marcus Strickland’s tenor was a sad train in the distance, Charles Haynes’ drum raps, beats, and brushes, the leaves and stones, and Keyon Harrold’s trumpet a galactic plea, while Kyle Miles’s compacted bass riffs wove Mitch Henry’s piano silk threads.
The scotch, the speed, the joints and the fatigue colluded against any splinter of responsibility, embedded in his middle-aged body.
He turned to look at her again, her eyes closed, lips just parted; she moved to the sound, her long fingers rapped her left knee.
Twenty-five years ago, it was the so-called ‘wrong time’. She was twenty-two, aspirational, and he was thirty, in pain and out to burn everything while running away from Adelaide.
Over the last year, her work brought her to Melbourne once a month. She was recently divorced.
They began to share coffees and lunches; they talked politics, art, Hellenism, and dropped names of people from the past he hardly knew then.
The first time he had seen her since 1992, her olive skin was still taut around her angular face. His stomach tightened.
They kissed and hugged like old friendly acquaintances.
“I like your hair short,” he said. Age had carved mild crow’s-feet at the corners of her large, dark Levantine eyes.
“You have an androgynous quality," he said.
“I can satisfy my homoerotic fantasies at the same time,” he said.
“Yeah, like a boy, I can do that,” she replied.
She was polite about her ex-husband; she was graceful and from a ‘good family’, dignity always at the forefront.
“He’d sneak around the house as though he didn’t belong there, like it wasn’t his house,” she said.
She showed him photos of her children, both under 10 years old, a boy and a girl.
“I make sure he has access, but I feel better when the kids are with me, but it is good to have some time…” she explained her life to him, the last 25 years, as best she could, and he did the same.
He showed her photos of his wife and his son. The photos were his lifejacket.
“Wow, she’s so beautiful,” she said and meant it.
“He’ll break hearts,” she said, about his 14-year-old son in his college uniform.
