Swimming on the Peninsula Freeway

Winter is the only true season for falling in love in this city because it’s when the people here are at their quickest. 

In Summer it’s impossible to really fall in love with anybody and do it well because everybody becomes too stupid with the heat to possibly come up with something clever and charming enough to earn a worthwhile glance. Summer might be the provenance of the body, but winter is certainly the season of the mind. 

Let the poets swoon over Spring. Love should be like Winter; like Autumn: sharp, swift, red all over and finishing in a beautiful mess; everyone throwing on their old furs– the ones that still smell of past lovers and strangers’ perfumes – inside of little bars and dim restaurants where the lighting is just forgiving enough to make anybody look enchanting. Winter is when everyone becomes quick-witted and radiant enough under the glow of early evening to finally earn their frivolity. Maybe we could all love somebody enough to sleep next to them in Summer and make them eggs in the morning, but Winter is when we substitute all that easy affection for a crueller but wiser kind of tenderness which emphasises fun rather than limits it.

If you live in Melbourne, to reckon with linear time is a trick, since there is no order to the seasons. There’s just the hot days, the cold days, the wind, certain parties, and particular people. There are even some particular people in this city who do live by the rules of the calendar and actually believe winter here to be a tragic thing– and yet while many of them jet off to Ibiza and Paris for July, they always seem to make it back. While I can understand their love for this city, I tend to take it personally when any creature of beauty is abandoned the moment she becomes a little cold. 

Yes– I am in love with this city in the wintertime. I am in love with it the way you love the first person who ever really looks through you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I am in love with this city because I feel I share with her the same secret, intimate things only ever known between two strangers at opposite ends of the party. Cupid dipped two arrows in early sunsets, cobblestones, Helen Garner and the wind– and then he drew them and let go: one through my head, and the other through my heart.  

I want to tell these people who abandon my sweet city that charm is never content–  it’s all form. The same way a story will never win you over by what it’s telling– but rather by how it’s told– Melbourne will never win you over with her weather: but you will come to love her hidden alcoves and the sputtering of rain, early sunsets and a season devoted to wit. It’s a lesson I learned watching Max drive in the rain that July day on the Peninsula Freeway in a particularly weird and wet July. 

— 

Glorious, hangover-like day. We had spent the night down the coast, had overslept, and then had fallen asleep again in the winter sun sprawled on a rug we had pulled out onto his deck. Max had woken up with the rain on his face, while I had surfaced only by him shaking me vigorously. Max was always shaking me awake vigorously, usually because he needed to go somewhere that was far away from the consequences of our union. Meanwhile, I was starting to think that the fastest way to my heart was for a man to roll over and say: “Listen, I have to be up early tomorrow…” I always felt luxuriously involved with the evidence that there existed something somewhere even more interesting than me, which is my favourite way to feel. That day, we were late; we had to be back in the city by two o’clock to go to one of those gallery openings where everybody is lithe, fashionably androgynous and contemptuous of current trends. I picked up my shoes from the door and followed him to his BMW, my feet cold and wet against the earth. 

Because he was an older man– and I was a younger woman– Max spent most of our time together in the car imparting wisdom. He seemed to accept my responses and most things he said without needing to listen to me too much. This was because he was in A Rut, which meant that he needed to talk a lot about The Work. The Work was Art, which he was currently Disillusioned By. His response to most things I said was to furrow his brow, squint through the rain, and mutter: “The most important thing is The Work”.

It was difficult to tell whether this was advice or an admission of some personal error.  

— 

 It was one-thirty now, we were two hours away, and the whole world was writhing and thrashing about us. The rain was so heavy that it was drowning the car in its lecherous waters, we could make out the highway before us for only one second in every two– when the rain was washed from the windscreen by the wipers, we were immediately thrown into another torrential blur. Max turned down the radio– there was no point; we couldn’t hear Ella Fitzgerald or one another over the sheer sound of winter. I could feel some hazy snap, some uproar about to happen, some light about to be thrown out. The cars had slowed in the wet and turned their lights on. Everything blurred and reflected off of itself. It reminded me of a phrase friends in Seattle used to throw around in the real down and out seasons that side of the equator– “We’re in The Big Dark now”. Well, Max and I were in The Big Dark. It was the perfect atmosphere for the sky to crack open or for a gunshot to go off. And then it did. 

It was so loud that it set itself above the rain, above Max’s tense, distracted conversation, above the slosh of tires moving through water. It wasn’t the sound of a pistol or thunder–  it was more the tight, quick sound of a  tendon snapping in the dark. A sort of musical gasp rose up from Max beneath the clash of the rain. There was another loud crack. On the windshield, the rain had ceased parting. Both wipers had torn off of the car. We could make out nothing save for a few shapes that could have been either houses or trucks. We were truly underwater now. 

I learned a lot of things on that ride back to the city. One of them is that artists really do not like to miss an opportunity to drink for free in the afternoon, and in the event of an obstacle to this will simply tell their date to tighten her seatbelt, close her eyes, and not talk for ninety minutes. 

I didn’t close my eyes, but I didn’t attempt to look through the windshield either. Instead, I watched Max, whose knuckles had turned white on the steering wheel; his portrait lit up by yellow headlights as if it were on fire. There was nowhere to pull over. He turned Ella back up until we were wrapped in the sound of it– the rain, the jazz, the water, the blue heat of it all– and just kept on going. 

— 

Hemingway, in his typical leathery way, said that courage is grace under pressure. It occurred to me in that car that unless you're going to tame bulls or write gossipy novels about your friends, this misses the mark. The same way it wasn’t an eye we wished for in that storm, it’s never been grace I reached for under the weight of hours. Peace doesn’t interest me just yet– I’m saving all of that softness up for years from now when I’ve dried off and I look around and it’s all that’s left to long for. 

What I’ve always needed instead is something to look forward to, which is almost always better than the thing itself, because it gives you a reason to actually survive the car. And like everyone else walking down Collins street in July in the biting cold that same winter afternoon, the two of us were just bleaching our knuckles to get somewhere– anywhere– warmer and slower with the promise not merely of survival, but of a party.  Either you make your own fun, or someone or something else will make it for you– and then take it from you– civilise and discipline your impulses, and leave you out to dry. 

I’d rather stay in the rain. 

— 

There are particularities unique to the winters here that are unfamiliar to those who don’t bear it year on year; The first is the proximity to heaven’s ladder that emerges only in Melbourne mid-winter.  

I didn’t know what I wanted in the world before I paid attention to winter sunsets in this city. Now it’s simple: I want the sky like that always, or at least as often as I can get it. It might be cold, but I am convinced that  this particular feeling of loveliness is located only here; this easy rapture from the sky, protective and simple, is one known to those who walk back from cramped offices or stumble into or out of bars in early evening, who know that it doesn’t only exist in the sky itself, but everywhere and all at once. The world is cast in a pulse of pink and orange; the leaves make themselves visible, shimmering; the air is quiet, ecstatic, glittering. Down by the clock on Flinders and Swanston, or in little laneways behind Degraves or Hosier, or on the steeples of wine bars up North, everything, for a moment, is silent and personal. You’d have to be crazy to resist that light as it dapples the cobblestones and cabs. Even the umbrellas unfurl like musical notes. 

I was once at a bar engaging in the non-committal charm of the smokers’ section when a girl– small and pink and so beautiful that her beauty seemed to be essential, somehow, to who she really was– floated up to me, asked me for a light, and shared a cigarette and the sunset with me. We stood there, together, in silence, until the sunset blurred and tossed out its terrific mid-winter blush and the sky and the world ended right then and there. In the dark, she said to me: “I just want to wrap my legs around that,” and then walked away. I love it when a woman makes me feel, for a moment, the dazed stupor of a boy. 

Try as I might, I simply cannot be a creature of the day. But I’ll fall in love and do so fast with anything that gives me more of the night. Winter does this.The light shortens, the days tighten and shrink, and those intimate sunsets arrive at seven, and then six, and then five. It’s this insistence upon the dark that I love her for– the shortening of her days which simply leaves room for longer nights that have us running toward dark bars, pub fireplaces, and warm, familiar arms. The hours slow and unfurl; life, for a few months at least, wants us to play in the dark. It’s all warm rooms and breathing bodies and little glasses, and walking home on those certain kinds of winter evenings kicking stones– the early morning dark and bitter with a wind off the Yarra by the bright windows of terrace houses – you may even feel that no matter what happens in your life, at least you’ve got that sunset and everything under it. 

— 

Sometimes in winter running for the train or drawing my coat over my head I think about that day in the car and the high winds and the churning water all about us like a true Surrealist painting. When he gripped the clutch and leaned forward in his seat to make sense of all those shapes outside and his back was lit up as if it were on fire, that fire melting water, I wasn’t afraid. I had no future, and I had no past. As crazy and hostile as that winter was, I felt safe. We were safe. We had something to survive the car for. I found myself beginning to sing, and I was singing along with Ella, with her butter and cigarettes voice, to those same words sung by creatures everywhere who know that it isn’t about the rain, it’s about what you do in it. 

I know now that all we need this winter are the words “it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it". And all that sky and all that glory and all that rain.