The Golden Notebook (53 page)

a doorway, I'd come after you for assurance, yeah, it's the truth. If you were there I'd come after you. I need security, yes, that's what I need from you, my analyst says so, and who am I to contradict? SHE: Yeah, that's right, that's what you need from me. And it's what you get. You need Mom, God help me. (They are both laughing, leaning towards each other, screaming with laughter, helpless with it.) HE: Yeah, you're my mom. He says so. He's always right. Well it's O. K. to hate your mom, it's in the book. I'm right on the line. I'm not going to feel guilty about that. SHE: Oh no, why should you feel guilty, why should you ever feel guilty at all? HE (shouting, his dark handsome face distorted): Because you make me guilty, I'm always in the wrong with you, I have to be, mom's always right. SHE (suddenly not laughing, but desperate with anxiety): Oh, Nelson, don't get at me all the time, don't do it, I can't stand it. HE (soft and menacing): So you can't stand it? Well, you've got to stand it. For why? Because I need you to stand it, that's why. Hey, perhaps you should go to the analyst. Why should I do all the hard work? Yeah, that's it; you can go to the analyst, I'm not sick, you're sick. You're sick! (But she has given in, turned away from him, limp and desperate. He jumps towards her victorious but appalled): And now what's wrong with you! Can't take it, huh? Why not? How d'you know it's not you that's sick: why should it always be me that's in the wrong? Oh, don't look like that! Trying to make me feel bad, as usual, huh? Well, you're succeeding. O. K., so I'm in the wrong. But please don't worry-not for a moment. It's always me that is in the wrong. I said so, didn't I? I've confessed, haven't I? You're a woman, so you're in the right. O. K., O. K., I'm not complaining. I'm just stating a fact-I'm a man, so I'm in the wrong. O. K.? But now, suddenly, the tiny blonde woman (who has drunk at least three-quarters of a bottle of Scotch and is as cool and controlled as a soft little kitten with sweet, just-open misty blue eyes) gets up and says: 'Bill, Bill, I want to dance. I want to dance, baby.' And Bill jumps up towards the record player, and the room is full of late Armstrong, the cynical trumpet and the cynical good-humoured voice of the older Armstrong. And Bill has gathered his beautiful little wife in his arms, and they are dancing. But it is a parody, a parody of good-humoured sexy dancing. Now everyone is dancing, and Nelson and his wife are away on the edge of the group, ignored. No one is listening to them, people can't stand it any more. And then Nelson says, loud, jerking his thumb at me: 'I'm going to dance with Anna. I can't dance, I can't do anything, you don't have to tell me that, but I'm going to dance with Anna.' I stand up, because everyone is looking at me, saying with their eyes: Go on, you've got to dance, you've got to. Nelson comes over, and says loudly in parody: 'I'm going to dance with Anna. Dance with m-e-e-! Da-a-a- ance with me, Anna.' His eyes are desperate with self-dislike, misery, pain. And then, in parody: 'Com'n, let's fuck, baby, I like your style.' I laugh. (I hear my laugh, shrill and pleading.) They all laugh, in relief, because I'm playing my role; and the dangerous moment is passed. And Nelson's wife laughs loudest. She gives me, however, an acute, fearful inspection; and I know that I've already become part of the marital battle; and that the whole point of me, Anna, was probably to add fuel to the battle. They've probably fought over me, interminably, in the terrible hours between four and seven in the morning, when they wake in anxiety (but anxiety about what?) and fight to the death. I can even hear the dialogue: I dance with Nelson, while his wife watches, smiling in painful anxiety, and listen to the dialogue: SHE: Yes, I suppose you think I don't know about you and Anna Wulf. HE: That's right, you don't know and you'll never know, will you? SHE: So you think I don't know, well I do know, I've just got to look at you! HE: Look at me, baby! Look at me, doll! Look at me, honey, look, look, look! What do you see? Lothario? Don Juan? Yes, that's me. That's right. I've been screwing Anna Wulf, she's just my style, my analyst says she is, and who am I to argue with my analyst? After the wild, painful, laughing dance, everyone dancing in parody, and urging all the other members of the group to keep up the parody, for their dear lives' sake, we all say good night and go home. Nelson's wife kisses me at parting. We all kiss each other, one big happy family, though I know, and they know, that any member of this group could fall out of it tomorrow, from failure, or drunkenness or unconformity, and never be seen again. Nelson's wife's kiss on my cheeks-first left, then right, is half warm and genuine, as if to say: I'm sorry, we can't help it, it's nothing to do with you; and half exploratory, as if to say: I want to know what you've got for Nelson that I haven't. And we even exchange glances, ironic and bitter, saying: Well, it's got nothing to do with either of us, not really! The kiss makes me uncomfortable, nevertheless, and I feel an impostor. Because I was realising something I should have known by using my intelligence, without ever having gone to their flat at all: that the ties between Nelson and his wife are bitterly close, and never to be broken in their lives. They are tied by the closest of all bonds, neurotic pain-giving; the experience of pain dealt and received; pain as an aspect of love; apprehended as a knowledge of what the world is, what growth is. Nelson is about to leave his wife; he will never leave her. She will wail at being rejected and abandoned; she does not know she will never be rejected. The evening after the party I was at home sitting in a chair, exhausted. An image kept coming into my mind: it was like a shot from a film, then it was as if I was seeing a sequence from a film. A man and a woman, on a roof-top above a busy city, but the noise and the movement of the city are far beneath them. They wander aimlessly on the rooftop, sometimes embracing, but almost experimentally, as if they are thinking: How does this taste?-then they separate again and aimlessly move about the roof. Then the man goes to the woman and says: I love you. And she says, in terror: What do you mean? He says: I love you. So she embraces him, and he moves away, with nervous haste, and she says: Why did you say you loved me? And he says: I wanted to hear how it would sound. And she says: But I love you, I love you, I love you-and he goes off to the very edge of the roof and stands there, ready to jump-he will jump if she says even once again: I love you. When I slept I dreamed this film sequence-in colour. Now it was not on a roof-top, but in a thin tinted mist or fog, an exquisitely-coloured fog swirled and a man and a woman wandered in it. She was trying to find him, but when she bumped into him, or found him, he nervously moved away from her; looking back at her, then away, and away again. The morning after the party Nelson telephoned and announced that he wanted to marry me. I recognised the dream. I asked him why he had said that. He shouted: 'Because I wanted to.' I said he was closely bound to his wife. Then the dream, or film sequence stopped, and his voice changed and he said, humorous: 'My God, if that's true, I'm in trouble.' We talked a bit longer, then he said he had told his wife he had slept with me. I was very angry, I said he was using me in his fight with Ms wife. He started screaming and reviling me as he had screamed at her the night before at the party. I put down the receiver and he was over in a few minutes. He was now defending himself about his marriage, not to me, but to some invisible observer. I don't think he was very conscious of my being there. I realised who it was when he said his analyst was on holiday for a month. He went off, shouting and screaming at me-at women. An hour later he telephoned me to say he was sorry, he was 'nuts' and that was all there was to it. Then he said: 'I haven't hurt you, Anna, have I?' This stunned me-I felt the atmosphere of the terrible dream again. But he went on: 'Believe me, I wanted nothing more than to have the real thing with you-' and then, switching into the painful bitterness-'If the love they say is possible is more real than what we seem to get.' And then again, insistent and strident: 'But what I want you to say is that I haven't hurt you, you've got to say it.' I felt as if a friend had slapped me across the face, or spat at me, or, grinning with pleasure, had taken a knife out and was turning it in my flesh. But I said that of course he had hurt me, but not in a way which betrayed what I felt; I spoke as he had spoken, as if my being hurt was something that could be thought of casually three months after the beginning of such an encounter. He said: 'Anna, it occurs to me-surely I can't be so bad-if I can imagine how one ought to be, if I can imagine really loving someone, really coming through for someone... then it's a kind of blueprint for the future, isn't it?' Well these words moved me, because it seems to me half of what we do, or try to be, amounts to blueprints for the future that we try to imagine; and so we ended this conversation, with every appearance of comradeship. But I sat, in a kind of cold fog, and I thought: What has happened to men that they can talk like this to women? For weeks and weeks Nelson has been involving me in himself- and he has been using all his charm, his warmth, his experience of involving women, and using them particularly when I've been angry, or he knows he has said something particularly frightening. And then he turns casually and says: Have I hurt you? For it seems to me such an abrogation of everything that a man is, that when I think of what it means I feel sick and lost (like being in a cold fog somewhere), things lose their meaning, and even the words I use then, become echo-like, become a parody of meaning. It was after the time he rang me to ask: Have I hurt you? that I dreamed and recognised it as the joy-in-destruction. The dream was a telephone conversation between me and Nelson. Yet he was in the same room. His outward guise was the responsible, warm-feeling man. Yet as he spoke his smile changed and I recognised the sudden unmotivated spite. I felt the knife turn in my flesh, between my ribs, the edges of the knife grinding sharp against the bone. I could not speak, because the danger, the destruction, came from someone I was close to, someone I liked. Then I began to speak into the telephone receiver, and on my own face I could feel the beginning of the smile, the smile of joyful spite. I even made a few dancing steps, the head-jerking, almost doll-like stiff dance of the animated vase. I remember thinking in the dream: So now I am the evil vase; next I'll be the old man-dwarf; then the hunch-backed old woman. Then what? Then Nelson's voice down the receiver into my ear: Then the witch, then the young witch. I woke, hearing the words ring out with a terrible spiteful gleeful joy: 'The witch, and then the young witch!' I have been very depressed. I have depended a great deal on that personality-Janet's mother. I continually ask myself- how extraordinary, that when inside I am flat, nervous, dead, that I can still, for Janet, be calm, responsible, alive? I haven't had the dream again. But two days ago I met a man at Molly's house. A man from Ceylon. He made overtures, and I rejected them. I was afraid of being rejected, of another failure. Now I am ashamed. I am becoming a coward. I am frightened because my first impulse, when a man strikes the sexual note, is to run, run anywhere, out of the way of hurt. [A heavy black line across the page.] De Silva from Ceylon. He was a friend of Molly's. I met him years ago at her house. He came to London some years ago and earned his living as a journalist, but rather poorly. He married an English woman. He impressed one at a party by his sarcastic cool manner; he made witty remarks about people, cruel, but curiously detached. Remembering him, I see him standing away from a group of people, looking on, smiling. He lived with his wife the bed-sitting-room, spaghetti-life of the literary fringes. They had one small child. Unable to earn a living here, he decided to return to Ceylon. His wife was unwilling: he is the younger son of a high-class family, very snobbish, who resented his marrying a white woman. He persuaded his wife to go back with him. His family would not take his wife in, so he found a room for her and spent his time half with her and the child and the other half with the family. She wanted to return to England, but he said it would be all right, and talked her into having another baby, which she did not want. No sooner was this second child born than he took flight. I suddenly had a telephone call from him, asking for Molly, who was away. He said he was in England because 'he had won a bet in Bombay, as a result of which he had a free ticket to England.' Later I heard this was untrue: he had gone to Bombay on a journalistic assignment where, on an impulse, he had borrowed money and flown to London. He had hoped that Molly, from whom he had borrowed money in the past, would take him on. No Molly, so he tried Anna. I said I had no money to lend at that time, which was true, but because he said he was out of touch with things, asked him to dinner and invited some friends to meet him. He didn't come, but telephoned a week later, abject, childish, apologetic, saying he was too depressed to meet people, 'couldn't remember my telephone number on the evening of the dinner.' Then I met him at Molly's, who had come back. He was his usual cool, detached, witty self. He had got a journalist's job, spoke with affection of his wife who was 'coming to join him, probably next week.' That was the night he invited me and I ran away. With good reason. But my fear was not from judgement, it was running away from any man, and that was why when he telephoned me next day I asked him to supper. I saw from how he ate that he wasn't eating enough. He had forgotten he had said that his wife was coming 'probably next week,' and now said 'she didn't want to leave Ceylon, she was very happy.' He said this in a detached way, as if he were listening to what he said. Up to this point we had been rather gay and friendly. But the mention of his wife struck a new note, I could feel it. He kept giving me cool, speculative and hostile glances. The hostility was not to do with me. We went into my big room. He was walking around it, alert, his head on one side, as it were listening, giving me the quick impersonal interested glances. Then he sat down, and said: 'Anna I want to tell you something that happened to me. No, just sit and listen. I want to tell you and I want you to just sit and listen and not say anything.' I sat