“I thought there were only three, waves I mean.”
“You’ve heard of ‘Me Too’.”
“Of course.”
“Well, now there are four.”
We fell silent, Joe probably replaying his lapse in confident sensitivity, me wondering if I should pick up a take-away bean burrito on the way home from work.
“I really liked Olivia you know,” he said, breaking out of his reverie. “She’s got so much energy and ambition. She’s doing great things.”
“Well, maybe next time you should keep Wittgenstein down to a dull roar.”
“Yeah well, at least you’re a lucky man.”
“Lucky, why?”
“You’re so level and contained, women don’t upset you like they upset me.”
“Oh yeah, and how do you know that?”
“It’s my Jewish thing. My people are born with overwrought DNA.”
“Isn’t that a myth?”
“Not to me. You’re solid. If you were in a Marvel movie, you’d be Moderation Man.”
“Too much equilibrium to experience romantic grief, is that it?”
“Exactly.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Such common sense, Moderation Man.”
I’m different to Joe, in that it takes me a long time to get emotionally involved. Joe sees love immediately, has absolute faith in all women, and charges ahead without fear. My furnace smoulders at a slower rate. I don’t think I’m critical or consciously over-careful; it just takes a while for me to ignite. Once the flames are blazing, however, they take a lot to extinguish, which is why I sometimes get seared.
At the time, I was recovering from a relationship with the avatar I mentioned earlier. When I fall, I fall for someone who is clear about what she’s doing. Emma was an equine vet specialising in thoroughbred racehorses and I have to say her mind was like clear light. I had to focus and that was a thrill, particularly because she was athletic, which gave her a sort of superwoman quality. She was also elusive, which added to the attraction.
I thought she was self-reliant, another attraction; but, as it happened, she was exercising her independence in the arms of a married woman. I was always the understudy and, when her affair exploded, I was the first casualty. The married woman swept Emma out of her life and Emma swept me out of hers.
The last time I saw her was about a month after the expulsion, in a business class lounge waiting for a flight to New York. She had cut her hair, dyed it dark auburn and looked gorgeous.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Oh, hello,” she said, barely looking up from her iPad and Cosmopolitan.
“Off to somewhere good?”
“Kentucky, for the yearling sales. You?”
“Hong Kong. There’s a conference on the larval connectivity of tropical fish.”
“Fascinating.”
“So how are you?”
“Shithouse, as a matter of fact.”
She looked at me properly for the first time, her gleaming fuchsia lips forming the hint of a smile, while lightning crackled in her dark eyes.
“Oh.”
“Listen, Tim, I never swap sex for small talk. You should know that.”
There was another burst of electrons and she went back to her iPad. I was annoyed in two-second flashes for days, and occasionally had to work hard to focus on the proclivities of fish living sultry equatorial lives.
So this was the emotional state at Franken and Wilde when Sophia Luca walked into our waiting room in Elizabeth Bay. It was a turbulent morning, with a steady flow of birds and fish and the usual collection of cats. There are around twenty-five million pets in Australia, the same number of pets as people, an interesting statistic, given Joe’s theory about animal owners hungry for affection.
In the clinic that morning there was a Siamese kitten, a pair of budgerigars, three dogs and a ferret, most of them chirruping or yowling or, in the ferret’s case, hissing.
As often happens, I noticed the patients before I noticed their human. Kevin and Ralph are a pair of schnauzers who resemble old roués in a nineteenth-century Parisian bordello. With their long moustaches and food-stained beards, I’ve often imagined them with their paws wrapped around absinthe and cigars. Sadly, their charm doesn’t match their Moulin Rouge looks. They are cantankerous and always aggressive.
When I first met Kevin, he sank his teeth into the flesh between my forefinger and thumb and, if I hadn’t had a syringe full of sedative in my right hand, it might have ended unpleasantly. Their owner is a bassoon player with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, a stern middle-aged woman who seems to reserve her only emotional contact for her “boys”, as she calls them. Miss Elvira Banks spoils the schnauzers outrageously, but Miss Banks was nowhere near the surgery that morning. When I looked up from Kevin and Ralph, I fell into the radiant aura of one of the most extraordinary women I’ve ever seen.
For six months now I’ve tried to convey the presence of Sophia Luca. I’ve used words. I’ve looked for comparisons online, on Facebook and Instagram; but, apart from fuelling the obsessive side to my nature, none of it has helped. It’s inaccurate to describe her as beautiful. Her jaw is too square, her mouth too large, and her nose slightly off-kilter, thanks to a martial arts accident. She’s tall, almost six feet in the old language, with noticeably large but beautiful hands. Her skin is ivory white, her hair brunette. But none of this registers once you’ve been hit by the light in her sea-green eyes.
Green eyes are relatively common among people in Western Asia and Central Europe, and they occur frequently in cats, specially Russian Blues and chinchilla long hairs; but with Sophia the effect is beyond pigmentation. There’s an optic luminosity about her that reveals a formidable spiritual presence, reinforced by the potency of her gaze. I genuinely felt she was looking into the deepest part of me with the relaxed and dispassionate aura of the Mona Lisa.
“You are the vet?” she asked in a strong East European accent.
“Yes, Tim Wilde.”
She considered this for a moment, before lowering her head like an artillery piece and aiming her amazing eyes at the schnauzers. “Do you know these two?”
“Kevin and Ralph, sure.”
“They’re mad, correct?”
“They have their moments.”
She turned back from the schnauzers with an enigmatic smile. “Moments?”
“I mean, they can be badly behaved.”
“Mad,” she repeated, as if that was the end of the conversation.
As if to confirm her diagnosis, the reception area erupted in violence. Kevin and Ralph, yapping and snarling, made a dash at the kitten and then the budgerigars until Sophia choked them to a halt at the end of their leashes. I knew the pair of them would be giving this exotic foreigner a rough time on the streets of Elizabeth Bay.
“Are you a friend of Miss Banks?”
“I am her tenant and I pay with these,” she said, hauling on Kevin and Ralph.
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Miss Banks is in Bucharest and I am here. For me this is not such a good deal.”
“So you’re looking after the dogs while she’s away?”
“Yes.”