Absence Makes by Bruce Menzies

Author:Bruce Menzies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781922204219
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

10

June decided to stay with Claire. ‘I’m finished with men,’ was all she would say. For the time being, Ross could remain in the house despite pressure from her father to ‘claim her rights’. Martin Preston put money into Mangler Avenue. It was a gift to both of them at the time but, now they were separated, the storyline changed. It was meant only for June.

‘He knows a lawyer,’ June told him, ‘and thinks I should force you to sell up.’

They were now talking. It was a fragile peace, with eggshells beneath their feet but Ross was happy for the progress. Of the men she despised or distrusted, he was well down the list, a peg or two below her supervisor, her father and her younger brother. Her wrath with the professor had not abated but, in dropping out, she removed herself from the daily conflagrations on campus. On the other hand, the issues that lay dormant with her family resurfaced. Ross suspected psychodrama was the catalyst. She would not talk to him in detail but said she was ‘working on it’ with someone. In the meantime, she’d secured a job in a bookstore. There was no mention of the future.

The future? Though there were moments he yearned for June, he found perverse pleasure in his solitary confinement, as he described the mosquito net hideout under the grapevine. There were worse things than being alone. He turned to his books, supplementing his old favourites – the likes of Hemingway, Steinbeck and Dos Passos - with Camus, Malraux, Sartre and Wilson, especially Colin Wilson. The Europeans rather than the Americans suited his prevailing mood. No longer did he hanker for the snows of Kilimanjaro or to fish the Caribbean. In his mind, he retreated from the bright sunlight of outdoor adventure to the shadowed world of the disenchanted, aligning himself with the chain-smoking intellectuals who met in the cafes of Madrid and Paris and London, and dissected the human condition in all its futility. He seized on Wilson’s The Outsider, identifying with a species of man not at home in the world, and dismissive of contemporary values. That could be me, he thought. Everywhere I look I see delusion. A sleeping society, its citizens going through the motions, bogged down in the heavy soil of their conditioning, stuck in the twin grooves of respectability and materialism, and immune to the fate of the dispossessed and the starving. He vowed he would never embrace that kind of society and took solace in Wilson’s conclusion the outsider was not a freak but simply a more sensitive version of the human animal. This resonated, offering Ross a bittersweet gratification, and he began to look forward to his next session with Simone.

She stood in front of the bedroom mirror. What would she wear? Her appointment was at eleven. They had arranged to meet in a Cottesloe beer garden. Ross suggested the venue. There was space to talk in private. They could enjoy a beer as they talked.

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