Excerpt: Sad Girl Novel by Pip Finkemeyer
CHAPTER 9
‘Are you young, Kim?’ he asked me.
‘Am I young?’
‘You act young.’
‘Well, I’m young at heart and plan to always be.’
‘I meant more like a teenager. You don’t look like a teenager, but you do talk like a teenager.’
‘Oh, I’m twenty-seven. A regular adult woman. I live in Berlin, so . . . arrested development maybe?’ I laughed self-consciously, not sure if I was proud that this older man perceived me as younger than I really was, or ashamed that my life’s circumstances would allow him to think so. He hadn’t asked me many questions that would enable him to glean much about me, so I told myself I had nothing to be ashamed of, as he didn’t know anything yet. There must have only been ten or so years between us, but he had the gravitas of a man wearing elbow patches, although he was dressed in a casual button-down shirt, rolled up at the sleeves.
We were in the cigar lounge of our hotel and he was smoking a half-cigar which he’d brought to Frankfurt in his suitcase because he liked to have the kind he likes, a kind that was often hard to find. He offered to share it with me but that seemed too intimate for a first meeting with the occasional colleague of a friend. The room smelled like the inner sanctum of some subsection of society that I was grateful was irrelevant to me.
Leonardo had carved out something of a niche for himself, I learned, writing biographies of historical figures after new details about them had come to light, changing everything we had previously thought to be true. In a sense,he said, he rewrote history, corrected false legacies, took some down a peg and lifted others up, giving credit where credit was due and reallocating it when he saw fit. His latest book had been inspired by the discovery of an erotic poem written by Frederick the Great in the late 1700s about a handsome Italian count whom, it was now unanimously agreed, he had taken as a lover on many occasions. Frederick’s sexuality had been established some time and many books ago, but according to Leo the poem was so salacious it warranted yet another take on how the man was gay and hated his wife.
‘Berlin is where Frederick kept his wife,’ Leo explained. ‘He detested her, naturally.’
I sipped on the whisky that I hoped he was paying for and he talked some more about his book, which he was very good at, until new whiskies arrived. The more he talked, the more water I added to my whisky. A dome of liquid now formed on the top of the glass, so I leaned down to drink from it while it remained on the table. I sat back in my chair, satisfied, and looked at Leo, who had resting stern face. There was a moment where we sat facing each other that I thought one of us might pounce on the other, like a cat on a bird.
‘Have you ever been to Peacock Island?’ he asked abruptly, puffing on the half-cigar, the kind he liked.
His question was not exactly expected, but I knew why he was asking. Peacock Island was where Frederick had built a small summer palace in which to house his lovers, not far from the main palace in Potsdam. It was not so far from Berlin and was a common destination for daytrips.
‘Yes, I went there once with a friend. It was her dying wish.’
‘Oh. Sorry for the subject.’
‘It’s okay—she wasn’t really dying, she was just leaving Berlin. Which is sort of the same thing, because we’ll never see each other again.’
‘Oh.’
‘We’d both lived here for a couple of years by then and had never made it to Peacock Island, so she wanted us to go there together before she went back to America. I really miss her.’ To my surprise I was starting to get emotional. ‘It’s one of the hard things about living here.’
‘In Frankfurt?’
‘No, Berlin.’
‘I live in Geneva.’
‘But still.’
‘Not really.’
‘Hmm.’ I shrugged. ‘I mean, it’s hard living in a city where all your friends will leave, one by one. It kind of brings tears to my eyes, the inevitable loss of all the connections everyone is making.’ I blinked sadly. ‘I miss them all so much, it still shocks me.’
‘What did you think of Frederick’s palace on the island? Do you know the story behind the design of it?’ he asked.
Some men were always trying to bend conversations back to facts and away from our personal circumstances. All I wanted out of most conversations was a volley back and forth, where one person said something and the other person reacted to that thing. Was that so hard? Instead I found myself having conversations like this one was promising to be, where I would lob some intimate or personal thoughts out there for the other person to hit back, and instead they’d dodge them and let them roll away, preferring instead to recite a list of facts at me in a one-way stream, as if I didn’t know how to look up a Wikipedia page on my own to find the information I wanted. My impulse to bicker was kicking in at the most inappropriate time. Who cared if I liked this man, or if he seemed like a person who knew how to be curious about other people or not? I was supposed to be here to glean information from a successful author, that’s all. But just because he was older and successful didn’t mean I really had to listen to him, did it? I was much more interested in myself than in history—was that such a crime? It kind of was.
But my own emotional state helped me to learn about the emotional state of the world, because what made us us more than how we felt? Why were we still talking about how some dead king felt? In my defence, while I was more interested in myself than the past, I was less interested in myself than the future. As a naturally anxious person, I thought about the future all the time. To me, everyone’s future seemed worth making sacrifices for. I wasn’t a completely selfish person. Mainly I wanted the world to continue in good stead after I was gone. But while I was here, I did have some questions, about why things had to be the way they were. About why a lot of things in our lives were so stupid and joyless.
I thought about Bel and how she had set this meeting up, and my quote unquote career as a quote unquote writer. I should probably try to avoid fucking this evening up, I decided. Leo had that look in his eye like he was preparing his exit strategy (maybe it had something to do with my unprompted near-crying experience), and so I sat back and let the social training of my younger and less assertive self kick in. I would ask him questions that allowed him to keep expounding on a subject I cared very little about. I would facilitate him talking over me even as I hated myself for it, knowing I was betraying young women everywhere: women who just wanted to be able to cry in public at the same time as being taken seriously. Maybe in the future emotions wouldn’t have to be made invisible to favour facts.
What could I say about Peacock Island? I had assumed the name of the island came from the peacocks that seem to roam freely around the island, but if you look at a map of the island it is literally shaped like a peacock, man-made in the shape of a bird. A short ferry ride from the mainland, it had a dairy as well as the palace, manicured pastoral gardens and an aviary complete with a real albino peacock. ‘It was interesting, the palace,’ I offered. ‘It looks incredibly artificial. When I saw it I felt like I was on a film set, or looking at a Disney cartoon castle brought to life. Why is that?’
Leonardo leaned back in his chair and explained that it all started with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I thought it would have been a nice touch for him to take a slow puff of his cigar before he started, but he left it resting on the ashtray. Inthe eighteenth-century Rousseau called for a ‘return to nature’ as an antidote to modern life. This inspired European nobility to construct mock farms to imitate the simple country life. Ruins were considered similarly romantic, and so the palace was built to look as if it were already in ruins. Old and authentic from the beginning.
‘Like shabby chic?’ I suggested.
‘Not exactly,’ he said. Leo went on. The walls were supposed to look like white marble, but on closer inspection were white-painted wood. The dairy resembled a ruined monastery. Upstairs was an impressive gothic hall, and downstairs were the cows. Frederick could milk them himself if he chose, as was in vogue at the time. Apparently the milk was sweeter this way.
‘Sounds like a fetish,’ I said. ‘Dressing up like a farmer and milking cows. Was there rubber involved?’
‘It was a fetishisation of class, if anything,’ Leo said, ignoring my attempt at a tonal shift. ‘It’s not unlike those corporate hunting trips, where groups of wealthy men go on safari and pay real hunters to corner animals for them, so it’s easier for the wealthy men to shoot them. It is meant to replicate the feeling of hunting for one’s food.’ He paused, and I felt a thought forming, so I thought I would try and say something, even though I wasn’t quite sure yet what itwould be.
‘Yeah. It kind of reminds me of something more modern, too. Like, people of my generation are still fetishising a certain class, and we’re all sort of playing at living a lifestyle that doesn’t come naturally to us, and mutually agreeing to believe in it, ignoring the obvious signs of artificiality. I guess traditionally people have aspired to move up in class, so it’s more noticeable today when people are trying to move down or across, which people play at when they want to be perceived as arty in Berlin. But I suppose it is reassuring to hear that humans have always played atthis type of pretending, even royalty.’ I paused and made a sort of ‘see, I was listening to you’ face before continuing.
‘And what about Frederick’s wife? Does she have a perspective on this in your book, or is she always just the punchline?’
‘My book can’t be everything to everyone.’
‘I feel that way about my book too. That it’s not for everyone. That it’s not everything.’
‘I’ll keep an eye out for it.’
‘My book?’
‘Sure.’
Based on what? I wanted to say. We had never got round to talking about it.
‘I assume it’s fiction?’
Finally he had thrown a question my way. Technically it was a statement with an upwards inflection at the end, which is the most you can hope for as a certain type of young woman speaking to a certain type of jowly elbow-patchy man.
There was a long pause in which I was expected to launch into an explanation of my work in progress. But instead of words forming and my tongue moving—in other words, an opening up to another person—I felt the opposite of bodily sensations, a sharp closing-off. My internal metal shield of defensiveness rose inside of me and firmly set itself in front of my heart as if to say: none shall pass. I had created my own little world in which I was important, and I was doing important work: international sad girls everywhere were urgently waiting for me to finish my novel. And in order to protect this world, I had to create a strong exterior to protect myself from all the medieval lances (%) that buried themselves in the conversation like the one that was threatening to happen now. If I let a serious and successful man like Leo through the gates to see what was going on inside, everything would come crumbling down around me. I didn’t trust my resolve to believe in myself in the face of all that institutionalised brilliance represented by Eurocentric penises lounging in European cigar lounges. I imagined if I lowered my defences and let Leo in on my idea, he’d lean in witha metaphorical monocle, and get close enough to see that my confidence was counterfeit.
I drained my glass and rose from my chair. ‘Yes. Well, thank you for a lovely evening. I don’t know many people here. It was enlightening.’ I resisted the urge to curtsy. I smiled. I left.
This is an edited extract from ‘Sad Girl Novel’ by Pip Finkemeyer, Ultimo Press, RRP $34.99, available now.
Read our interview with Pip here, where we chat about sad girls, delusion and coming of age as a writer.
Pip Finkemeyer’s fiction has been listed for the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize, the Richell Prize for Emerging Writers, the Disquiet Literary Prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She completed a Masters in Publishing and Editing at RMIT. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne and Sad Girl Novel is her first novel.