Yellow Notebook, page 16
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I pulled the petals off the pink roses, which were almost dead. I seized each bloom with my fingertips and pulled: they came away with a little fleshy helpless resistance.
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I dreamt of a church. A spiritual possibility in living alone, with children but without a man. I ate about a kilo of cherries, all by myself, without having to feel guilty for not sharing.
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I wanted to say, ‘Can I come over?’ But I was too proud.
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I am by myself. I think I like it but I’m not sure. It’s ‘good for me’.
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It is always worse to see your mother lie down and take it than to see her stand up and start yelling.
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The old woman showed us a photo of herself on holiday in America, standing on a country road in summer wearing a dress that reached halfway down her calves—an abundant skirt, a loose blouse and flat sandals. Her legs were comfortably spaced, her feet planted firmly. ‘It’s you! You look wonderful. You look like a peasant woman.’ She simpered, back home in her Melbourne eastern suburbs outfit of a neat-cut synthetic frock, sheer stockings, and prissy little high-heeled sandals that made her stance like that of a bird gripping a twig.
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Went to Communion. The Mighty Force is not there. Or it doesn’t stand near me. The bread and wine don’t seem to have anything to do with it. Or maybe it’s me, awkward on my knees, anxious about doing or saying the wrong thing among those pretty, slender, grey-haired ladies who genuflect.
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Twenty years ago, at uni, but I knew her at once. The long Italian boots, the brown wool dress. The face: closed, dark, in pain. The hands in pockets, the fast, absorbed walk, head down.
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We say hurtful things that are not quite true. Such a war. Ammunition to hand in any situation. Any memory can be distorted at will.
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He drove away. I stood at the gate. His face remained turned towards me until he was swallowed up in the dark.
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They told me that no English publisher is interested in my work. A bloke with a hyphenated name said, having read The Children’s Bach and Postcards from Surfers, that he ‘just didn’t like the stuff’. Why does this make me cry? Why should I care?
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The doctor’s kindness and intelligence make his face attractive. He said that the medical politics surrounding AIDS was ‘disgusting’. He said that at the hospital they got attached to the AIDS patients. ‘It’s awful. They all die. Every one of them. Young men, never had a day’s sickness in their lives. It’s sad. It’s as if your brothers and sisters kept on dying.’ He said the gay men in the AIDS task force ‘had a hidden agenda: basically, underneath, they claim it as a right that they should be able to fuck any man they choose. That’s all right, except when you’ve got a fatal disease.’
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I read in the New Yorker that Rosario Godoy, a member of an organisation of women searching for ‘disappeared ones’ in Guatemala, was found dead in a car that had crashed over a cliff. Also in the car were her brother and her infant son, both dead. It might have been passed off as an accident but for one thing: the baby’s fingernails had been pulled out.
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K calls and wants to change all the arrangements.
‘We’ve had our deadlines brought forward. They sprang it on us at the weekend.’
‘Why didn’t you ring up at the weekend and tell me?’
‘I had all my shopping to do,’ he says irritably, ‘and then I was at a party.’
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A strange little orgasm, a keeping-still orgasm, brought about by a sudden mind-sight of a museum, an art gallery, a wall filled to the sides with a rapid series of intense and highly-coloured paintings. All this, however, as if experienced by someone else, which explains my reluctance to use ‘I’ in an account of it. Now that K’s gone, and I’m in the hotel room by myself, I can’t find any trace of his having been here: as if the hours of his visit existed in some element other than the time which is now in force.
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A rainstorm, with hail and thunder, passed over. It blotted out the harbour entirely. It was strange to see the raindrops from this far (eleven storeys) above the ground: they fell past the window in an apparent order, each in its own column of air, not jostling or swerving. I fell asleep watching a tap-dancing movie on TV.
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I’m scared.
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I’d like to be able to accept my physical self as it is. I resist being looked at. I want to be the controlling one, the one who looks.
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The harbour pool, Balmain, with two women, a producer and a director, who want to make a movie with me. Grey water slapping, a salty smell like Eastern Beach in Geelong. We swam about, calling to each other and laughing. From the dressing sheds, if we stood on the seats, we could look out through louvres and see the low port buildings all peaceful in the grey rainy evening. We walked up the steep hill under the trees. A strong smell of moss. I remembered my body, that I was alive in the physical world.
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‘Gosh, you’re prolific, aren’t you!’
‘Lately I am—but I’m always lashing myself for being lazy.’
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I told the Jungian about Dad, his mother dying when he was two. ‘A child who loses his mother,’ he said, ‘is often unable to trust anyone, ever again.’
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Wonderful landscapes, full of grain—shades of blond—and tremendous clouds, richly shaped, with dark floors and boiling white tops. Sometimes a split, through which a clear blue would show or, further west, a paler pastel greenish-blue.
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She saves used teabags. She uses every teabag twice. I refuse to believe she’s that poor.
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A horrible dream about sex with a man whose face as we fucked turned beast-like: the eyes sank into the skull, moved closer together, burned with a red light. I knew that this creature wanted to murder me, and that I had some secret power which could hold its savagery under control as long as I went on believing I had this power.
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The student told me about speed, cocaine.
‘Do you mean snorting?’
‘No. Hitting. My boyfriend was dealing, he had enough money for us to go right down. I went right to the bottom, really quickly. And came up again. I feel I’ve got that stuff out of the way.’
‘Do your parents know?’
‘I told Mum. She said, “Should I be worried?” and I said, “No, you shouldn’t.”’
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I was getting dressed after my swim when I heard the woman on the turnstile say, ‘He’s got all his clothes on!’ Running steps, the PA hissed, and a scornful, angry male voice, highly amplified, said, ‘Will that man in his clothes get out of the water. GET OUT NOW.’ I came out to look. A sodden man with thick dark hair, in jeans and a shirt and shoes, was sitting in the posture of Rodin’s Thinker on a starting block, with his back to the water, passing one spread hand back and forth across his forehead. ‘He’s a flip,’ said the woman at the turnstile. ‘He’s a flip. He’s got something wrong with him.’
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Could I write a story without any characters? Only objects?
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I bought some red leather sandals and some pink ballet shoes.
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‘Cod seemed a suitable dish for a rejected one and I ate it humbly without any kind of sauce or relish.’ —Barbara Pym, Excellent Women. This is Elizabeth Jolley’s tone and it made me laugh out loud.
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At Parsley Bay I hit my right knee very hard against an underwater concrete step. It hurt so much that things went colourless.
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T and I agreed that we liked having short hair, and didn’t feel very female. She told me she had read a Jungian book about goddesses, and bought herself some skirts. ‘But in a while I got sick of them. They don’t have pockets. And what are you supposed to wear on your feet and legs?’ I lent her the Kombi. She stole some bricks in it, went home and built a barbecue, then rang and asked me to dinner. She cooked two trout on the coals.
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Q’s patient demeanour makes me ashamed of the pleasure I take in complaining, in being aggrieved.
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The murdered girl’s stepfather told us that at the committal hearing the two accused were sitting right in front of him. ‘They were holding hands and giggling. All my principles about capital punishment went out the window. Immediately. Straight away.’
Another friend at the table said, ‘Do you want to get inside their heads?’
A long pause.
‘No. I’ve never wanted that. Because it might make me feel—’
‘Merciful?’
‘No! Not merciful. I’m afraid it would be like going through the gates of hell. I’m afraid that if I found what violence and coldbloodedness there was in their heads, I might find the same thing in myself.’
The other man tried to argue with him about this—to comfort him, to reassure him that he could never be as bad as that. But he would not be persuaded. Secretly I admired him for it.
‘Everybody in my position,’ he said, ‘wants to be asked the questions we can’t ask ourselves.’ He said they want to be pushed, but they are concerned not to tell people things they might not be able to handle. ‘You’re scared you’ll make them feel worse than you do yourself.’
I asked him if I could come to the trial.
‘Why do you want to?’
‘First because I thought you might like people to be with you. And second because I’m curious.’
The real truth would be in reverse order. In fact the real truth is part 2. The first is cosmetic, though it is true also, in another way.
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Each of us sat with her chair turned slightly towards the open back door. The baby is due in five weeks. Upstairs I saw the baby’s things. I loved the singlets best of all: white cotton, size 000, with a rib. Something in Elizabeth Jolley about the pangs caused by the sight of a baby’s shoulders. I remember the shoulders, and the pangs.
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Someone’s applied to rent our spare room, a law student, and M’s school friend’s big brother.
‘Is he a spunk?’
‘Not when you first see him. But then you realise he is.’
‘What’s their family like?’
‘A bit like us. They eat crude things. Nobody’s much of a cook. Once I asked her if she wanted some pastrami and matzos, and she looked blank. I showed her what it was and she said, “At our place we call that meat and bread.”’
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C calls me from a restaurant in St Kilda. ‘My father’s just told me: a nudnik is a bore. A shlemiel is an idiot. And a shmendrick is a born loser.’
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I told the Jungian how I hated and feared the kind of privilege claimed by beautiful women.
‘And how have you claimed attention, Helen?’
I did not like being asked this question.
‘Sex. Using my brains.’
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Swimming laps at 8 pm. The cold, when I get out of the water, makes my jaw go up and down like that of a ventriloquist’s dummy.
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Tenant number 2. A, a born-again, from Sydney. Heavy eyelids, hair that grows in points in front of his ears, a slow naughty wit and an old-world turn of phrase: ‘Don’t give ’em too much leeway or they’ll skin you.’ The girls ask what makes black bread black. ‘It’s probably got molasses in it,’ he says. I inspect the packet. ‘There’s no mention of molasses on this list of ingredients.’ He snatches it from my hand with a snarl: ‘Gimme a look at that label.’ I seize the uke and defiantly play There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood. Maybe this could become a household.
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I reviewed Spalding Gray’s one-man show. Last night he came up to me in the lobby and shook my hand, asked for my phone number. Up close his eyes looked unnaturally wide apart, as if they didn’t focus or as if he’d had something to drink, or smoke. The audience loved him and I felt proprietary.
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Space Shuttle Challenger blew up just after blast-off. The ‘first school-teacher in space’ was thus vaporised before the eyes of her pupils, parents, husband and children. The strange shape of the exploded stuff—white smoke etc. It was pretty horrible but I felt revolted after a while by the emotional tirades the US media carried on with.
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The woman’s husband, whom she deeply loved, has died. She wrote: ‘I feel I have been reborn without skin on an alien planet.’
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The teenager told us that when she heard that her parents were going to separate, she pulled the new wallpaper off her bedroom walls. ‘I tore it all down with my fingernails. I didn’t even know I was doing it. I suddenly saw—’ She mimes waking up and looking at her outstretched hands as if they held strips of paper.
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The mind of A, the born-again, has several gears: dreamy and disconnected; witty and on the ball; plodding with difficulty from point to point in some long internal argument of which only the iceberg tips emerge in speech: ‘There’s worse things than war.’
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The gist of it is, I guess, that I wasn’t vulnerable, or feminine. F says that I didn’t need him enough, that I barged straight through him. I have to accept this in silence. Because it is true.
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I am a forty-three-year-old woman, a mother, healthy, reasonable-looking; I am in my own city; I am able to make a living; I am sometimes sad or frightened, and recently I have been hurt; but I am also learning to examine myself and my crimes less defensively; the Mighty Force has not lately come to me in the form I was expecting; but it does not abandon people, and it won’t abandon me.
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Spalding Gray, the monologist. He talks all the time. But since he is never boring, one is never bored. His voice is ‘soft, pleasant and emphatic’. He has a strange face, rather like a dog’s: big-mouthed and snubbed. He says he is very drawn to the neuroses of women: ‘I’m always acting out stuff with my mother, who killed herself in 1967.’ A woman approached him in Sydney. ‘It was getting too much for me so I left the bar without saying anything. Next morning she left a note in my box: “That was a pretty tacky thing to do.” She even came to my hotel when I wasn’t there and asked the clerk for my key.’ He gave me a copy of his book and wrote in it, having to ask me to check his spelling: ‘Thank you for shinning your lights on me.’ I suppose he meant what I wrote about him in the newspaper. We talked for several hours. I’ve never met a more fully and richly self-obsessed person in all my life.
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I listened and listened. Did I hear? Maybe not what the man was telling me, or wanting to impart; but something.
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The law student washed the dishes last night, without speed, enthusiasm or skill.
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A day at the murder trial, in the Supreme Court. At first bored with the nit-picking and the slow pace, but after a while we became accustomed to the rhythm and entered into the case’s world. The feast of human types dragged in as witnesses: two junkies; a man from Glen Waverley; a union official and his wife, a toughie with a cigaretty voice, long perfect silver nails which she tapped loudly on the witness stand, a carefully tended tan, long arms and legs, slender, very well-preserved (younger than me, no doubt). After this I was terribly tired, almost ecstatic with fatigue. And I was only watching.
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They have found at Ayers Rock the body—partly eaten by ‘dingoes, birds or goannas’—of a young English tourist who had fallen; and beside or near it a baby’s matinee jacket.
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A told me about his father and his brother. ‘I felt that if they couldn’t get themselves together they should die.’ He said it harshly, with a sharp pushing-aside gesture of one hand. Then, of course, they did, and the girl killed herself. ‘I just went to bed. I was completely undone. And I prayed. I didn’t believe, but I prayed.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said, “If there’s anybody who can take away this load of guilt, please will you.”’
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‘You seem happy lately, sweetheart. Singing round the house, always in a good mood.’
‘Yes, I am. It’s so much nicer around here. You used to fight all the time.’
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In the cathedral, fifteen minutes before the communion service was to start, a bloke got up and said, ‘As we feared, someone has rung a TV station and said there’s a bomb in the building.’ A boy of five or so was sitting beside me with his mother. At the word ‘bomb’ he looked up at me with an expression of intense and comical puzzlement, and said, as if trying to nut out a problem, ‘Well, it can’t be the Americans, because—’
‘It’s not a bomb from a plane,’ I said. ‘It’s only a stupid joke—somebody’s told the police that there’s a bomb under a seat.’
He sprang up like a scalded cat, would not be reassured that it was a hoax, and dragged his mother off down the aisle at a fast clip.
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Another day in court. Fascination seized me. An unflappable pathologist read out her description of the injuries and wounds on the girl’s body. The shock of detail.
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They rang and told me I’d won the festival award. Ten grand. I began to tremble at the knees.
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I woke and heard the north-westerly rushing the dead leaves past our house: thousands and thousands, an unending supply, a people going into exile. Now the sky over the low mountains is dusty orange.
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While we were in the Twins it began to thunder and lighten and pour with rain. The dog, chained to the post outside the shop, barked and whined. She did not have the nous to stand under the veranda.
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P called in at dinner time and ate with us. She spoke about Halley’s Comet and suddenly the wonder of its colossal journey struck me. Surely God exists? Can such a phenomenon have no meaning?
