Yellow Notebook, page 15
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You can’t write about this stuff. I met my Mighty Force on top of the rock and it played with me.
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‘She’s got a season ticket,’ said Dad. ‘She likes to go to concerts. She likes classical music. Oh, I like it too, but—I reckon you can have too much of that sort of thing.’ The idea of excess; how he hates it. I walked out to see the sun go down, and passed the bar, from which poured loud music and voices, like the noise of a party. I glanced in, saw dimness, many men in working clothes, some bending over pool tables. I loved the noise. I thought gladly that somewhere people were shouting, talking to each other, over-doing it. I looked round and saw a clapped-out Valiant with two mattresses and some bendy strips of building materials strapped to the roof. In the front seat sat three men in singlets, dust-coated, sunburnt. I smiled and waved, and so did they. The driver planted his foot and the car took off in a plume of dust. The motor sounded sick, the man was laughing, I laughed too and off I went, running and jumping and swinging my arms. ‘Ratbags!’ I shouted to myself, a tribute to maniacs and excess.
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Corny, mediocre country-and-western songs that touch on painful truth.
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My father lives on meat.
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At the base of the rock the silence plugs my ears. There are no sounds. Then a little tuft of grass behind me rustles. I jump round. Other clumps hiss and move, it is a sudden rush of wind, my skin stands up.
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Oh, how we hang on to that last prison! Even though it’s ugly and damaging.
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I felt stranger and stranger. I took a cab to North Sydney. In the hotel a strange wind whined at the window and what water I could see was mistral-coloured. I sat looking out at the warm evening, the sparkling towers, and thought in a stunned way, This is a very peculiar moment in my life.
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I could say to him, ‘I would get a broken heart if you left. But it’s been broken before, and has healed.’
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In the funding meetings they probably think I am ‘tough and ruthless’, but they are mistaking for ruthlessness a spontaneous following of my shit-detector, which is the only part of me that functions confidently in this impersonal world.
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A poem translated from the Arabic called Homesickness. Words to the effect of ‘Once again you take out your knife and stab me’, and then this: ‘Nobody knows whether I am dancing or staggering.’
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‘There is something between me and her.’
‘Since when?’
‘Two weeks.’
I keep walking but put my hands in my pockets.
Nobody knows whether I am staggering or dancing.
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It is night. Perhaps it is raining, or has been. He stands with my suitcase in his hand, and looks wildly for his car. The car park is half empty, but he cannot see it. ‘I think it has been stolen,’ he says. ‘Look again,’ I say. ‘It must be here.’ And it is, white and long, slightly closer to the building than he has remembered.
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He has been tormented for a long time by childlessness.
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I’m split in two: the shocked, stunned part which will suffer when feeling returns, and another part which examines and censors certain urges that rise thickly and clumsily from the stunned part: no, that is a cheap shot; no, there you are drawing attention to yourself as suffering; no, it would not be just to say that, and so on.
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I slept about two hours, woke at 5.30 in my room and watched the curtains get whiter.
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‘You never made concessions to me, in the way you lived your life.’ This I cannot deny.
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Downstairs M and the two girls from Ballarat have set up their music stands and are playing eighteenth-century music with sweetness and confidence. I love their straight backs, their gay clothes, their lovely concentration. ‘Again? Two, three, four.’
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I was hard inside, bitter and cold, wanting to hurt her: ‘If you’d been fifty-three, ugly and stupid, this wouldn’t have happened.’ But she went on being humble. She turned the other cheek, is that it? She went on standing there, presenting herself, not running away.
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‘People who are jealous,’ he said, ‘ask questions whose answers will hurt them. That’s why I lied.’
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‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve hurt you terribly.’
‘But I have hurt you much worse than that.’
‘Let’s forgive each other.’
‘I forgive you for everything.’
‘I forgive you too, for everything.’
All this through sobs, and floods of tears. And then we went out into the kitchen and started drinking.
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The girls played, and I washed the dishes, wearing the grotesque rubber gloves my sister brought me from New York, with the silver ring and painted nails. I finished the scotch. I went to bed. I read a poem by Alison Clark called Credo: ‘I am chained, but I have a soul…’ And then I went to sleep.
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M’s father, F and me walking in the cemetery with the dog.
Now I have two ex-husbands.
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Strange images of loneliness: a bathroom that’s clean, with a hollow sound because it contains only two towels, hers and mine.
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In the old woman’s calm flat, full of her quiet, idiosyncratic, practical objects and things of unusual colour, she too was calm. Women who live alone and like it have a rested, full look. I told her everything. ‘It seems,’ she said, ‘that when you are successful you need to have someone near who will undercut you. As if you will not allow yourself to flower fully.’
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In the wine bar F put to me his proposition. I stayed firm, but felt inside the small screaming sadness of having to reject something you long for but which is offered in a wrong spirit.
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I need to find out why I so often get myself into situations where people have to symbolically murder me.
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My little niece’s collection of matchboxes, full of obsessively modelled plasticine objects. Each box has a label: ‘CONTAINS: Carrot. Guitar’. I want to burst out laughing with each treasure she unveils, her intricate inspirations. I long to make a little movie, to show her absorbed expression, the way her head comes forward on her neck to peep into the next container.
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‘My experience tells me that marriage does not make one happier. It takes away the illusion that had sustained a deep belief in the possibility of a kindred soul.’ —Paula Modersohn-Becker in her diary, 1902
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‘…Layers, or strata, or veils; an indefinable looseness or flexibility of handling; windows; autobiographical content; animals, flowers; a certain kind of fragmentation; a new fondness for the pinks and pastels and ephemeral cloud colours that used to be tabu unless a woman wanted to be accused of making “feminine” art…’ —Lucy Lippard on recurring elements in women’s art, in From the Center
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Leave me alone. I’ll get over you if you’ll just leave me alone.
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A drunken, filthy old man walked straight off the street into R’s house. He thought it was his place. We pushed him gently out the front door. He sat on the pavement shouting: ‘I kill. I kill everything.’ After half an hour he got up and walked away.
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A voice almost oily with the desire to appear co-operative.
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‘When my husband and I split up,’ the woman told me, ‘he suddenly wanted to talk at great length about himself. He used to invite me over and cook a meal and have a bottle of wine, and start pouring out streams of stuff. I used to feel so terribly tired, and bored, that I’d fall asleep at the table.’
‘Because it was too late?’
‘Yes—and because instead of tinkering all along, the way women do with their friends, he wanted to produce one great dollop, and expected me to pick it up and carry it. And I couldn’t, and didn’t want to.’
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Traces of his presence: large, hacked scraps of toenail on the bedcovers. I picked them up with care. Lucky for him I’m not a witch.
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Fresh morning. I went for a jog in Princes Park. Elms still fluttering and shedding those very pale green seedpods: they make a tiny rustle on the ground when a breeze moves them. Near the football ground a black man, a Pacific Islander I think, was doing stretch exercises after a run. His body was thick, dark, packed solid, shining, in green shorts and a tracksuit top. I think that’s what he was wearing. How on earth do people give evidence in murder trials?
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A houseful of sleeping teenage girls. Bleached hair sticking out of twisted doonas.
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I told Z that we’d split up. His reaction was what I’d expected—a rapid drawing-back, a look that said, ‘I don’t want you to tell me about it, I don’t want to know the emotional stuff.’
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At Tarrawarra the brown river ran by. In an outside corner of the abbey there was an arsenal of anti-magpie sticks, leaning against the white weatherboards. Each of us carried one in rifle position on the shoulder. Every now and then we would pause and stand still. Always traffic noise, but also the twittering of swallows. The soft, heavy air that hangs over rich farmland. Wheel marks in the grass—on each blade a glossy sheen of light.
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The interviewer asked me a strange question: ‘In what ways are you a different person from the one you were ten or twenty years ago?’
I could have bawled, but I thought for a long time and then said, in a low voice, ‘I know now that people will do anything. They will do anything.’
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At the Harbourfront International Literary Festival in Toronto I am mistaken by three separate male writers for a staff helper. ‘How many buses do you have, in this organisation?’ ‘I’ve no idea. I don’t work for it.’ Stanley Elkin, an American writer of ‘extravagant, satirical fiction’, is offended when I say I have to go straight home after the festival. ‘Nobody has to do anything.’ ‘Yes, they do.’ ‘Why can’t you stay a couple of weeks and go to New York?’ ‘I’d have liked to. But I have to go straight home.’ ‘But why?’ ‘Because I split up with my husband just before I came away, and I’ve got a daughter at home.’ That shut him up. But when he found out that my daughter was sixteen he renewed his attack. He moves about on two sticks and has the bitter look of someone in pain.
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In the gallery I liked humble paintings of interiors. A bedroom, a strip of light across a chest of drawers. It becomes clear to me that middling art comforts, while very good art challenges and unsettles. The Henry Moores, though, do something else: they make you still. Your breathing slows down.
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Two gay shop assistants saying goodbye. The black one says, ‘Touch you later.’
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At Niagara Falls, Kenzaburō Ōe told me a little story. ‘A Japanese man came up to me, back there. He said, “Are you Japanese?” I said, “Yes.” He showed me his camera and said, “Japanese camera.” Then he said, pointing at the falls, “Are you surprised?” I said, “Yes.” He turned to his wife and said, “This man is Japanese, and he is surprised.”’ We laughed so much, we could not stop.
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The timelessness of a long flight. I gazed down on the land we were passing over. An immensity of absolute flatness, divided by humans into a regular pattern of squares, and planted and cropped. It spread away in every direction for thousands of miles. I was frightened. Every now and then a small town would cluster at an intersection of roads, or in the bend of a river. I thought, Each of these settlements has a name, a social fabric, a feel to it all its own which its inhabitants consider to be unique. This thought made my heart ache. We passed over snow-sprinkled mountains, then a wide valley, then a grey, bare wilderness through which twisted seaweed-shaped rivers or dry watercourses.
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At 3 am I woke, and came to very gradually. My eyes focused on the top shelf of a bookcase. I thought, ‘That looks just like my bookcase at home.’ I let my glance roll sideways and down. I saw a planet lamp, a mirror, all these minor, still objects in the faint light from outside the curtains. I was astonished. ‘This room, in Canada, is exactly like my room in Melbourne.’ Then I woke properly. I was at home, in my own bed. A moment of absolute happiness.
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The Exhibition Gardens are thick with new leaves and lovers lying in sexual postures.
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The woman at the wedding who told me about the months, even years, after her husband was killed in a car accident. ‘Nothing that should have been good was. I’d look out the window in the morning and see the sun shining, but it wasn’t good.’ Is that what grief is?
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On the phone K told me some true-life stories about swords and rings. They were wonderful. I said, ‘Why aren’t you writing all this down? Without trying to be funny?’
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Imagine living in a city beside an OCEAN.
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At the pub reading, the lights shone in my eyes and I saw nothing but one young woman’s face, right at the back. She was smiling, rapt. It unnerved me. I felt I could not read well enough, had not written well enough, to justify her undefended openness.
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I saw the mad one. His face is triangular, like that of a knight in a painting. His eyes slide away.
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I wonder if what we see as a world full of couples is really a world of triangles.
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The dream where someone gave me three Swiss knives, big, middle-sized, small.
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I get no pleasure out of drinking. I feel blurred, stunned, disconnected, after even the tiniest quantity. I’ve got pains. Shoulders stiff as coathangers. My neck is rigid. My ovaries hurt. My tubes hurt. The twinges are tube-shaped.
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The meeting at the Goethe-Institut. Openable windows, huge pale green leaves thickly massed outside the glass. The motherly woman stood next to me with her hand on my shoulder. Her kindness made my self-control almost impossible to maintain. I longed to burst out sobbing, to lean my face against the arm of the tall man beside me, and for people to go on talking quietly and let me be weak. But the show had to go on. She pointed to my head and said, ‘You’ve got a real little puritan in there, haven’t you!’
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I dreamt I saw a white bird, like a pigeon, waddling along a path with a smaller white bird riding on its head, and the second white bird had an even smaller bird perched on its head, a bird that was of a striated appearance, black and white, like a stone or a streaky opal. People watched and laughed indulgently, as at a clever circus trick or a childish antic.
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It is always me who ends our phone calls. Sometimes I feel boredom creeping over me, but K could chatter on till nightfall.
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I feel: disgusted. Angry, jealous, tired. Bored. But all in quantities so small as to make action or even statement too much of an effort.
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Dreamt I was in India, in a room full of children. The window was open. A jeep full of soldiers drove past. One of them stood up and threw a hand grenade into the room. I turned away and covered my head. One of the older boys picked up the grenade and threw it back out. A close-up of the grenade as it lay on the floor: it looked black and greasy, and its surface was divided into those raised squares one sees in cartoon drawings of such manly objects.
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M got 97% for French. She’s going to Paris next week. In the park she left her coat on a rail and did cartwheels and somersaults on the grass.
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‘Perhaps it is better that men don’t grow up,’ said the Polish doctor. ‘When they do they become sad, and serious.’ Is this why women are sad? Because they are obliged to grow up? They have children, they shoulder the emotional responsibility and let the men go free?
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A letter comes. Another description, from someone I love, of me as too big to handle.
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I dreamt I went to the doctor complaining of a nasty discharge. She approached me with a pair of scissors. ‘You’re not going to cut my hair, are you?’ I cried. She insisted, good-humouredly, and I let her. I shut my eyes while she clipped. When I opened them and looked in the mirror I was surprised to find I looked all right. Fragile, almost pretty, like someone recovering from a dangerous illness.
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The old writer read a story full of flip stuff, lists of expensive things—cars, furniture, whisky—and tales of faithless wives. I watched two women in the front row. As he read, their faces registered a polite distaste.
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The way P had put watercolour on the paper made tears of respect come to my eyes. A picture of a centaur in a ring of moonlit trees had the same effect on me as a book I remember reading as a child, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone: some children in a moonlit garden, silvery and mysterious and terrifying.
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I have stopped cracking hardy. I cry, I shout. Last night I reached the lowest moment. I went into the kitchen, I didn’t turn on the light. I stood at the sink and ran myself a glass of water, but I was crying so hard my mouth was too stiff to drink. I was full of shame and cheapness and misery.
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The painter told me that when she finished the portrait she ‘sat down in the lumpy chair and cried’. The miracle of making something that wasn’t there before. Pulling something out of thin air.
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I cried a bit more and then I ate my breakfast and read the paper. A stubborn optimism came creeping into me as I climbed the stairs. I went and had a healthy shit. I got out my new Hermes and set it up with pleasure.
