by
Helen Garner
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One day I’ll have to burn this book. I use as buckets of cold water thoughts of his wife’s preparations for Christmas.
ackkkk
Maybe he’s the kind of man who conducts flirtations with women in such a way as to allow his wife to find out; she then puts a stop to the developing affair and, though he grumbles etc, this is what he wants, and needs. No idea why I thought of this. Just running through the painful possibilities.
The monolith of his marriage, and my own solitariness and flimsiness by comparison. I feel very small, slight, impermanent. It is not too late for me to save myself.
[...] In a second-hand shop window I saw a pretty nightie I wanted to buy. Always, under whatever else is happening, a level of thought and fantasy about V and what is possible. I try out the idea of a mistress, some long-term thing running parallel to his marriage. I know my ego wouldn’t accept this. When I’ve been with him I feel fed, and anxiety dies a little. Like a junkie after a hit, I am able to contemplate giving him up.
Dinner with the retired academics. I made a big effort and stayed with the conversation. Spare me from old men’s calm assumption that anything they say, no matter how dull, slow or perfunctory, deserves and will have an audience. Their wives are still real, warm people, compared with these old blokes frozen in their own importance. The jerky little tales of eccentrics and their drinking. Sly innuendo about famous women they have known, one of whom was said to have had ‘sixty-four lovers’. I sat quietly, thinking, ‘You call that a lot?’ Is this what V means when he says women never understand that men want to be with other men? Dread: he too will turn out to be manly in that way—looked after by a woman, no longer alive to her yet still drawing full benefits from her love and sacrifice…Is there hope for women and men?
lol
These two men. I could say ‘I love you’ to each of them. To L in the most direct, old-fashioned and simple way: I know him, I like him, he is like me, we know each other without effort, two greedy, cheerful, sexy, sociable people, takers of foolish risks. To the other, how? A thinker, intellectual, contained, cautious, measured, hard-working, private. And married. This will have to be lived. It can’t be walked away from.
fuck
A Tchaikovsky piano concerto, on my own. The idea of it made me yawn but soon my skin began to crawl and various thoughts came to me with the music as background. If I go ahead with this, I will be spending a lot of time alone. That’s something I am already good at, and often prefer. I will spend a lot of time waiting. And when I’m old I will be alone. How strange these thoughts are. They are serious thoughts. I am contemplating a course of action which at my age will have certain repercussions, important ones. Have I got, can I find in myself, the courage and strength to live like that? Would I want to be ‘married’? I am notoriously bad at it. It does not suit me. The wife envies the passion her husband feels for the mistress. The mistress envies the steady companionship…‘The world is made up of triangles.’
The flight to Sydney lasted only five minutes because I was reading Marguerite Duras’ La Douleur. When her husband comes back after the war I cried so much my face twitched, I had to wipe my eyes on my skirt. ‘I remember the sobbing all through the house, the tenants lingering on the stairs, the doors standing open.’ Her writing is so physical. The movement of her sentences captures the movement of emotion and thought—it’s real women’s writing, shameless but never sloppy. Maybe she’s what I’m looking for—to show me how to control emotion without being false to its power, how to be absent and fully present at once.
What am I doing? He has been married for more than half his life on this earth. Why should it be any different from any other love affair? Why shouldn’t it run through its phases, wither, and die? I’d better work if I want to survive this, and if I want to play my full and proper part in it. Who wants a lovesick, lazy drip, obsessed with her own emotions and full of resentment against fate?
AH
During the wedding ceremony I asked myself why the simple hopes of these promises are so impossible when the complications of life fall on them like a collapsing wall. I do not understand marriage. V is always talking about symmetry but we are not symmetrical at all. I am offering everything and he is offering everything except the final thing, which in effect means that he is offering nothing. Is this true or is it just a smart crack? It is quite understandable to be stunned and even sick with fear when you’re heading for a brick wall at 100 miles an hour.