by
Helen Garner
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At lunchtime I take V to see the place. He says very little. I notice myself becoming anxious and disappointed: I want to drag a response out of him. I want him to like it. He withholds in obedience to some dark part of his nature. I keep control of myself: whether he likes it or not is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT. In fact, this irrelevance is part of the point of my renting it in the first place. Finally he says, ‘You can bring some of our old clapped-out cups and saucers down here.’ ‘Bugger that. I’m not putting anything in here that I don’t really like.’
heh
Walking home from La Buvette.
H: ‘These sandals have turned out brilliant. Last year I thought, “Oh bum, they’re a lemon,” but suddenly they’ve gone all soft and comfortable.’
V: (glances down; grunts)
H: (mimics his voice) ‘Huh. Pity they’re so ugly.’
V: (with a cross laugh) ‘You bloody women! You always think you know what a bloke’s thinking!’
H: ‘No we don’t! We have to make it up! You won’t engage with us! You won’t answer when we speak! You present us with a blank face! We have to invent a response, out of loneliness and despair! So we won’t have to live in an emotional vacuum!’
lollll
He says he can’t talk to me any more, that I keep correcting everything he says, that I’ve got a list of subjects that I don’t want to hear about any more.
I say it’s because he never has anything new to say on those subjects, and only rants and fulminates—how boring young people are, the worthlessness of popular culture, the tedium of first-person writing. He says he experiences my response to this as censorship, and trimming. I say I can understand why he wants to spend time with someone fresh, who hasn’t heard all his opinions yet, who can admire him and be refreshed by him and look up to him, and be advised by him on what to read—the Stendhal, the Berlioz. His love of certain writers is new to her. He seems miffed by this.
damn
Don DeLillo, interviewed by David Remnick in the New Yorker: ‘Between books,’ he says, ‘what happens is, I drift. I feel a little aimless. I feel a little stupid, because my mind is at odds. It’s not trained on a daily basis to concentrate on something, so I feel a little dumb. Time passes in a completely different way. I can’t account for a day, a given day. At the end of a day, I don’t know what I did.’ The work, when it starts, ‘comes out of all the time a writer wastes. We stand around, look out the window, walk down the hall, come back to the page, and in those intervals, something subterranean is forming, a literal dream that comes out of daydreaming.’
V admires a pair of grotesquely high heels that Marilyn Monroe is wearing in a photo. I look at them and see two instruments of torture. He speaks at some length about how women who wear high heels are showing that they like men, that they’re prepared to ‘put up with a bit of discomfort’ to please a man. They are much more feminine than women who wear flat shoes or runners.
i hate this guy
He questioned me about why I was ‘a jealous person’, and what I thought jealousy was. I said it was a panic, a terrible fear of being rejected or replaced. I said that one of the things I loved in Proust was his brilliant, hilarious accuracy about jealousy and his intense interest in it. V said he thought there was far too much about jealousy in the book, and that what he liked was the ‘overarching’ shape of the book and its interest in time. He said that if he were a jealous person like me he would try to get control of it. I said I had worked hard to get control of it. He said, ‘What’s the evidence for this?’ I said, ‘The fact that you’re still walking around, for instance.’ He half laughed. I said I sometimes thought that if I were a man I’d be in jail. ‘What for,’ he said. I said, ‘For violence.’ This irritated him, and he said so. He said that I ‘despised the rational’ and ‘worshipped feelings’; that I ‘used’ feelings. I asked him if he thought there was anything about his personality that might also be contributing to our troubles. He went vague. I asked him what sort of person he thought he was. He replied that he thought he knew himself pretty well, that he had a clear view of what he was like; and even though some of the aspects of this were ‘not very good’, there was no point in trying to change them now, since there was little hope that people could change their basic nature. He said he thought he had a tendency to meanness, that he could be generous but that he tended towards the mean. He was ignorant about some things, disinclined to forgive, impatient. ‘I know I can be charming, but sometimes it’s a con job.’ He asked me once again, tipping his head back and staring down his cheeks, whether I thought he should ‘see a shrink’. I said that I would never try to persuade him to do it, that it had never occurred to me to suggest it to him.
I don’t know what look is on my face, during these horrible low-voiced conversations: on his, a blank stubbornness, mouth tight, chin up. He’s fighting me for his own survival, just as I am fighting him: for respect, and for self-respect, for a place to stand.
ack
For three days we worked on the proofs of his novel. He read aloud, I wielded the pencil. I was once again impressed and moved by the book’s sweep, its intricacy, its flow of ideas. And also surprised by the way his imagination seems to dwell forever in the 1950s. His efforts to get inside a woman’s head—every now and then a convincing spark, then a weird impression of his impression: as if he imagines our minds as ‘vague’, ‘soft’, ‘drifting’, ‘spreading’. Up close to the texture of his work, I realise I understand almost nothing about him, and he understands almost nothing about me. We have no shared experience, it seems.
damn
Eventually he admitted it. She had flown down to Melbourne after I’d left, he’d met her at the airport and they’d set out straight away. When I got home from the lunch party yesterday and found him all hot and flustered, he’d just dropped her off at her place. I flung myself on the couch and wept and howled, doubled up, holding a hanky over my face. He kept trying to get a grip on my arms and I kept shouting, ‘Don’t you touch me! Don’t you dare touch me! You lied! You lied!’ ‘I didn’t lie!’ ‘You did lie! You lied and lied! You lied all year! And five minutes ago you were still telling me she wasn’t with you on the drive! In the motel! At Gundagai!’
V: ‘I didn’t want to tell you.’
H: ‘Why? Why?’
V: ‘Because it would hurt you and make you upset.’
H: ‘For Christ’s sake! Nothing is worse than being lied to! No pain is worse than that!’
The bitterness and disgust, the self-disgust for having been a fool. I kept groaning and crying out, ‘I can’t bear this pain.’
I got calmer. He went out to the kitchen and got a cloth and began to clean up. I sat on the phone chair, slack and stupid, beyond speech.
ack
Yes, he says at last, it had been an affair all along, though not sexual till very recently. I don’t believe the second part but at least I can breathe: I wasn’t mad, all last year. But the following day he claws back the ground he’s given, becomes proud and defensive and cold. He’s back in his concrete bunker and looks out at me through the slit, with a cool, appraising face. All he wants is to move along, to get to the bit where I cop the blame.
i can understand why for her it's so devastating to be lied to because as a writer she is clearly someone who seeks truth above all else. and to be denied access to that is maybe the deepest form of betrayal, deeper than the infidelity
X: ‘Your marriage must have been in a very bad state. When did this begin?’
H: ‘I beg your pardon?’
X: ‘V has told me that you live separate lives.’
H: ‘That’s not true.’
X: ‘You told me he said I didn’t like you, and was not interested in you. I asked him. He said he had not said this.’
H: ‘He did say it. You must realise he’s telling lies to both of us.’
X: (stubbornly) ‘I trust what he tells me.’
H: ‘He has told lies to both of us.’
Her face sets hard. This must be her famous ‘independence’: she experiences no female solidarity. I see that she means business. I have no resources to deal with such a woman. I’m breathing hard, with one hand over my mouth.