“He’s my partner, actually.”
“What to do?”
On Saturday evening, there was a storm. When Ash was climbing Cockroach Mansions, the first plump drops arrived; he held out his palm to receive them. The whole of Glebe was gardenia-scented. Cassie appeared in the doorway, her toenails painted silver. She had darkened her eyelashes as well, and looked starey and judgmental. Ash said, “Warm rain!” and kissed her—how he adored this weather!
The lease drawn up by the Romanians forbade their tenants to remove so much as a dead twig from the garden, but Cassie had risen before dawn to steal gardenias from the laden shrubs. They gleamed in tumblers on the table, along the windowsill. Amazingly, the table, set for two, held only flowers, candles, and a bowl of pistachios. Cassie poured water from a jug, made of milky green glass and hand-painted with pink roses, in which ice cubes tapped.
Ash opened the wine he had brought. They clinked glasses as the room darkened and the wind grew huge. Cassie moved along the louvers, closing them as lightning began its epileptic jig. Thunder and the racket of rain on corrugated iron made conversation difficult. Standing at the window, Cassie and Ash drank wine and ate pistachios. Lightning produced one weirdly lit, arty still after another: the tinsel roof of the shed, the tattered banners of a banana palm. The gale was blowing the rain sideways and breaking it up into millions of tiny droplets, so that a horizontal stream, furious yet fine as mist, flowed past the tops of trees. Ash slipped an encircling arm around Cassie. Part of her face and the candle flames were reflected in the glass—they looked like pieces of heaven. Farther along, a branch was hitting against a pane. The scent of gardenias neither increased nor faded but merely drenched.
Cassie raised her voice over the din: “Anyone could be out there, watching.”
Ash said that he thought it unlikely.
“If I left you,” shouted Cassie, “would you stand in the rain without an umbrella hoping to see me?”
“Are you saying your old boyfriend is out there?” Ash tried to remember what Cassie had told him about her previous partner; surely she had painted a picture of a smart-arse who laughed at his own jokes, rather than the portrait of a lunatic?
“It was a hypothetical question.” She wanted to say: I would like to believe you were capable of it, that’s all.
Ash gestured at the apocalypse. “Darling Cassie—it would be suicidal.”
She said, “It’s OK, I know you wouldn’t do it.”
It was the moment of bafflement that arrived in all Ash’s dealings with women: a crystal filled up with smoke. He moved away from the windows as lightning returned to produce more shivery photographs. Now it was difficult not to imagine how the room would appear to someone looking in. The Ashfield Tamil was outside in the downpour, peering up at a beautiful girl who questioned him about his life as if it mattered—Ash was sure of it, for thirty seconds.
Cassie asked him—cheerfully, as if their last exchange hadn’t taken place—if he was ready to eat. Left alone, Ash refilled their glasses and gulped the contents of his. Cassie reappeared with a tray of dishes, went away, and returned with more. She said, “Everything’s still warm but won’t be for much longer. Start helping yourself while I get the rice.”
Ash set out all the dishes and placed the tray against a wall. He surveyed the banquet, wondering why, from time to time, Cassie lavished so much labor on a meal. Then his mind slid to a period during his own graduate student days in New England when he had smoked spliff after spliff while watching a videoed television drama set in a legal practice in Amsterdam. When the last tape ended, Ash watched the whole series again and then a third time. He was particularly taken with an episode in which one of the barristers defended a man accused of having sexual congress with a hen. The lawyer argued successfully that his client loved the bird, was gentle with it, and that no cruelty had occurred. Why should a man not desire a fowl? That struck Ash as both tender and profound. Weeks passed pleasantly. In the dead of night, he would wake in terror: the mountain of undone work weighed on his chest and it was difficult to breathe. But the next day, nothing was as pressing as the next episode and the next spliff. He concluded that Cassie’s cooking was another kind of displacement scheme elaborated to avoid working on her thesis. For much the same reason, she had recently attended a two-day St. John’s Ambulance first-aid course. She had said, “I might be able to save a life.” Ash, who knew that there was more to saving a life than preventing someone from choking on a fishbone, could have predicted Cassie’s fantasy. It was the kind of dream girls with clear, remote eyes could offer themselves because nothing ever happened to test it.
Cassie returned with a two-handled pan that she stood on a cork mat. She said, “It’s special muthu samba rice from Sri Lanka,” and lifted the lid. A stench that had been born in a sewer rose like a fog. Vanquished, the gardenias retreated. Ash had the presence of mind to hold a napkin to his nose. Cassie, a stricken statue, remained there clutching the lid. “It’s special,” she repeated. “From the Ashfield Tamil.” Her face wore its blind, uncaring look.
Ash took the lid from Cassie’s lifeless fingers and replaced it on the pot. He opened windows. The gale had died down to a stiff breeze. Cold air filled the room, spreading rather than dispatching the reek. One of the candles succumbed to the draft.
“Does muthu samba rice always smell like that?” asked Cassie. She sat down—abruptly, as if an invisible intruder had whacked her behind the knees.
“How on earth would I know?” Ash added, “I doubt it.”
“Could it have been off? Can rice go off? I thought it just went weevilly.” Cassie was turning her rings. She closed her hands so that the jewels dug into her folded fingers.
Ash joined her at the table. They faced each other across a spread of cooling food. The spare chairs looked on like witnesses. Cassie should have made a move: to take the saucepan away, to make a fresh, odorless bowl of rice. She did neither of those things, but after a while began helping herself to curries—she couldn’t help it, she was hungry. She scooped food into her mouth with her eyes lowered over her plate. The tepid dhal was particularly delicious. Ash looked on in wonder. His face said, What is wrong with you Australians? You eat curries without rice, a barbarism. You fear being attacked by people you’ve killed. You stole their land for animals that you slaughter in their millions, when you don’t leave them to die by the side of the road. Your shamefaced paddocks— But Ash couldn’t go on, because another part of him wanted to uncurl in giggles. The candles and flowers, the stink! A dinner party gone wrong: the first-world definition of tragedy.
Across the table, Cassie’s white forehead was as defenseless as a rib. Controlling a smile, Ash looked away. Her books caught his eye: lined up on shelves, stacked on the floor. There were so many books, safe in a room where gardenias flared and the roof held through a storm. He thought soberly, She has no idea how lucky she is. It wasn’t an accusation but a recognition: Cassie was alone on her side of the gulf. On the other side, Ash stood shoulder to shoulder with the Ashfield Tamil, lashed by rain, transfixed by an enchanted girl whose notion of loss was a real estate deal that had made her a minor heiress.
Cassie looked up without lifting her head, checking out Ash through her blackened lashes; there was a tiny smear of yellow at the corner of her mouth. Ash knew that he would undress her before the evening ended. He would spend moments savoring the sight of her: the scene loomed plain as pornography, the girl’s pearly flesh, the man’s clothed, formal limbs. Ideally, she would be wearing a red bead necklace to set off her nakedness—there had been a Spanish girl who liked to do just that. Cassie’s hair was falling over her face. Ash scratched his neck. He began to help himself to food, not realizing that he was doing it. He saw the rest of his life: the books that would make his name, the solid comforts. He thought, I will die alone.
In retrospect, Cassie would look on the evening as a watershed, although nothing seemed to change at the time. She went on seeing Ash. It was accepted between them, without discussion, that they would be spending Christmas apart. On Cassie’s last evening in Sydney, Ash