by
Helen Garner
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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.’
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