by
Helen Garner
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A Tchaikovsky piano concerto, on my own. The idea of it made me yawn but soon my skin began to crawl and various thoughts came to me with the music as background. If I go ahead with this, I will be spending a lot of time alone. That’s something I am already good at, and often prefer. I will spend a lot of time waiting. And when I’m old I will be alone. How strange these thoughts are. They are serious thoughts. I am contemplating a course of action which at my age will have certain repercussions, important ones. Have I got, can I find in myself, the courage and strength to live like that? Would I want to be ‘married’? I am notoriously bad at it. It does not suit me. The wife envies the passion her husband feels for the mistress. The mistress envies the steady companionship…‘The world is made up of triangles.’
The flight to Sydney lasted only five minutes because I was reading Marguerite Duras’ La Douleur. When her husband comes back after the war I cried so much my face twitched, I had to wipe my eyes on my skirt. ‘I remember the sobbing all through the house, the tenants lingering on the stairs, the doors standing open.’ Her writing is so physical. The movement of her sentences captures the movement of emotion and thought—it’s real women’s writing, shameless but never sloppy. Maybe she’s what I’m looking for—to show me how to control emotion without being false to its power, how to be absent and fully present at once.
What am I doing? He has been married for more than half his life on this earth. Why should it be any different from any other love affair? Why shouldn’t it run through its phases, wither, and die? I’d better work if I want to survive this, and if I want to play my full and proper part in it. Who wants a lovesick, lazy drip, obsessed with her own emotions and full of resentment against fate?
AH
During the wedding ceremony I asked myself why the simple hopes of these promises are so impossible when the complications of life fall on them like a collapsing wall. I do not understand marriage. V is always talking about symmetry but we are not symmetrical at all. I am offering everything and he is offering everything except the final thing, which in effect means that he is offering nothing. Is this true or is it just a smart crack? It is quite understandable to be stunned and even sick with fear when you’re heading for a brick wall at 100 miles an hour.
At Mum and Dad’s I sat sideways on my chair, staring out the window. Dad said, affectionately (for him), ‘What are you thinking about, Helen?’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘just the meaning of the universe.’ A true answer would have been, ‘I’ve found the love of my life, and he’s married to somebody else.’
lol
The urge to blame V. To say, ‘He is selfish. He wants to have everything, for the world to revolve around him. He will never choose me. He should never have begun this.’ The cowardice of this urge. The old longing to play the victim. What’s required here is a bracing of the self. After all, ‘we’ ‘love’ ‘each other’. These hackneyed words. Who’s we? What’s love? Do we know each other? Or is each of us only a screen for the other’s light show?
Reading an old diary. I cannot remember, even in the thinnest or most fragmentary moment, how it felt to ‘love’ the man I was in love with, back then. All that hideous torment, everyone suffering, and for WHAT? What would I remember of NOW? This one works, steadily, quietly. His mind does not take the easy way out. I can only live the thing to its fullest extent. This is what life is. It’s not for saying no.
Fantasy: V’s dead. No one close to him, of course, thinks to tell me. Finally, a day or two later, R calls: ‘H, I’ve got some very bad news…’ Odd feeling that he may as well be dead, he may as well never have existed. His existence is purely intellectual. I can’t even write him a letter. Because he doesn’t exist.
Yesterday I felt lonely. I knew that he would not leave her. I forgot that I did not want to be his wife. A failure of imagination. I did not feel beautiful. I longed to be asleep. Woke, heard rain falling quietly outside, felt the desolation of my position. I thought about Primrose Gully, the room with the table, hearing rain there, looking out at rain falling, the healing of it. I need to go home.
:(
I heard a gospel song in the car and a rush of Christian moral scruples came over me: ‘If I gave him up I would be a more virtuous person, more correct, more calm, more blessed.’ This kind of thing, which attracts me at times, is almost a death wish, a nothing wish, a blankness wish—like wishing that we could all like each other’s work, that there should be no conflict. The LIFE of life. No laws apply.
<3