by
Helen Garner
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Only a man distracted by love will get up from the dinner table and return with a single glass of water; will barge first out the heavy front door of the building and let it slam in his wife’s face. The sick power of knowing something he thinks I don’t know; of knowing that he’s lying to me. The clumsiness of the lies, the humiliation of being clumsily lied to.
The morning after the Frenchwoman’s visit, as we walked, he took up his railing against ‘self-obsessed people’. His particular bugbear is people who never ask him questions. I asked him whether he’d always found himself surrounded by such people, or if it was a recent development. ‘Oh, there’ve always been some, but there are more lately. And when I went to live in Melbourne and met your family, I really started to become aware of it.’ I said, working at not being ‘emphatic’, that I’d had a bit of an idea about this problem. I said I’d noticed that when he met someone new he would soon begin to ask them quite intimate questions. They, surprised, would reply; and then he, rather than offering corresponding information about himself and his own life, as most people do in the give-and-take of conversation, would push on with further questions (always intelligent and sensitive) into the other person’s territory. In this way the other was drawn into revealing himself, while V remained veiled, and thus, in the end, more powerful. This made him furious. He said I’d ‘shifted the blame’ on to him. I said I didn’t think I was blaming anyone. I said I was trying to examine the dynamic of the phenomenon that bothered him so much. He battered away, declaring that men’s way of conversing is ‘better and wiser’ than women’s, because it doesn’t ‘depend on subjective anecdote’.
lol
I stayed a night with friends at Mona Vale. V wouldn’t come. Ashamed to be sleepless, to be in this much pain. And yet this is life. The toughness of life. People’s utter, bottomless selfishness. This is what people do. The fact that I’ve been faithful to V for ten years has no weight, in the big scales of what will become of us. No ‘virtue’, no ‘self-control’ can save us, or protect us from each other. We can’t make room for each other. We push each other into the most extreme versions of ourselves, and then with a gritty determination we fight.
:(
Everything fine in our bodies, but no emotional contact. No eye contact, no sound, not a word spoken. He turned his head sideways on the pillow so as not to look at me. In a small rush of courage I took hold of his chin and gently turned his head towards me: ‘Hello? Are you there?’ He opened his eyes. I said, ‘Hello? It’s me. I’m here.’ ‘Eh? What’s the matter?’ ‘I had a feeling things were happening only from the neck down.’ We both laughed. He said, ‘Of course they weren’t.’ But they were.
nooo
The nakedness of strangers. Every time I go to the Korean Bathhouse I feel more free. I can gaze at the perfect, and differently perfect, bodies of very young women without envy. May as well envy a tree, or a rock, in its perfect ‘thing itself’-ness. And the older bodies flabby or scrawny—marked by child-bearing or overeating or heredity, or just the attrition of gravity—they move me too, with a comradely feeling of respect.
I offered to go right back and expunge all—or all unfavourable—mentions of him. He looked sceptical. I said it would be a distortion, but that I’d do it if it was necessary. I also offered not to mention him any more, except procedurally. I said it was the first time I’d had to make a decision between being a writer and being married. He laughed and said I was overstating it. I said I didn’t think I was. This morning we spoke further about it. He expressed his revulsion again, but said he felt ‘awkward’ about seeming to ‘demand self-censorship’ from me. He said I should write an account of this disagreement, and then continue to write as before. This to me is not quite right. But I don’t know what I ought to do instead.
It would be a ridiculous distortion not to write about him at all. There’s no way he’ll ever understand that writing about my life is the only thing that makes it possible for me to live it. I can’t (or won’t) give it up. And I won’t burn the notebooks or leave instructions for them to be burnt when I die: this last is where he’s putting the pressure on. Actually I feel real sympathy for him. It must be awful to know his life is being reported through my eyes. It would be awful to be married to me.
thinking about why i feel differently about this vs the caveh zahedi (eg) approach to things ... it's definitely gendered, but the gender aspect is only a proxy for some bigger moral battle ... i think the typically feminine approach is to use art as a way to wrestle with the moral stakes of a situation, to find clarity that can be used to guide one's actions. whereas the male approach is almost the opposite, to abdicate one's responsibility to find the moral center by instead dramatizing it. (thinking also of Rejection and why i hate it so much)
maybe i'm overreaching by trying to overlay it on a gendered axis but i don't think it's the worst framework for thinking through the matter tbh
another way of putting it (the more generalized conclusion) is that there is a difference between using your art as a place to figure things out, to draw conclusions that you can then apply in your life (with the side effect of there being some record of it for posterity), and giving up entirely on achieving any sort of moral equilibrium because you think that dramatizing it is your primary responsibility. the dramatization should always be of your attempt to make things right
I rang up X and said I was sorry if I’d seemed ‘rude and cold’ to her on the phone. She was puzzled: ‘I didn’t think you’d been rude and cold?’ ‘Oh. That’s what V told me you’d said.’ We didn’t know what to say next. But wished each other well and hung up. This must be what G meant when he said he thought of V as ‘a manipulator; a spider in the middle of the web’.
I’m coming to see that he has no conceptual equipment—nothing that would help him to analyse a mess like the one we’re in. All he can do is repeat his statements of will and purpose. But when I calm down and start taking things apart, he listens to me and almost always agrees. Or appears to. Because what I say lets him off the hook. Of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Neither of us is a criminal. At those moments I have a powerful sense of myself as working.
We’re engaged in a bitter struggle to define ourselves, each against the other. He sets his face against things that have meaning to me; and my urge is to split hairs and demand exactitude. I suppose I’m just as unbearable to him as he is to me.
I’m dangling in the space between old customs and new ones I don’t know how to establish.