by
Helen Garner
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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.
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!’