project/wine-story
Helen Garner,
Charlotte Shane,
Lauren Elkin,
Mary Gaitskill,
Mary Karr
I WONDERED ABOUT THE wives, but I wondered about the husbands, too. Some of them had plenty of sex at home. And some had gorgeous wives, young and vibrant wives, at least from what I could see in the images that came up when I googled the man’s name during screening. (Unsolicited, they might show me pictures during our appointment, not only of their wives but of their kids, in-laws, pets, and homes. Because I’m nosy, I loved it.) One man said his wife was a former model; another bragged that his wife never ate carbs. Yet another showed me a picture of his wife in lingerie to illustrate her fitness. They knew how attractive their partners were and how much time their wives spent alone while they themselves were away for work (and “for work”). Yet they didn’t worry about being on the other end of the cheating. I suspect their complacency came from knowing they had the money, and that their wives were unlikely to forfeit their lifestyles and incite the gossipy local scandal of a divorce. The husbands may also have assumed their wives were too busy with the kids.
My allegiance was forever shifting between the two, the husband and his invisible wife. Sometimes a tender, mild-mannered client who was especially talented in bed would say his wife denied him and I’d feel so bad for him and so unhappy with her, angry that she was wasting him and hurting his feelings. Throw the fish back if you’re not going to eat it. More often, on my back, I’d think about how well I understood the wife, how refusal was the only conceivable stance; if I could have outsourced or refused this onerous chore, I would have. You may want to think this was a matter of personal preference, and a different woman would have been overjoyed to fuck the man in question. But I think some guys would be fobbed off on someone else until they died.
Whether or not a wife sounded likable, I knew I usually had more in common with her than with him. The clients, almost all of them, made a strong case for the impossibility of male fidelity. Any person can be cheated on at any time, but it feels like a uniquely humiliating and female position to be put in. More than that, my identification with the wife was based on my assumption that she and I both hated having sex with him or listening to him bloviate, yet we relied on him for money. And this key commonality rendered us enemies or at least rivals. I didn’t see it as a strictly her vs. me struggle, and it wasn’t that I wanted any wife left destitute, but her presence limited his freedom, and he couldn’t hire me if he didn’t have time to himself. Family trips in particular took the husbands and therefore their money away from me. I felt put out by those.
Why married people have affairs: you feel luckier, with a happy secret place in your imagination in which to refresh yourself. My mistake in the past has been to keep it on the front boiler, cooking briskly, instead of turning off the gas and letting it go cold.
Sunset last night was like a swap card I once had of a pirate ship: torn clouds, dramatic perspective, orange, gold and green. And now a dawn sky of delicate purity, and a smell of eucalypts. Maybe a marriage can get up again and walk, after a terrible beating.
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He’ll be like the Russians: he’ll retreat and retreat and retreat until I freeze to death.
noooo
What am I setting up for myself, here? Some happiness, perhaps. I’m calm, and in good spirits, quietly, as if something important and good were about to happen. I’m not scared or nervous. I can’t even imagine it, how it will be, what it will look like, what felicities or clumsinesses either of us will commit. Bucket of cold water: he’s married. He is an intellectual and I am not. ‘He lives,’ said Z, who introduced us, ‘almost entirely in the world of books and ideas. I imagine that’s why he didn’t want to have children.’ Maybe he’s in the habit of having quick, harsh, demanding affairs. Or maybe this will be an important relationship, for both of us.
ack
I see that what I am doing, in this diary, is conducting an argument with myself, about these two men, and myself, and men in general.
The only way I can have anything to do with him is by (a) lies and (b) hurting someone. Am I prepared to do this?
One day I’ll have to burn this book. I use as buckets of cold water thoughts of his wife’s preparations for Christmas.
ackkkk