by
Helen Garner
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I’ve been offered a job reviewing movies for a monthly magazine. Out of the depths of my ignorance I take it. The editor, gossiping about a certain journalist, says, ‘Like all bullies and authoritarians, he’s very easily wounded.’ Later I report this to V. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘that’s good, isn’t it. Did you, um, think it might apply to you? A bit?’ ‘Yes, I did,’ I said, hanging my head. And the more easily wounded one is, the more bullying and authoritarian one becomes. To protect the shivering chasm at the core.
At the Sydney International Piano Competition I sat in the second row where one can see the sweat splashing off their noses and chins and soaking the hair on the backs of their necks. I’d been in a mood for never hearing Mozart again, but a Frenchman played a rondo with such airy clarity and creamy smoothness that I nearly passed out. People in the audience become intimate friends with strangers. By the next session they have completely forgotten each other.
pretty
We walked along the creek this morning. Wind very sweet and balmy, a drying wind. High, creamy clouds, burst through by sheets of sparkling sun. The first spring-like morning. The green shoots clearer on every tree, and everything seems in motion, standing up to the wind in good humour.
she likes the word creamy!
The imagery V uses in ordinary speech, loaded with reluctance. ‘I’ll dump you off at work.’ ‘I said I’d cart her round the bookshops.’ ‘We’d better get rid of’ (i.e. eat) ‘those potatoes.’ ‘I suppose I’ll drag m’self into town.’ As if the ideal were stasis.
Janet Malcolm’s big New Yorker essay on the biographers of Sylvia Plath: boom! She shows me that the things I’m too timid to write can be written—that I should trust the stuff that my inner censor has been telling me to scrap. Meanwhile, in the New York Times someone reviews a book: ‘a model polemic, full of autobiographical detail, conversations with friends, family and colleagues, and debates the author has had with himself and critics.’ Is that what a ‘model polemic’ is? I think maybe I can do that.
G writes. He has been present at the birth of the baby, a girl with ‘long, splayed fingers: I think she could manage a tenth already, on a proportionately reduced piano. I’m dizzy with exhilaration and lack of sleep—exalted, absurdly happy. Is there a plan, Helen, or is it just women carrying on with life, civilising through that peculiarly feminine self-abnegating and unselfconscious love? In awe and wonder, your respectful friend.’
British Airways messed up our flight to Madrid and our English friends had to go on ahead without us. V handled the desk staff so brilliantly, never losing his cool, that he got us a refund for the whole trip, including the hotel, and we even still went, at BA’s expense, though not arriving till dinner time. Astonished and impressed by the patient charmingness of his negotiations. H: ‘We’ve really had a nice day, haven’t we, in spite of our visa troubles.’ V: ‘Yes, and it’s because I was in charge.’ I laughed; but we’re locked in an endless power struggle. When we see couples who are cheerfully loving we exchange sad, wry glances. I suppose he thought we would always be ‘in love’. My next task: to pick up at speed enough Spanish to handle the weekend here, without threatening his need to be seen as running the show.
:(
Since my drunken fall in New York I have hardly any sense of smell. I read in Janet Malcolm about a patient of Freud’s whose sense of smell went away while she clung to unrealistic fantasies that her employer would return her love and marry her. I ask myself what my ‘unrealistic fantasies’ are, or rather, what I am declining to say bluntly to myself. And out it comes: ‘I regret having got married. I regret my loss of freedom.’ Okay. I regret it. But I also accept it, accept my regret, and decide consciously that I’ll try to stay married, and will make serious efforts to be more generous, less angry, less controlling, less reducing. I state to myself, too, that for all the faults I find in him V is a clever, funny, decent man who puts up with my craziness and tries to be kind to me. And that while there are thousands of ‘wrong’ men out there, there is no such thing as the ‘right’ man.
The harbour. I can hardly comprehend its constant differentness from itself. Today wide slow ridges, ten feet apart, move towards me at a slant and softly collapse against the low stone wall. Taking notes—this little discipline—is a defence against the blank wordlessness that overcomes me when I stand at the window and look at the water. Why do I feel I have to conquer this state, subdue it, flail away at it with my vocabulary? In fact it is a tremendous gift. A chance at the soul.
The adventurous beauty tells us about her lover in India.
V: ‘What are his good points?’
AB: ‘He’s deep, serious, moral…’
V: ‘What are his bad points?’
She hesitates.
H: ‘He’s deep, serious, moral?’
She laughs.
AB: ‘Exactly. He doesn’t much like to play.’
lollll