by
Helen Garner
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Late this afternoon X the painter called me on the phone. She was in bed with flu. First thing she said was, very politely, ‘I don’t know why you think we can help each other.’ An hour of conversation followed, a quiet comparing of notes, during which many long pauses fell. Pauses of thought. Of stunned attempts to match up pieces of information. Turns out that right from the start he told her we lived separate lives: ‘He told me you are an old hippie; that you had separate friends, that you would not mind his visits to me.’ Even before last Christmas he told her we’d decided to part: that we were parting because we weren’t able to resolve our disagreements about work and the flat and about both being writers. When I found the first letter (neither of us mentioned the hat) she had told him she was not prepared to continue with him until he sorted out his marriage. I said he’d told me that he made the renunciation in order to save the marriage. She said she had held out for months, keeping her phone unplugged, not reading his letters; but that on Mothers Day she had plugged the phone in and he’d got through: he’d told her I was going back to Melbourne to live, that I was ‘happy’ about the decision, that we’d reached it together, that we liked and respected each other and would remain friends. Thunderstruck, I said that I’d thought of going back to Melbourne only because the pain of his lies had become unbearable‚ that I couldn’t stand the pain.
omg
‘So,’ she said. ‘He stirred us up against each other.’
I said, ‘It’s obvious that he’s in love with you, but he won’t say so. If he’d been able to say to me, “Listen, I love X and I want to leave you and go with her,” I would have accepted it. I would have been hurt and angry and sad but I would have accepted it. Instead he keeps saying he still loves me, and that he’s extricating himself from you and wants us to get through this.’
‘Do you mean to say,’ she said in a faint voice, ‘he never told you how he felt about me?’
‘No. I found out by snooping. All he’s ever said is that he likes you, that you’re a close friend that he likes to see.’
Enormous, endless pause.
At last she said, ‘So—all we’ve learnt is what each of us most feared.’
I said, ‘To me, the most destructive part of all this is how he denied and kept on and on denying—and is still denying—what I instinctively knew the truth must be. He’s damaged my faith in my own instincts.’
‘Oh,’ she said at once, ‘but that is what men always do to women. And I wonder if they have any idea of the damage it causes.’
this convo restored something in me
Immense relief. Freedom, lightness, clarity. And thinking of V and his manoeuvres, a stunned, incredulous pity, even tenderness, as towards an oafish boy, a yokel, a creature barely evolved.
He’s still insisting, always in the same words, like a mantra, that X is ‘just a friend. A good friend. That I like to see.’
I’m never going to get a blessing from him. He’s never going to tell me the truth. It’s beyond him.
We went for a walk, early. Fresh morning: glossy water, tide high, clouds scattered, air spiked with perfumes from invisible flower-ing plants. We were both yawning. Coming up the steep part of Yarranabbe I said, ‘You know why we’re always tired? We’re exhausted from flogging a dead horse. Can’t you see it’s time we parted?’ ‘What? Just because I happened to run into X in the street when I was putting the rubbish out?’ I said, ‘Things between us are too fragile for something like that to have no meaning.’ It was nothing serious, he said, it was trivial; I was overreacting as usual, it wasn’t worth getting upset about, it wasn’t worth having all these feelings.
seriously fuck this guy
V says his old friend’s wife has told him she’d thought all along that I’d leave him. ‘And she said it’s because of your restlessness.’ Jolted by this, I call and ask her. ‘Yes. I did tell him you’d leave,’ she said. ‘Right back at the start. I couldn’t believe the shit he was giving you, and how long you went on taking it.’
<3 <3
And I am also learning that there’s a kind of man who believes he can have everything. He thinks he deserves both a wife and a girlfriend, and that everything will be fine and civilised, that he can become ‘really deep, strong friends’ with his wife, once she’s been exhausted by the struggle and dropped off, just so long as she doesn’t ask whether he’s still having the affair that finished off the marriage.
Well, yes, he is. Sort of. ‘I spend most of my time alone,’ he says. ‘I’m like you. I like being alone. I walk from room to room thinking about things. I miss you terribly, but at the same time I think it’s good for me to be alone.’
‘But you’re not alone, are you. You’re with her, and you’re still trying to make me think you’re not with her.’
‘Yes, okay, I do sleep with her, but eighty per cent of my time I’m alone. Being alone is the larger truth.’
omg
In this flat, alone, I can at last see myself as a grown-up. I’ve moved a cane chair into the bedroom so I can survey my view. I sit there in the early evenings and contemplate it. At certain hours it looks almost Italian. One day I’ll be light-hearted again. I swear I will. I will work my way there.
Hawai‘i, the Philippines, Guam—it wasn’t easy to know how to think about such places or even what to call them. At the turn of the twentieth century, when many were acquired (Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, American Samoa, Hawai‘i, Wake), their status was clear. They were, as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson unabashedly called them, colonies.
Yet that spirit of forthright imperialism didn’t last. Within a decade or two, after passions had cooled, the c-word became taboo. “The word colony must not be used to express the relationship which exists between our government and its dependent peoples,” an official admonished in 1914. Better to stick with a gentler term, used for them all: territories.
It was gentler because the United States had had territories before, such as Arkansas and Montana. Their place in the national firmament was a happy one. The western territories were the frontier, the leading edge of the country’s growth. They might not have had all the rights that states did, but once they were “settled” (i.e., populated by whites), they were welcomed fully into the fold as states.
But if places like the Philippines and Puerto Rico were territories, they were territories of a different sort. Unlike the western territories, they weren’t obviously slated for statehood. Nor were they widely understood to be integral parts of the nation.
[...] One of the truly distinctive features of the United States’ empire is how persistently ignored it has been. Apart from the brief moment after 1898 when the country’s imperial dimensions were on proud display, much of its history has taken place offstage.
This is, it’s worth emphasizing, unique. The British weren’t confused as to whether there was a British Empire. They had a holiday, Empire Day, to celebrate it. France didn’t forget that Algeria was French. It is only the United States that has suffered from chronic confusion about its own borders.
The reason isn’t hard to guess. The country perceives itself to be a republic, not an empire. It was born in an anti-imperialist revolt and has fought empires ever since, from Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich and the Japanese Empire to the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. It even fights empires in its dreams. Star Wars, a saga that started with a rebellion against the Galactic Empire, is one of the highest-grossing film franchises of all time.