by
Helen Garner
project/wine-story
Helen Garner,
Charlotte Shane,
Lauren Elkin,
Mary Gaitskill,
Mary Karr
‘His father went to jail.’
‘What for?’
‘Theft, I think. Embezzling, maybe.’
‘Embezzling’s creepy, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘Worse than straight-out theft. It’s the betrayal of someone’s trust over a long period.’
Horrified that he might think I was referring obliquely to his behaviour towards his wife. But he didn’t seem to notice, and went on talking.
my god lol
I know, from my own experience, that people can recover from things. And I can’t see the end of a marriage as the end of a life. ‘Life goes on,’ says R. ‘It must go on. It can’t stop.’ ‘And it can’t go back?’ I say. ‘No,’ she says, ‘it can’t go back.’ In a blighted cafe in Rozelle V and I share a small bottle of mineral water. I feel deeply appalled that he’s started the process of extrication. My thighs on the seat feel weak. I’m not seeing properly. Terror of the magnitude of these events. And grief. For them, and their marriage.
On the spare bed at R’s in the afternoon I try to sleep, counting my breathing, but wide awake. Something’s gone. I know what it is: the necessity for stoicism. A hard jacket’s been taken off me. At first what I notice about its absence is a kind of blank surprise—then a fencelessness. My thoughts no longer run up against the monolith. I lie under the cheap quilt, calm, empty, complete, as if at the end of some trial. ‘The monolith.’ That smashed thing. Full of holes. Air and light now pass through its breached walls. Who’s responsible?
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
Yet for every conceivable holiday--from Easter lamb to Christmas ham--our tin-car car crunches up the drive to the Whitbread estate, which lures me in some ways and yet always saps me dry. This isn't meant to sound peevish, for the Whitbreads are never not nice. But from the second I haul my bag up the curved stair, the place drains me of force like a battery going rust. Maybe it's all the fine wines I take in. Of those many visits, I remember absolutely nil. Beyond sitting at a table while plates appear and get swept away, I can't recount one damn thing we did.
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His name is Weisz, like vice, and he is that, a wicked indulgence and something that grips me. I’ve never had such big hands on my body. We sit together in his office and he plays me his records and then he puts his hands on my body.
I am in love with him, I am in love with his shirt, with the way that it sits just so lightly on his torso, his collar that sits away just so from his neck. I’ve never actually wanted to rip someone’s clothes off before. He has a wife at home so I have to be careful or she’ll be wondering why all the buttons on his shirt popped off at the same time.
Desire makes us others to ourselves, the maestro says, and he is right, I am not myself when I desire Max, I am myself-with-Max, quite another person from myself when I’m without him.
He comes, every night. He doesn’t text me during the day or give me any notice. I text him if it’s not a good night. If David is in town. He always comes even if just to tell me he can’t come, that Clémentine is staying home. Usually this is just after she has come over herself, so I already know, and he’s come straight from work. I don’t want to ask too many questions, about how this works for him, or for them, lest I should lean on it too heavily, and make it collapse. I try to remain open, open to whatever there is, in this strange parabola in my life, this pocket, in which so much is held.
[...] “Something Nice” also definitely describes an experience I had, when I worked briefly as a prostitute, and that one was told entirely from the man’s point of view—an invented character with an invented life. That dynamic wasn’t as antagonistic, but it still took something to imagine myself into another person who was very different from me. I was pretty young when I wrote that story, and he’s an old guy in an unsatisfying marriage.
I’ve sometimes had my students try an exercise where they narrate an episode from their life in which they felt mistreated by someone, or had a conflict with them, from the perspective of that other person. You pick something that happened a while ago, at least a year, ideally, because your emotions won’t be as hot. It’s remarkable how many of them really can’t do it. They’re still portraying the other person as an asshole. It’s hard to sincerely occupy feelings that are fully oppositional to yours—to be able to look at yourself from that other position and think, What a twit!