Tuesday
David has just gone, the house is quiet; the girls have taken him to a publisher’s party. ‘Come on, Katherine, it’ll be fun,’ Anna said, ‘you can bask in David’s reflected glory.’ I waved them off, pleading a headache, intending to write this before taking yet another long hot bath and heading off to my dreamless bed. The bath is my sanctuary.
Word is out that David’s forthcoming book is marvellous, a certainty for every known literary prize. It is a sequel to that other triumphant book which made his name, that book of remembering which I once helped him to remember. On the rare occasion when I accompany him to a social event, strangers approach to tell him his book is a masterpiece, then they turn to me to say I have revolutionised the essay form. I am ashamed to say that I feel miserable whenever anyone compliments me on my column.
These days David is constantly being marched off to glamorous events, to meet actors and politicians, to have expensive lunches with literary editors; he is frequently asked to join the advisory boards of Australian cultural bodies. Because of my column I am sometimes asked to various things too—to speak at lunches for middle-class North Shore matrons, for example, who have never had to worry about money in their lives. Sometimes I feel like a terrorist within their midst and wish to depart from the script to tell them the real story. I have my fans, too, it seems; David says it is never done to insult one’s fans, no matter how few.
At these events, during questions after my ‘amusing’ speech, I am frequently asked if I am flattered by my husband’s literary portrayal of me as his muse, as an unearthly goddess whose beauty rivals that of the sun. I laugh modestly and hope they won’t be too disappointed by my actual human form, by the jowls at my chin, by the film across my once extraordinary blazing eyes. If only David knew what an image he made of me which I can never live up to. I have begun to say no whenever I am asked to these events: I feel a strange embarrassment about my collapsing face, as if I were stepping out in public sporting a particularly ripe cold sore. And besides, appearing to be anything but flattered by David’s portrayal would seem unattractive. Bitterness is the least appealing of emotions.
Everyone wants to know what I think of David’s new book, how I feel about being portrayed as that fallen beauty who broke her poor husband’s heart by having an affair. At least I assume that’s how I’m portrayed—I still haven’t read it. He keeps pushing it in front of me, where it remains unread on the table or my desk or wherever he has put it, like something crouching and menacingly alive.
How does anyone know what is in his book anyway, apart from the handful of people in his publisher’s office who have read it?
I hate being the subject of gossip. I hate the way gossip is a form of Chinese whispers. I have trusted perhaps two or three people in my life, for the rest it is silence and cunning. Even Ros has heard campus gossip about his new book and asked if I’d read it: she can’t believe I haven’t. ‘How can you stand not to?’
This from my sister who once accused me of betraying her trust for writing about a character who resembled her in my first novel. If I remember correctly, Ros said I had destroyed her life, embarrassed her in front of her friends, turned her into someone she wasn’t.‘I was never that mean to you, Kath. Never!’
‘Are you telling me that, or are you telling the character who you think is me? The character in the novel isn’t me either, you know.’
She sneered. ‘Oh, sure. You used dialogue that actually happened. Sentences I can remember saying.’
I recall arguing with her that fiction was not life transcribed, yet fiction unquestionably took life. ‘Of course you were never as mean as that character in my book—and I was never as innocent or as put-upon. I made us both more interesting. Characters in books walk around as if floodlit, Ros; you can see inside their heads like you never can in real life. Fictional characters are always meaner or crueller or more innocent—they are like figures in an allegory, far more radiant than anybody is in real life.’
She wasn’t convinced. ‘Whatever you think you made of me, I own the copyright to my life. Don’t you think it’s a question of who owns the story? Who says you have the right to use my sentences in the first place? God, the ego of writers! You think you own the whole bloody world.’
I told her I believed everyone owned the story, for all of us make it. She rolled her eyes, ‘Yes, but don’t you see that writers have an unfair advantage? Not everyone can write the story.’ She went on to say that there was something morally corrupt at the heart of fiction: we argued long into the night. Of course, now I am terrified of what she will make of the Hebe character in The Broken Book. Might that be one of the reasons I can’t finish it?
But right now it is my turn to sit on my hands while my husband ransacks his life and mine. David will chop me and gut me, fatten me up like the sweetest of fish. I will float up, newly rinsed. I will no longer be myself but will emerge transformed, for that is art’s job. But how much is art worth?
I am but a single moment, the briefest of flickers. I can only hope that when I am gone, something of that flicker will endure in art’s bright flame.
Why do I feel strangely exposed then, as if I was publicly naked? I know that his cruel mermaid is no longer me because I, too, once made the sleekest of fish from the plainest of bones. I know that his cruel mermaid is not me, but the question is, will anybody else?
And where is my own bright book? For so long, through so many failed attempts, I tried to capture the experience of felt life in a net of meaning—some glimpse, some nuance that would reveal something at the heart of life, its mysterious core. But all my words have been stillborn things, too frail to support the great hopes I held for them. For so many years now I have begun a story, a novel, and then stopped. I have begun everything with the most radiant of hopes and been disappointed again and again—I have captured nothing. Everything has fallen short of my intentions. The result, unhappily, was not correspondent with her efforts. All the labouring of my fingertips has come to naught.
Surely now is the time to ask myself whether David’s success has been bestowed because he is the better writer. I was only ever half good, a minor talent, while he has proved the real thing.
I am carrying in my pocket a handful of the poorest words, a writer of ash and air.
Thursday
Another tooth broke off this morning. The second in two months. Jagged pit in back of mouth. Tunnel to nothingness.
At night my hips ache, arthritis in the bone. I lie sleepless in my single bed between the twin peaks of pain, imagining the curved crest of each decaying hip bone, the fallow skin slung between.
The greed of the grave: so much human effort, following the wasted dead.
Midnight
What does it matter that the world lacks one more book, that some book inside myself remains unwritten? The world will not cease to roll for lack of it, there will be no cold waiting hole in the fabric of the universe.
What value has my life had—have I been brave, kind, good? Should I have been more engaged in the public world instead of caught up in the vanity of believing I was making a testament to life through writing? Have I been generous enough to my husband, to my daughters, to my friends? It sometimes occurs to me that I should have tried harder to hold onto what was mine, that I loosened my grip too easily without a fight. I let something go when I shouldn’t have, failed some test I didn’t know was mine.
Strength is leaving me, all desire to pull myself to my feet. Darkness has descended, some shadow I spent too long trying to evade.