by
Helen Garner
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
Late this afternoon X the painter called me on the phone. She was in bed with flu. First thing she said was, very politely, ‘I don’t know why you think we can help each other.’ An hour of conversation followed, a quiet comparing of notes, during which many long pauses fell. Pauses of thought. Of stunned attempts to match up pieces of information. Turns out that right from the start he told her we lived separate lives: ‘He told me you are an old hippie; that you had separate friends, that you would not mind his visits to me.’ Even before last Christmas he told her we’d decided to part: that we were parting because we weren’t able to resolve our disagreements about work and the flat and about both being writers. When I found the first letter (neither of us mentioned the hat) she had told him she was not prepared to continue with him until he sorted out his marriage. I said he’d told me that he made the renunciation in order to save the marriage. She said she had held out for months, keeping her phone unplugged, not reading his letters; but that on Mothers Day she had plugged the phone in and he’d got through: he’d told her I was going back to Melbourne to live, that I was ‘happy’ about the decision, that we’d reached it together, that we liked and respected each other and would remain friends. Thunderstruck, I said that I’d thought of going back to Melbourne only because the pain of his lies had become unbearable‚ that I couldn’t stand the pain.
omg
‘So,’ she said. ‘He stirred us up against each other.’
I said, ‘It’s obvious that he’s in love with you, but he won’t say so. If he’d been able to say to me, “Listen, I love X and I want to leave you and go with her,” I would have accepted it. I would have been hurt and angry and sad but I would have accepted it. Instead he keeps saying he still loves me, and that he’s extricating himself from you and wants us to get through this.’
‘Do you mean to say,’ she said in a faint voice, ‘he never told you how he felt about me?’
‘No. I found out by snooping. All he’s ever said is that he likes you, that you’re a close friend that he likes to see.’
Enormous, endless pause.
At last she said, ‘So—all we’ve learnt is what each of us most feared.’
I said, ‘To me, the most destructive part of all this is how he denied and kept on and on denying—and is still denying—what I instinctively knew the truth must be. He’s damaged my faith in my own instincts.’
‘Oh,’ she said at once, ‘but that is what men always do to women. And I wonder if they have any idea of the damage it causes.’
this convo restored something in me
Immense relief. Freedom, lightness, clarity. And thinking of V and his manoeuvres, a stunned, incredulous pity, even tenderness, as towards an oafish boy, a yokel, a creature barely evolved.
He’s still insisting, always in the same words, like a mantra, that X is ‘just a friend. A good friend. That I like to see.’
I’m never going to get a blessing from him. He’s never going to tell me the truth. It’s beyond him.
We went for a walk, early. Fresh morning: glossy water, tide high, clouds scattered, air spiked with perfumes from invisible flower-ing plants. We were both yawning. Coming up the steep part of Yarranabbe I said, ‘You know why we’re always tired? We’re exhausted from flogging a dead horse. Can’t you see it’s time we parted?’ ‘What? Just because I happened to run into X in the street when I was putting the rubbish out?’ I said, ‘Things between us are too fragile for something like that to have no meaning.’ It was nothing serious, he said, it was trivial; I was overreacting as usual, it wasn’t worth getting upset about, it wasn’t worth having all these feelings.
seriously fuck this guy
V says his old friend’s wife has told him she’d thought all along that I’d leave him. ‘And she said it’s because of your restlessness.’ Jolted by this, I call and ask her. ‘Yes. I did tell him you’d leave,’ she said. ‘Right back at the start. I couldn’t believe the shit he was giving you, and how long you went on taking it.’
<3 <3
And I am also learning that there’s a kind of man who believes he can have everything. He thinks he deserves both a wife and a girlfriend, and that everything will be fine and civilised, that he can become ‘really deep, strong friends’ with his wife, once she’s been exhausted by the struggle and dropped off, just so long as she doesn’t ask whether he’s still having the affair that finished off the marriage.
Well, yes, he is. Sort of. ‘I spend most of my time alone,’ he says. ‘I’m like you. I like being alone. I walk from room to room thinking about things. I miss you terribly, but at the same time I think it’s good for me to be alone.’
‘But you’re not alone, are you. You’re with her, and you’re still trying to make me think you’re not with her.’
‘Yes, okay, I do sleep with her, but eighty per cent of my time I’m alone. Being alone is the larger truth.’
omg
In this flat, alone, I can at last see myself as a grown-up. I’ve moved a cane chair into the bedroom so I can survey my view. I sit there in the early evenings and contemplate it. At certain hours it looks almost Italian. One day I’ll be light-hearted again. I swear I will. I will work my way there.
In the early seventies, when my daughter was two, I moved into the first of these hippie houses—what were called communal houses—in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. It was while I was living there that I had an affair with a guy who was addicted to heroin, and as it rolled on over a year or so, the chaos of it became painful and obsessive-making. I’d been keeping a diary for a couple of years and was enjoying it—I needed to write it, and I was learning to write through it, by means of it—and as this relationship grew in complexity, as my life thickened up and became more eventful, I could see that my experiences were forming themselves into the kind of curve that we call a “story.” Story is a chunk of life with a bend in it, and I could feel this one coming. I suddenly thought, Maybe I could write about this while it’s still happening, as it’s coming into its bend.
I decided to look back in the diary to the moment when I first fell in love with the guy. I skipped over all the boring stuff, and transcribed the interesting bits into another notebook. I wanted to see if I could shape it into something. For about a year in the mid-seventies I sat every day in the state library with my two notebooks and kind of blindly thrashed along. So the truth is that Monkey Grip really was my diary, with links between passages and with some passages expanded.
I’d always wanted to be around clever people, to be playful with other clever people. My first husband had been involved with a radical theater group that was quite important in Melbourne, and I’d been involved in the feminist arm of it, although I was always a bit of a tourist in that world. But then he was out at night a lot, and I was home holding down the fort with my daughter, and I started to get lonely and sad.
My mother’s life, the life of a married woman with children, had never really appealed to me. It had dawned on me when I was quite young that my mother could never go out for more than about three hours at a time. She always had to be there at lunchtime, at dinnertime. I’d grown up as the eldest child in a family of five girls and one boy, and everybody was always squabbling and looking at the others to see if they were getting more—counting the strawberries in one another’s bowls. I remember it hitting me when I was about fourteen that our mother was in a sort of cage.