by
Helen Garner
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This is the hardest thing I’ve ever taken on, in my whole life. Its huge demands: self-discipline, solitude, secrecy; the frustrated longing to speak about it. I pick up his moods. His wind blows on me and I shiver and tinkle. And yet I like my life, perhaps better than he likes his. I don’t have to tell lies.
‘Do you think people can ever avoid betraying each other?’
‘No. Because promises can’t stop everything from moving and changing.’
He goes home to his life. I will always be displaced by it. And here I am again in this room, calm, half-sleepy, looking forward to going back to my life. We will never be a couple. One day we will find the sexual passion gone and a friendship taking its place. And through it all his marriage will have sailed serenely on. A radio’s on, somewhere out there, a woman singing wildly. A train passes. I don’t care. Nothing can touch me. The power of work. Art, and the huge, quiet power it gives.
<3
Dinner in Camberwell with my angry sister. She arrived full of bitterness against the tax department, and against me for having lived on a supporting mother’s benefit when M was very small. Went to see Huston’s The Dead at the Rivoli. She fell asleep twenty minutes in. The middle-aged couple on my other side talked all the way through. When Gabriel sees his wife on the staircase, the bloke said, ‘Look at that wallpaper. It’s peeling.’ And during the great monologue at the end about the snow ‘faintly falling’ all over Ireland, the woman said, ‘Huh. Depressing. Bit depressing.’ All the way home I felt a violent hatred for common sense.
‘His father went to jail.’
‘What for?’
‘Theft, I think. Embezzling, maybe.’
‘Embezzling’s creepy, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘Worse than straight-out theft. It’s the betrayal of someone’s trust over a long period.’
Horrified that he might think I was referring obliquely to his behaviour towards his wife. But he didn’t seem to notice, and went on talking.
my god lol
By being decent, you only extend your own period of suffering. I said, ‘I’m not waiting for you to leave. That’s not what I’m doing.’ But the truth is more like: ‘Tell me whether you ever will, or whether I must accept that the rest of my life will involve this complicated, delicate balancing act. What hurts me is the suspense.’ I didn’t say this. But I must.
Biographies in which artists change wives without apparent outrage or destruction (because the tale is told from the artist’s point of view) give the false impression that it can be done cleanly, without the charred flesh and gouged innards.
I know, from my own experience, that people can recover from things. And I can’t see the end of a marriage as the end of a life. ‘Life goes on,’ says R. ‘It must go on. It can’t stop.’ ‘And it can’t go back?’ I say. ‘No,’ she says, ‘it can’t go back.’ In a blighted cafe in Rozelle V and I share a small bottle of mineral water. I feel deeply appalled that he’s started the process of extrication. My thighs on the seat feel weak. I’m not seeing properly. Terror of the magnitude of these events. And grief. For them, and their marriage.
On the spare bed at R’s in the afternoon I try to sleep, counting my breathing, but wide awake. Something’s gone. I know what it is: the necessity for stoicism. A hard jacket’s been taken off me. At first what I notice about its absence is a kind of blank surprise—then a fencelessness. My thoughts no longer run up against the monolith. I lie under the cheap quilt, calm, empty, complete, as if at the end of some trial. ‘The monolith.’ That smashed thing. Full of holes. Air and light now pass through its breached walls. Who’s responsible?
R says that now is the time when I should consider what giving up my separateness could mean, that if I live with him I will of necessity become ‘cook and bottle-washer’. Painfully I consider these propositions. But how could I not live with him? Could I fight him about the housework? Could I make demands and hold out for them?
:(