by
Helen Garner
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The end of the movie. Who can help me with this? I groaned all day and then at 5 pm something happened. Strange power and freedom I experience, when I start to invent. It has its own logic. I feel my way along some kind of dark thread.
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A visit from Mum. Terrific strain I’m under, when she and I are with other people. When we’re alone I can submit to this vast, slow, stunning stream of monologue and apply as little of my concentration to it as I need to (about fifteen per cent) in order to remain calm. Yesterday she talked so much—on the drive in from the airport, meeting E, shopping at Leichhardt, having coffee at Via Veneto, driving to Manly, walking on the beach—that by bedtime she was hoarse. She never asks a question, or listens. She starts every anecdote days, months or even years before its proper starting point. Her only liveliness in speech comes when she can criticise: idiot skateboard riders, lunatics on motorbikes, men unloading trucks in narrow streets, stupid dills who drop rubbish or leave security doors ajar. A film of the world as she sees it would be always swelling, blurring, lurching, swivelling—sparkling and looming with danger. At moments, while she drones on, there comes over me a painful tenderness. This ‘tenderness’, which if I told the truth I would have to call pity, has to do with my dread of becoming like her. V asks her straight out which of my books she likes the best. She says, shyly, ‘The Children’s Bach.’ I am embarrassed and don’t know where to look. I always give them copies, with a loving message written in the front, but she has never told me whether she’s read any of them. And I’ve never asked.
‘I sometimes think the world is divided into people who survive from their own inner strength and those who have to latch on to others to survive.’ —Elizabeth Jolley, interview in Good Weekend
what's the synthesis. finding even greater strength through occasionally trusting other people?
I’ve sold my books. I’ve let my house. I’ve agreed to sell Primrose Gully. I’ve changed cities. I’ve got no home. I am not to answer the phone at V’s, or be present when certain visitors come, or leave my stuff lying around. I am forty-six-and-a-half and I am humiliated. V is unable to resolve the thing by telling his wife the truth. I say to Z that I wish V would deliver the coup de grâce. ‘The trouble is,’ says Z, ‘that to do that, which I agree he must do, he’ll have to admit, to himself as much as to her, that his leaving her had something to do with you. He seems to need to keep the two things separate in his mind. He’s still saying they’re separate—as late as yesterday he was saying it. What I think he should do is tell her that your existence hastened the end, but that he’d felt it was over for quite some time already.’ ‘And did you tell him that?’ ‘Oh no.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. That would be to deny the whole way he sees himself and his situation.’ ‘But Z. You’re his friend. It’s the responsibility, the duty of friends to help each other see what they’re doing. How else can we find out what we’re like?’ Z seemed very surprised and put off by this definition of friendship.
Work offers come and I take them. I don’t want to go over to V’s. What if his wife comes visiting and I’m there? Maybe a terrible explosion of truth is exactly what’s needed. I said, ‘She needs you to tell her the truth. Somewhere in herself she knows you haven’t told her everything.’ He will not accept this screamingly obvious fact. He decides to invite two friends to dinner, and casually assumes that I’ll cook. I say I won’t: he can’t expect me to turn on wifely service and then when it suits him pretend I’m only a casual acquaintance. He’s furious. We slug it out. He says he objects to the way I make flat pronouncements. I say he makes assumptions that aren’t even acknowledged by him as assumptions until I challenge them. I can’t see he’s got a leg to stand on here. We reach a truce, the passionate kind still available to lovers. But there’s a reserve between us. We both feel it.
A movie on TV about John Waters. I laughed till I was weak and grateful—I’ve been missing that angle of life—shit and fart jokes, the utter refusal to be in any way serious, intellectual or polite—and what is the quality Divine has, that ‘puts everybody in a good mood all the time’? I said to V, ‘There’s never any little treats in your fridge. And there’s not enough light and fresh air.’ He hates light and likes to keep the windows closed against the cold, though the place is a box in which he smokes cigars. He won’t ever stay a night with me over at E’s: ‘If I’ve slept somewhere else I find it really hard to get started on my work the next morning.’ I say briskly, ‘I used to be like that in primary school. But I got over it.’ He is delaying to infinity the duty of levelling with his wife. He is permanently lying doggo: ‘I don’t know why I have to tell her.’ Dumbfounded, I say, ‘You’re thinking of not telling her?’ ‘I don’t see why I should have to,’ he says, in a lightly defensive tone. I let it pass, in sheer astonishment. As if he thinks of himself as having simply walked out of her life.
‘It’s mad,’ said Z, ‘to think that only what lasts matters. How can that be? If we lose everything? It can’t be. And we all lose everything. Everything.’ I asked if he found the ephemeral enough; I said that so far I thought I did. He said yes. I said that what he’d been saying reminded me of the end of Ecclesiastes. ‘ “In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble…And those that look out of the windows be darkened, and the grasshopper shall be a burden…” ’ He went very still, looking right at me. ‘That passage,’ he said, ‘is the centre of my book.’
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I begin to wash the dishes. I’m so tired I’m hallucinating. I can’t sense where in the tiny flat he is: I see a shape dart in the corner of my left eye, and think he’s crouching in the dark to jump out and frighten me. I put down the dishcloth and step sideways to check. Nothing there. He has gone into the bedroom. I lie on the couch. ‘Are you coming to bed?’ The married person’s question. ‘In a little while.’ I wash my feet, put on my nightie, get into bed. ‘I’m aching like a bastard,’ he says. ‘It’s those bloody typhoid and yellow fever shots. I feel hollow behind the eyes and in the chest—as if hot winds were blowing all through me, down my arms and legs.’ I say nothing. He lays down his book (African Discovery) and turns to me: ‘Forgive me, if I’ve made you unhappy and angry.’ I’m amazed that after all that madness he can lay his weapons down. H: ‘I’m sorry too.’ V: ‘You haven’t done anything to be sorry for.’ We lie side by side, wrung out. ‘It’s astonishing,’ he says, ‘and I’m mortified by it—how I wanted to go on and on with it, even when I could see it was making you more and more unhappy. I never got bored with it. I wanted to keep going.’ He was speaking almost wonderingly, as if about something he’d never experienced before. I said, ‘We had to get to the end of it.’ He said, ‘I love you more, for your toughness and your seriousness.’ I don’t remember now what I said.
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I have to swear an affidavit for F’s and my divorce. I went to the university bank and asked if they had a JP. A shy young man with gold-rimmed spectacles dug out from his glassed cubicle a tiny, battered, green New Testament. There we stood at the open counter, in full view of customers and tellers. I wanted to say, ‘This is for a divorce. It’s rather personal. Can we do it in your cubicle?’ But I thought I should discipline myself to do things wherever I am presented with them. I kept my palm flat on the little green book and he asked me to swear. I swore, and read out the highlighted words: ‘So help me God.’ The solemn moment of the oath rushed past me, like the moment of communion at the altar rail. I didn’t prepare myself. Is that why it flowed past me without ceremony?
god she's just like me
William Styron in Darkness Visible—how hearing Brahms’ ‘Alto Rhapsody’ had hauled him back from suicide. A day when I’d been struggling with V and was dully washing up: the radio was on, and they played a Brahms string quartet. For the first time I knew what the word ‘grace’ meant. It came dropping gently on my head, through the music. My anger and sadness flowed out of me and were gone.
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