The White Door (10 page)

One day, lying on the floor of Karl Stead’s house in Tohunga Crescent, the better side of Parnell, ferns and sea in view, Stephen heard James, who was lying beside him, intone a long sermon on guilt to Karl, and Karl listened politely and sought to engage with James on the points that were ludicrous. Such politeness, Stephen thought, James just talks about guilt so he can draw Karl into debate, so James can then, very jesuitically, prove himself to be as guilty as sin. If you talk to him about it, you just help him reinforce this hump he’s carrying. But Stephen loved Karl more than he loved James. It was Karl who had helped bail him out of police custody and who, for years afterwards, hung the headlines of the sit-in on his office door. Moreover, Karl was helpful to Stephen’s own poetry, whereas James was barely aware that Stephen tried to write. Twenty years in the future, James seventeen dead, Stephen applying for citizenship in Britain, Karl would be excoriated by a new generation of the politically correct, who would remember not at all his youthful radicalism, his help to young poets, the book Karl wrote of dissent and armed revolution which, as a film, launched Sam Neill to fame. A fanciful book of youngsters with rifles and dynamite in the fern forests of New Zealand. Ah, thought the age-marked Stephen in London, picking
through the literary tabloids, Heaven’s Cloud with its five thousand correct particularisms. And here is Karl, taking an unpolitic stand on behalf of universal measures. He still thinks something can be indisputably good or irremediably bad – just as the Vietnam war offended his sense of the universal good. But to go to war in New Zealand for the sake of the universe at this moment in time? The country will need to divide these five thousand particularisms, and their individual measures, among its three million inhabitants and, let’s see, you’re bound to say one politically incorrect sentence out of every six hundred. He put aside his dubious mathematics. He remembered Dan Davin, in his last days in Oxford, attacking Karl as well, but for very different reasons to do with Dan’s view of Karl’s fraudulent critical apparatus. Stephen would simply say, he was my teacher, and the venom would moderate. But, of James, Stephen could never say, he was my mentor, but this was what James, in a clumsily loving way, became. Stephen was determined never to acknowledge it to James’s face, determined not to be even a nanosecond’s worth of guilt in James’s image-completed self-destructing life. He loved Karl more, but he loved James much.

One night, James took Stephen – rather, he used Stephen for transport – to a party in Ponsonby. There, for the first time, James introduced Stephen to drugs and there, for the first time also, to something that marked him much more than six years of chemicals ever did, he heard the new Van Morrison LP and, on the end of side one, the singer’s up on Cypress Avenue, waiting in his car seat, and – it struck him like a hammer; for years he remembered the almost physical blow – words to do with a waif-like girl, so young and bold (then the words are almost slurred), fourteen years old. Ever after, his test of whether a person had suffered as he had suffered, whether others met the waifs of the moon, was if they had picked out these words in a haze of an LP.

When he choked back his tears, a gypsy-haired girl said to him, ‘you look as if you can levitate. Will you please levitate?’ And he said, not now, but I feel now as if one day parts of my soul will, out of grief, rise up and travel the world. ‘Perhaps they will travel in time,’ she said,
‘and always come back to this moment. Then you will have levitated for me.’

For Elizabeth had been fourteen when she first fell in love; and at the same time learned how men of a certain type would fall in love with her because of her beauty and her tremendous frailty. There were two of them, from north America, professors already, who never fell out of love with the dying girl. And, from there, she collected a trail of men and, four years later, Stephen lived with them and the knowledge of them, even if they were chosen from among his best friends. But she never chose Anton, though Anton complained of being overlooked. And the men served her as if they were the priests of her temple, and Stephen was sent to study the alchemy of how hearts live without jealousy and rancour. The more she betrayed him, the more he loved her, until he needed the hurt to know he was in love.

As a year, then two, slipped by, he would visit James at the house he kept for healing addicts. This was in Grafton, at the other end of the great Domain, and James would walk the Domain late at nights, dew under his feet in mild seasons, breaking ground frost in others – the toes of Baxter imagining frostbite for the sake of the Lord. For James prayed that his addicts would suffer little, or as little as possible at the feet of the police; and he wrote a long poem that all the critics, remembering the Latin and Greek allusions of his early work, dismissed as trivial. But Stephen thought it James’s strongest work and noted in his log that James now prayed to a star in which he no longer believed. He was wearing out his guilt and Stephen felt he was wearing out the surcoat of his body, and the thin coat of his soul.

But Stephen visited James’s filthy house in Boyle Crescent because opposite was a space where once his grandparents’ house had stood. Now a Medical School car park, they had moved there, and taken son, daughter-in-law and grandson with them, and left Parnell, trams and blue flashes behind. And, because it was now a space, Stephen took the Grafton years to be also a space and, for him, the spring of life was a shop in Parnell, and he looked at the space in James’s life and
thought the guru of the junkies would not live long. At the universities, professors of English hoped Baxter would emerge from his phase and be, again, the stormy petrel of their seas, patrolled by their discourse, and did not recognise the endgame of death’s black hand.

If James led him from Parnell to Grafton, Elizabeth led him to Ponsonby, not far from his point of levitation. There, her young priests set up house and, there, Stephen would visit – frock coat now an affectation of his own past – and issue the politesse of a stabilised soul, unconsumed by rancour or jealousy, and treasure his rationed moment in the endgame of her ministrations, in the endgame of her life. And wrote a paean to the house when later it too became space.

Beneath this arched moon, words would not fall, unless my cancer were so insistent. Last night I drove down a street I had almost forgotten. No adventures filled the air, but a lighted cloak baptised the city. Dante’s
Inferno
was not read from the windows of old houses. Your young men were asleep, with one exception. He could have been lost in his books, his blonde hair falling over his eyes and around his learned expression. But that is a picture you have left, merely against the cloaked sky of a city.

Against the walls of that house, you and I have learnt to live, without excluding despair, but permitting its tumescent ecstasy. Tears then, yours when you remember, and mine when I pass. Something has lifted itself from that house. The street has lost its exceptional blessing. No red coal informs the sky that you are visiting.

I could tour many houses. So much has been lost. I have discovered the fragility of all thoughts that intrude as convictions, hopes and dreams. That house in Ponsonby is not as derelict as those who scribble totalities inside, of he who remembers unconnected hours outside, not scribbling, but hoarding up the broken stammers and choken wishes. Every Saturday night I would arrive drunk enough to be immune from your ceremonies. My part was to drive you home.
Slowly, I would not urge a movement, I found it necessary to reassure myself on behalf of my friends, somehow you belonged to them and to their house.

Now I shall confess to you. Last night, the sky was very light, because half a mile away, a huge factory was burning. Fire machines and attendants with red flashing lights turned away all spectators. Cars had to detour through backstreets. Coming on purpose to that street, to see the house silhouetted against the flames. It was my intention. I wanted to shout ‘Collingwood Street is burning! Collingwood Street is burning!’ It would have exorcised some haunting memories. It would have been a symbolic frailty. A filigree of compensation.

I neither saw flames there, nor found any pitch to set my voice against. The sky was light. The city was cloaked. Somewhere in the city, you were sleeping, your mouth was allowing a subtle curve, a smile. I did not shout. A single light was burning. Your monkly lover did not appear at the window. His blond curls were framing the italics in urgent poems.

It was a habit we had, he and I. We would write love songs for you, spell out secret formulæ, stabbing final lines with concluded mysteries of ardent expectations. His grin would accompany my flights into isolation. Even from other cities, I would feel his benevolence attached to my own.

Last night Collingwood Street did not burn. The sky failed in its intensity. No sweeping waves of music heralded disaster. The house stood, while less dramatic notes insisted that the love which once motivated young men, was settled into its source, and there only.

I could have transferred all sentiments of my own, from one house to another. A shed really. A tiny room with earthen floor and walls, dug out from the underside of a hillside structure. There, with trees and railway lines, the tender tricks of memory could have fastened on to brief blue moments.

No tiny passer-by in those days could have forgotten our afternoons together. Looking to that room, my sentiments could have told me that nothing else will ever rival those intimations of happiness.

I did not transfer my sentiments. My sense of tragedy lies with
the Ponsonby house. There, your blonde scholar, and later your young spinner of Greek calligraphy, wove interlocking textures and romances all sceptics would have pronounced impossible.

Possible for over a year. I counted the time, lived through the months, as I carefully wrote down all developments, all unanswered and unanswerable deviations, all prophecies that one day, the three of you might coalesce into an indivisible trinity.

It took a liberal undertaking of alcohol for me to call on Saturday nights. It took my own peculiar ceremonies. My overcoat, my long black hair, my practiced mannerisms. I would arrive whenever I was ready. Afterwards, I would return to my alcohol. That year, I addicted myself to whiskey. Any gesture, after all, was best inflated into a worth of its own.

Whiskey and long debates, where I acted out my true character as a sophist. Whiskey and those strange exquisite young women. You would watch my progress. I would watch for your moments of vulnerability, I had plans to suddenly rush over to declare myself. For a year, you omitted vulnerabilities. My strategy failed.

But last night, last night saw the defeat of my final pretensions, my collapse in a car, outside a house, unknown to those asleep inside, unknown to the reader of books and camouflaged lines. Unknown to you, some miles away. Collingwood Street is dead, its sense of love and its respondent tragedy also. Now, no drama appends itself to my secret driving up and down.

In Ponsonby, people tap along footpaths, past churches and the smell of deserted loneliness. In small all-night cafés, the visible do not fail to excuse all those who are unaware of the mysteries, who have not tasted the sacraments, who have not hoarded up fragment after fragment, who have not seen love disappear from houses, who have not made fumbling attempts to cast huge billboards with bold letters, catalogues of what has been lost and what can never again satisfy the static nature of years and the careless exchange of hopes for the future.

In the wake of Elizabeth, all memory was of the nights as haze. Entire years he could remember only as rose-tinted evenings and
rose-scented
women. When Judith Todd visited New Zealand to urge support for the struggle in Zimbabwe, he met her courteously but at the same Parnell party, commandeered a room and scandalised the university guests by making love to one of his own tutors. Judith remembered that when, years after, they met in Zimbabwe, he to monitor the independence elections, she to campaign for the victors. She gave him the key to her father’s walled garden and, for respite, he took to swimming there with his closest companions – a Nigerian colonel, a Barbadian secret policeman and a British amputee from the Korean war. But she smiled at him. ‘How was the blonde beauty at the Parnell party?’, and he answered that she, and many, sought only to mother him. I think for three years I must have wandered looking emptied and vulnerable. ‘You also looked drunk and drugged,’ she laughed, and he could not demur.

If he was mothered, many nights were spent escorting his own mother about Auckland, as she uncovered step-by-step the evidence of his father’s infidelity. One mistress led to another, and it would have been like father, like son, only he resolved never to deceive; each of his women knew of the others, and he – in Elizabeth’s well-taught lesson – asked courteously about the health of their husbands and other lovers. Thus a collectivity, he thought, and not a harem, but his father had dropped enough hints to him that, for his part, he saw himself as the centre of his concubines; and it was the Red Emperor receiving his just due, after decades of struggling to be accepted in Auckland business society. Indeed, his success with women was a consciously-paraded motif of his continued acceptability – one of the boys in every boyish way.

Years later, his sons by his longest-standing concubine came to his funeral. Far away, in an English garden, a first-born son was finding it hard to cross the oceans of the world. But, in New Zealand, his mother hugged the other offspring, sons, daughters, hers, those not hers, in
a gallantry he could not have foretold more than twenty years earlier. Though of mixed blood, European, Chinese, the sons were clearly scions of the Red Emperor. But, away from the funeral, he and his father were walking in the blue night towards a bridge in the stars. In Auckland, the sons of his last status symbol, his sign of arrival, his location in his adopted community – a white woman – wept as any other sons, by light of moon or day, would weep.