by
Helen Garner
for/pq-maybe
Helen Garner,
Charlotte Shane,
Jenny Erpenbeck,
Vivian Gornick,
Lauren Elkin,
Clifford Odets,
Shirley Hazzard,
Ingmar Bergman,
Michael Ondaatje,
Lucia Berlin
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.
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?
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
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—’
:(
By being decent, you only extend your own period of suffering. I said, ‘I’m not waiting for you to leave. That’s not what I’m doing.’ But the truth is more like: ‘Tell me whether you ever will, or whether I must accept that the rest of my life will involve this complicated, delicate balancing act. What hurts me is the suspense.’ I didn’t say this. But I must.
I never knew before the difference between sadness and sorrow. Sadness is general, broad, heavy, passive. Sorrow is sharper, more focused, more active, working hard. I could even say labouring. Labouring with sorrow. When I think of his wife’s unhappiness, my own ‘indignities’ almost vanish—because the reason he gives for requiring them is to save her from further pain. He does not see that this is unlikely to work, in the long run.
emphasis on the almost
We will only see each other occasionally, he says, but each time will be like our first time — a celebration. She listens to him attentively and nods. I can only be a luxury for you, because I am a married man. I know, she says. Perhaps that won’t be enough for you, he says. I understand that. She looks him straight in the face, there is a ring of yellow around her pupils, he now sees. I’m not just married, I’m also in a relationship with a woman who works in radio. If you had a thousand women, she says, all that matters is the time that we get to spend together. How can he ever refuse her anything, if she doesn’t demand anything? The black velvet ribbon moves him, it makes her look like a schoolgirl. If he doesn’t manage to say quickly what he needs to say, it’ll be too late. And you can’t expect any sort of public acknowledgment — I know, and you know, and that will have to do. That’s fine, she says, and smiles. Where terms and conditions are set, there is a future. All yesterday and today she was afraid he would just toss her out.
When they part very early the next morning, he is instructed by her to buy pepper and breadcrumbs. Padlizsán, says Katharina, but she won’t tell him what it is in German, it’s to be a surprise. Tomorrow they are planning to cook together, Ingrid and Ludwig will be away at a summer party in the Uckermark. Ingrid knows her husband isn’t keen on such festivities, just stay home, why don’t you, she said. Who knows, maybe she’s planning to meet someone there herself. Years ago now, the couple made a joint decision not to watch each other too closely. Only they didn’t want to make it public, lest it seem too much of a slight to either party. Is there enough wine in the house? When he woke up this morning, he called her his darling, and she reciprocated.
Barbara is the name of the waitress at the Arkade. She’s tall, and taller when she puts her hair up. Two coffees and two glasses of Rotkäppchen, please, Barbara. A celebration. It’s their third 11th day, their trimensual anniversary, and if Katharina had a wish, then she would wish that fate never ran out of elevens. Nine years, three years. How long will she and Hans be good for? Is what they have nothing but a so-called affair? Will he be sitting with someone else in ten years’ time, showing off a snapshot of her, Katharina, and saying: that was Katharina, she was my lover? How to endure the way that the present trickles down moment by moment and becomes the past? So why did he show her the photos? Of course he’s been with other women, he’s been around that much longer. Even she’s had three or four others, plus Gernot. What makes her so jealous is the secrecy around the other women, the trouble Hans must have gone to to keep each relationship going: rubbing the lipstick off a wineglass after a meeting in his apartment, or telling Ingrid, we were working late in the office, using her hairdresser’s appointment for a phone call or taking advantage of a moment at night when the wife’s gone to bed to whisper into the telephone: O darling, O beautiful, O sweetheart. The way he does now, with me. Little Ludwig was revolted by it, she recalls. And isn’t he right to be? And now she’s a part of this tissue of deceit. And even thinks of these little treacheries of Hans’ as a distinction. Not long ago, when Hans went to the cinema with Ludwig, she sat three rows behind them, just to have some proximity to the man she loves. In the general crush when everyone filed out, Hans brushed against her hand.
this KILLS me
Two weeks ago, when Ingrid was taking Hans’s jacket to the dry cleaner’s, she found a passport photo of Katharina in the inside pocket and wouldn’t talk to him for three days. He didn’t tell Katharina. In October Katharina cried for the first time about the fact that he was married, and in November for the second time, and since then he’s avoided mentioning Ingrid’s name. And if Katharina now sometimes looks deadly earnest, he knows she’s making an effort and is repressing something she ought really to talk about. Anything the matter? No. Because everything is avoided that might make one or other of them sad, sadness suddenly comes to occupy a lot of space between them. He is old enough to know how the end likes to set its roots first imperceptibly, then ever more boldly, in the present. Without my marriage I wouldn’t be the man I am. That’s what he told Regina as well, the newscaster, and Marjut, the Finn. They went along with it until he’d had enough. Where Katharina is concerned, the sentence carries a different meaning, but she would deny it if he were to write it to her. Without his marriage, there wouldn’t be the danger, the secrecy, the circumstances that give rise to yearning. Not the content of their love, but factors that energize and quicken it. Just as if/ in a gallop/ an exhausted mare/ thirsted for the nearest well. Thirsting. Another one of those dead words. The marriage that threatens and attenuates their affair is also the ground that nourishes it. And probably, if Hans were honest, the other way around as well. Wasn’t Ingrid — when at the end of three silent days she started to speak again, and during the ensuing scene to cry, and when the makeup ran down her face and she picked up the nearest thing that came to hand, which happened to be a clothes brush, and threw it out of the window into the yard — wasn’t Ingrid in her desperation more beautiful and desirable than she’d appeared to him in a long time?