by
Helen Garner
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I am beginning to see that you can’t numb yourself and step cleanly out of a marriage. You can’t just pack your stuff and walk out the door. There is no door. You have to dynamite your way out. Blast, burrow, crawl—and you have to let yourself keep on feeling it, every inch of the way.
In the sauna with the ship’s doctor. We get naked and talk, red-faced and dripping. She says stress can make your fingernails crack and peel, and your hair fall out. She parted from her husband five years ago. It took them ‘six agonising months’ to break up: ‘I didn’t want to live, at that stage.’ But once the break was made, ‘things started to go right for me. I’d been working against the flow of things for so long, and suddenly I was going with it instead.’ ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it,’ I said, ‘how much against-ness you can go on tolerating.’
<3
He makes a concession. He offers to rent a place to work. ‘All I need’s a bare cell, whereas what you need is two bedrooms, and it’ll cost a bloody fortune. I could rent a place for six months and see how it goes.’ So staggered I couldn’t speak. After all these years he is talking about it simply as a question of logistics, and not as an attack by me on the very fibre of his innermost being. Later I recall that the last time he made this offer it was a lie. I also know that it’s come too late.
‘All the people who should be told have been told,’ he says. ‘Our friends are bored. They’re sick of hearing about it.’ Turns out he’s been going round telling them that we’ve hit a rocky patch, that I’m unhappy. Puzzled people keep ringing me up: ‘What’s going on?’ In each case, I learn that he has omitted to mention the third party.
damn
I said, ‘Look, V. We’re married. We know each other. We know what’s horrible about each other. We don’t subscribe to each other’s myth. And the only way out of being known like that, if you can’t stand it, is to leave and find a new person. For a while they think you’re wonderful and believe in your myth, but then they get to know you too, and the same thing happens all over again. Anyway, don’t worry. I won’t be around much longer.’
He scowls: ‘What?’
H: ‘I won’t be around to bug you for much longer.’
V: ‘What a thing to say.’
H: (recklessly) ‘Well, that’s what you want, isn’t it?’
V: (indignant) ‘No! It’s not! If you found a way to stick around, it’d be really nice!’
My computer at St Neot packed up so I had to work at home all day. He actually brought me a coffee.
V: ‘Want me to make you a little snack?’
H: (amazed) ‘Thanks! Yes! I’d like that!’
V: (mimes a flinch, as if put upon)
H: ‘You did offer.’
V: ‘I can do it, if that’s what you’d like.’
H: ‘ “I can do it.” This is what you do! You make an offer, then when I accept it, you withdraw it. That’s your style!’
It was an illuminating moment. For me, at least.
omg
‘Where life immures, the intelligence cuts a way out…The intelligence knows nothing of those closed situations of life from which there is no escape…Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure our heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy.’ —Proust, The Captive
I don’t know what she would make of this but here’s what I think happened: I wanted so much to be loved that I tried to turn myself into the sort of woman I thought I would have to be, in order to be lovable. In the process I falsified myself, lost part of my soul, made myself sick with swallowed rage; I connived, I enabled; and I allowed him to set hard into worse versions of the misogyny he already felt: the little tin god, the artist as superior being whose needs must be met, no matter what it costs or who pays.
In other words, it’s not all his fault.
</3
On the couch. Why do I find it so hard to be happy? She suggests that pain is more familiar to me, that I gravitate towards it. We talk about the ‘desert’ in me, how V had reached it, no longer found what he wanted and needed, and turned away to another woman: how this was my part in what happened; and how I’m learning that there is a spring of water, if I can just find it in myself. Walking away from her house, I find I don’t remember which of us put these things into words.
The Polish philosopher, on the phone: ‘Let’s say you decided to leave V. What would be holding you back?’
Long pause. I walk through our life, as it were room by room. It is very bare.
‘In my heart I know I have to leave. But I’m hanging on. Because I’ve got this terrible need for him to tell me the truth. And because I’m scared.’
‘What of?’
Longer pause.
‘Failure. This is my third marriage. Fear of my failure to sustain intimacy. To sustain a relationship.’
‘Intimacy,’ she says, ‘has to go both ways. And the aim of a relationship is not to sustain the relationship.’