by
Helen Garner
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The urge to blame V. To say, ‘He is selfish. He wants to have everything, for the world to revolve around him. He will never choose me. He should never have begun this.’ The cowardice of this urge. The old longing to play the victim. What’s required here is a bracing of the self. After all, ‘we’ ‘love’ ‘each other’. These hackneyed words. Who’s we? What’s love? Do we know each other? Or is each of us only a screen for the other’s light show?
Reading an old diary. I cannot remember, even in the thinnest or most fragmentary moment, how it felt to ‘love’ the man I was in love with, back then. All that hideous torment, everyone suffering, and for WHAT? What would I remember of NOW? This one works, steadily, quietly. His mind does not take the easy way out. I can only live the thing to its fullest extent. This is what life is. It’s not for saying no.
Fantasy: V’s dead. No one close to him, of course, thinks to tell me. Finally, a day or two later, R calls: ‘H, I’ve got some very bad news…’ Odd feeling that he may as well be dead, he may as well never have existed. His existence is purely intellectual. I can’t even write him a letter. Because he doesn’t exist.
Yesterday I felt lonely. I knew that he would not leave her. I forgot that I did not want to be his wife. A failure of imagination. I did not feel beautiful. I longed to be asleep. Woke, heard rain falling quietly outside, felt the desolation of my position. I thought about Primrose Gully, the room with the table, hearing rain there, looking out at rain falling, the healing of it. I need to go home.
:(
I heard a gospel song in the car and a rush of Christian moral scruples came over me: ‘If I gave him up I would be a more virtuous person, more correct, more calm, more blessed.’ This kind of thing, which attracts me at times, is almost a death wish, a nothing wish, a blankness wish—like wishing that we could all like each other’s work, that there should be no conflict. The LIFE of life. No laws apply.
<3
From a review of Jessica Anderson’s short stories: ‘…we are made to see the futility of trying to prolong an affair beyond its natural limits, and how little an outsider—even an ardent lover—can ever know of what actually binds a husband and wife together.’
oof
Weird feeling, when I look at a photo of V that I took, that once again he does not exist, I have never met him, I have invented him, he is a FIGMENT. If a long enough silence should fall between us we would forget each other and slip back into our previous lives. Does he exist? No particular emotion accompanies these fancies. In fact it’s a breathing space between bouts of reality. I don’t miss him. How could I miss a flicker, a quick darkness. It would be easier if we never had any further contact with each other, but left each other’s lives alone. He won’t leave his wife, they’ll live out the rest of their lives together, side by side, without passion but with a strong familiarity, used to each other. What’ll I do? I’ll take up piano lessons again, learn to make plants grow, write novels. Summer will come. I’ll grow older. I’ll be happy. If I could be this calm, when we’re apart, then we could live it properly, honour it, without causing smash-up, pain, grief, humiliation. On the other hand, this state seems unreal to me, a kind of nothing state, an interim—or like sleep, or death. ‘First—chill—then stupor—then the letting go—’
:(
While I’m in America, V is going to Africa. My fantasy: he doesn’t come back. I find out from someone that he’s lost. I fly to Sydney and say to his wife, ‘Come on. We’ve got to go and find him.’ She won’t come, flatly refuses, but when the me character gets to the airport, there she is. The two women set out. The conversations they could have! The silences, resentments, outbursts. And quieter passages: they have to share a bedroom in some shit hotel, two single beds, they lie parallel, like sisters, exhausted, angry, frightened. One begins to talk…would there be flashbacks? Voice-over? Flashbacks that don’t match what’s being related in the voice-over because each of them is having to embroider the truth.
lmao
Rain pours down. Lightning. A huge roll of thunder. He’s telling me about his famous friend in England and his ‘flat-chested, pug-nosed, short-sighted wife, a real sweetheart. She serves him.’ I want to say, ‘Does your wife serve you?’—not meanly, but because I need to know. I’m afraid that if she does, that this is what he needs and will continue to need so he can work. And before long he’s saying, ‘Do you think two writers can ever live together?’ I hardly know what load this question is carrying.
Possibilities: this will run its course and subside. He’ll sink back into his married life, its comfort, taking with him whatever he’s learnt from this. But what about me? I tend this seed of fear, water it, want it to sprout.