Free The Complete Stories by David Malouf Page A

to have detractors. She herself wanted it all—everything. And more.
    “You want too much,” her friends told her. “You can't have it, you just can't. Nobody can.”
    “You just watch me,” Jo told them in reply.
    She had had two serious affairs since coming to Sydney, both briefer than she would have wished. She was too intense, that's what her friends told her. The average bloke, the average
Australian
bloke—oh, here it comes,
that
again, she thought—was uncomfortable with dramatics. Intimidated. Put off.
    “I don't want someone who's average,” she insisted. “Even an average Australian.”
    She wanted a love that would be overwhelming, that would make a wind-blown leaf of her, a runaway wheel. She was quite prepared to suffer, if that was to be part of it. She would walk barefoot through the streets and howl if that's what love brought her to.
    Her friends wrinkled their brows at these stagy extravagances. “Honestly! Jo!” Behind her back they patronised and pitied her.
    In fact they too, some of them, had felt like this at one time or another. At the beginning. But had learned to hide their disappointmentbehind a show of hard-boiled mateyness. They knew the rules. Jo had not been around long enough for that. She had no sense of proportion. Did she even
know
that there were rules?
    They met at last . At a party at Palm Beach, the usual informal Sunday-afternoon affair. She knew as soon as he walked in who it must be.
    He was wearing khaki shorts, work boots, nothing fancy. An open-necked unironed shirt.
    Drifting easily from group to group, noisily greeted with cries and little affectionate pecks on the cheek by the women, and with equally affectionate gestures from the men—a clasp of the shoulder, a hand laid for a moment on his arm—he unsettled the room, that's what she thought, re-focused its energies, though she accepted later that the unsettlement may only have been in herself. Through it all he struck her as being remote, untouchable, self-enclosed, though not at all self-regarding. Was it simply that he was shy? When he found her at last she had the advantage of knowing more about him, from the tales she had been regaled with, the houses she had been in, than he could have guessed.
    What she was not prepared for was his extraordinary charm. Not his talk—there was hardly any of that. His charm was physical. It had to do with the sun-bleached, salt-bleached mess of his hair and the way he kept ploughing a rough hand through it; the grin that left deep lines in his cheeks; the intense presence, of which he himself seemed dismissive or unaware. He smelled of physical work, but also, she thought, of wood shavings—blond transparent curlings off the edge of a plane. Except that the special feature of his appeal was the rough rather than the smooth.
    They went home together. To his place, to what he “The Shack,” a house on stilts, floating high above a jungle of tree ferns, morning glory, and red-clawed coral trees in a cove at Balmoral. Stepping into it she felt she had been there already. Here at last was the original of all those open-ended unfinished structures she had been in and out of for the past eight months. When she opened the door to the loo, she laughed. There was no glass in the window. Only a warmish square of night filled with ecstatic insect cries.
    She was prepared for the raw, splintery side of him. The sun-cracked lips, the blonded hair that covered his forearms and the darker hair that came almost to his Adam's apple, the sandpapery hands with their scabs and festering nicks. What she could not have guessed at was the whiteness and almost feminine silkiness of his hidden parts. Or the old-fashioned delicacy with which he turned away every attempt on her part to pay tribute to them. It was so at odds with the libertarian mode she had got used to down here.
    He took what he needed in a frank, uncomplicated way; was forceful but considerate—all this in appreciation of her own