Chapter Nineteen Down Under
Nineteen
Down Under
When I picture myself during my first few days in Australia, I have to laugh.
I am standing behind the stove in my in-laws’ kitchen, learning how to make coffee the Italian way, one strong cup at a time.
I pour water into a tiny silver percolator, then spoon finely ground coffee into the sieve-like reservoir through which hot water will soon flow.
It’s a cozy scene, except for what I’m wearing: a skimpy undershirt and Daisy Duke cutoff shorts with my thong underwear protruding from the waistband.
To see me, you might think I’m trying to show off my body, but that isn’t right.
While in Epstein’s employ, I’d been encouraged to wear clothes that made me look even younger than I was.
Now, no longer Epstein’s captive, I was a wife—a grown woman.
But I still felt—and dressed—like a teenage girl.
I didn’t have the slightest idea how an adult version of me should look.
When I moved into Frank and Nina’s house, that was just the beginning of what I didn’t know.
I had never loaded a dishwasher, for example, or scrambled an egg or separated laundry into darks and lights.
I’d never opened a bank account or filed income taxes or made a good cup of coffee—the list went on and on.
Sometimes the weight of my ignorance overwhelmed me.
What is adulthood, I wondered, and will I ever master it?
What is it to be a wife? It would take time for me to figure out the answers.
Our first weekend in Australia, Robbie took me camping in Hunter Valley, north of Sydney, with a group of his friends.
The place is one of the country’s major wine regions, but we had so little money that Robbie decreed we were there to rough it and enjoy the natural beauty, not to sip Shiraz.
I was good with that until I saw where we were sleeping: a ramshackle shed.
That weekend was quite an introduction to my new country.
Yes, we saw a few Aboriginal cave paintings, but the weather was freezing and the only kangaroo we spotted appeared to have been dead for months.
A few days after our return, I fell terribly ill with some sort of flu.
When I spiked a fever, Robbie was at work—he’d gotten a construction job.
I felt awful: clammy and hot. I didn’t want to be a pain in anyone’s ass, and—especially since I’d just learned the Aussie phrase “having a whinge” (complaining for no reason)—I was determined to be stoic.
But when Robbie’s dad discovered how sick I was, he swung into action, whipping up his special zuppa di lenticchie, or lentil soup.
I was too weak to get out of bed, but Frank propped me up on my pillows and then sat beside me, feeding me spoonfuls until I was full.
Later, as I passed in and out of a sweaty, delirious sleep, he returned every few minutes to cool my forehead with a damp cloth.
When my fever broke, Frank brought me coffee that was creamy from the raw egg he’d stirred into it.
After I’d recovered, Frank sat with me and showed me how to peel a prickly pear, teaching me to avoid the nettles, which will embed themselves like fiberglass in your fingers if you aren’t careful.
He didn’t say much, just as Robbie had warned that he wouldn’t, but in those first weeks that I was in Sydney, Frank gave me more nurturing than I ever got from my own father.
The women of the Giuffre clan were more skeptical of me.
Robbie’s mom, especially, is blunt and quick to call out wrongdoing, and at first she was suspicious of this skinny American who’d crash-landed on her doorstep.
Then, just before Christmas, Nina took me to the home of some of Robbie’s aunties, or zias.
It was cannoli-making day, and I was being drafted to help.
I knew nothing about making cannoli, of course, but I quickly figured out the assembly line: pounding out the dough, then rolling it thin and wrapping it around bamboo poles that we dipped into a fryer, taking care not to burn them.
Then we stuffed the crispy shells with three kinds of fillings: ricotta, vanilla cream, and chocolate.
We must’ve made three hundred cannoli that day, and when I returned home, I had ricotta in my hair.
But I’d passed some sort of test. The zias were proud of me.
Married life took some getting used to. I couldn’t get a work permit until we were legally married, which we would accomplish in January 2003, but already, Robbie was working all the time, trying to make good on his promise to provide for me.
I helped out when I could with the Giuffre family’s catering business—hauling steam trays, doing dishes, waitressing when needed.
I liked keeping busy and contributing to this family I’d just joined.
But at the same time, I was struggling to come to terms with my new existence.
Robbie’s and my sex life, for example: I was fiercely attracted to him, but I still sometimes had trouble letting myself fully enjoy being with him in bed.
Before Robbie, I’d been a sort of zombie when it came to sex—going through the motions, keeping my true self under a psychic lock and key.
I had also been trained to do things that Robbie found downright weird.
I remember the first time I jumped out of bed right after we made love, only to return with a warm, wet washcloth.
When I tried to clean Robbie up, like Epstein had required me to do, my husband took hold of my wrist. “You don’t have to do that,” he said gently.
“That’s not right. Lay down with me instead.
” I did as he asked, and I never brought a washcloth to bed again.
But while this should have been a relief, it also left me confused.
That act, however demeaning, had been expected of me for so long, and I’d been praised for it.
Now that I wasn’t doing it anymore, I was unsure what to do with myself instead. It was difficult just to relax.
“What do you like—and not like—in bed?” Robbie had asked soon after we met.
Now, little by little, I began to acknowledge that there were things I wasn’t comfortable with.
For example, I wasn’t wild about giving blow jobs—too many memories of unwelcome hands pushing on the back of my neck, forcing me to swallow.
And receiving oral sex only reminded me of my dad.
This was a lot for Robbie: hearing how much my past abusers had ruined for me, and also for him.
When he first realized how much I was effectively removing from the menu of our intimate life, Robbie looked a little stunned.
But then he made it okay. There were lots of ways to make each other feel good, he told me, as we lay around in bed. “I want you to feel loved,” he said.
I did feel loved, most of the time. But then my past would intervene.
I didn’t want to think about the Billionaires, the Prime Minister, and all the others.
But sometimes during sex, a contorted face would pop into my head, and I’d remember.
This was awful in myriad ways—experiencing flashbacks in the first place, obviously, but also trying to shield Robbie from knowing it was happening.
I wanted both to protect him and at the same time to keep him from knowing how damaged his new wife really was.
But whenever Robbie got an inkling that I was trying to hide something, he felt as if I were shutting him out.
We were a team, he said. We needed to deal with these things together.
I knew that made sense, but at times, that kind of wide-open togetherness was more than I could handle.
While we were still living with his parents in Sydney, Robbie—knowing how much I missed Mary-Jane, the Chow Chow I’d left in Florida—bought me a Jack Russell terrier.
I named him Champion (Champ, for short), and he gave my days structure.
Like any dog, Champ needed to be walked, which got me out of the house.
But his unrelenting Jack Russell brain also demanded that I engage with him constantly.
I couldn’t just retreat into my own memories—Champ wouldn’t allow it.
Being driven by the needs of others was familiar to me, but with Champ, that was a healthy impulse.
Robbie and I had always planned to move out of his parents’ home eventually, but Champ’s arrival hastened that decision.
Frank and Nina were from the old country, so they believed animals should be kept outside.
My need to have Champ on my lap, at the table, in our bed, made them crazy.
So in early 2003, Robbie and I moved into our first apartment in Parramatta, a bustling, artsy, multicultural neighborhood.
The walls of our tiny two-bedroom second-floor walk-up were thin—I remember our lovely Indian next-door neighbors had a new baby, whose cries we heard at all hours.
I’m also sure they heard Robbie and me fighting.
Too often, usually after drinking too much, we’d go at it hammer and tong—why didn’t I clean the house, he’d yell, when he was working so hard?
Why couldn’t he come home earlier, I’d scream, when he knew I was so lonely?
Sometimes he’d call me on his lunch break, and I’d just be waking up.
“What are you doing, just faffing around?” he’d ask, using Aussie slang for wasting time.
“Jenna, you are acting like a child.” That made me angry.
But the truth was that in some ways I still was a child.