Wedding Puzzle Read online

  But even as I clung to Jordan with the talons of my mind, I could feel him shrinking in my arms. Jordan was a blowup figure with a puncture. He was losing air steadily, he was rapidly reducing and soon he would sway to the left and to the right before toppling over at my feet. I wasn’t going to hang around to hear the last bit of air whistling out of him. I left the sugar shakers to their fates and turned around.

  ‘I have to ring my fiancé now. It’s urgent!’

  ‘Follow me.’ Vanessa eagerly complied, for she’d been standing there politely doing nothing while I stood by the window in a dream. She exited the room while I remained behind, looking around for my satchel and room key. I scampered after Vanessa, trying to catch her up as she brought me down the guest stairs, across the lobby and into the billiards room where she waited, indicating the public phone that sat ready for my use. And all the time I was walking behind Vanessa, I was wishing we could swap places, and I could be her, and she could be me and I could lead her uncomplicated life.

  After all, Vanessa didn’t have to make a decision today that was going to affect the rest of her life. She could enjoy her day knowing that any mistake she made at work would not be a grievous one. I saw her as totally free and sublimely fortunate. My natural inclination was to be a spectator observing others, and from that backstage position the risk of a botched personal performance would always be greatly minimised.

  ‘You’ll need thirty cents,’ Vanessa advised, then left me alone in the room. With renewed purpose I found some small change and made my way to the window, where the bright red phone was waiting.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  In distress I had rung Jordan at eight o’clock this morning.

  His housemate Angus had answered the phone. ‘Nope, not up yet, Beth,’ referring to his yawning self as well as that late riser, Jordan. I knew the guys would be recovering from the bucks’ night party, but this was an emergency.

  ‘Please wake Jordan for me,’ I pleaded, but Angus refused to do it.

  ‘Hey, he needs to catch up on his beauty sleep for tonight. He’s got a wedding to go to, you know.’

  As I drifted around my villa unit in Chelsea, half expecting Jordan to return my call, my thoughts yielded to the prior commitment of the day. Though my doubts about my fiancé had by no means withered away, from another angle they seemed fantastical, like a dead cat splayed on the road that on closer inspection turns out to be a clump of old clothes. Why question the honesty of my fiancé because Tracy wanted me to?

  Once I’d realised that Jordan liked an easygoing relationship, I had tapered my behaviour accordingly. He would want me to ignore Tracy’s letter, to shrug it off. I didn’t know how much in love with me Jordan was anymore, but I knew it wasn’t worth spoiling his good mood on our wedding day, and that would surely happen if I brought up the letter. On the other hand, it felt essential to talk to him to clear things up. Yet I was afraid to do that. If I spoke too harshly I might ruin everything.

  At nine o’clock I shifted to automatic pilot and drove down to Portsea almost to keep myself out of harm’s reach. Forget the letter, Beth, forget you ever read the stupid thing.

  But the little black cloud zoomed down and claimed me, and for much of the journey I regretted not speaking to Jordan first.

  In the billiards room of the hotel, I clutched the bright red receiver and dialed the number I knew by heart.

  ‘Jordan speaking.’ My fiancé was upbeat. Not a bit sleepy.

  I took a deep breath. ‘Hello, I’ve just got down to Portsea.’ I would save the hard stuff for the end of the call.

  ‘Portsea? I thought you were coming here first?’

  He must have got himself really sozzled last night.

  ‘We altered that plan. Remember? Gus is driving you down after your haircuts.’

  ‘Beth,’ he said, rather more serious than usual. ‘There’s been an –’

  Then the phone cut out. But it didn’t sound like Jordan had hung up on me. It sounded like the connection had been pulled out at the wall. Maybe a malfunction with the line? Beth, there’s been an –. What had there been? Jordan wasn’t ever flummoxed by trivialities, so he must have been going to say something important. I was taken aback as I was supposed to be the one arraigning him: Jordan, there’s been an unexpected change in the way I feel.

  My heart was beating wildly as I slid two more coins into the slot and redialed. This time Jordan decided not to pick up. Or he was rushing out the door as he heard the peals of my follow-up call. I was let down but also spared – what if I’d been able to spit out my invective? Jordan, you dirty double-dealing scumbag! Worse still, what if he couldn’t refute Tracy’s scalding claim? How was I going to come to grips with that?

  I put the receiver down and it clicked back into place. Stay rational, Beth. There will be a sane explanation for this. For everything, hopefully. The guys have probably gone down to the shops for a greasy hamburger and a fizzy drink. After last night they’d have queasy stomachs for sure. And then there were the hairdressing appointments.

  ‘When I turn up tomorrow, you’re going to find me a whole lot different,’ Jordan had warned with an air of petulance, twirling a strand of his hair meaningfully. Jordan has remarkable shiny brown hair, just like the singer Jackson Browne. He’s been growing it out this year, as he knows I prefer it long.

  ‘Just a trim for you tomorrow, Jordie,’ I told him yesterday with a smile.

  ‘Beths, you only love me for my hippie high school hair.’

  ‘Yes, and it’s almost grown back to the length it used to be.’

  I drifted away from the phone, jittery but resigned to another deferral. It was only half past ten. I had loads of time to solve the quandary I was now in. Sitting down on a leather couch opposite the billiard table, I tucked my right calf beneath my buttocks in a childhood pose that was somehow reassuring. I mustn’t lose my resolve. But I knew full well that if I spoke up, the result could be dire. I had lost my Dad and I might lose my first steady boyfriend too. Nine months, we’d been together. Jordan had spent every Saturday with me for nine sweet months.

  Never once had I taken him for granted. I had a calendar of Italian Renaissance portraits in the kitchen, and every time a month passed, I’d flip the page and look at the shiny new picture, saying with a sigh, ‘Still living the dream, Raphael (or Botticelli or Leonardo), still living the dream.’ Prior to this, the longest I’d spent with a guy was three months, then splat. They were minor losses, in retrospect – now I was really looking down the barrel. I might have to relinquish not just today’s razzle-dazzle but also the stretched-out safety of marriage, a cute grizzle-free baby, the whole shebang.

  Judy, my bridesmaid, would be here around midday. I’d be able to tell her I was having second thoughts. I could imagine her wisecracking response: ‘It’s supposed to be the groom who gets cold feet on the wedding day, not the bride.’

  That was the tradition. ‘I can’t go through with it, Pete (or Andy or Matt)’, the groom confides to his best man. But he gets talked out of fleeing by Pete (or Andy or Matt): ‘You gotta do it, mate.’ That’s what best men are for, aren’t they? And so the groom knuckles down to the concept of a knuckled-down life.

  But surely some brides must also marry under sufferance, because on this day it was I who wanted to abscond. A sharp stick had pierced the big red balloon of my heart. Why did I blow it up so big in the first place? Until last night I had intended to wed Jordan at any cost, for who wouldn’t want to be married to Jordan Sinclair? If I didn’t snap him up when he was on offer, someone else would. I was jealous of every shopgirl he chatted to while buying bread and milk – and he liked to chat to shopgirls, believe me. His lips would curl when a slim girl materialised at the counter. All the pretty girls in Melbourne know where to find me, his eyes would glimmer.

  ‘Window-shopping. Jordan’s just window-shopping,’ Judy would console me. And she was right, because Jordan was equally attentive to me when we met after a s
hort absence. So I forgave him his benign interest in shopgirls. Loving Jordan was a necessary debility for me. But how could such a longlasting attachment founder in the passage of a few hours? That I couldn’t explain. Last night had been a sleepless revelation. Tracy’s news had prompted me to reconsider all that had taken place between me and my boyfriend with agonising suspicion. I paced around my unit so many times I must have worn the carpet thin. When Jordan said that, what did he really mean? When Jordan did that, what was he really up to?

  I had always known mine to be a somewhat perverse attraction, if also a powerful and sustaining one. Perverse because at fifteen I’d supplanted my pin-up idols with a real live heartthrob and stuck fast to my obsession. I hardly knew Jordan back then, and I actually preferred it that way. God knows what gibberish would have come out of my mouth if he’d started chatting me up. After leaving school, I continued to harbour my Jordan idolatry. Such an emotional tethering could come in handy. I believed in my university boyfriends while they believed in me, but my self-conjured genie Jordan could always soothe any wounds caused by these lesser guys. Jordan was my default position. The bastards who dropped me for being too contrary, or for laughing at the wrong moment, weren’t a patch on my ideal guy, so good riddance to them anyway.

  I continued to daydream about a younger Jordan while getting to know the older one. When the real Jordan and I went for short periods without seeing each other, his illustrious fictive brother was still beating a path to my door. Self-indulgently, I could flick the switch and entertain myself with mindmovies set in a finishing school with a strong resemblance to Mornington Grammar, only now the classrooms were lecture theatres and the playing fields were those green lawns I was habitually lounging on with friends at teachers’ college. In these curative soap operas, Jordan always ended up in bed with me after I’d wrenched him from the clutches of the infamous baton-change girls.

  The baton-change girls: that was what we called Tracy’s relay team at school.

  Tracy and her classmates Binny, Pen and Mish ran the 4 x100-metre relay at most inter-school carnivals. Tracy’s heart was set on breaking every relay record in the book. When she was only thirteen her father had supplied her with some metal batons so she could practise with her friends whenever they liked. At some stage we began calling Tracy’s team ‘the batonchange girls’, and before long even the teachers were using this name for the wing-heeled quartet.

  Tracy, Binny, Pen and Mish were retired from competition now and rather slovenly; they were resting on their laurels. They existed mostly in my imagination as we’d gone our separate ways since leaving school. To my surprise Jordan insisted on inviting them all to our wedding. The baton-change girls had been his athletics club friends, and they were still part of his extended group, if only tenuously.

  After we became physically intimate I was bold enough to confess my schoolgirl crush to Jordan. He was dismissive, saying: ‘We’re adults making adult choices now, Beths.’ That was the first time he called me Beths, adding a playful s to my name that I’ve loved ever since. Referring to me in the plural.

  What Jordan said about us being adults was true, but I was still carrying the carcass of my teenage self around with me, hoping to score teenage hits for it, to satisfy a long-lasting thirst. Saturday nights when Jordan slept at my place, I could pretend it was Jordan Junior who had his hand between my legs. I could have an orgasm really quickly.

  Unlike my former boyfriends, Jordan seemed to find me a cohesive enough person. Never once did he whistle through his teeth and lament, ‘I can’t get a handle on you,’ or frown in irritation, ‘What was funny about that?’

  Ours was a capricious courtship, entangled with the past from both our perspectives, it would seem. Facing each other in the booth of an Esplanade cafe, we drank caramel milkshakes in those big icy metal cups that made the milk seem vast and supremely cold. Jordan the milkshake bearer.

  ‘I never came here before,’ I said, fingering the letters and numbers on the plastic jukebox at my elbow.

  ‘We used to come here after St Moritz,’ Jordan noted.

  ‘Who’s we?’ I asked, though I could already guess.

  ‘Tracy and co. The girls were really into ice-skating for a while.’

  ‘I can ice-skate too,’ I said proudly.

  Jordan nodded and suppressed a burp. ‘Hey, do you want to finish my milk? I’m not used to drinking so much of this stuff.’

  Gaily I noticed his greenish pallor. ‘Are you going to puke?’

  ‘No.’ He winced. ‘Not if I can help it.’

  ‘Sorry. I don’t know much polite talk, do I?’

  Jordan eyes opened wide, almost with surprise, as they often did when I put myself down. ‘You do okay, Beths. You’re a lot like the others, as a matter of fact.’

  The others. I assumed he meant Tracy and co. But I wasn’t remotely like those girls. Not now and not back in school either. His memory was defective or playing tricks on him. It must have suited Jordan to think of me as one of Tracy’s clan. He was recreating the past like it was one of Harriet’s Fuzzy Felt sets. Jordan had picked up a felt cut-out of me and put it in the picture with the other flimsy adhesive figures and the blue lake and the tree and the brown cow.

  Later, walking along St Kilda beach, he noticed a discarded condom lying on the sand. He skewered it with the end of a stick and held it up for my edification.

  ‘Yuck. Put it in the bin, please.’

  Jordan trudged along the sand with the help of a gnarled piece of driftwood.

  ‘Why do you need a walking stick?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I’d go all wobbly as jelly without it,’ he insisted, and demonstrated his infirmity by collapsing on to the sand. No doubt he was amusing me with another of the crazy clown acts he performed for the toddlers at crèche to make them laugh at him. To make them feel like he was one of them. To make them love him more than the other childcare workers. Jordan was often asked, ‘How do the kids like having a male childcare worker?’ and he could always confidently answer, ‘I’m their favourite!’

  ‘Dodo.’ I teased, pulling him up. ‘You spend too much time with toddlers.’

  ‘It’s a full-time job. Can’t escape ’em.’

  On St Kilda Pier we watched the dusk dissolve into night. I leant against Jordan for greater intimacy (or was it a possessive incline?) and he reacted by leaning the other way and dropping down on to the boards. How he packed up laughing when I fell on top of him. We lay there entwined for a few minutes, silently drinking in the sounds of cars and voices and moving water. From the inner suburban pier the Melbourne skyscrapers were upright dominoes. Patterned chinks of light emanated from the city offices.

  Jordan whispered in my ear, ‘All those people up there are still at work, Beths. But you and I have escaped.’ Oh, he could make my heart melt with his unpredictability and charm. But wasn’t he also giving me a big fat clue that he couldn’t be relied upon? And I didn’t twig to it back then. Not until it was shoved in my face last night.

  Jordan’s reverence for the suburb of St Kilda wasn’t because of the band mecca called the Prince of Wales that pulsed like a jumping castle on Saturday nights, or because of the Luna Park fairgrounds that crowned the suburb like a medieval castle sprayed by the sea. No, it was St Kilda’s association with his hallowed football team. Even though his team didn’t play their home games in St Kilda anymore, the suburb held immense patriotic appeal. ‘You mean to say you don’t have a footy team? That’s grouse – you can share mine, Beth.’

  On Saturday afternoons Jordan put on his hand-knitted footy jumper, which had his favourite player Tony Lockett’s number 4 sewn on the back. Nothing embarrassed Jordan about the thick wool his mother had used to knit the jumper. It looked daggy but he didn’t seem to mind at all. I dared to imagine that Jordan was in love with me the day he gave me his treasured jumper to put on as we travelled home from a game in which our team was slaughtered by more than ten goals. It was a brute of a Melbourne evening,
raining in gusts, the wind chill factor making it about three degrees. Ah, that Melbourne winter wind is cruel.

  At Richmond station the platform was a sea of red, black and white streamers. Hordes of St Kilda fans had poured out of the stadium before the final siren sounded to avoid hearing the opposition team’s song being blasted through the loudspeakers. When we boarded the heated train I almost sweltered to death in that woollen jumper. But I would never have taken it off. Not for a million dollars. It smelt of the footy ground we’d just been in, it smelt of beer and meat pies and cigarette smoke, and best of all it smelt of Jordan. True to form, some female passengers looked at Jordan, and then at me, to see who’d snared this lovely feline lad.

  It was only a matter of time before our lackadaisical rambles through that gritty suburb sucked us through the open mouth of Luna Park. We traipsed around the amusements, surrounded by flocks of animated kids. As a matter of course we went on a couple of rides that spun me around and made my hair stick up straight, but the ride I most wanted to go on was the ghost train. ‘Let’s save that till last,’ Jordan said indifferently, probably hoping I’d forget about it. Eventually he succumbed to my pestering, and we made our way to the ghost train enclosure.

  We climbed into a two-person cart and the attendant warned us not to touch any of the exhibits inside the tunnel. He pulled the lever and our cart wheeled into motion, knocking apart the wooden doors and immersing us in darkness. The displays along the route were unremarkable: stuffed animals illuminated by red globes, fake medieval paintings, and a lone cadaver that sat up in a coffin. Those exhibits wouldn’t have scared anybody, though I did clutch Jordan when the cart headed straight for a wall, then veered right at the last moment.

  Back in daylight Jordan said impertinently: ‘Well, whoop-de-do, Beth!’