by
Helen Garner
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In the street we ran into a Labor MP I vaguely know. She teasingly asked V if he was giving me ‘plenty of support’ since my book came out. V passed it off with a quip but at home later he launched one of his rants against stupid, cliché-ridden, impertinent, presumptuous, offensive women. A heavy vibe filled the flat. After careful thought about my wording I asked whether there was any reason why her question had so violently got under his skin—did he feel perhaps that I hadn’t properly acknowledged how much support he had been giving me? My attempt at humility didn’t cut much ice. He said this hadn’t even crossed his mind, and that he was furious because I ‘didn’t give a shit’ about his opinions of her; I hadn’t even looked up from the paper. Finally I said, ‘All right. Next time I’ll pay more attention.’
The bad vibe is still hanging around, hours later. I don’t know what this is about; and I’ll never find out by asking V, because he doesn’t know either. He truly believes it’s about the politician.
damn
The Age calls my agent, offering me ‘six figures’ for ten pieces a year, on anything I fancy. I say I’m happy at the Independent Monthly. The editor of the Australian summons me to his office. I go out of curiosity. He lolls behind his desk, I perch on a chair. Sums of money are mentioned, and a carrot: one day, he says smoothly, I ‘might even get to interview the prime minister.’ I stare at him, too amazed to say, ‘Is there anything in my work that makes you think I might be interested in interviewing the prime minister?’ Walking home I think, ‘He hasn’t read your work, you idiot, and he never will.’
lolll
I think I am in the classic position of a woman artist who in order to maintain a marriage is obliged to trim herself so as not to make her husband feel—what? Something a man is not supposed to have to feel? This must be one of the reasons V is so against it when I have to do publicity. It’s also perhaps why he is encouraging to me about doing journalism. He is as generous as he can possibly be about my book and its success, but if I had success like that with a novel there’d be serious trouble—I don’t know what trouble exactly, but life would get tougher. Why are men so fragile? If he were getting more attention than I was, everyone would be at ease, it would be seen as normal and appropriate. Tilt it, and everything gets unhappy and shadowy. Maybe it’s true then. A woman artist who wants to develop as far as she can needs to live alone. He is a better novelist than I am—he can handle broader ideas, more characters etc—this is not the problem. The problem is that my success seems to get in his way. It somehow stops him from working.
What to do? I could accept without further complaint his demand for uninterrupted occupation of the flat. Work harder at cooking. Do less publicity. Pull my horns in. How dismal.
she's not wrong
Bought myself a sewing machine at Grace Bros, a demo model which, the Brother consultant earnestly assures me, ‘only Vicki and I have ever sewn on’. Vicki (big hair, raking red false nails, missing side tooth, gold-rimmed specs) tells me the shop runs classes. ‘You learn to make a skirt with a zip, and a shirt with a collar.’ I lug it home, dizzy with ambition.
cute
The play was ‘splendidly written’, in that Irish style that half of me wants to relax and swoon into, while some drier, more English aspect of me draws back in scepticism: Look out, you are being seduced.
I try to behave with some sort of grace. I try to be pleasant and generous. But I actually feel I’d like to give up this draining attempt to be married, to go and live somewhere high and sunny, on my own. With the windows open. Yesterday my fantasy was to ask him if we could each write down a list of good and bad things about being married to each other, and try to talk about them and work them out. But I haven’t mentioned this idea because I know what his response would be—one of his incredulous laughs: ‘Why the hell would we bloody well do that.’
:(
I get home from work late afternoon, loaded with food for tonight’s dinner, and find a note from V. He’s down in the park having a coffee with X the painter, do I want to come down? I conquer a surge of female martyrdom—How hard I work! How much money I spend! How little thanks I get! I get a grip, put on a record and set about cooking the meal. By the time he comes in I’m cheerful. He reminds me of a short trip we’ve been planning to the Flinders Ranges. His tone is so reluctant that I say, to let him off the hook, ‘You don’t feel like going, any more?’ ‘Aw, it’ll be all right, I s’pose.’ Does it come from his family, this tendency to take all the joy out of something in advance? Or is he just being ‘level’? Is it the weary struggle of writing his novel? Or is it me? Am I a bore? Am I distracted? What am I doing wrong?
I took Mum and Dad a copy of True Stories. ‘Errr,’ they said, looking at it with peculiar gingerly expressions. Dad said that the cover photo made me look old, and ‘didn’t do much’ for me at all. Then, while explaining to me how to sharpen a knife against a stone, he demonstrated with his blade across the smooth surface of my book’s cover, this chancing to be the flat object closest at hand. My niece and I shrieked about this later, but once more I’m winded by their ignorance of social forms—I mean, doesn’t one learn from life to say ‘Congratulations’? Whatever one might feel about the quality or significance of the achievement in question? Less and less do I understand them. They become more mysterious to me, with every passing year.
:(
A woman with a racked, pointed little face tells me that her husband has fallen in love with one of his students and ‘it’s been hell all year’. They’re talking about selling their house, trying not to wreck things for the kids. Apparently he doesn’t want to leave, though: ‘He says he’s stopped seeing her, but he weeps and wails and says he can’t bear it.’ ‘Kick him out,’ I said. ‘You can’t live with that.’ The man wreaks havoc but lacks the guts to give the coup de grâce, so she has to do it.
rough
V has been stewing over a remark the minister made at Robert Haupt’s funeral: ‘We should be glad that his tribulations are over.’ V said it was a ludicrous misrepresentation of Haupt’s whole approach to life. I agreed that it was a misrepresentation, but suggested it was an attitude integral to a Christian’s beliefs, which in his own church a minister has a right and perhaps even a duty to express. A fierce argument broke out. I retreated to the closed-in balcony where we eat (which V has from the day we moved in referred to, for some reason, as ‘the sewing room’), and sat at the table to sew a button back on my nightie. It’s nice in there, the cheesecloth curtains that I made puff and drop on a breeze. V walked through the room. Seeing me stitching away there he said in a soft voice, ‘Good room for sewing, isn’t it.’ I realised that to see me sewing, by hand or with the machine, releases in him a flow of feeling. While being touched by this I also secretly resolve to make use of it, if and when things get rough. I mean that I could sit down with a needle and thread, and bring about a lessening of tension.