Perfect Skin Read online

  I start work behind, and I manage to stay behind all day. I don’t even get to check my emails till after my last patient’s gone and George and Nigel are leaving for the pool. And the Window Weasel says:

  Listen, my friend. You said you wanted the weasel. And now things wouldn’t be the same without it, would they? So go click YES!! I LOVE MY WEASEL!! and you can register to use Window Weasel for life for only $30! Click LATER to register later.

  I don’t even know what the fucking weasel is, I tell the screen in a tone that doesn’t hide my annoyance. So how do I know how things would be without it?

  I’ve got one email. It’s from Katie.

  Jon,

  Lunch was fun on Monday. Have to do it again some time. Actually, how about dinner? I’ve just had someone in to redo the kitchen, so I was thinking it’d be nice to do something to ‘launch’ the new one. I was thinking Saturday. How are you placed?

  Could she have been at lunch on Monday? Which part was the fun part? And suddenly, evening baby-sitting arrangements pending, Saturday’s looking full for me.

  Katie can’t have a lot of friends if I manage to be on her dinner-party list right now, so I should probably try to go. Maybe she wants to push beyond Monday, pretend it never happened, re-establish some social equilibrium where we actually can have coffee, and no-one goes red or wrecks the paper.

  But I shouldn’t think it’s about normalising things with me. I expect I’ll be there to round up an odd number, or that it’ll be one of those dinner parties where you deliberately invite a bunch of people who don’t know each other. To subject them to an evening of protracted awkwardness, or whatever it is that you’re supposed to get out of those events. Why do I think it’ll be like that? How do I already know that the whole night will be characterised by the eighties, and by awkwardness?

  Tonight, book club is at George and Oscar’s. I set Lily up to sleep in George’s bedroom. He got it airconditioned one summer in the hope that it would make him more attractive. For sex, he once announced, I can promise you twenty-two degrees. It sounded horribly like the draft text for a line in the personal ads.

  You’ve really got into this running, haven’t you? Oscar says, while we’re serving the food. George says its practically every day now. There’s you and the running, him and the swimming.

  George takes his plate, and says, I think I could be starting to tone. I think that’s the feeling I’m getting.

  So how many times have you gone now?

  Well, Monday and today. So when I go on Friday that’ll be a three-times-a-week routine. That’s my plan. And today I felt less comprehensively rooted on the second lap. I’m sure I can call that progress. Hey, are you going to that thing on Saturday night?

  At Katie’s?

  No.

  Oh. What thing?

  But it’s too late. He’s smiling, and I know he’s completely lost interest in his question.

  Katie’s?

  Yeah. Just some dinner party she’s having. What are you doing?

  It’s a college thing. College of Dermatologists. Of which you aren’t a member, so it was a stupid question. He stops there. They both look at me.

  Katie’s nice, Oscar says.

  Yeah.

  So what is it? You and a bunch of Jungian therapists?

  Or just you?

  I’ve got no idea who’s going to be there. I don’t even know the collective noun for Jungian therapists. I hope that’s not what it’s like. I’ve only ever read Synchronicity, and I don’t really think that’s going to be helpful.

  But you bandy Jung’s name about all the time, George says.

  Yeah, but I’m faking it. You know I am. Not totally faking it, but pretty close. And have you noticed how, if I get specific, it’s usually one of only a handful of references?

  Like the fish one. The seven references to fish in one afternoon.

  Exactly, and how much of an impact do you think that has on Katie’s day? It’s not going to get me too far on Saturday. Let’s face it. Whatever a Jungian therapist does – if there is such a thing, and it’s not just a concept one of us came up with in a past conversation – it doesn’t involve sitting there reviewing your clients’ lives by demonstrating the acausal connectedness of things. She’s not sitting there going, ‘So, fish come up a lot in conversation today, then?’ That can’t be Jungian therapy. It can’t actually help anybody, can it?

  Not that they’ll be talking shop on Saturday, necessarily. If that’s the kind of people who are there.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have said yes. I only read Synchronicity because it was thin. You know that.

  Hey, we’re talking about books, he says, as though he’s just worked it out. We’re talking about books at book club.

  I had a thin-book phase at uni. I’ve known people who have publicly gone through fat-book phases, when they’ve read one blockbuster after another, but I don’t know anyone else who’s admitted to a thin-book phase. It’s as though you’d be admitting to cutting corners, which isn’t fair, since it’d be a pretty rare fat-book phase that’d lead to a person’s betterment.

  It was a reaction to alcohol, largely. I had a habit of drinking to excess at friends’ houses – nothing unique in that – and becoming paradoxically awake around 3 a.m. I worked out the first couple of times that there was no point in lying there trying to persuade myself to sleep, so after that I read something instead. And I found that picking the biggest, most boring book didn’t help (unless it was Patrick White), and I’d still be there at dawn and my body would be confused for days. Sleep, I found, came only with completion. So my best chance came with the smallest book in the house.

  I got to read Synchronicity that way. And Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death foretold and Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Which lets me cover quite a lot of territory, if the conversation demands it, but in a way that’s a bit haphazard. As a system it’s good, but it’s not perfect. Its main limitations are the serious expert (who is likely to assume that you might have tried one or two of the larger books of the same authors) or the person who assumes that your thin-book habit suggests a greater acquaintance with the western canon generally. And if you happen to be dropping the references in to impress, you can end up telling a lot of lies about Tolstoy, or Proust or some other fat-book person you’ve heard George go on about.

  I’m beginning to think it’s no surprise that I didn’t get a lot of sex back then. With the aid of hindsight, I’m Sure I seemed like a wanker most of the time and a charlatan the rest. I’m amazed I could have had such a low capacity to identify a lose-lose situation.

  After we’ve eaten, Oscar changes his shirt for a black turtleneck top.

  Do you think this is the look? he says, mainly to George, and he pats the plump turtleneck part of it.

  Oscar’s going on a date, George says.

  It’s not a date.

  George calls anything a date, I tell him. I wouldn’t worry about it.

  It’s just a reading. A poetry thing.

  George, you never mentioned poetry to me in the date scenario.

  I was assuming you wouldn’t be dating Justin.

  It’s not a date. You know I’ve got my own event on in a few weeks. All that new material I’ve been working on. It’s good to see what everyone else is doing first. And to be supportive. Get out there and go to other people’s things. And Justin just happens to like that kind of thing, too. Besides, any time I call anything a date we get our hopes up, don’t we? I can’t work under that kind of pressure.

  Well, George says, allowing a decent pause for reconsideration. I think the top looks good.

  Oscar fidgets – fidgets as though it might be a date – when Justin is three minutes late and still not here. He walks around the room, polishes imaginary marks from his glasses.

  So what’s your new material like? I ask him.

  Oh, more of the same, he says. But I’m hoping to take it to a new level. A new level of performance, but
also a more cohesive set of material. I think I do it on the twelfth. You’ll be there, won’t you?

  Oh, sure.

  Oscar is preparing his new material with the aid of an Arts Queensland grant. The last time I saw him perform, he wore hair extensions and sat in a large cardboard box surrounded by dead flowers. I’m not certain why. It was supposed to be something urban. I can’t say I completely understood the poetry, but it did seem very angry, and people seemed to like that. Lots of spitting. My kind of show.

  He writes poetry on Mondays, works in general practice on Tuesdays and Fridays, and does sessions with us on Wednesdays and Thursdays. He says that one day he’ll get himself a business card that reflects all of that, but he’s still not sure which order the different jobs should go in. And he’d like to open a bistro too, so there’s no point in rushing with the card.

  A car turns into the driveway and Oscar says, Finally, with a gesture that’s unnecessarily large. Now, should I go meet him, or should I wait for him to come to the door?

  Wait, George tells him, like a big brother who knows. You don’t want to look anxious about poetry.

  Right. Right, Oscar says, an element of psyching-up going on as he fiddles with his cuffs.

  And get back from the door, Oz Man.

  Oh, yeah, relaxed. I’ll be relaxed. I’ll be . . . in another room. Doing other things.

  Good call.

  Oscar turns, and walks away from us. He’s almost at the kitchen when the bell rings. George answers the door.

  He’s about to introduce me to Justin when Oscar reappears with a whisk in his hand and says, Oh, Justin, is it that time already?

  Hi, Justin says, as they move in a way that makes them face each other a bit like prize fighters, and turns the rest of us into an audience. Justin is wearing a black top as well, and snug-fitting new jeans. That’s a cool look, Oscar, he says. It really works for you.

  Ah, thank you. I was thinking it was good for a night of poetry.

  Yeah.

  Oscar moves the whisk from his right hand to his left, reciprocates the shameless checking-out that’s going on, swings the whisk back to his right hand, holds it in both, in a coy kind of way.

  Um, George, he says, when the silence has gone on a little too long. Is this what you were looking for?

  As, yes, my whisk. Now I can make that nice fluffy icing I said I’d make for your cake.

  Thank you. I’ll look forward to it. Um, we should be going now, I think. For the poetry.

  Of course, George says, and Oscar and Justin hurry out the door and down the front steps. And this is our invisible friend, Jon, though why bother noticing that he’s here when you’ve got a whisk? Honestly, I thought he was going to pin it on him like a fucking corsage.

  Yeah. Where was ‘I’ll be relaxed’ when we needed it? It was all rather school formal. What kind of boy are we bringing up here?

  Well, a poet for a start. And you should see the new stuff. Prepare to be entertained. But sit up the back. It’s a wet show. Lots of energy from that little mouth.

  We load the plates into the dishwasher and he boils water for coffee. I’d be offering you cake, obviously, he says, if only we’d found my whisk in time. Where on earth did he get the idea that the whisk was the prop he needed? He scoops the coffee into the plunger.

  So, this Katie thing, he says. Are you sure it’s a dinner party?

  That’s certainly the impression I got. I’m thinking six or eight people. Or seven or nine, even.

  Did she say that?

  Why would she?

  It’d only be fair. It’s all to do with the signals you send out. It’s how you invite that makes it clear what’s going on. Is it just you? Is there any suggestion of intimacy . . .

  Fuck, no. No intimacy. I don’t need to have that sprung on me. Give me a break.

  Okay, I’m just saying, be ready. She will be sending you signals, and you have to read them. That’s only fair, even if you’ve been out of the game for a while. And if she’s going, ‘Hey, there’ll be nine of us, a really mixed bunch of people, could be fun, why not come?’, then that’s fine. That’s a particular kind of thing. Not that it necessarily means there could never be other things.

  Well, that’s the kind of thing I’m thinking it probably is.

  George just looks at me. We both know she said none of that. We both know that his next question should deal with that, put it in its place, raise the date spectre once again. But we also know I’ve had enough.

  It’ll be fine, I tell him. Here’s what I think, right? She’s a coffee friend, and coffee friends can invite people round to dinner parties. And there’s none of your highly structured signalling business going on. This is all casual. I’m probably just there to make up the numbers. You can do that with a coffee friend.

  I’m glad to hear it. I’m glad to hear that in the absence of socially responsible signalling, there’s still a sophisticated conceptual framework underlying this.

  Sure. Always. And why not? What’s wrong with the coffee-friend concept? That stuff can work, you know. I’ve got a running buddy now too.

  A running buddy?

  Yeah. Someone else who does laps of uni, so we go together in the mornings now. You know how that is. It’s like you and Nigel and the swimming.

  Yeah. Is it? Who’s your running buddy?

  She lives near uni. Right where I park my car.

  Good, he says. Convenient. He stirs the sugar in my coffee, taps the spoon twice on the side and hands me the cup.

  She happens to like to run at the same kind of time as I do. And she likes to run in groups.

  So there’s a group of you?

  Well, there’s just the two of us at the moment, but there could be other people some time. It’s a good time of day to run.

  A running buddy and a coffee friend. It’s sounding very compartmentalised, this life of yours.

  Which isn’t a problem, is it?

  No. He drinks a mouthful of coffee. Did I tell you I’ve downloaded some new software that could be good for work? For the records side of things?

  No.

  I’ve got the demo going. It’s pretty good. Do you want to see it?

  Okay. Yeah.

  We go into his study, and his tropical fish screen saver is bubbling away calmly on his computer.

  Synchronicity, he says. Weren’t we talking about Jung’s fish references earlier?

  He flips around from one page of the new records software to another, but I’m not paying much attention. I shouldn’t have mentioned Ash. I should have known he wouldn’t get it, but it seemed like a good chance to bring her up. And I couldn’t have said I think she’s lonely, or anything like that. So we’re running together. And having lunch on Saturday. It’s definitely good I didn’t say that.

  He’s showing me how the software recommends dosages, raises possible drug interactions.

  Here, he says, Try it. Prescribe something. Give John Doe a really stupid dose of Amoxil.

  He steps aside so I can get to the keyboard. I fumble around trying to find the right tools on the toolbar.

  No, no, it’s that one, he says. Like I showed you before. And he goes on trying to be helpful, but using software words.

  You’re teching me out here, George, I tell him.

  What do you mean?

  You’re losing me. Any time you’re about to use a word that has a capital letter in the middle or ends in a little R in a circle, replace it with something bland and old-fashioned. Luddite-friendly.

  You are so behind, aren’t you? I’d like to call it retro, but it’s just behind.

  George loves technology. Not long after we started uni, he noticed that I was the only person in our social medicine tute group whose assignments were done on a word processor. Soon enough he was over at our place pretty regularly, talking hardware and software with my father and then angling for a turn at the keyboard in the study downstairs. Word processing, experimenting, taking the kind of interest I never could. He
tried programming, in a very basic way, and designed a totally non-visual golf game that relied on advice from a wise-cracking invisible caddie, a random number generator and blind luck. George had never been on a golf course in his life and the game obviously sucked, but my father got quite excited. Particularly when he shot a course record fifty-eight on only his third or fourth go.

  It was that kind of thing that made me feel as though I was letting the side down. Letting two sides down. Being an inadequate friend, unable to muster enthusiasm for the world’s most unappealing computer game, and an inadequate son, finding myself unable to care much about computers in general (and the record round in particular).

  In fourth year uni, my father got George a cheap, second-hand computer through work, and George got excited about its very limited graphics potential. He repaid us by doing up a particularly eye-catching A4 flyer that read, ‘[] YES!!! I want good head from a friendly person with no serious diseases’ and about twenty tabs at the bottom with my name and phone number.

  There were several calls. Enough, in fact, that I had to explain it to my parents. I came home from uni one day to find my mother on the phone, calmly telling someone that this was a bit of a mistake, that she wasn’t sure I was looking for that sort of thing, really, But thank you for your interest.

  So we had to have a talk. Not that it was her business what I was looking for, of course – and she was pretty clear that she didn’t want to know – but was there anything I wanted to tell her? Was I lonely? Was I looking for what these men were offering? And if I wanted their numbers, they were on the pad next to the phone.

  When I explained, my father said, The lad just likes his new computer. Got a bit excited, obviously. Nothing wrong with that.

  The next morning, I ignore the weasel completely. I have the cursor hovering over the part of the screen where the LATER box will be, and I stare straight at it to make sure the weasel doesn’t catch my eye. I click as soon as I see the outline.

  I check all my emails from Katie to see if there’s a hint from her one way or the other. I’m sure there’s nothing going on. Then when I go on-line there’s a new one, but it’s only confirming the time for Saturday and telling me to bring nothing, or wine if I really want to. Not even George could find a signal in that. Damn it, why has he got me thinking this way?