CHAPTER FOUR: THE TRUNDLE OF DISTANCE MACHINERY.

It was the same, sleep-deprived night, during which Paul had dreamed of anti-intellectual pogroms, that Patina had a significant dream of her own.

Immediately after Paul's departure, while she was readying herself for bed, some disturbing thoughts and suspicions began to work their way into her consciousness:

"Why did he answer the phone when my mom called? I wish he wouldn’t have. What would prompt him to do something like that in any case? I mean, what was the point of his getting my mother involved in our affairs? What would be the good of that? Was it really just a reflex action?"

"I warned you--didn't I." said Merlin's voice inside her head. "I warned you repeatedly, and I'll even tell you this once more, and you can mark my words: this boy will cause you heaps of trouble.

This boy is the type to attach strings to people and things. But you ignore my warnings; you think you don't need me any more."

Patina was by no means convinced of the validity of Merlin's argument but she felt distinctly troubled nevertheless, and her anxiety became manifest in a dream she had that night:

On getting to sleep, she began to retreat to the secret, silent world of snow. The snow was falling heavily and continued to do so without any signs of it stopping. It was already several feet deep when she first ventured out in it, but she had an important and urgent matter to attend to and could delay no longer.

She was dressed like an Inuit and was even wearing snow- shoes, which resembled tennis rackets. The heavy snowfall continued even as the wind picked up speed and the combination brought blizzard conditions, through which she continued to walk while growing ever more anxious at the prospect of becoming lost.

She didn't even know exactly what it was she was looking for but felt it was something she needed badly and yet the blizzard had now become so intense as to cause a white out, through which she could see absolutely nothing.

This made the entire venture seem dangerous, and pointless too because it left her with virtually no chance of finding whatever it was she needed, and it even prevented her making a decision as to which direction she should head in. As a result, she just stood impassive and feeling lost and totally helpless.

After the passing of indeterminate minutes, however, her spirit was uplifted by the appearance of a golden glow. The glow was warm, deep and rich, it inspired a feeling of wellbeing and it had the further magical property of illuminating the white out.

She then saw the source of the light: it was a lantern, and Merlin was holding it. He pointed his bony, wizened finger in Patina's direction.

She was at first taken aback and confused--thinking he was pointing at her in an accusatory fashion--but on finally turning to look behind her, she suddenly noticed a public telephone booth.

"Exactly!" she said. "Of all the many things in the world, that's exactly what I need." With courage and hope restored to her, she walked quickly toward it, opened the door and entered. She was also pleased to find a respite from the freezing wind and driving snow.

She picked up the telephone receiver. A girl's voice at the other end answered promptly and said:

"Alaska operator."

"Oh, Hi! Can you please put me through to Long Distance Information?"

"Connecting yooooou."

"Oh, Hi, can you get me the number of Mr. Van Zandt in Sydney, Australia. He wrote it down on a piece of paper for me and he asked me to call him, but I never did, because I lost the piece of paper, so I couldn't call him even if I wanted to . . . not that I wanted to; you see, his name was in the book in any case, so I could have called him any time prior to that . . . not that I wanted to, but it was just like some kind of mindless stupidity, you see. But I do have to call him now for real to convey a vitally important message."

"Yes, hello." said Paul.

"Oh, it's you! I'm very sorry but I've had to get a job over the school vacation, and, unfortunately, it's in Alaska, so I won't be able to see you for all of three months, or the entire duration of the school holidays. I'm terribly sorry but I just can’t help it."

"That's okay. As it happens, I have to work too--I'll be working in Darwin building chicken sheds and for the full three months as well, so I wouldn't be able to see you in any case. So don't worry yourself about this for one moment, and try to enjoy Alaska as much as you can. It's good to have a little time apart in any case--isn't it?"

"You're so understanding. I really do appreciate your being like that."

*

Having gone to the trouble necessary, Paul was able to hand in his assignment on time at 9 a.m. sharp. With that feat accomplished he headed for the library to work on a paper, but before sitting down to commence that task he decided to wander around a little in the hope of locating Patina. He was successful in that venture and it didn't take him long.

She had a window seat on the north wall of the ground floor. The sun was pouring in through that window like diaphanous gold and bathing the golden Patina in a gleaming radiance.

"My sunshine angel." he thought. "I'm the luckiest guy alive, and that's for sure."

Paul got down on his knees on the carpet, rested his hands on her desk, smiled and said, "G-day." She responded with a sweet and appropriately gilded smile.

"What's that you're reading?" he asked.

"It's a fairy tale. I read them all the time. I've read them since I was a kid. Have you ever read The Lord of The Rings or The Hobbit--they are also for adults, but I like fairytales that are written just for children too, and just as much."

"Mm," thought Paul, "this might be the cool new thing for college kids to get into."

He then said: "No, I can't say I've ever read anything like that."

He looked at the book she was holding. It was a tiny book made for tiny hands; measuring about three inches wide by four inches high and less than a half inch thick.

Patina's enthusiasm in talking about the book, and her holding it up for him to see; seemed, to Paul at least, like an open invitation to borrow the book, read it, and perhaps discuss it with her at a later stage--just as he had done with Secret Silent Snow.

I made a casual, perfunctory request,

Assessed as superfluous by amity weighed.

I expected an un-delayed ‘be my guest’

As my fingers pressed on the book she displayed.

But to my surprise she didn't let go,

Her head drooped low in doleful guise.

Her pensive eyes looked up as though

She feared this precious thing's demise.

"If you're sure you'll give it back," she said, in a slightly irritated tone of voice. After that, she finally loosed her hold on the book so he might take it from her.

But Paul felt as though he had snatched it out of her hand by force; had taken it from her under protest; that he had won a tug of war; that Tina had only acquiesced through the duress he had unwittingly imposed and that she had been far from happy to do so.

"She trusts me, she trusts me not." he thought.

He felt hurt because it seemed she didn't trust him all that much after all, and he was concerned and upset by the further implication: that their friendship was not really so solid or close-knit as he had estimated and hoped.

He was surprised too that she trusted him enough to have him in her bedroom late at night and kiss him for hours on end, and yet she had doubts about whether she could trust him with this little book.

He felt upset also by the unfairness of her mistrust, because he had returned Secret Silent Snow promptly and intact; therefore, he had a proven track record of trustworthiness, which she had failed to acknowledge. She should have trusted him enough to return the book.

Was it so valuable or beloved? Was the chance of her never seeing it again significant? Why didn't she just wait a week or two and then, if he hadn't already returned it, politely ask him to do so? Why should she become irritated by his request?

Paul read the book going home in the train. It only took him half an hour to read the whole thing. It was clearly a book intended for small children. He didn't find it very interesting or enjoyable or unusual.

It was hard cover but very small, and couldn't have been worth more than a few dollars. It wasn't an old or rare book--it was only two years old. She would have been able to buy another copy without any trouble had he been determined never to return it. There was nothing written in the front cover to give it sentimental value.

He returned the book the following day. He felt just a trifle nervous about having it in his possession, and was eager to get it back to her as soon as possible. He also wanted to reassure her that he was a person who could be relied upon. He was vaguely anticipating praise for his punctuality.

On getting it back, however, Tina gave no indication of being especially pleased or relieved. She simply took the book in a matter of fact way while wearing a poker face, and put it in her shoulder bag. Paul was bewildered by the entire episode.

"My mom said you are invited for dinner this coming Sunday. Please don't say anything to remind her of my upcoming twenty-first birthday. She'll want to throw a party for me, and that would be an ordeal of the first magnitude."

"Oh how fabulous!" thought Paul. "I'm gaining so much ground, and so quickly . . . But, Oh Christ, it will be an ordeal meeting her folks, an absolute ordeal, I'm sure. They are probably both really terrible, horrible people.

They won't be accepting but will probably scrutinize me. I will have to choose my words with care, and not declare my lack of brass. I must somehow keep them unaware that I am lower middle class.

Being Americans, they probably won't even know the socioeconomic topography of Sydney in any case; so, if I just speak politely, and casually throw in a twenty-dollar word here and there, they might never even suspect I'm a westie--not that that's a fair label to stick on me, but they might do it anyway."

"You will have to catch a ferry boat to get there," she said. "I will already be there, so you'll have to find your own way, but I'll give you the directions.

You can catch a train to Circular Quay and then a ferry. I'll draw you a little map of how to get from the Harbor View wharf to my parents’ place."

"God, wowweee! The time has finally come for me to make my debut in high society." he thought.

*

The harbor was beautiful, and so was the weather on that bright sunny day. There was a briny smell in the air, a smell noticeably stronger than that of the harbor per se because it was intensified by waves crashing over the bough of the ferry and breaking up into a fine spray.

Sea gulls were sailing like kites in the breeze and just keeping pace with the boat. They were ever on the lookout for tit bits of human food; tasty morsels of concentrated sugar, fat and salt--as if they didn’t have enough of the latter in their diet already.

The Harbor View wharf was not grand or impressive to look at. It seemed quite as ordinary as a railway station or any other kind of public place, and this gave the impression Harbor View itself might not be such a grand place either. But on leaving the wharf’s boardwalk, standing on solid ground and making his way up the first road, Paul found himself assailed and quickly overwhelmed by an imposing succession of mansions and prestige cars, which appeared to be growing more expensive with almost every step he took.

His massive inferiority complex had already primed and prepared him with the expectation of being overawed, and with such a firm foundation laid, it was not likely to fail--and it did not, in fact, fail to achieve that self-defeating end.

He also felt an overpowering sense of being an outsider; but more than that, he felt like an intruder, an interloper, and even an imposter. The influence of these prestige cars made him nervous to begin with, because they were up-market makes such as Mercedes; but as time wore on they made him many times more nervous because they were the more unusual models like convertibles, which are so expensive in Australia. Paul almost felt like throwing up; the fancy cars made him almost physically sick.

The road’s steep, socioeconomic gradient made his walk feel like a long hard climb indeed, but, finally, he reached the Van Maanen residence. It was an enormous house on a quite large block of ground by harbor standards.

"It must be worth a million or more," he thought. "I should never have come, goddamn it!"

He unlatched and opened the front gate, passed through to the other side and then restored things carefully to just how they had previously been. He then made his way cautiously along a steep, winding path, climbing an altitude of about fifteen feet in the process before reaching the front door of the house. He coughed nervously and knocked at the door. He was expecting his nervous state to continue to intensify at least until the door was opened; at that point it would either settle or be ratcheted up another notch or beyond depending upon how he was received. But he was doubly surprised when the door opened after barely a few seconds, and he was very much relieved to find Patina standing there in the doorway, looking as pretty as a picture and smiling effusively at him.

In that brief moment, it also struck him as something so odd to see her here in this totally unfamiliar setting. It seemed so surprising in fact he almost felt like saying:

"What are you doing here? This is such a coincidence that both of us should be at this same distant place at the very same time."

She ushered him inside with a sweeping motion of her arm. "My Dad's working again today, he had to go in at short notice, so there's only my mother here for you to meet."

"Oh what a relief!" thought Paul. "Bless your heart for bringing me such glad tidings, and for telling me straight away rather than keeping me on tenterhooks."

His anxiety level had dropped to below half of what it had been only seconds before.

They went through the entrance atrium and into a huge room with a very high ceiling and cathedral glazing. The room was about sixty feet long by thirty feet wide, and the ceiling was twenty feet high.

Next to it was a stairway leading to a mezzanine floor, which had the effect of endowing half the house with two stories while the other half consisted of only one story but of double the normal height.

Mrs. Van Maanen came walking briskly towards them. She was quite tall at around five-eight, blonde, slender, attractive and forty-six years of age. She looked as if she could have been a model in her younger days. She had a very definite manner about her and something of a regal bearing.

She approached Paul in a manner, which was anything but tentative. With quick and deliberate strides, which seemed forcefully abrupt to Paul, she intruded right into his personal space and attempted, ostensibly, to grab both his hands with hers.

Paul crossed his arms with the even greater abruptness of a defensive reflex, which was aimed at warding off a lunge or grab at his private parts, or a knee to the groin; something his experience in high school had conditioned him to anticipate, and which he was now continuing to anticipate even after a period of eight years had elapsed.

Introverts are said to condition very readily. Paul would condition instantly and permanently; it was part of the downside of his sensitive nature.

Mrs. Van Maanen suddenly crossed her arms too, in an apparent effort to compensate for Paul's abrupt change of position, but she miscalculated just a little and ended up grabbing him forcibly by both wrists.

Paul felt like a gauche imbecile at having reacted in such a puerile fashion, and he felt an even greater degree of discomfort and embarrassment too at the sheer clumsiness of now being held in such an ungainly grip:

They could have bent down and picked up a passenger who might have sat on their interlocked arms, which were doubly crossed to resemble scissors, and that passenger might have enjoyed a ride in something resembling a four-footed, ambulatory sedan chair.

But Paul could not make a decision about which direction he should move in or what he should do next. By dint of the apparent forcefulness of her determination, he felt Mom was well and truly in control of any such proceedings. It was attitude, it was mind, but it was body too: she seemed so amazingly strong and muscular--even though her muscles did not show, and she held him in a vise-like grip.

And the physical nature of their interconnectedness went even a step further. It seemed as strangely intimate as wrestling or football or some other kind of strenuous, body to body, contact sport.

"I'm so glad Patti has finally brought one of her little friends home from School." said Mom, patronizingly. "Come up stairs, and I'll show you my view."

They took but two or three awkward steps with their arms clumsily interlocked and entangled. Mom then released her grip at a convenient place to do so--the foot of the stairway--and they began to ascend the stairs together. She appeared to show not a trace of embarrassment during these entire unfortunate proceedings.

"This is a beautiful house," said Paul, with a moderate enthusiasm that was calculated to steer the narrow path between politeness and obsequiousness.

"It's not too bad I suppose, but I have yet to get my house in order. I have had a new stove custom fitted into the kitchen, and this place was such an unholy mess for what seemed like an eternity while all of that work was being carried out.

Those workmen are as slow as molasses in January. You have to push and push and push them to get anything done, and that doesn't help me to put my house in order.

I'll show you my kitchen later, but first things first."

Having reached the summit of the stairs, they walked through a wide hallway, through another atrium and out on to the front balcony. To maximize the view, Mom went straight to the front edge of the balcony and rested her forearms on the railing atop the safety fence, which was a good four feet high--Paul did likewise.

"How do you like my view?" she asked, brimming over with pleasure and pride.

"It's very nice," said Paul, guardedly. "It's picturesque and colorful, and yet it has something else, something less tangible . . . a certain ambience."

Mom suddenly seized him with a cold and penetrating stare, which gave Paul the impression she was just about to issue him with a very stern warning. Her facial expression grew more threatening until she seemed to be glowering at him, and then she began to speak again:

"Patina paints, and I don't mind telling you, or anyone else for that matter--she's good!"

The edge of her mouth was curled up in a snarl and her words were spoken so ferociously that Paul felt intimidated. He felt she was just daring him to disagree.

"Yes indeed," he said, "I've seen her work--she has an extraordinary talent."

Paul had the highest, genuine admiration for Patina as an artist, which fostered in him a willingness to praise her voluntarily and readily. But he felt as if the praise he had just offered had been extracted by force and duress, and this caused him to feel uncomfortable and embarrassed because it made him feel like a frightened sycophant.

After absorbing all of the varied impressions her view could offer, it was time for a guided tour of her kitchen. Paul had never seen such a stove in all his life. Imported from England, it was about ten feet long and five feet high, and built into the wall. It also had no less than five separate ovens.

"It must be a real pleasure to own and have the use of something really special like that," he said.

"Well, yes . . . because cooking is messy, you see, and it's important that I get my house in order. Having five ovens definitely helps in that department, because they don't get dirty so quick, and because you can lay everything out just so. It really does make a big difference."

During his general overview of the kitchen, Paul had noticed, and counted, all of eight refrigerators. That struck him as something strange enough to be downright mysterious--like some kind of abstruse riddle, which was likely to contain within it the unabridged and unexpurgated answer to the meaning of life.

"Why so many?" he thought.

"Don't ask." said a voice in his head. "That might be the biggest faux pas you could ever make. When in doubt, play it safe by saying nothing. And who knows, they might not even be refrigerators, they might be upright freezers."

Dinner was surprisingly simple, and consisted of a chicken salad. That would certainly create less mess than a big slap-up dinner, and would presumably assist Mom in getting her house in order. The three of them sat at the end of a long table to eat it and to talk over dinner.

"We were at a party at Clara Goodman's place again last week--you've been to her place before haven't you Patti--she has the most wonderful city apartment, which occupies an entire floor of the Australia Tower--"

"Yes, Mom, I've been to her place."

"She's on the forty-first floor, and what a spectacular, 360-degree, panoramic view! But what I like and admire about her especially is--not just the fact that she really knows how to throw a dinner party, but that she is also able to keep her house in order.

I mean, she will spend two hundred dollars each and every day just on flowers for the dinner table, and, I mean, it just makes it, flowers like that.

Now Clara has just bought a million dollar's worth of gold. Just think of that--an even million . . . I wonder how heavy or big that much gold would actually be? Gold is so heavy, you see, that such an ingot might only be quite small."

"It's easy to calculate," said Paul, enthusiastically. "Gold sells for three-hundred dollars an ounce, so divide a million by three-hundred and that gives you three and a third thousand ounces.

Convert those ounces to grams--there are 28.4 grams in an ounce--and that gives you approximately ninety thousand grams.

Divide that by the density of gold--which is 19.5 grams per cubic centimeter--and that gives you four and a half thousand cubic centimeters or, four and a half liters, or almost exactly one Imperial gallon, or one and a quarter US gallons."

Mom gaped at Paul open-mouthed for a mesmerized moment and then snapped out of it. "That was a rhetorical question." she said, angrily, and then readied her facial expression for the issuance of another warning: "You had just better be careful or they'll make you a math teacher and pay you twenty dollars a week for the rest of your life . . . Now the law is an area of opportunity for a smart young man.

At Clara and Isi's place, we met a young attorney by the name of Llewellyn O'Brien. Now he is a young man who is really going places.

He told me the Australian government has allocated sixty million dollars to hold a royal commission to investigate the atomic tests the British carried out in the Australian desert back in the fifties.

He is only a junior attorney but he'll be getting a thousand dollars per day for his part in the proceedings, and that will be paid over a period of nine months.

That works out to one quarter of a million dollars, and, because he doesn't need the money, he can channel all of it into the purchase of a property at Bowral; which he can claim as a tax loss and use as a holiday home, and so he doesn't have to pay one penny in tax on the quarter million he gets from the government. It's really quite clever.

"But is a royal commission really useful?" asked Tina.

"Why, yes, of course, because it revealed the safety standards of the fifties were inadequate by modern standards."

"But I could have told them that for sixty dollars, and I don't think it's right for lawyers and judges to misappropriate large sums of taxpayer's money," said Tina, "especially if they pay no tax either.

The rich generally pay little or no income tax. I can even name at least one Australian Prime Minister who fits into that category."

"No, for heaven's sake!" said Mom.

"Yes, that Prime Minister is a millionaire who pays no income tax. He is greedy, and he leaves the tax burden to be shouldered by the ordinary people while he makes no contribution toward it himself even though he is one of the most able to do so--he is a tax bludger.

We live in a system of taxational feudalism, a de facto taxational serfdom, where only serfs pay tax. The Tsar doesn't pay tax and neither does the Prime Minister."

"That couldn't be right," said Mom, "and what in blazes is a bludger anyway? If the PM was just a greedy swine, like you say, if he was just a pig at the trough, then the church leaders would come out and denounce him; but they don't, and that's because he isn't a greedy swine at all. I'm sure he makes a bigger tax contribution than almost anyone else. After all, he has to set an example for the whole country."

"Yes, as Prime Minister, he is a fiduciary and should be held to a higher standard than ordinary people rather than a lower standard, and still the church leaders say nothing. They are too concerned about maintaining their place in the hierarchy and their privileges. They don't want to rock the boat, so they say nothing."

"Oh Patti, that is just so cynical."

"It's not my intention or my wish to be cynical, it's just the way people are. All they want is money. When I was in junior high, the Beatles put out a song called Just Give Me Money--I cried for three weeks straight when I first heard that song."

"Oh you never did, you never cried. Patina, you are being melodramatic. You never ever cried, you were always a happy girl. I don't know what sort of nonsense this is, but I will just ignore it and go and make us all some coffee."

With coffee and biscuits now sitting on the table, Mom suggested they should play cards. It was an ostensibly simple and straightforward suggestion, but bringing it to pass in the real world would be anything but simple because there was only one card game Paul could play. That happened to be euchre, and it also just happened to be one of the very few games Mom couldn’t play. What she really wanted to play was bridge, but teaching that in five minutes to a raw neophyte was out of the question.

Her palpable disappointment manifested itself in both her facial expression and squirming in her seat, but was not something she would live with for long, because, for some reason or other, she was determined they would play cards no matter what. She settled upon a compromise solution to this almost gadding problem, and that was to teach Paul a very simple game.

While he was familiarizing himself with the game, Paul found himself so preoccupied that beginning another conversation, or commenting upon any of the points Patina had raised earlier, seemed to be out of the question.

Patina’s present silence was indicative of a similar restraint, which she was exercising presumably so as not to distract Paul from his present learning task.

Whether by accident or by intentional design, this would effectively remove all serious conversation from the present agenda. It did . . . for a while. It may have lasted twenty minutes. It may have lasted even longer, but soon enough the conversation began to intrude once more into the proceedings and the subject matter became quickly and increasingly serious.

"I finished reading Sexual Politics, by Kate Millet, just yesterday," said Tina. "Now that is quite a work of literature. I don't think there'd be many people around capable of undertaking such an enormously comprehensive writing task." She placed a card on the table.

"I don't think a normal person could have written that book, to be sure," said Paul, "and she must have written it when she was in a manic phase--she's bipolar, you know." He placed his card on the table.

"Oh, a manic depressive." said Tina. "I didn't know that. Manic-depressives can be very creative. Take Van Gough: his Starry Starry Night looks like the work of a crazy person, but people like things like that--they like crazy things."

"I think Van Gough was certainly a seeded oyster," said Paul. "You know, they seed an oyster by placing an irritating piece of shell grit inside its muscle tissue; the oyster then grows a pearl around the source of the irritation as a kind of self-protection.

I think pain and suffering and persecution can also enhance creativity, because it makes people serious rather than shallow; it gives them focus."

Mom looked ill at ease. "Why do people have so many opinions?" she said, in a quiet and perplexed tone of voice, which, along with her confused facial expression, bestowed upon her the persona of someone diametrically different from the Mrs. Van Maanen Paul had seen so far. "Why should they have loads and loads of opinions about every different subject under the sun. For that matter, why should people have opinions at all--I don't have them."

Just then her face appeared so fraught with bewilderment.

"Where do opinions come from?" she asked, in a soft subdued voice that seemed serious and introspective yet strangely so.

Paul wondered if this was another rhetorical question. He thought it unlikely, and, if it was a regular type question, it was not directed at him or at Tina, because Mom was not looking at either of them; she was staring across the table at an arbitrary point on the wall. The question seemed too strange in any case for him to attempt to answer it.

A moment later Mom began to squint and pull funny faces, which amused Paul to the point where he had to exercise considerable restraint in order to refrain from smiling with an amusement, which might easily cause offence.

Mom all but closed her eyes, leaving just the narrowest slither of an opening between her eyelids. It seemed like she was straining to see through these narrow apertures in order to magnify her field of view--much in the manner of a pinhole camera. This technique might enhance her vision just enough to enable her to see something that was almost but not quite visible to her.

It looked to Paul like she was trying to see through an impenetrable fog. He had become enthralled by these proceedings and, in turn, was staring at Mom with a curiosity that was becoming intrusively intense. He was not normally one to stare, because he was too timid to risk earning the displeasure of people; but, being almost mesmerized as he now was, he became temporarily insensitive to the exigencies of etiquette and decorum.

It was not until she looked directly into his face, and noticed him staring, that he looked away. Quick as a flash, he looked down, ostensibly to look at his cards.

It was barely a fraction of a second later when he felt a painful charge of adrenaline go through his body. He looked in the direction of the source of the pain and met the hostility.

"IT'S YOUR LEAD!" screamed Mom, in a furious fit of rage, after having hit Paul very hard with her closed fist on his upper arm near the shoulder.

Paul was shocked. Not that he was unable to imagine that things like this could happen--he did, he often did, he even anticipated them, and he had even done so on this particular occasion. To be sure, he could and would imagine all sorts of things of precisely this nature--but Mom had actually, really and truly done it, had done it in the real world, and she had done it to a degree surpassing even his wildest imaginings.

That is what took him so much by surprise and made his shock all the greater; moreover, he was shaken too by the sheer physical force of the onslaught. He had never been hit as hard as this by a woman before, and was not now in the habit of being the recipient of corporal punishment in any case.

After the initial shock of adrenaline had died down, he became very upset and embarrassed.

"Mom! You're hitting him!" exclaimed Tina, in a tone of outraged disapproval and embarrassment.

"Well, he's got broad shoulders, hasn't he." said Mom, who was already looking quite composed and dignified again after her little outburst--almost as if it had never taken place.

"But you hit him so hard you knocked the cards out of his hands." said Tina, driving her disapproval deeper.

Mom then exhibited a slight chink in her armor, in the form of a momentary loss of composure, in the momentary quivering and un-stiffening of her upper lip. But she was nevertheless able to scurry quickly back to the safety of self-righteous security once again, and said:

"Well, it was his lead, so it was his fault--what was I supposed to do?"

"No, Mom, it was your lead!"

A look of terror now entered Mrs. Van Maanen’s face, which caused her dignified composure to break down altogether. She excused herself to have an early night, saying she had a headache and the headache had made her irritable.

It wasn't so early now in any case, and Paul had a longer distance to travel home than usual, so he thought it best to take his leave.

At the front door they uttered their parting words.

"I'm sorry this happened." she said. "I'd like to explain, but now is not a good time to talk."

"Patina, I was wondering . . . next Saturday--"

With these opening words Tina's face was suddenly and visibly beset with a fear of considerable intensity. It was a reaction of fear to take Paul aback. It was a reaction of anticipatory fear--as if his subsequent words might soon disclose the portent of something dark and unpleasant.

"--would you like to go to the zoo?"

With the latter part of his invitation came an immediate and enormous look of relief on Patina's face. She smiled beamingly.

"I'd just love to!" she said.

He gave her a quick little kiss on the lips--it was little more than a peck. He squeezed her forearms affectionately, almost reassuringly, and took his leave.

*

I arrived at her door on Saturday morn,

The clothes she wore were again contrived.

Every shade of green that could adorn

Was worn with green above each eye.

This time she was wearing green suede boots, which added an attractive finishing touch to her assortment of green clothing. This had the effect of making her even greener now than she had been blue before. That previous occasion, of course, had seen her bereft of blue shoes; but the belt she was now wearing, with its Amerindian designs, had a little admixture of yellow and red in it, which detracted from her perfect greenness, so perhaps the color score was still about even.

"You look different every time I see you." he said. "There are so many of you now already; you have more facets than the Hope Diamond. Your clothes are clearly the work of an artist."

Patina was smiling profusely. Looking different is not automatically a good or positive thing, but her apparent pleasure suggested she had taken it that way.

Paul, on the other hand, was pleased his words were deemed sufficient to serve as a compliment, because this obviated the need for him to say something more personal and explicit. He was much too reserved to say what he really felt:

That she was every bit as beautiful as a fairytale princess, that he would love her forever, that he would like to marry her and live with her happily ever after--just like they do in all the fairytales.

But he was too scared to dare to say anything of the kind; it would be too imprudent. Deep down he sensed it would be a reckless challenging of fate, which might cause everything to come unstuck.

The zoo bus stop was not even a hundred yards from Patina’s house--a good fortune further enhanced when the bus arrived after less than two minutes of waiting, and they were both pleasantly surprised and additionally pleased to find themselves ready to board a double-decker.

Tina jumped aboard and ascended the stairs to the upper deck in a briskly athletic fashion. Paul quickened his pace behind her in the hope of diminishing the growing distance between them. She was already seated when he caught her up. There were lots of vacant seats. He took his place alongside her. He felt a strong sense of it being his place.

"These are great!" she said, bubbling over with enthusiasm. "Oh, I still can't believe the weather you have in Sydney--it's just so friendly; you never have tornadoes or hurricanes, you can go outside almost anytime, and even in the rain if you have an umbrella."

When they arrived at Taronga Park Zoo there was a crowd of people concentrated at the entrance who were waiting to get through the turnstiles; this created a bottleneck and caused a delay of a few minutes before they could gain entry.

While standing amongst the crowd, Paul became aware of admiring glances Patina was attracting. These were not merely from men or of a sexual nature--they were also from women.

He felt this was due in part to her beautiful clothes, which somewhat resembled a theatrical costume, but was also a response to hearing her voice and her American accent. One woman, an older woman in her seventies, approached the young couple directly and began a conversation with Patina.

"Are you here for the International Art Festival?" she asked, smiling pleasantly.

"Oh no, I live here." said Tina in apparent surprise at being asked such a question.

"I’m sure I’ve seen you on TV," said the lady, "you must be someone famous."

"No, I’m just an ordinary person," said Patina.

"She is and artist," said Paul, "but she lives in Sydney."

"Oh, I knew it! I just knew it!" said the old lady.

Paul was fiercely proud of Patina, and he felt both consciously and self-consciously proud of her. He felt he was likely to be noticed and admired too, if only by association. He felt the way a person might feel if they were driving a Rolls Royce, or if they were deemed to be the owner of a Rolls Royce. Patina was just the ultimate in class to Paul's way of thinking: she was rich, American, and beautiful like a movie star, but her beauty had a much finer quality to it than the regular, two dimensional portrait of a magazine-cover-girl.

This was due in large part to her facial expression, which was just so fine, thoughtful, sensitive and intelligent; and to her eyes, which were always busy looking here and there and probing into things.

Patina was the girl Paul just had to have. She was the girl to only come your way once in a lifetime--and then only if you are very lucky. She was the girl he would have to get either by hook or crook.

She was the girl who was simply too good for him--the girl who had become involved with him only by accident or by mistake; a mistake she was bound to notice sooner or later, and rectify.

While Paul was not consciously aware of this, it registered nevertheless on the deepest level, where it manifested itself as a kind of paranoia about being rejected. This deep conviction, that she could never possibly love him or want him, instilled in him a terror of losing her, which was silent and sinister but never far away.

Sydney's Taronga Park Zoo sits on sloping ground, which, at its peak, climbs high above the harbor and affords some spectacular views. Observing the many animal exhibits necessarily entails a good deal of walking and standing. After two or three hours of this, the young couple seated themselves on a park bench to take a rest, but also to enjoy the view.

"The war is going so badly," she said, "and I know it doesn't affect me personally, because I don't have any family or friends over there, but I think the situation is dreadful per se."

"I was called up," said Paul, which caused her to be abruptly startled, "and I was even going to enter the army and do my patriotic chore, but I didn't because my father intervened. He has such strong views on the subject. He said he would never let me throw my life away to defend a cleptocratic thiefdom like South Vietnam. He said I could accept the draft only over his dead body."

"How was it you had a choice to accept it or not?"

"Well, I was supposed to go in when I was twenty, but the government chickened out. My family was originally Dutch-Indonesian, you see, so the Oz government gave me the option of renouncing my Australian citizenship and a year to decide.

After that I was given the option of moving to Holland, but no other option than leaving the country--it would be Holland or Vietnam.

My father then said I should write a letter requesting student deferment, and I did, but they declined my request; saying I had already been given one year, and they didn't regard deferment as appropriate in any case to someone who was only in the eleventh grade, because I would need a minimum of another six years of deferment to finish my intended course of study."

"So what could you do then?" she asked, without commenting on the discrepancy between his age and rate of academic progress, or that he had never mentioned anything about this before.

"My father went to the library and did biographical research on the minister in charge of military conscription.

He looked for anything we had in common, then wove those things into a letter, but subtly so as not to appear overly or obviously ingratiating.

I then copied the letter in my own handwriting and sent it in. I was surprised it worked. It worked so totally well--I have unlimited deferment now provided I don't give up my studies or flunk out."

"That was very clever of your father to be able to save you from being fed into the machine guns, and especially if English is not his first language.

I thought you were of Dutch descent like me, because of your name, obviously, but I had no idea you were actually from Indonesia . . . you were born there, I suppose?"

"Yes, I was born on Bali."

"Bali! How fascinating! Why didn’t you tell me that before! I love Balinese music and most anything to do with Bali. There was one particular dance--I only saw it once-- where the men sit on the ground and jump around, and all move and chant together in unison, and they make these strange, chattering sounds like: yucker chucker, chuck chuck, chucker chucker. And they stop and start instantaneously and in unison, and they go off on a tangent together and their chanting builds up to a frenzy."

"That's the Army of the Apes from the Ramayana." Said Paul. "That's a Hindu myth, the story of Rama and Sita."

"Oh it sounds fascinating. What's it about?"

"Well Rama was a prince and an avatar (an incarnation of Vishnu) and he was next in line to inherit the kingdom, but through a series of unfortunate circumstances, he ends up being banished from his island paradise and is forced to flee to another country.

Some time later his wife, Sita, follows him there but she is kidnapped and held captive by demons.

The rest of the story is taken up with his efforts to rescue her. He has one hell of a job trying to do that in fact and he would never have been successful at all if it weren’t for the considerable help he receives from the Army of the Apes.

The apes are actually monkeys, macaques--you know, the belligerent little ones with the sharp canine teeth."

"How long did you live on Bali?"

"I was born there in 1947 and we left in 1951, by popular request. It seemed everyone wanted us to get the hell out of there: the Americans, the Australians, the British and, of course, those Indonesians who were politically vocal. And so we got kicked out and we lost everything.

My father says the United States is arbitrary in its edicts and out of its depth in the sphere of international politics.

Take the case of the French:

They were not only allowed to remain as a colonial power in Vietnam and the rest of Indo China, the US gave them every kind of military and financial assistance to keep them there and in control.

The arbitrariness is twofold and consists of the fact that (1) the United States has determined the Vietnamese are not entitled to independence, whereas the Indonesians are, and (2) they could just as easily choose the opposite: Tell the French to get out of Vietnam; allow the Dutch to stay in Indonesia, give them huge military assistance if they need it to retain power, and conscript French-Canadian boys from Quebec to fight a guerilla war in Indonesia after the position there has become untenable.

That's why my father said with respect to my going to Vietnam:

"We obey no more rules!"

"Oh yes! Right on! But you know so much about it. I thought I was keeping abreast of the news, but I hardly know a damned thing by comparison."

"I wouldn't know much about it either except my father tells me things," said Paul, trying to look modest, and he was almost successful in that attempt.

"My parents never talk about the war. They are always too busy grubbing after money . . . How long had your family lived on Bali"?

"My mother was born there in 1918, but her family moved there from Java, where they had already been living for some considerable time prior to that--the Dutch were in Indonesia for about 350 years, but, for some strange reason, Bali had been entirely independent of Dutch influence up until 1906--that's when they had the massacre.

The Dutch claimed that whenever their ships ran aground or were wrecked on the coast of Bali, the Balinese would salvage the cargo. This complaint was probably a pretext but, in any case, it's the reason they gave for invading and taking control of the place.

With modern weapons, they were able to do that quite easily. But the Balinese wouldn't accept conquest and they began to commit suicide by the thousands. The whole situation got right out of hand.

It was a culture clash in part perhaps, and the Dutch were somewhat concerned about the deaths, but not to the extent that they'd let go of the prize. They have certainly done some dirty deeds and I don't deny it, and there were even times when they behaved just like pirates."

"I can understand that," said Tina. "There are skeletons in all our closets. The Indians in America were almost wiped out, and they didn't just allow them to commit suicide either--they shot them and starved them and gave them blankets deliberately infected with smallpox."

"When the Dutch arrived in Indonesia, the indigenous population numbered four million; when we left, they numbered one-hundred-million. We also left them a vast and valuable infrastructure. We were not nearly so bad as the political left tries to make out.

Colonialism had to come to an end, there's no doubt about that in my mind, but it was just bad luck that we were the ones who were there at the wrong time and had to lose everything. When I was a young child, we lived in a beautiful villa house. When I was born, we had a brand-new 1947 Ford V8 and even a full-time chauffeur. My father was a judge then but he lost his career along with everything else and was reduced to doing low-paying unskilled work.

We lived in a slum for ten years and I never had more than one pair of shoes, and the old pair was always totally worn out well before I got a new pair. If the political left loses five dollars, they scream blue-bloody-murder; but if we lose everything, they don’t care at all. Even Holland didn’t care. They abandoned us."

Paul now felt a deep and poignant sense of loss, the full intensity of which he had never previously experienced, and it must have shown in his face.

"Gosh!" she said. "I mean . . . things are tough all over. Life is tough in any case. I don't believe money really does anything to change that. I don't think it has done me any good at all, and it hasn't helped my parents either. My mother is a lost soul--you saw how she reacted the other night; serious conversation scares her.

She is a social butterfly who is always throwing parties. She stops and talks to people for barely twenty seconds at a time and then straight away moves on. The only subject she will discuss at length is money, prestige, and the trappings of success."

"Yes," said Paul, "I can see what you're driving at, but there's more to money than that--you see, if you have no money, you are forced to live with riffraff."

"Riffraff!" she exclaimed, with an expression of distaste on her face. "What do you mean by riffraff?"

"I mean petty criminals who will even steal from their own friends, who will beat you up, who will threaten you, who will burgle your house, who will siphon your car's gas tank--"

"Why would they siphon your gas tank? Is it like a practical joke or something?"

"No, it's not; it's mostly done because they've got no money, because they've spent it all on smoking, drinking and gambling; so they can’t buy petrol, so they have to steal it."

A magpie goose came waddling toward them. It approached on Patina's side of their bench seat. It was apparently in the habit of being fed by visitors at this particular location, and it was approaching them now with that expectation.

With its head stretched forward, its beak was its most prominent feature; and it was perceived as threatening by Patina, who quickly stood up and sat down again on the other side of Paul, thus effectively transforming him into a safety barrier.

"It wants to peck me!" she yelped. And she grabbed both his arms and clung to him with the full force and desperation of a terrified child.

"Go ‘way!" she said, flicking her arm out in a shooing motion. "Go ‘way!" She said again with such a serious look on her face; it was like the fierce determination written on the face of a five-year-old Shirley Temple.

Paul put his hand out toward the goose and let it nibble gently on his fingers. But disappointment was evident in the puzzled look on its face when it found no food.

"It won't peck hard or hurt you," he said, reassuringly. "It just wants something to eat."

Upon being adequately reassured, Tina reentered the conversation but on a slightly different tack: "You know, a friend of mine from high school bought an abandoned farmhouse in Minnesota for the equivalent of twenty weeks minimum wages (about $6,000 in year 2000 money).

She describes the area as something out of Norman Rockwell

--all apple pie and church on Sunday--and she said the people are friendly to the point of being spontaneously helpful.

Your experience is your experience, and I don't dispute the validity of it--and maybe it's an urban versus rural dichotomy. But I believe my friend's experience is equally valid yet entirely different, and in her rural situation it's possible to live alongside people of fine character even if you have almost no money at all."

Paul was flabbergasted to the point of feeling offended.

What she had just told him flew in the face of everything he had ever known or experienced throughout his entire life.

The bobcat paced the concrete ground

On padded feet that made no sound.

To eight by twenty her fate was bound,

Yet she used each inch to march around.

Her nose would all but touch the wire

Then she would turn as on a dime.

Just like a machine that could not tire

Going back and forth time after time.

She was forced to tread a narrow path

Within the bounds of her constraint.

Her territory now far less than half

Of Nearctic bounded by Bering straight.

"Oh, how sad!" said Patina.

"Yes," said Paul, "I don't know why they would give a bobcat such a small cage. The lions get a huge cage and don't even bother to use it; they just lay on their backs asleep all day. They should swap cages, throw the lions out, and give this poor little bobcat the freedom and space it deserves."

Patina smiled effusively but self-consciously. It was as if she took the favoritism Paul had bestowed upon an American animal as favoritism vicariously bestowed upon her.

"I wouldn't care to live like an animal trapped in a cage," she said. She appeared seriously alarmed and agitated. "It's not right. Freedom is the most important thing in the whole wide world.

I saw a bobcat once at our vacation house on Lake Superior. It came right into our front yard. It was probably starving to risk coming so close to human habitation, but it was near the end of an especially bad winter, the snow was still on the ground, and it was probably scavenging for anything it could find."

"It must be an interesting experience to see snow," said Paul. "I have never seen it myself. But it must be especially interesting, not merely going to a ski resort but actually living in a region where it snows. It would be lots of fun to travel through the bush when the entire ground is covered in snow."

"Well, most Minnesotans would say you're not missing very much, but I love it in spite of the cold. Minnesota is very cold and Lake Superior sometimes freezes over completely--"

"I'd sure hate to pay the refrigeration bill for that one," he said, interjecting a facetious comment.

"Yes, right." she said, giggling like a little machine.

"But, when the temperature drops below -20F--which happens every winter--people are confined to their homes and can't go outside at all. That’s when some succumb to cabin fever . . . I guess they feel just a little bit like that bobcat.

Cabin fever can drive some people crazy, and they can even become violent, while others turn to drink and can become alcoholics. It doesn't worry me except when I get so cold that I can't get warm.

When I was a kid, I would sometimes have to wait for a bus and, even with two pairs of mittens, my hands would get so cold I would cry."

"Wow! I can't even imagine cold of such an extreme intensity, but I think I would love to spend the winter in a cabin, all snowed in, provided I didn't have to go outside in all weather.

But if it turned mild, I could explore around the yard in snowshoes or drive a snowmobile. It wouldn't worry me to be confined, you see, because I'm very self-sufficient--I've always been like that." He was smiling pleasantly.

"Americans are all very self-sufficient--" said Tina, in a sweeping statement of such monumental grandeur as to appear glaringly irrational to Paul. He was tempted to raise his eyebrows in amusement and amazement, but decided against it.

He didn't want to upset her or argue the point but, in school, they had been told ten-thousand-times that you shouldn't generalize. And yet, the generalization she had just made was so surpassingly egregious that it struck him as a strangely stupid thing for a clever person to say.

"--That's why they don't get tied down." she continued. "They move around from place to place. They stay a short while just to break new ground--it's our frontier background that sets the pace. The early settlers were always on the move."

"But Australians are like that too." he protested, trying not to be outdone by her in terms of an over-generalizing one-upmanship. "We were pioneers. Our axes rang in the woodlands where the gaudy bush birds flew. We were pioneers every bit as much as the Americans, and every bit as self-sufficient . . . gosh," he said, awkwardly and distractedly, after a momentary pause, "I've been meaning to ask you . . . umm, since I've been over to visit your folks, I thought it only fair and proper that you should come over to meet my folks."

Her face was filled instantly with sheer terror. It seemed as if every burglar alarm and siren in the city had just gone off inside her head, and they had been set off by what Paul had just said. In response, he found himself now also called to battle stations, called to the emergency room, but only in an effort to rectify the fearful mistake he had just made.

He changed the subject and her fear subsided, his words were guided by facial cues; clues to the do's and don'ts that abided in those un-confided avenues.

Her face was a hotbed where emotions would cook, a window to complexes deep in her brain, an open book to an ingratiator's look, a conglomerate of clues to guide and explain.

"Well, maybe that's not really such a good idea." he said, in an effort to backtrack his steps. "I'm sure there are better things to do, and much more interesting things too. I should use my imagination a little more and think of something else. I don't want to limit you to any one particular type of activity."

Paul applied damage control as best he could, but his words merely served to embarrass her, because, he felt, she now knew that he knew she didn't want to meet his folks. He was beset with a nagging feeling that his damage control might be too little too late.

The bus was quite crowded going home to Tina's place that night. The only vacant seats remaining were right at the back, and they faced one another. People sitting opposite had an apparent constraining influence on Patina. She didn't care to look them in the eye.

Paul could see the reflection of Tina and himself in the window opposite. Because her gaze was downcast, he was able to enjoy staring at her reflection for extended periods without her noticing.

On seeing the two of them side by side, he felt they resembled a pigeon pair. They looked simply wonderful together, and their window-framed reflection could also have served as a perfect wedding portrait.

And yet, Patina's mood was so down beat he couldn't help but notice it. It marked such a contrast to her mood that morning. Could people have such a constraining influence on her?

Paul thought it very possible, because he had seen her like that--not always but quite often at school, and sometimes in restaurants: her conversation could be beset by a self-conscious constraint, which censored what she was allowed to say or do, and he felt this was caused by a powerful fear of disapproval. She wasn’t always like that, of course: her clothing was often flamboyantly extrovert and she could sometimes take the lead in a conversation with a half dozen or more people.

After getting back to Tina's place and having a cup of coffee, Paul made use of her bathroom once more. It was then that he noticed for the very first time his being alone and away from her for a few moments had given him the freedom to just sit and think about Patina without being distracted by her. Having been in her company all that day, he suddenly found himself strangely pleased to be able to get away from her, if only for a short period of time.

In that respect he felt almost like a smoker who was forced to go cold turkey and go without a smoke for an entire day, and who was now finally free to light up and take a hit of nicotine.

When it came to Patina, privacy was a paradoxically important thing to Paul. It seemed like he couldn't think about her properly while she was there in his company in the flesh. In that respect she was like a distraction. But he was now finally free to think about just how wonderful she was as well as rethink some of the day's highlights.

"Introverted thoughts in a land of you and me." was a phrase that came to him just then, seemingly from out of nowhere and then continued: "Introverted thinking just as true as it can be. I'll slay each beast and dragon for you, just you wait and see."

It was only 8pm when Paul emerged from Patina's bathroom; for that reason, he was surprised to the point of amazement when she said she would have to have an early night, that she had to get up early and visit her parents, and that their late nights had left her chronically short of sleep.

Paul was taken aback with surprise and discombobulated with disappointment. His unthinking assessment of things as they stood had left him with the expectation they might just kiss for about eight hours--just till 4:00 a.m. But, unfortunately, that was not to be.

He felt baffled and thwarted but hurt and rejected too, and the latter rattled him and made him feel insecure, but he tried not to let it show. He tried to act as if it was a casual matter to him, that he could take it on the chin, and that he could easily take it or leave it.

He wouldn’t hang around and be a pest. He wouldn’t make petty or childish demands on her time. He was quite capable of being big and grown up about it. It was a minor matter in any case. They could catch up on lost opportunities the following Friday, Saturday or Sunday. That was not a long time to wait at all. Surely he could wait till then.

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