THIRTEEN - The Australian

Sometime in July I found myself with friends at another of those underground, all-night dance clubs where the air doesn’t move and you need to situate yourself next to the exit in case of an earthquake because they don’t pay any notice to capacity restrictions. The clearest thought in my mind was I may have missed the clubbing experience in my 20s but I’m too old for this.

When the smoke cleared and my eyes adjusted to the dark, there was The Aussie, doing some sort of hip-drop dance move that gave him an endearing wanna-be stripper quality. He was surrounded by foreign women, most of them in their early 20’s. I watched all the stereotypes play out for a few hours, as the live entertainment was far more interesting than anything else that was happening on the dance floor. On a trip to the bar, he recognized me and flashed that big granite-chin grin. This time when he asked me out I said yes. The cliché would be “a moth to a flame” but it always seems to me more like someone defeated and exhausted rolling downhill, taking the path of least resistance, losing control and gaining bruises as well as layer upon layer of dirt as they propel downward. By the time they hit bottom, they are no longer recognizable and their muffled cries can barely be heard through all the acquired coverings.

I think it was fall when I left my rooftop home at the bottom of the mountain and moved into the two-storey, three-bedroom apartment that The Aussie’s engineering firm had secured for him and his two roommates. The rationale was that it was too expensive for us to keep travelling back and forth from his apartment near City Hall to my garden home apartment on the outskirts of the city. I was informed by his roommates that it must be serious if he was actually moving ‘one of us’ in. The Aussie had been briefly married to a German flight attendant in the past – a technicality made necessary by a work contract in the Middle East, where common-law relationships among expats are not accepted in certain areas. Other than that, his relationships had been relatively short-lived. The last one before me was a Croatian lingerie model, also named Diana. I spent the first few nights out with his friends explaining that I was a different Diana. The Canadian one. He rarely mentioned to his friends that I had children at home.

Our days consisted of work, the gym, the British pub on the way home for dinner, and sometimes the beach on weekends. We fell into a very comfortable groove. I believe the flipside of that description is a rut. The Aussie drank heavily, however, and the truths blurted out at midnight took a toll on our relationship. By night we could see no way to merge our futures from opposite ends of the Earth. He would accuse me of having too many male friends. He suspected I was seeing someone at work. He followed me and my girlfriends down the street on a girls’ night out and wailed drunken pleas to be allowed to join us.

By day he took beta blockers to kickstart his heart into sobriety, and declared his undying devotion and commitment once again. He was adamant that the girls would join us in Australia on summer holidays, when this contract was through. He said he would spare no expense to bring them over but he could never move to Canada. My one-year-date to return home to Canada came and went, with little fanfare. My family back home became adjusted and accustomed to living without me, and life ticked onward.

We went on several memorable trips together. He came home with me at Christmas that first year. We went to Australia and travelled the entire Eastern coast together, top to bottom, over a few different vacations. We were not close or connected on these trips, however, and I remember thinking I was once again experiencing something that I would appreciate far more if my children were with me. I met his family and they were polite and patient with me but carefully and honestly expressed no hope for the future of our relationship, with my children in Canada. I couldn’t believe they were actually voicing their thoughts in that way, with me in the room. We went to Singapore for a friend’s wedding and Vietnam for kite surfing but never Thailand. We were booked there in 2005 but had a last-minute change of heart. More about that later.

One day The Aussie asked me to pick out an engagement ring. He sent me photos of platinum bands and diamonds to choose from. The next weekend we were at another British Pub and when one of the Asian girlfriends of his colleagues asked why he had brought ‘coal to Newcastle’, he said, in a very loud voice while smiling at me, that ‘Diana is just going through a phase in Asia. Getting stuff out of her system after a messy divorce. She will be going home soon. She has three kids back in Canada, you know.’

Some nights the tension in that one private room of our shared apartment was unbearable, the air cloying. He stood at the open window with his whiskey, blowing cigar smoke out into the night. I stood at the window gulping mouthfuls of air that could never be fresh enough. Not in that city. The first time I left him was when he renewed his contract in Taipei without telling me. I found out through our roommate. I waited until he was gone to work and packed an overnight bag with everything I might need for several weeks (I never unpacked my makeup bag so I was ready to go at a moment’s notice) and after checking out and rejecting the beer-stained couches and cigarette-stained walls of the local hostel, landed on the doorstep of a girlfriend. I did that a total of twelve times during our 2.5 year relationship.

One week we were travelling home to Canada so that I could have surgery to reverse a tubal ligation. We were getting married and starting a family and preparing a future for my daughters to join us part-time. The next week I was staying at a girlfriend’s apartment until he could sort out his thoughts without flipping and pulling the floor out from under me.

I was sitting on our balcony at 4 o’clock one morning, watching the sunrise and speaking to my daughters who had just returned home from school in Canada. I heard The Aussie walk in and slam the door behind him. He had been out all night – I had decided to come straight home after the gym instead of accompanying him to the pub. I was tired of being left sitting in the corner, eating my Thai beef salad and reading a book while he stood with his friends in front of the bar, watching footie on the TV and flirting with the Asian barmaid who, if tipped appropriately, might be persuaded to take you in the back room for a moment. I told him once that the group of them looked like a bunch of penguins waiting to be thrown a fish.

Annoyed with me for straying from the routine, he decided to go with the boys to the massage parlour after the pub and make a night of it. He interrupted my call home to tell me that he must have left his phone and his good watch there and would return after a few hours to pick them up. I just laughed. I mean, at times like that, when you realize what a ridiculous mess you have created of your life, you just have to laugh, right? My hilarity was not well-received. The Aussie grabbed the phone out of my hand, swiping my cheek with it before wrenching the window open with his other hand and whipping the unit out over the banana trees. I stood up and watched as it fell with a plop into the pond where the over-sized, auspicious goldfish swam. My first thought was concern for what my daughter must think, having her phone call interrupted this way. Then I reasoned with myself that she probably had no idea what was going on – we had been interrupted many times before by interference and we could continue our conversation later. I wondered what the goldfish thought of the new addition to the pond. I wondered how long The Aussie would be in the shower and if it would give me enough time to pack, retrieve my cell phone from the pond and find an all-night coffee shop to sit in and wait for the gym to open so I could shower and plan my next move. He gave me just enough time.