Bodybuilder

BODYBUILDER

By Robert Davidson


‘Can I give you a hand with those boxes?’

The upstairs flat had been let at last and Helga could see that the new tenant was only a few years younger than herself. He was unloading boxes of books and computer equipment from a utility parked in the drive outside. Columns of heat shimmered in the air in the street in front of the block of flats. He was sweating profusely in the afternoon sun. Not very good-looking, she thought, noting the thin brown hair and underweight body.

He was making his way into the entrance hall to where she was standing, giving a brief greeting as he passed carrying a computer monitor up the stone stairs. He won’t last long in this heat, she thought.

Clay had met Helga Lindblom the previous evening when he first drove up and they had introduced themselves in the driveway. ‘Hello, I’m your neighbour on the floor below,’ she greeted. She was the phys ed teacher at a nearby secondary college, she said and looked it. Style, poise and elegance, he thought, and an unforgettable body. He was working in an insurance office in the city, he told her. Now when he came back downstairs again, she asked, ‘Would you like some help with those boxes?’

Helga was a Nordic blonde who had won several local bodybuilding competitions, she’d even tried out for the Olympic Games, she was saying, but for a pulled hamstring at the last moment. Exquisitely fair with gold-glistening hair, her sun-tanned body, was long and strong in tight blue shorts and cotton blouse. A regular Juno, he thought though there’s nothing grotesque about her. She’s a vibrant flame that dances, he thought. He averted his eyes - disturbed - the shadow between her breasts.

Hardly likely to be interested in me, he told himself ruefully. For here was woman, woman at her best, an ample madam, gracefully proportioned, with a body shaped and refined. Her luminous eyes surveyed him with a sort of queenly pity and forbearance,

He would do anything I wanted, Helga told herself, watching him as he took another carton from the utility and passed it to her. Clay felt over-awed, couldn’t stop looking at her tanned body and legs as she hoisted the box onto her shoulder, carrying it effortlessly up to his flat. He following, struggling with a suitcase.

Later, as they relaxed in his flat with a cool drink, he explained that he was a great reader and did a bit of writing at nights. He worked in a routine job in a city office during the day. ‘If you want a safe life, become a clerk,’ he smiled. She raised her eyes to his. Their gaze met for a moment then fell away. And because she’d lingered a little longer than he expected, he invited her out to dinner and a movie that evening.

Like the touch of a scorching flame, her lips brushing his with her own as they stood outside her flat late that night. The warmth of that kiss lingering as he made his way upstairs.

During the next few days the desire to sleep with Helga never gave Clay a moment’s rest. The excitement that surged through him. She was in his blood, he felt. The longing for her.

She took it for granted he was coming to her flat a few nights later after they had come back from a night club. ‘I hate sleeping alone,’ she was saying good naturedly as she closed the door behind him. Her mouth moving down the line of his neck, his shoulder. Trembling under her touch, he held the length of her body pressed to his.

Clay opening himself to her, spoke his fears. Self-doubts. His surprise that she could be attracted to him. At the same time Helga was arguing within herself, should she surrender herself to the will of the man? She was looking down at the slim lines of his body lying on her bed. He Gazing up the long length of her. Her legs - twin towers of power above him. The palpitant flesh. Her movement told him what to do.

Later she told him straight out that she like passive men, that she needed to be in charge, make decisions. That everything would be all right between them providing he did not come the heavy male with her. ‘I divorced a brute of a man two years ago. I don’t want the strong male stuff again, she paused a moment then went on to say. ‘Tom wanted me to give myself unreservedly to him, to sink my personality, become submerged in him. So fired up with his male ego, he even struck me across the face on more than one occasion.’

No doubt I had wanted to be wanted, Clay thought to himself. I was netted and like it. Well, at first! Perhaps there’s a touch of the female in me who wants to be dominated, he reasoned. Or was it because being an unprepossessing male I had wanted Helga so much, overwhelmed by her interest in me. I was prepared to play along with her, adopt the submissive role. Submission to a female body-builder!

At the beginning Helga had a curious masculine detachedness to their whole affair. ‘I’m fond of you, Clay’, she would tell him, but no more. He succumbed to her once more. Held in those strong arms he felt like a love-doll.

In the evenings Helga would spend time reading and commenting on Clay’s stories and poems. Frequently she would make constructive comments and he would rewrite. When one of his stories won an important prize, Helga said she thought he had a future. One night she told him: ‘You must give up your job, Clay, concentrate full-time on writing. I have money enough,’ she said ‘to support us both for a year.’

Initially Clay was reluctant to accept this offer, fearing it would make him too dependent on her. But with some persuading he agreed. After moving down into her flat, he was happy with the arrangement at first. But as the weeks went on, he began to feel a loss of identity,

So he would turn to writing for relief. Tried to lose himself in work. Words. A search for validation and self-identity through language.

Often Helga would break into his thoughts, seemingly inconsequentially. ‘Well, I do want a child one day in the not too distant future’. Her voice as she talked had a low and throaty timbre. ‘Best to be honest with you.’ Then she calmly went on to say without the slightest change of vocal inflection. ‘But, of course, if you’re not interested, Clay, eventually I’ll have to move on, have to find somebody else.’ Helga was as self-contained as stone.

But Clay within himself feared that a child at this time would tie him completely to Helga. I’m sorry if I’ve no enthusiasm for children,’ he said. ‘I don’t dislike them, but I can’t work up much interest in them. Perhaps in a few years I might feel differently. But for the moment I’ve got to concentrate on getting my novel finished.’ She listened quietly for a few moments then chided him not too harshly for his lack of enthusiasm.

And so the relationship continued for the rest of that year. Helga was of course the better lover. Gave finesse and imagination to it. Clay was in abject surrender before her. His face to her inner thigh, offering that humility which a slave might render a queen. Her kiss was like a bruise on his lips.

Clay was often puzzled by his feelings towards her. He was certain he did not move her, yet there was a pain and loneliness in him when she was away at work during the day that surprised him. But many times he felt trapped, caught like a wasp in a spider’s web. Soon they began to quarrel. They even spent Christmas Day not speaking. He went down to the pub in the next street and when he got back she had gone off to visit friends. I must cut the umbilical cord, be more independent, he often thought.

On top of it all, he was not writing well. He had made several attempts at a pot-boiler of a novel. A spy-thriller that never got off the ground. Even tried an abortive love-romance. Losing himself in a wilderness of words. Words place clumsily on one another like stones.

Then another quarrel. ‘There’s a hard, opposing core in you, Clay,’ she said on more than one occasion. He in masculine menace refused to answer, refused to be drawn. It meant another evening at the pub.

When he got back Helga was asleep, the covers thrown back to reveal her naked breast and the curve of her thigh. He undressed, went to the bathroom and made ready to slip into bed beside her. Her body now stretched out face downwards on the bed. She stirred. He made love to her, over-riding her resisting will. My very selfhood is at stake, he thought. To relinquish her will to mine

Later that night he felt like Atlas carting the world on his shoulders.!

But such was the labyrinth of loving. Helga now began to withdraw from him physically. She had set herself against me, he thought Helga reasoned within herself, I must withhold myself, I must keep myself taut within my own self. Rob him of his male power.. And then she was saying ‘I am going off to Adelaide for a week or so.’ Her mother was sick.

However, once she was gone, Clay began to feel trapped in the flat and by the walls of that other prison, his self. I might at any moment splinter into all directions, he thought. By the bedeviled depths of my own nature! Many have murdered those they love, he mused. This deadly Juno I have been living with. Helga - the eternal mother, provider of shelter, warmth and even my food. It was the sense of power it afforded her he supposed.

Alone Clay was very much at odds with himself. He was increasingly dissatisfied with being the passive partner in the relationship. This dark mood clung to him like the cobwebs of a nightmare. His emotions were rubbed raw. An all or nothing woman, no less. It was as though I was being stripped of his skin, he thought. It had all begun because she was eager and I was seized with the need to affirm my virility, he reflected. I am like an insect being drawn into the Venus fly-trap. She’ll devour me completely if I let her.

Feeling such desolation within himself, Clay realized he must break free of Helga Lindblom. I must look for another job and a flat of my own, he decided. In the days that followed he was lucky enough to find another day-time office job, but not nearly so well-paid. This meant problems in finding another suitable flat so he moved to a single room in a hotel. But by evening the black devils were at him again. He could not bear the solitude of his room and went down to the bar for a drink.

In the crowded bar-lounge Clay hesitated a moment, looking about for a vacant table. Everyone seemed to be with someone else. And here was he going to a pub to be among people for the sake of it. Then he made his way across to the far side of the room. Several couples were standing at the bar. He went and stood beside them and ordered a beer. Then he made his way over to the far side of the room. ‘Mind if I sit here?’ he asked a girl sitting alone. Her skirt revealed most of her thigh. ‘You’re not waiting for anyone?’

‘No,’ she smiled, giving it full in his face, beckoning him to join her. Those parted lips, he thought. A lipstick of the bloodiest tone. She readjusted her dress by about half an inch. She was on the look-out, he was convinced. The sleeve fell back from her rather thin, but elegant arm as she took up her drink. After a few moments of small-talk, she held out her hand.

‘Zadie, Zadie Tyburn. It’s a stage-name, of course,’ she explained. ‘On the stage. Small parts. Film and TV work,’ she said, recrossing elegant legs. Her voice had a bronze-like resonance and she spoke rather fast. ‘I’m just waiting for the right part to launch my career.’ Her bright mouth laughed. A perfect Botticelli face, he thought. Her features had a harmonious flow of line. The ultra-feminine type, he told himself with a smile admiring her slim, well-shapen legs, the tight-fitting dress. One who’ll cling to you. Enough to make a man feel twice his size.

Zadie studied her glass before removing s particle from it with a long pink fingernail. A half-mocking smile was playing in her eyes. He’s a bit of a lone dog, she considered. But he’s about my age, and that’s a change. She’s quite a tonic, Clay thought. Very feminine and playing up to me. Just what I need. He felt she yearned to be compelled and subjugated. More people came crowding into the bar, mostly students and a few solitary drinkers. Clay was rooster-pleased when Zadie readily agreed to go on to another pub with him and then to a dance that night. He was convinced that with a girl like Zadie, he would be playing a much more masculine role than with Helga.

He returned with Zadie to her room late that night. She lived in the glassed-in end of the veranda of a old terrace-house in South Melbourne .And although they spent much time touching and caressing one another, she held back sexually, saying: ‘Not on the first date!’ And when he protested she made a mocking mouth at him.

And as men will always want what is withheld, Clay spent a lot of time and effort pursuing Zadie over the next few days. His need to assert his manliness, he felt. At the same time he knew full-well that he was simply trying to cope with stress by sexual release. Always it seemed in human relations there was the need to enter and consume the other. Always there was the urge - the need to let something out of oneself.

The following afternoon Zadie rang Clay at his office. ‘Listen,’ she said, I want you to meet a woman named Phyllis Loman. She’s Production Manager for Parker-Anderson Productions and she wants me to audition for Stan Parker, the Director of a new TV mini-series called Breakwater. They‘re going to try me out for the leading role. It’s terribly important. Phyllis is giving a party in South Yarra to meet some of the crew. Saturday night, Phyllis says. It’s going to be a fantastic night to meet the people who count.’

By ten o’clock Phyllis’s party had got underway. When Zadie and Clay arrived the dancing had begun. They entered a renovated Federation-style house with walls knocked out making one large room running in many directions. A huge wall-poster featuring Che Guevera with his wistfully sad eyes dominated. Phyllis was a big witchlike woman with wild bird’s-nest hair and voluminous green caftan and a long skein of wooden beads reaching almost to her knees. She was dancing solo in the centre of the room. As the night wore on claret flowed copiously, in-jokes proliferated, the hi-fi blared, and there was a whiff of burning joss-stick.

There was a girl called Francie in built-up hair, enormous glasses, and a bunch of wilted Parma violets in her hand. She sat down in Phyllis’s lap and stayed there most of the night. Phyllis was putting a pink plastic flower into Francie’s hair.

But Zadie was overdressed for the party she’d invited Clay to. Where the others dressed down, Zadie dressed up in a bright yellow trouser-suit. ‘Always,’ she said, ‘I am concerned with the maintenance of a sharp personal image. I’m carefully concerned with every public appearance I make. Of projecting the right body image. Elegance, self-possession, style.’

But to make matters worse Zadie played up to men outrageously at other parties she dragged Clay to. Said it didn’t mean a thing, that the people she carried on with were useful, vital to her, could help her to get jobs. But in lust - one loses all pride. Clay felt the need to engulf her. To absorb Zadie completely. But still she held out on him. His uprushes of longing left him restless and moody.

One Saturday night at a city restaurant, Zadie introduced Clay to TV director Stan Parker. Stan was an educated man who made great efforts to sound like an outback Australian when he talked, Clay thought. A little, fat, oily man who leered like Silenus. Eyes brittle and bright under bristling eyebrows. His paunch touching the edge of the table.

Stan was saying that it was necessary to grab whatever life can give you. ‘A thing like TV depends largely on the blokes you know in addition to you being who you are. It’s the crucial hand-shake that matters and the mates you make along the way, that gets you in, while a lot of brighter sparks are often left out.’ He looked sideways at Zadie as he spoke, ‘but the sheilas have always got to show it off, share it around. Now, I can get you in anywhere you want, I can get you to where you want to be’ Zadie was looking up into his face like a dog eager for a bone.

Stan, as it turned out in the course of conversation, was offering Zadie the lead role in a new TV mini-series. He stood there with his fingers swollen around a beer glass, fingers tufted with hackles of little black hairs. When he lowered his glass, you could see the fleshy bulges where his belt was eating into his stomach.

But there was a condition, Zadie later explained to Clay in the car on the way back to her room. She’d get the part in Breakwater, which meant everything to her. She paused. Providing she slept with Stan. This was the offer she couldn’t refuse. Zadie then went on to explain ‘Seventeen girls did screen-tests and Stan could have given the part of Myra to any one of them. Such is the supply and demand of talent in show-business. My career would never get off the ground otherwise. So I’m quite prepared to sell my body to launch myself.’

Clay reflected as he settled into the room’s one armchair. I had wanted sex with Zadie. Apparently I’m not getting it. Stan Parker only has to snap his fingers. Or wave a contract. The lady is a tramp, but she doesn’t come cheap!

Then to his surprise Zadie did invite Clay into her bed that night. Zadie made the gestures that Helga never rose to. At least she went through the moves of feminine seduction, he thought watching her undress. Made you feel male. Did it matter very much whether or not there was any deep feeling behind it?

Suddenly they came together, she desiring him even more than he wanted her. And there was an urgency in him which made him impatient and domineering but also stumbling and clumsy. So what was born in him - was still-born. The loving with Zadie, such as it was, was brief and unsatisfactory.

‘What you need is a girl who’ll make no demands,’ she said later. Clay could not keep the hurt out of his voice. ‘You are upset!’
‘No, I’m not. Why should I be?’

Zadie Tyburn. Her passion was calculated. Her body was beautiful but her smile was a smirk. To Clay her ambition seemed self-consuming - she was like a moth caught in a lamp.

The following day Helga returned to Melbourne and telephoned Clay to say she was pregnant. ‘I intend to have the baby alone,’ she said, her voice firm and decisive as usual. ‘Now that you have moved out of the flat.’ She didn’t seem upset or worried at all, he thought. In fact, there’s a strange sibylline calm about her. Now doubt the new life that’s feeding on her, he considered. But after she had rung off, Clay realised how innerly lonely he was for her.

‘I want to share responsibility for the child,’ Clay said later that afternoon as he stood in the doorway of her flat..

‘That won’t be necessary,’ Helga replied. ‘You need to go on with your writing. A child will only hold you back.’

He had followed her into the living room and she was handing him a coffee. Helga and Clay stood confronting each other.

‘I’ve reached a bit of a dead end. I’ll either have to start a new story or give up,’ Clay admitted, accepting the cup from her outstretched hand. Settling himself on the couch, he then went on to tell Helga that he has had an affair with Zadie Tyburn while she was away. ‘But I was not emotionally involved. It’s over now.’

Clay is surprised to find how pleased he is to see Helga and is astonished when she asks bluntly: ‘You didn’t love me at all?’

Helga’s question broke his resistance to her. This woman has been my alter ego, has known my mind, he realised. And how she has mellowed, he thought. Quite a change in attitude.

It made her tremble now that his touch told her he still cared for her. ‘Maybe I’m the heart-broken one,’ she said, crossing to him and standing above him for a moment and then dropping to her knees. ‘I’ve had a lot of time while I’ve been away to ponder, react, yearn for you. That makes a woman very aware of herself,’ she said. ‘I’ve been all tied up inside, I realise now,’ she continued. ‘So very sure of myself. I wasn’t afraid of anything. And what of me now, without you?’ Her eyes ate into his face, searching. No other man has made me lose myself as you have, Clay, Helga thought to herself. And this at times terrifies me. ‘Don’t you feel anything for me any longer? Don’t I count?

‘You tore the soul out of me at times,’ he said, ‘but you n also gave me a confidence in myself that I’d never known,’ he replied moving to her.

‘Hold me close, Clay. Please hold me very close.’

This is astounding, he thought. He never imagined he’d see Helga so emotionally dependant.

She sank into his embrace as if they were one. Her flesh throbbed under his touch. Undressing her he wedged her legs wide. Her body arched suddenly beneath him. Those brown eyes were no longer hard or challenging. They were soft now, the eyes of a woman. The moist warmth of the parted lips.

The following morning they were having breakfast when she said, ‘I must go back to Adelaide the day after tomorrow, there’s some outstanding legal business of my mother that I must fix up.’

A few days later Clay was dumb-founded when he received a letter from Helga saying she was seeking an abortion in Adelaide.

Clay could not understand why Helga wants an abortion seeing she craved a child so much. I’m angry she never bothered to consult my feelings. I feel responsible. I realize now I don’t want to lose the child.. I must commit totally to Helga and our child, he thought.

Distraught, Clay tries to track Helga down by phone, ringing both her mother and her solicitor in Adelaide but is unable to reach her. He greatly fears losing her and of her having an abortion.

But when he finally meets up with Helga again, he moved to kiss her, but there was no response in her mouth. She looked as if she had been given a sentence of death. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Her voice unsteady.

And then she said, her mouth distorting. ‘I have had an abortion. Not because you didn’t want a child.’ She paused, wiped her eyes, took a deep breath. ‘I have a very advanced stage of lymphoma and the prognosis is not good.’ He held her tightly in his arms. ‘There’s no point in having a child then dying,’ she said.

Clay was overwhelmed. He did not know what to say.

‘I went to two specialists here in Melbourne, and since I wanted to know the truth they told me.’

‘At the outside, I’ve got three months,’ she later told him. ‘A month or so of mobility.’
Clay shaken to his roots, sought to be the consolation Helga had always been to him, said, ‘The doctors could be wrong.’

‘They’re not wrong. They showed me the X-rays.’

‘What about radiotherapy? Chemotherapy?’

‘They may try that. They said, but they don’t sound at all hopeful.’

‘Chemotherapy? Then there is a chance.’

‘Let us not deceive ourselves, Clay.’

Clay frantically longed to do something, but what?

Helga sensed his emotion and said, ‘It helps to know you are near, Clay. And perhaps you are right. Perhaps chemotherapy might …’

That magnificent body already wasting with disease, he thought.

The next few weeks it seemed as if Clay’s hopefulness might be right. But then Helga stopped work, the pain continued, and morphine was administered. She was given chemotherapy, but it was a failure. Afterwards she was unable to leave her bed.

Clay visited Helga every day in the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

Clay grew impatient with everything as Helga continued to decline, as he saw the life ebbing from her. He was by her side every possible moment of the last few days. She kept saying, ‘You must go on,’ and he felt a bitter inadequacy as she slipped away from him.

One afternoon he learned that Helga Lindblom at twenty-nine was dead.

4340 words

Copyright 2007
www.robertdavidson.blogsource.com.