Turn Left at Venus Read online

  What I didn’t know how to say, Ada eventually thought, was, it all had been a matter of outlandish chance.

  Ada had thought that if she had published a book she’d proved she could make a living as a writer. Months passed. She had better come up with a better idea.

  She felt guilty. Because of the betrayal of herself; that’s what Ada would think eventually, she had betrayed that true self she felt she had connected with while she had been writing her first book – though, really, thinking about oneself became tricky because who was the self thinking about the self?

  Girls in their twenties getting married, it was normal then but not for her kind! Not for the free and bohemian world. But Ada capitulated.

  They married at the registry office with Roger and Gail as their witnesses. Roger also had been one of Les Messieurs, and Roger had already married Gail.

  Ray understood that Roger also was sincerely making an effort, making a commitment, to the world of normality, that safe kind world; you had your meal with your family at a set time each night, you were ‘we’.

  It was understood that the way they lived before was over; it had been perhaps a stage, perhaps a misstep.

  Ray had not known of Roger’s arrangement. Probably.

  ‘Write a love story,’ Gail told Ada. ‘Everyone loves love stories. Make it sexy.’

  Could she? But Ada knew that for her, love was not the point. She had never seen in real life that love made people better people, made them stronger or more free. Or even happy. But people tried to be happy or were meant to try. To try to be happy was to be good. And if love was only for stories, for fantasy, then in a fantasy you could make up anything at all, and she wanted to invent more than a romance between two people she had never seen and could not really believe in. If you could invent anything at all then she wanted to go on inventing another kind of world.

  Two people ending up together, that was meant to be the best idea.

  To Gail she said only, ‘That idea’s just not inspiring for me.’

  Gail didn’t mind Ada saying that, but did not understand.

  Ada shouldn’t try to talk with Gail about writing.

  Gail only liked reading love stories.

  Love. Love was meant to be anyone’s salvation.

  But salvation meant freedom and love was the enemy of freedom.

  ‘I’m a gay lady, a good-time girl, love, but I’m looking for love all the same,’ Gail said, maybe quoting a song.

  Ada was stuck, betrayed by her own self, at the lowest point of her life.

  She thanked heaven for Gail.

  One day Ada was talking to Gail and realised they were talking at cross purposes.

  Gail was saying, ‘If everyone knew how good it was they’d all be doing it.’

  Doing what? Ada slowly or suddenly came to see Gail’s meaning.

  They were having a dish of ice-cream in the milk bar on a hot day.

  Gail thought Ada had the same arrangement with Ray. As Gail had with Roger. They’d all met through Charles. And then, lately, they’d meet as two couples, couples who could go together to the review at the Phillip Street Theatre or the show at the Sky Lounge or a classical music concert at the Town Hall with a new conductor from Europe.

  Gail was saying, ‘We’re really good friends. He can tell me anything. Not details. He’ll have his nights with the boys, and I’ll go out and meet who I might meet.’ Ada must have seemed to catch her meaning at once, though she had not, even while Gail was saying, ‘This is the only way a man and a woman can live together.’

  Ada somehow made Gail understand that they, she and Ray, had been trying to make what she would have called a genuine marriage.

  When she started explaining it to Gail is when she realised they weren’t going to try anymore.

  Maybe Ray was still trying to make a genuine marriage with Ada, trying to love her and be the kind of man he thought he wanted to be. Or trying to make it seem as if he were.

  She had to tell him he didn’t have to anymore.

  But he would not want the same arrangement, would he? Ray did not attend Roger’s nights, and their nights as two couples out together had a kind of formality about them. It seemed to be understood that Ray and Ada did not reminisce. There might as well have been a wall around the past with signs saying Keep Out.

  Ada didn’t want to go out at nights looking for a good time, though she certainly did think Gail certainly was better at living life than Ada was.

  And then Leyla turned up.

  Gail said, ‘No offence, she’s a bit up herself now, isn’t she? She always was, you’d just sit there quietly watching and she’d be madly showing off and needing to be the centre of attention. She used to be quite funny, though.’

  It wasn’t the friends who most charmed and inspired you, it wasn’t the ones who were your soul kin, it wasn’t those with whom you had the most intense and enchanted times who would be there in your life much later. It was Gail who’d always be there whenever Ada returned to Sydney, every few years, who faithfully sent her New Year letter to whatever address Ada had.

  It was ones like Gail she would return to, the ones at home where they were, taking you as you were, accepting your difference with unquestioning tolerance established in their earliest acquaintance. Gail trusted that Ada would not mention to anyone else anything from the past that the present might not understand.

  Then Leyla came, and one day soon after Ray and Ada had this conversation.

  ‘I think you could be happier. I mean, I think we both could be happier,’ one of them said.

  ‘I was thinking the same, I think we each could be happier,’ the other said.

  ‘I’m not saying I’m all that unhappy but I think. You would be. Happier. If. We. Had our own lives.’

  Horror chimed the moment. They were saying something true. Why hadn’t they said it before now? Perhaps they had not known, had tried not to know. Horror at telling the truth, then only relief.

  They had tried to have a good marriage. Ada wanted to think he had swept her up. Ray wanted to think she had a hold on him.

  18

  LEYLA WAS BACK IN SYDNEY

  One day they ran into each other in Kings Cross, or it might have been arranged, probably was. Ada will forget how she had heard that Leyla was back in Sydney. It had been years since they had last seen each other. Ten. Not quite. Seven?

  How would it be? But at the sight of each other they burst into laughter, of all things. Then took each other’s hand and walked a little and then sat in the hotel bar where Ada used to work and some people there remembered them.

  Leyla had fulfilled herself as a woman of impeccable and inimitable stylishness. She’d been living mostly in Los Angeles, first with the musician she ran away with from Bali, who was more of a music producer, then with a music producer who was more of a record executive. Ada didn’t know what she should have asked her, if anything; she and Leyla were, in a sense, at that moment so much in the moment, as they did not yet say like that then. Leyla often said ‘you’ll see’ about her life in LA. That life Ada was not to even think she could imagine, stuck in this end of the Earth colony.

  She couldn’t imagine what she couldn’t imagine. Leyla had a career, it seemed, which consisted of what exactly?

  ‘My career is being myself,’ Leyla declared.

  Apparently people wanted her to show up at things, and give them advice. They paid her in commodities, clothes, cars.

  Leyla mentioned people she knew, who were apparently famous and powerful where she lived and to anyone who actually knew anything that went on away from here, here this nowhere nothing place.

  This was just about believable when in moods like this Leyla exuded an invincible certitude.

  Who could separate person from persona?

  Ada might have only slowly realised this, as one thing contradicted, sometimes, or amplified another; there were disparate versions of how Leyla met a famous person and the extent of their special intimacy;
next time Leyla mentioned them, their latest work of art was all due to her.

  ‘I remember him,’ said Leyla about Ray. ‘He always changed the records.’ So he had, Ray chose the music when they had music on. Ada had forgotten that Leyla had noticed it too.

  Leyla learned about Charles. ‘That’s why I don’t live here,’ she said. As if these things couldn’t happen where she lived, nothing so barbaric.

  ‘I was wearing some of those things Charles made,’ Leyla meant in LA, ‘and people loved it. I mixed his skirt with a kebaya.’

  The one she’d worn that night in Bali.

  They talked about Charles.

  They talked about Kevin.

  ‘Oh Kevin’s around,’ said Leyla, waving her hand.

  ‘Oh you see him!’ Ada exclaimed.

  Leyla said, ‘Hollywood wouldn’t exist if gay people didn’t work there.’

  Ada remembers this moment she realised she knew the word ‘gay’ this way.

  Leyla didn’t seem interested in knowing about Gail. That arrangement, where Leyla now came from, everyone was doing it, being open in their whatever their arrangement was.

  Leyla said, ‘There’s nothing to keep me here.’ It’s possible she had wondered if there might be.

  Maybe by this time Leyla said that she had already told Ada she must go to San Francisco. Maybe so that there really was nothing here for her.

  Ada said, eventually, ‘I wrote a book.’ Which was not the first thing Ada said because it was a different kind of thing to tell, one where there had to be the right mood, it would have to be clear this was a moment she now chose. ‘And it was published.’

  Leyla looked at her as if to find proof or disproof upon her. ‘Are you famous now?’

  ‘Ha. Not at all.’

  Ada brought a copy to show Leyla. She looked at the cover: a man in a spaceship surrounded by writhing fantastical creatures, the curved horizon and a small sphere beyond it denoting Earth thus making obvious this story took place on another planet but giving a sense it was a story of peril and horror, which it wasn’t.

  Leyla gave her a look, like, Really?

  ‘It’s nothing like what it looks like,’ said Ada.

  Leyla didn’t say she wanted to read it, and the way she looked at it Ada didn’t offer to give her the copy.

  Leyla said, ‘When you make a work of art you can call yourself a writer.’

  Leyla was staying in a room at Kings Cross again, but in a nice hotel this time; she never complained about whatever that might have cost. She had come back to Australia because her mother had died and somehow she had found out, so somehow there was that other side of life, the family connections. There was something about cousins that Ada never remembered, one cousin Leyla had somehow heard from, the cousin she’d always liked.

  Ada had lost touch with her own mother. Ray had persuaded her to try and tell her when they got married. But there was no reply at the phone number and then that had been disconnected and Ada went to the old house and no one was there and no one in the street knew anything.

  That was never going to be any different.

  ‘I came back here to find you,’ Leyla told Ada after a while, wanting Ada to believe she was the only reason, because that would make Leyla the most faithful one.

  The two of them ran around the city, walking around their old neighbourhood and through the Domain to the Quay, walking all over their territory, Kings Cross, Darlinghurst, the bay, taking the tram to Bondi and the ferry over the Harbour to Manly. Theirs was a city built on water, its waters extending to other shores.

  Leyla took up all of Ada’s time for that period.

  It seemed that Leyla had as much money as she needed. Ada had enough too somehow, Ray always gave her money.

  Enough for now only.

  It came to light as an established fact that Ada would leave Ray.

  If you could only ever drink one thing what would it be?

  If you could only ever wear one colour what would it be?

  If you could only ever listen to one song what would it be?

  If you could go to only one place on Earth where would it be?

  If you had to hear only one song what would it be?

  If you could meet one person from the Bible

  The language you wished you could speak

  Like young girlfriends, just babbling away all day.

  Ada told Leyla about mailing her manuscript to San Francisco.

  Leyla said with earnest knowledgeableness, ‘Real heavy publishing is in New York, but they do some things in San Francisco.’

  Ada told Leyla that the publisher hadn’t written back in ages.

  Leyla said, ‘You should go there.’

  What? What? Of course she should, Ada could see that.

  Leyla had learned in the business that you took face-to-face meetings whenever you could. Talking on the phone wasn’t enough, you had to be there, look at their face, breathe the same air. Break bread, if the meeting was important, if you wanted something from each other. Leyla had learned these things, and delivered her knowledge with unblemished confidence. Leyla had learned these things from being on the right hand of the important people, who if they wanted to could just do it all on the phone, starting with her second husband, as she referred to someone she no longer lived with, it seemed at times, or would go back to, it seemed at times.

  Leyla said, ‘Get an agent.’

  Leyla said, ‘Look in the phone book, that’s how.’

  Ada imagined herself entering a phone booth in San Francisco, opening a thick directory, and turning its pages to A for Agents.

  But the question of how to get the money to go there. ‘I don’t think I can just go to the racecourse again,’ said Ada.

  Leyla said, ‘Ray has to give you half the house, half of everything.’

  Leyla said, ‘Of course you’re leaving, what were you thinking?’

  Leyla said, ‘There are lots of people trying to be writers in San Francisco.’

  Leyla disowned the idea then and treated the going to San Francisco idea as a stubborn whim of Ada’s that Leyla had given up trying to budge her from.

  Noemi says, you must have thought about it.

  There had come a point when Ada allowed herself to wonder why she and Leyla had never become lovers. It’s hard to say when. Once she let herself wonder it was as if she might always have wondered.

  No, it’s not exactly that it might ever have been like that.

  Ada thinks: These girlfriend couples do have at their core an intense physical attraction; it’s an indissoluble element along with a taboo of equal strength. There are those friendships where sex is not a question, it’s just not like that between you, and this impossibility allows for a kind of freedom of expression, a kind of flirtatiousness and even adoration you understand as an end in itself.

  Noemi says, That’s how straight women talk about gay male friends.

  Leyla was going back, taking a flight.

  ‘Let’s go out!’

  Ada told Ray she was going to have a night out with Leyla. Ada and Ray rarely ate dinner together, both claiming to have had such a big lunch they only wanted a tin of soup or a sandwich.

  Where shall we go?

  It was the dullest night or it was the funnest night. It was both.

  Fun. When the doors are bolted and the curtains drawn and the party moved to the inside room of the restaurant where the laws about drinking are reinterpreted. ‘We’re the queens of the room,’ Leyla said.

  That was fun for a while but then what, there was nowhere to go, and they wished they were in a city with the kind of bar that only existed late at night.

  Literally actually nowhere to go.

  Where you talk and have a drink in the midst of louche atmosphere, among men and women who’ve been in bars in a dozen cities, smoke, jazz, repartee. Glimpses of seedy tragedy and so on. Eruptions of song.

  Ada said, ‘I want to go to a city that has bars. Does San Francisco have bars lik
e that?’

  Leyla said, ‘In the movies.’

  ‘Does where you live?’

  ‘People only go to private parties in Los Angeles.’

  Ada said, ‘I’d like to see San Francisco.’

  Leyla said, ‘Tell me when you go there. It’s quite close really.’

  19

  IT BROUGHT YOU HERE

  She stayed in a little hotel in North Beach. Ada tells Noemi, ‘I’ll show you. I still always see this city the way it was then. It’s where I eventually saw Leyla again. But first, I met Sophie.’

  People came to San Francisco to be free. Ada had come to the right place. The years had not after all been lost, the years between her novel first being published and now; the years doing the stupid things she did, and that after writing this. They will say that Turn Left At Venus was a groundbreaking work that ‘interrogated gender’, which is not how she’d have put it at the time but it was true she had been having thoughts in that territory. It had been somewhat exciting that it was published and then nothing at all happened and for so long it went on like that and all that time she was in Australia.

  Her little child had been left in the care of a mysterious stranger in a dark faraway forest, but had never returned, and no travellers had any news of it.

  So she had to go herself.

  And everything changed and in San Francisco she really knew it. The years had led to this, to this beautiful city where people came to be free.

  It sometimes looked a little bit like Sydney: a vast body of water punctuated by a vast bridge, and the steep streets and the rows of terrace houses. But this was a city founded in freedom, and the row houses were not uniform and dull coloured as in Sydney with its military and gaoler founders, no, here they were varied, with asymmetrical windows, each house with its own unrestrained colours and contrasting details, each quirkily different from the others in the row, exuberant and singular. Painted Ladies.

  All the people were friendly.

  Ada was in San Francisco and everything was better than anything she could have ever invented, for this short mad time that for a while seemed like the whole of her life, like her life would always be like this.