by
Helen Garner
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
Since I got back from Melbourne I’ve had to stay in bed with a horrible cold, coughing up brownish-yellow stuff. V’s gone to the gallery with X the painter. He mentioned with elaborate casualness that they’d had ‘a few coffees’ together while I was away. I realise that by getting sick I’m encroaching on his private daytime social life, which he so often and so strenuously denies the existence of. Yesterday he kept remarking on how ‘much better’ I seemed, and when I announced early today that I was going to stay in bed again he seemed surprised and taken aback. I suppose he’d already arranged the X outing. No suggestion that I might go. Oh hell. Should I pay attention to my instincts here? Can I be bothered letting jealousy develop? If you’re a man’s second wife you know for a fact that he’s capable of anything.
ack
A manuscript by the music critic John Clare is studded with moments of electrifying power and beauty: Sydney’s ‘brassy, maritime light’; ‘a ferry walked on tiny spines of light’; two drunks wrestle in the Cross, and one stretches the other’s ‘cardigan a yard at least’; a man frenziedly about to fuck a girl in a dark lane sees over a fence, through a kitchen window, ‘four people gravely playing cards’. Gravely. I take off my hat to that.
<3
Opening at random Lichtenberg’s Aphorisms I note that V has put a mark in the margin beside this: ‘To excuse one’s own failings as being only human nature is, provided one has meant well, every writer’s first duty to himself.’ It is? I flip the pages, seeking more clues to his thoughts about himself. Feel as criminal as if snooping on a diary. A page corner has been folded: under it I read, ‘It is very charming to hear a foreign woman speak our language and make mistakes with her fair lips. Not so in the case of men.’
ahhh
I think I’m searching everywhere for a model, someone to show me how to write a book about my widowed sister and her rage and grief. I don’t know where to stand, to write the story. Is it even ‘a story’? Where to grab hold of it. Whether to build this not-knowing into the story, or to blast a way through the uncertainty and pretend (to myself, or to whoever I fantasise as reader) that I know what I’m doing and how to do it.
With a friend who is married to a painter I compared notes about our respective husbands and their demands. In his determination to deter visitors, hers has disabled the buzzer and made adjustments to the heavy street door of their house that make it impossible for her to get in, even with her key, without putting down everything she is carrying. Like me, she is expected to run the house, do the shopping and cooking, and keep the home fires burning, all this without being permitted on the premises during work hours. I saw in her face my unhappiness. We did not know whether, or how, we could go on tolerating their regimes, or what we could do to change them. When I was leaving she said, ‘I’m beginning to experience it as violence.’
H: ‘Let’s take out hospital insurance.’
V: ‘Why.’
Pause.
H: ‘I’ve got an idea. Let’s agree not to ask each other why in that aggressive way. Could we avoid that tone? Do you think? For the New Year?’
V: ‘Why is one of the most important words in the language. It’s an absolutely crucial word. It’s a much better word than Let’s.’
Short silence.
H: ‘Do we have to be in competition all the time?’
He makes out he doesn’t know, can’t imagine what I mean. I point out his placing of why and let’s in opposition. He acts as if he’s amazed by this ridiculous suggestion.
You must be logged in to see this comment.
I think he’s lying to me. I said, ‘If you don’t tell me you’re seeing her, if you sneak behind my back and I find out accidentally, it makes me feel mad. It makes me crazy.’ He appears to take my point. But in a darker area of my thoughts I’m remembering his declaration, made to me several times over the years, in various contexts, and always with a note of defiant eternal-verity-ness which I would have to describe as smug: ‘All men are moral cowards.’
‘Now that you’re starting to go to things,’ he said, on our walk this morning, ‘I was thinking that’d be a good time for me to see X. In the evenings.’ Whereas he once used to think, he said, that it was ‘ridiculous and wrong’ of me to get up in the night and sleep in the spare bed (because he snored! which is not mentioned), he has now begun to see that ‘separateness, for adults, is a natural and good thing’. If it weren’t for X, I’d be fine with this. But somehow I feel manipulated, roughed-up by him. As if he’s turning me against myself. You want separateness? I’ll show you separateness!
Still. I’m going to find a place in myself to stand, from which I can engage better with V. I would like him to know that I don’t see him and his inflexible regime as my only possible source of happiness.
And I’m determined that I’ll give this marriage the best I’ve got, without thinking about ‘flight’, till he finishes his book. I’m going to work hard at not wallowing and being abject. I’m going to tell him what I feel, and not in an accusing tone. I’ll keep on inviting him to ‘things’, and going to them anyway whether he comes or not. Plus, I’ll try not to turn X the painter into the mule to carry all this anger.
girlll he doesnt deserve u
V has raised again the possibility of my buying a little flat, as a work space and for visitors to stay. (Renting is anathema to him: ‘money down the drain’.) Tried to stay calm. Asked him if he could see any other way of resolving our situation about the flat. I can’t remember what (if anything) he said. I have a pathetic, unspoken hope, or fantasy, that one day he’ll say, ‘Look, we can solve it all in one simple stroke: I’ll rent an office.’ So many times this suggestion has been blasted away that I know it’s never going to happen. He offered to speak to a real-estate agent for me, to a tax accountant. I’m being very firmly pushed. Horrid little spurts of fear.