by
Helen Garner
inspo/characterisation
Lucia Berlin,
Helen Garner,
Shirley Hazzard,
Michael Ondaatje,
Rachel Kushner,
Francesco Pacifico,
David Foster Wallace,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Elizabeth Hardwick
nice character descriptions (fiction, memoir, journalism)
In Toulouse our hostess made a dormitory of her bedroom and she, M and I slept comfortably in a row. All the sheets and towels, from her trousseau sixteen years ago, are embroidered with her initials. At about 4 pm I remembered that it was my birthday. She took us out of the city to stay with some friends in a village. On the drive she told us that the husband had had an affair. The wife had fought it, or sat it out. He had returned to her. ‘So,’ she said with a satisfaction that did not quite convince me, ‘she won.’ The air in the house was thick. The husband and wife did not look at each other. In the afternoon we walked halfway up a small mountain. An easy track. Chestnuts still bright with yellow leaves. At night the darkness and silence around the house frightened me.
jesus
A couple passed us on the beach. We guessed they had met through a dating agency. I said the man couldn’t find a woman because he talked all the time and expected her to listen. F said the woman couldn’t find a man because she listened all the time with her head on one side and made attention-murmurs, and was ‘limp’.
yikes
After dinner the waiter brought L the wrong coffee, was corrected, went away. Time passed. He realised he’d been forgotten and from that moment the evening was lost. He went dark and stiff with rage. Anger spread into the air around him. A grille clanged down between him and the world. I panicked. All the air went out of me. I felt my face drop on its bones. He noticed and said, ‘What’s up?’ I said, in a small voice, ‘I feel sad. And scared.’ ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I just hate it when things like that happen, when people treat you like—’ I wanted to say, ‘He doesn’t scorn you, or hate you—he just made a mistake.’ But his whole ego was bound up in it. My own iron grille came down. I missed the chance to level with him. From then on we were both deep in reticence but keeping the superficial intimacy going. In the morning, a shyness. I like him. I envy his beauty and I hate the way it distorts his life. He is all split and troubled; and his loneliness is as bad as mine. We would wear each other out.
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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
A visit from Mum. Terrific strain I’m under, when she and I are with other people. When we’re alone I can submit to this vast, slow, stunning stream of monologue and apply as little of my concentration to it as I need to (about fifteen per cent) in order to remain calm. Yesterday she talked so much—on the drive in from the airport, meeting E, shopping at Leichhardt, having coffee at Via Veneto, driving to Manly, walking on the beach—that by bedtime she was hoarse. She never asks a question, or listens. She starts every anecdote days, months or even years before its proper starting point. Her only liveliness in speech comes when she can criticise: idiot skateboard riders, lunatics on motorbikes, men unloading trucks in narrow streets, stupid dills who drop rubbish or leave security doors ajar. A film of the world as she sees it would be always swelling, blurring, lurching, swivelling—sparkling and looming with danger. At moments, while she drones on, there comes over me a painful tenderness. This ‘tenderness’, which if I told the truth I would have to call pity, has to do with my dread of becoming like her. V asks her straight out which of my books she likes the best. She says, shyly, ‘The Children’s Bach.’ I am embarrassed and don’t know where to look. I always give them copies, with a loving message written in the front, but she has never told me whether she’s read any of them. And I’ve never asked.
He said that I was very ‘touchy’. I said that this was true. He asked what he did, or was, that made him hard to live with. After a lot of thought I said it was his tendency to enjoy stressing the negative in everything that came up; that it made me very tired, as if I were dragging behind me a heavy bundle, ‘the vibe’. I notice that since this conversation he’s stopped snarling, whenever the phone rings, ‘Oh, who the fuck can this be?’
The imagery V uses in ordinary speech, loaded with reluctance. ‘I’ll dump you off at work.’ ‘I said I’d cart her round the bookshops.’ ‘We’d better get rid of’ (i.e. eat) ‘those potatoes.’ ‘I suppose I’ll drag m’self into town.’ As if the ideal were stasis.
He says he can’t talk to me any more, that I keep correcting everything he says, that I’ve got a list of subjects that I don’t want to hear about any more.
I say it’s because he never has anything new to say on those subjects, and only rants and fulminates—how boring young people are, the worthlessness of popular culture, the tedium of first-person writing. He says he experiences my response to this as censorship, and trimming. I say I can understand why he wants to spend time with someone fresh, who hasn’t heard all his opinions yet, who can admire him and be refreshed by him and look up to him, and be advised by him on what to read—the Stendhal, the Berlioz. His love of certain writers is new to her. He seems miffed by this.
damn
But suddenly, there’s Macario and how many others rushing the podium. They pull out their banners: Save the I-Hotel! Fight the Eviction of Elderly Tenants! Shame on you, Simon Solomon!
At precisely 5:12 a.m. Macario speaks: Mayor Alioto and the people of San Francisco. The Great Earthquake destroyed our city. It destroyed all of Chinatown, but we Asian Americans labored to rebuild this great city. Now another kind of earthquake seeks again to destroy our communities and to replace our homes and neighborhoods with financial buildings and parking lots for the rich . . .
That’s the mayor’s Earthquake Party.
I admit. I’m surprised. Life takes that kind of turn. A clumsy kid who just listens suddenly gets some guts. Spits out the cork in his throat. Maybe Phil’s thunder in his chest makes its way out.
How many years Joe’s running the I-Hotel? Maybe not forever, and nobody knows how he starts. Gets the manager’s room with his private bath and all the keys, decides if there’s room for you at the inn, collects your money. For some, there’s always a room. For others, don’t bother. For Joe, it’s about loyalty and protection. You in his brotherhood, you stay there. Sometimes I think, who else could do this job but Joe? Think about the tramps and lowlifes coming through. Pimps and hustlers. Addicts and ex-cons. Joe might give you a slim chance, but he wants it respectable and quiet. He’s keeping the rooms for his brothers. Nobody breaks Joe’s rules. How many times I see Joe arriving at somebody’s door with his baseball bat. Guy might be naked. He’s got to run out the hotel or take his medicine. How many rules Joe’s got to break to keep this kind of peace?
Over the years, Joe’s rubbing shoulders with the guys who rise to the top. In case you forget, city’s a port. Tough guys rise from the dock to do the work of the people. Longshoremen with connections up and down the coast, up to organizing us Alaskeros. An injury to one is an injury to all. And just in case, he coaches boxing to every new generation. So when the I-Hotel gets threatened, he gets the ear of the mayor himself, old family friend. Probably taught this kid his jabs and hooks. Don’t let the mayor forget where he comes from.