Not a homecoming
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Creed O'Hanlon
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Creed O'Hanlon's biography and other articles by this writer
Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.
– Robert Frost, The Death of the Hired Man
I rented the house the way I did most things back then – remotely. I Googled real estate agents in the beachside suburbs north of Sydney and found illustrated listings of available properties online. There was an older-style, white weatherboard, two-storey house overlooking the south end of Palm Beach: two flights of sandstone steps led down from it to the seawater rock pool next to the beach itself. A reasonable rent for the winter was agreed via email, and I wired an advance for a month, along with a fee for a weekly cleaning and linen service. The key was left above the front doorframe, a copy of the rental contract slid under the door.
The house was what the agent called a duplex: actually half a house, separate, self-contained, with its own entrance. I had the lower floor; the landlords, an elderly couple who, the agent assured me, used the house no more than a couple of times a month, had the rest. There were two bedrooms, each with a queen-sized bed and a side table, a small living room with a cane two-seater settee, two armchairs and a coffee table, all of '70s vintage, and a narrow galley kitchen next to what used to be called a breakfast nook in which there were a linoleum-covered aluminium table and four vinyl-upholstered aluminium chairs. The decor was chintzy retro, faux-tropical-'50s-resort-lounge-meets-American-truck-stop-diner.
But there was the view. From the glass sliding doors that opened onto a terrace that ran the width of the house, I could look out along a kilometre of beach to the lighthouse atop the high, rocky knuckle at the far end of the peninsula and beyond, the national park and beaches on the coast further north, and from north-east to south-east, several kilometres of uninterrupted ocean horizon.
The house was as temporary and impersonal as a hotel room and that suited me. It was not meant to be a home. In a couple of weeks, only a little more of me would be visible there than when I first arrived.
MY COMING TO REST ANYWHERE WAS ALWAYS MARKED BY SMALL RITUALS that fixed me in a particular place for a time. The first thing I did was unpack my duffel. The contents had been refined over the years through a kind of reductive experiment. The aim was to travel as lightly as possible for extended periods while still allowing for some quirkiness in the inventory, which comprised:
a pair of black Levi 501 jeans; a couple of jean shirts, one blue, one black; half a dozen short-sleeve American XXL T-shirts in plain grey and black; two long-sleeve T-shirts, both black; black lightweight socks; underwear; a pair of feather-light, Japanese-market-only Nike Presto sneakers; a sarong silk-screened with the image of Bob Marley on a background of Rastafarian red, yellow and green; a faded pair of Mambo board shorts; a dozen bottles of pills, half of them prescription, the rest over-the-counter pain-killers, vitamins and supplements; two zippered nylon bags, one containing a selection of wires and power adaptors for my computer, a hot-sync and charger shoe for my Palm PDA, and two mobile phones – a GPRS-configured Nokia on a British account and a Japanese Sony-Ericsson CDMA, both with their chargers and headphones – the other, a half a dozen Japanese Pentel B50 black nylon-ball-tipped pens, two Muji aluminium refillable pencils with spare .5mm leads, an aluminium Muji fountain pen with half a dozen ink cartridges, a six-inch metal ruler, yellow and orange highlighters, a soft eraser and a hand-carved stone hanko (a Japanese personal seal); four books (on this trip, paperback editions of Amy Yamada's Trash, Jean Baudrillard's Cool Memories, a compact, leather-covered world atlas, and always, The Penguin Concise English Dictionary); a spiral-bound A4 notebook; a pack of a dozen Ilford FP4 black and white film; a nylon ripstop toilet bag bearing the logo of an airline; a black leather Filofax (the "Personal" size, with a clear zippered insert containing two embroidered Shinto blessing pouches, a scrimshaw on whalebone from the Azores and photos of my children); and two miniature Mexican madonnas, traditional touchstones rough-hewn from soft white soapstone.
I put the toilet bag and the pill bottles in the bathroom and arranged the madonnas on a corner of the linoleum table where, I had decided, I would work. I put the clothes away on one shelf of the linen cupboard and the film in the empty refrigerator. Then I turned my attention to my backpack, which held the indispensable stuff:
an Apple G4 PowerBook with a 17in. screen and a gigahertz of RAM (the iTunes application loaded with four days of music); a power cord and adaptor; Sennheiser HD-570 headphones; a Lomo LC-A 35mm camera; a pair of Chinese antique Qi Gong acupressure balls in a silk box; matt black Ray-Ban Outsiders Balorama sunglasses; a small, travel-worn, brown leather journal, its covers tied with a leather thong; another Pentel B50 black pen; a Palm Titanium PDA; a long, handmade black leather wallet containing my passport, unused flight tickets, One World and Star Alliance frequent flyer platinum cards for various airlines, and a leather pouch containing a St Christopher medal, a small cross and a silver angel, this last a protective gift from my wife.
I unpacked the PowerBook and positioned it on the linoleum table so that, when I was at the keyboard, I had an uninterrupted view of the ocean; I plugged it into a nearby wall socket to charge. In the larger of the two bedrooms, I placed the journal and a Muji pencil on the bedside table. The rest I left in the backpack.
In all, it took about 20 minutes, maybe less. Afterwards, I sat in one of the cane armchairs and for the first time, allowed myself to unwind, to accede to the idea of arrival, however provisional, and of actually being somewhere other than in transit. My circadian rhythms were still stuck in a time zone 17 hours behind here, and I craved won ton soup, kung pow chicken and fried rice.
THIS WAS NOT A HOMECOMING. "HOME" – OR EVEN THE SENSE OF PLACE, of belonging, which passed for it – had nothing to do with it. I was born about 15 kilometres from this house but I grew up everywhere else. If I ever had a home, it was one that I had invented – and I had invented so many over the past 40 years that the whole idea of "home" no longer had any meaning for me. The same could be said of a lot of things in my life.
Three days ago, I was waiting for a taxi on the front lawn of the large house in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that I had bought for my wife during one of those infrequent times when I was making a lot of money. I had lived in it with our three kids and her for three years, off and on, without trying to pretend it was "our" home. Now she wanted me to leave. "What can I believe anymore?" she asked. "I'm so tired of your secrets."
She had come across some old emails from a Japanese girl whom she had suspected of being my lover. I had last seen the girl at the departure gate at Tokyo's Narita Airport before I boarded a flight for Los Angeles three months ago. "There's been so many secrets, so many things you've never told me – and it hurt so bad," the Japanese girl had told me then. After she had left me at the airport, she went back to an apartment I rented in Nishi-Azabu, another non-home, and packed her belongings. The secrets she referred to had nothing to do with my wife. I suspected the secrets my wife referred to had nothing to do with the Japanese girl. There was just this continuous white noise of confused or contradictory indications, punctuated by resorbent nulls; it was as if I were trying to elude substance, to become a ghost. Prolonged exposure to it had exhausted them both.
I flew economy on American Airlines to Los Angeles via Dallas, with the thought of staying for a while in a city that sustained itself through its transients. I took a cab to Sunset and checked into a large room on the third floor of The Standard Hotel, overlooking the pool. Young bodies were arranged around it like MTV extras, sprawling on white plastic lounge chairs scattered across an expanse of blue AstroTurf. One corner was taken over by a photo shoot, and chain-smoking assistants arranged a tripod, lights, battery packs and reflectors as a model, dull-eyed, barely a teenager, suffered the final touch-ups to her make-up. Loud hip-hop and a visceral human hum reverberated within the walls.
I phoned a woman I used to date when I lived in the city. Blonde, in her late 20s, she had played a bit part as a stripper in a Nicolas Cage movie; now she was married, with a nine-month-old baby, her ambition to be an actress fading. We met late that night at a sushi restaurant on Third Street, and afterwards, fucked on a silver beanbag in my room. The hotel was now quiet, except for the occasional creak of beds and floorboards in other rooms. The lounge chairs and AstroTurf were empty. An old, ornate, red neon sign atop a Spanish-style apartment block nearby flickered against the starless sky: Mirador.
When she left, it struck me that staying any longer in Los Angeles would be a mistake. It was too easy to re-invent yourself for the moment there; no one questioned it, and you could forget in an instant who you really were. I had already crossed and recrossed the fine line between delusion and lie too many times to risk it again.
It was the beginning of the rainy season in Tokyo, sticky and hot. In the eerie, pre-apocalyptic stillness that precedes dawn in Los Angeles, I thought of Sydney.
DESPITE THE YEARS I HAD BEEN ON THE MOVE, I still found it hard to remember time zones in a conventional way. I relied on short cuts I had first come up with as a kid being dragged around the world by my parents. If you asked me if Tulsa was 16 hours behind Sydney, I would tell you something like "It's eight hours ahead, the day before". Or "It's four hours behind, at the opposite end of the day". It was easier, somehow.
It was midday in Palm Beach, eight in the evening, yesterday, in Tulsa. The kids would be getting ready to go to bed. I wondered whether I should leave it another day before trying to negotiate the trip-wires of my wife's anger. As in every war, hot zones flared, then subsided into uneasy stand-offs as each side dug in and assessed the attrition. My wife would not attack again, not for a few days; we were both worn out from the last fight, and maybe she was as nervous as I was about pushing the slim chance for peace over an ill-defined brink. She picked up after several rings, and waited for me to say hello first. I might have been wrong about the possibility of attack. "Where are you?" she asked. "I'm here. Just arrived." "Yes, but where?" "Still at the airport. I haven't figured out what to do yet."
And there was another of my inexplicable deceptions. I didn't know why, but I was not ready to tell her about the house, or about my plan to stay for a month or so. She sensed the secretiveness, and it irked her.
"Will you stay with your mother?"
"I don't know. I'll call you later and let you know what I'm up to."
A long pause.
"I'll get the kids," she said.
My daughters, aged four and 10, were used to pretending that the harsh words they heard their parents exchange had not happened. They chirruped happy goodnights and made exaggerated kissing sounds into the handset before passing it to my 11-year-old son. He was on the verge of tears.
"Hi, Dadda. Where are you?"
"Are you OK, son?"
"No."
"I'm so sorry. I really am."
"Mum says you're going to Australia."
"I'm already here."
"Are you going to come back?"
"We'll see each other soon. And I'll call every day. You have my mobile number so you can call me whenever you want." "It's so hard." "I know." "Does it have to keep being this way?" "No. We'll get through this. Just know I love you, OK?" "I know. I love you too, Dadda. But come back soon. Please." There was nothing more I could say. I hung up before he could hear me crying.