Yellow Notebook, page 11
‘I don’t think they should eat in the street,’ I say. ‘I don’t think anyone should.’
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F so rarely buys clothes that he can barely bring himself to be polite to shop assistants.
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But I don’t like lying.
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Some men were loading sheets of building material on to a skip. I walked past and seconds later heard a colossal crash. I ran back. The sheets had toppled and pinned a workman’s lower leg against the side of the skip. He was dangling upside down, leg caught, knee bent, head and shoulders and arms resting in crucified position on the pavement. He was uttering strange cries—not harsh, not screams, but light, rhythmic, descending moans, like the sound of someone making love. His Italian workmates were calling out. A shop assistant ran back into the jeans store to call an ambulance. A small crowd gathered. ‘Lie ’im down!’ called a woman. I walked away.
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She wrote that my comments on her manuscript were ‘like a refreshing breeze blowing into a stuffy room’. How generously people other than me can accept criticism!
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G called about the book. His voice sounded very close and warm, as if he’d been laughing. ‘Hel? I loved it. I laughed, I cried, I shivered, I hugged myself.’
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It’s raining silver and the sky to the east is blazing with a vivid double rainbow, a fatly arched one. Mad spring.
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‘I used to hit her,’ says the man in the bar.
‘What sort of hitting?’
‘Up against the wall. Backhander across the face. That sort of thing. And it would turn into a fuck. Because there are some women who goad a bloke into violence. It gives them the moral advantage. Years later, after I’d gone away lacerating myself for having been a violent, woman-bashing pig, she came to see me and said, “I wanted to tell you that I see now that I provoked you all those times, that I goaded you into hitting me.”’
‘Wow. That was honest. How did you feel then?’
‘Furious. That she hadn’t told it to me years earlier, and let me go on punishing myself all that time.’
‘Maybe it took her that long to understand it about herself. I think it was big of her.’
He goes silent. Flicks me a complicated look.
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M has her school friend over for the night. Together they enter an element quite separate from ordinary life—male and female characters, invented accents, vast fantasies, paroxysms of malicious laughter. There’s something terrifying about them.
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I love F and I want him to be joyful. I’d like to say to him, ‘Let’s chuck the whole jigsaw up in the air and see what comes down.’ But he wants to hash things over, to make sardonic remarks, to criticise again my horrible personality. The love and attention I have to give him wither on the vine. A line from some forgotten book: ‘We always want those we are hurting to be gay.’
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A visit from the new parents. She feeds the baby from her enormous breasts, so big she has to lie on her back and lay him belly down across her bosom like a tiny mountaineer.
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The Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante says that the writer is important not because he can write but because he can listen. His job is ‘to catch the human voice in flight’.
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Sex fades, and if one has chosen the right person something else comes to fill the space it leaves. Maybe one day I’ll read this over and be overwhelmed with bitter laughter.
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In the library I sat down with three translations of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Translators are a mob of cheats, vain and attention-seeking. An impossible profession. So I stumbled from word to word in the original, without a dictionary. I wanted to groan and weep with frustration. All that knowledge I once had, dissipated through lack of use.
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Stranger at the lunch table: ‘This is the day after my husband walked out. He came home on my wedding anniversary and said he’d reached a stage in his life where he didn’t want the responsibility of a family. I’ve taken some tranquillisers. That’s why I’m not having any wine.’ Her elder boy, she said, took to his bed, then asked her, ‘What did I do wrong?’ The younger boy cried for a quarter of an hour, then came out of his room and said, ‘Why don’t we all have a game of cards?’ Maybe it was the tranquillisers, but something about her calm chilled me. I sat beside her, aware that I was gazing carefully and curiously into her face as she talked. She was very good-looking, with eyes set in deep sockets. ‘I’m a pretty tough lady,’ she said. ‘I’ll survive.’
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A little girl today at the lolly shop. Seven or so. Silvery blond hair pulled into wispy pigtails. Jeans rolled to the knees, and the most extraordinary legs and feet. Her calves were as developed as a dancer’s, slim and with muscles clearly outlined, almost squared. She sprang and leapt about with her sister. She crept after a bird that had hopped under the table looking for crumbs. Something heart-breakingly strong about her legs and high-arched feet.
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The mother asked the father to go to the counter for an ice cream. He turned to go, then flung himself back to her with a grimace of discontent and said, ‘You go. I feel an idiot, holding your purse.’
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‘Marriage is a kind of…mystical union,’ said the new father. ‘You’re not only you any more.’ Mystical union. I stared at him. The size of the statement, the theological term, dropped casually at the table. I have never, ever felt any such thing, and do not expect to. Like R, I feel that ‘in the end, there’s only you’.
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The newspaper interviewer, young and intelligent and pretty, with a thick plait, seemed disappointed that I was not ‘rebellious’. ‘Did you have a message?’ she asked. ‘Were you trying to criticise middle class values?’ ‘No. I was just trying to tell a story the best way I could.’
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Young male photographer: ‘Come on. Big smile. Love those big smiles.’
‘Please don’t tell me to smile.’
‘You look starched.’
‘I am starched. I am a starched person.’
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Peacocks in the courtyard outside my office window engage in what looks like mating preliminaries: the male puts up his splendiferous tail and strolls about, stretching it forward, curving it over his head, bowing and turning and preening like a Brazilian drag queen. I have a powerful urge to run out there and sink the toe of my boot into his fluffy arse.
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We rode together into the big park. Spring flowers everywhere—freesias in throngs, and startling growths of kangaroo paw with its dark red, vividly red stalks. From an eminence I saw a vast cloud of rain moving in from upriver. It hit us and she fell off her bike—came off slowly and gracefully into a patch of thick grass. It cushioned her. The rain poured down and we were doubled over with laughter. She was too weak from laughing to get up. She knelt there in the undergrowth bowed over with her palms on her thighs.
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‘I burnt all your letters,’ he said. ‘The postcards exploded. I thought that was significant.’
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First student: ‘That’s a cliché.’
Second student: ‘I put it there on purpose! To disorient people!’
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The strange couple arrived late at the dinner party. She paraded in, chin high, teeth blazing. She had skinny little legs and a short dress that barely reached her knees. No sooner had they sat down than she said to her husband, whose little legs were as stumpy as hers were stick-like, ‘Dougal, would you go out to the car and get my bag?’ He sat still. We all looked at him. ‘I won’t be able to find it,’ he said sulkily. ‘Oh, just run out and get it,’ she said, as if brushing aside a child’s objection. And he did. She spoke with a kind of serene boastfulness: ‘One of the reasons why I know more than many people is that we had servants, a butler, a boy—and I read a great deal.’ Throughout the meal she was always moulding her husband: ‘Dougal. Tuck your serviette into your belt, so you won’t keep dropping it and having to hunt for it. That’s better.’ I worked hard for hours, asking questions to keep myself awake. Late in the evening her husband turned to me: ‘So. What’s s’ special about you?’ I surprised myself by saying calmly, ‘Why are you speaking to me like that? I don’t know how to answer.’ He backed down at once. He said he had taken up golf, and played by himself at the crack of dawn.
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Eduard Limonov, in It’s Me, Eddie, describes a thirty-year-old woman as ‘ageing’, ‘in the autumn of her life’.
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Elizabeth Jolley spoke about the huge hotel the Toronto festival had put her in: ‘The first night, there was a white flower in the bathroom. The second night, a scarlet flower. Of course this sort of thing is completely wasted on someone of my age.’
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‘He’s a sweet bloke, isn’t he.’
‘He is. Adorable. But with such vast areas of ignorance! Not knowing what ravioli was!’
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I came out of the Arts building this evening after my class and saw a huge, pale-orange moon rising out of the Swan River. It was so big that for a moment I didn’t know what it was. And then I wanted to shout to people passing, ‘Why aren’t we all standing still gazing at it? Or down on our knees praying to it?’
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She had long smooth dark hair drawn back off her ears and temples by two combs, and skin that at first I thought was made-up; as the evening progressed and we struck up conversation, she came and sat beside me and I saw that her skin was bare, and quite perfect. I liked her. She was extremely slim, and was wearing a cobalt blue jumper with shoulder pads. Once, in an absent moment, she pushed her left sleeve up past her elbow. This gesture made her seem less perfectly presented; it was the moment at which her beauty ceased to repel me. I looked happily at her lovely face while she talked.
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‘Some people are Christians,’ said J, ‘some people are atheists or agnostics, and some people agonise about it. They’re sub-Christians. I think that’s what you are.’
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The house: an uncertainty of taste, a bit too cluttered, furniture not quite the right shape for the room that contains it; but pleasant, light and clean. If I owned a house I would always be getting rid of things.
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Homosexual man ten years older than I am: ‘My parents always took care to teach us that we mustn’t show our emotions—that they are tedious, and a bore and a nuisance to other people. I learned this lesson so well that as an adult I have found myself in a situation where someone will leave me because he thinks I don’t need him .’
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At dinner the surgeon asked me why I write with a pen rather than using a dictaphone or a word processor. ‘Why would I?’ ‘Because it’s faster and more efficient.’ ‘But it’s my life’s work. I’m not in a hurry.’ I was surprised to hear myself make that answer.
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When I play the piano I have a lot of noble and generous thoughts. Moral thoughts. Correctives to what I actually do. In my life I have gone round hurting people. I would like to ask everyone I know: On what basis do you make moral decisions? I know what they’d say: ‘You’ve always been good at getting what you want.’ But now I can’t, and I don’t like it.
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A dream about a heap of old fans that I found on the floor behind a couch. They were all made of ivory and clearly of value. I picked them up, one by one. They were heavy, smooth and very beautiful. One of them consisted of so many slats that I couldn’t open it right out: as if it were a full circle of slats, and not in a fan form at all—I could not handle its richness. Another had too few slats, only two or three, and even those were so loosely connected that they flopped in the hand, like keys on a ring.
‘What could a fan represent?’ I asked my hostess.
She looked slightly panicky: ‘Fresh air?’
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The only passionate love that can co-exist with civilised daily working life is the love we have for our children. The other sort either loses its madness and becomes something else, or blows everything sky-high.
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I opened the front door. It was the professor. He handed me the cheque for the week’s work, and said without preliminary, ‘What’s speed?’ His son had rung him from Sydney, asking for money ‘for a ticket home’. He showed me a photo of a gaunt, good-looking boy of twenty or so, dressed in fashionable rags, his hair with that gelled, torn-out-by-the-roots look. Thank God for Javo. My girl sees no romance in that.
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‘I should tell you I’ve read your book in proof,’ said the visiting writer. ‘Brendan had it at his place. He was sure you wouldn’t mind.’ He added, in a light, dismissing tone, ‘I rather enjoyed it.’
Is that all you feel about it? Is that really all?
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With the drawing pens K gave me I begin to understand the limitations of the rapidograph: so rigid, the line unvarying. With the dip pen you get thick and thin, and curlicues, and the way you can draw a striped jumper is absolutely voluptuous.
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The new parents were moving house and I went to give them a hand. I helped them carry boxes and cartons for an hour or so. Eventually I said, ‘Well, I’m off now.’ He looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read. His face was white, even strained. ‘You were mad to come,’ he said. ‘Dunno why you stayed so long.’ I cried on the way home.
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‘Did you get my letters?’
‘Yes. It’s the problem of timing. When I needed the letters they didn’t come, and when they came I didn’t need them.’
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In the roadhouse the food was what you’d expect and I loved it. I ordered a nut sundae. ‘What flavour topping?’ asked the lacklustre waitress. ‘Chocolate,’ I whispered, flooded with bliss.
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I’d go outside except that a large Alsatian is loose in the motel compound, roaming about in that smooth, low-backed way they have; I heard deep barking first, then looked out and saw the dog, posing like a dingo against the swimming-pool fence, favouring one hind leg and dragging its lead.
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One of Elizabeth Jolley’s stories starts: ‘Every small town has some kind of blessing.’ And so does every blighted motel. The tiny room, the sagging bed, but when I climbed up and cranked open the bathroom window, what I saw was a sunny morning and a big paddock full of what I ignorantly imagined was wheat. Something yellow.
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Rereading my letter I saw I had smudged the ink while turning a page, at such a point that he’d think it was the blot of a tear. Oh no. I threw it in the bin.
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‘If I asked you now to drop everything and run away with me,’ said K, ‘you wouldn’t, would you.’
(Hangs her head) ‘No. But I would’ve. Once.’
‘What changed?’
‘I started thinking.’
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Peter Handke’s notebooks, The Weight of the World. Intense pleasure at the tininess of his observations. Actually, they’re not observations so much as junctions between moments. When I read them I feel that I am not after all crazy or even weird. I feel strengthened, private, encouraged. I feel the worth of very small things. The whole cast of his mind is familiar to me.
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Indira Gandhi has been assassinated.
‘They got her and missed Maggie,’ said F.
‘Only just.’
‘She’d finished cleaning her teeth only a few moments before.’
‘It’s because those idiots mess around with bombs,’ I said. ‘Guns are more accurate.’
As if we were professionals, or had considered such actions ourselves.
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P wheeled her bike towards me across the grass. Her shirt was the colour of the grass, her bike basket that of the daisies. It was spring.
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When people have been drinking they taste of wood.
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A young man sings tunefully and wordlessly in the street: ‘dada–da da–dadadada.’ Writing those sounds, a blast of memory—being taught to write. At Manifold Heights State School. A flash of the old building. The objective correlative is the loop loop loop action of dadadadadadada.
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I love to make F laugh. How handsome he looks when his face is filled with teeth.
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‘“I want you to go on living for many years.” I was glad to hear her say that. It was a bright, pure, friendly night, reasonable through and through.’ —Peter Handke, The Weight of the World
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‘Faut pas contrarier les fous.’ In French cartoons a mad person is drawn with a funnel as a hat.
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‘Do you think there’s anyone in the world who doesn’t like Bach?’
He shrugs, fills his cup with strong tea. ‘I don’t know. It’d be like not liking water.’
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When the English teacher got a posting to Inner Mongolia she took a whole suitcase full of sanitary pads and tampons—‘They stuff themselves with rags, or, out in the country, leaves’—but her menopause came, and she’s never had a period since.
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‘Writing: safe again.’ —Peter Handke. He’s more brutal with himself than I have ever been. He inspires me to try to be more truthful in this book. It’s hard, for I am always hiding something, either from myself or from the person who may or may not, today or on some future day, read this and be inclined to think less of me.
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K calls from some hotel, to tell me, thick-voiced from crying, that his friend, whom I didn’t know, has killed himself. With pills. ‘He set it up. He told his girlfriend to go away for the weekend, said he was going to work; didn’t turn up at work but when people went to his place there was no answer and his car wasn’t there. After a couple of days they broke in. They found his little body in there.’ He was crying; so was I. ‘He wasn’t a close friend of mine. But he was one of the pure ones. He wasn’t one of the guilty ones. It’s the dirty, gritty ones who survive.’
