by
Helen Garner
project/wine-story
Helen Garner,
Charlotte Shane,
Lauren Elkin,
Mary Gaitskill,
Mary Karr
Maybe he’s the kind of man who conducts flirtations with women in such a way as to allow his wife to find out; she then puts a stop to the developing affair and, though he grumbles etc, this is what he wants, and needs. No idea why I thought of this. Just running through the painful possibilities.
The monolith of his marriage, and my own solitariness and flimsiness by comparison. I feel very small, slight, impermanent. It is not too late for me to save myself.
What am I doing? He has been married for more than half his life on this earth. Why should it be any different from any other love affair? Why shouldn’t it run through its phases, wither, and die? I’d better work if I want to survive this, and if I want to play my full and proper part in it. Who wants a lovesick, lazy drip, obsessed with her own emotions and full of resentment against fate?
AH
At Mum and Dad’s I sat sideways on my chair, staring out the window. Dad said, affectionately (for him), ‘What are you thinking about, Helen?’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘just the meaning of the universe.’ A true answer would have been, ‘I’ve found the love of my life, and he’s married to somebody else.’
lol
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?
Fantasy: V’s dead. No one close to him, of course, thinks to tell me. Finally, a day or two later, R calls: ‘H, I’ve got some very bad news…’ Odd feeling that he may as well be dead, he may as well never have existed. His existence is purely intellectual. I can’t even write him a letter. Because he doesn’t exist.
Yesterday I felt lonely. I knew that he would not leave her. I forgot that I did not want to be his wife. A failure of imagination. I did not feel beautiful. I longed to be asleep. Woke, heard rain falling quietly outside, felt the desolation of my position. I thought about Primrose Gully, the room with the table, hearing rain there, looking out at rain falling, the healing of it. I need to go home.
:(
While I’m in America, V is going to Africa. My fantasy: he doesn’t come back. I find out from someone that he’s lost. I fly to Sydney and say to his wife, ‘Come on. We’ve got to go and find him.’ She won’t come, flatly refuses, but when the me character gets to the airport, there she is. The two women set out. The conversations they could have! The silences, resentments, outbursts. And quieter passages: they have to share a bedroom in some shit hotel, two single beds, they lie parallel, like sisters, exhausted, angry, frightened. One begins to talk…would there be flashbacks? Voice-over? Flashbacks that don’t match what’s being related in the voice-over because each of them is having to embroider the truth.
lmao
Possibilities: this will run its course and subside. He’ll sink back into his married life, its comfort, taking with him whatever he’s learnt from this. But what about me? I tend this seed of fear, water it, want it to sprout.
There’s a tremendous weight coming from somewhere, pushing me towards feeling that I’m being short-changed, that there’s something humiliating in my situation. I hate it. I think it’s wrong. I fight it. Because I’m happy, when I don’t think about it in that way.