The Golden Notebook (64 page)

country. Marguerite in the coffee bar.' 'Jane telephoned. Making trouble about Anna. Don't want trouble with Anna. Date with Marguerite.' That was today, so when he went off it was to Marguerite and not to Jane. I am shocked at myself because I am not shocked at reading someone's private papers. On the contrary, I'm full of a triumphant ugly joy because I've caught him out. (*15) The entry, I don't enjoy sleeping with Anna, cut me so deep I couldn't breathe for a few moments. Worse, I didn't understand it. Worse, I lost faith, for a few minutes, in the judgement of the female creature who responds, or does not, according to whether Saul is making love out of conviction or not. She can't be lied to. For a moment I imagined she had been deluding herself. I was ashamed that I cared more for his not wanting to sleep with me, since at the best I would be 'a good lay' than his liking me. I put away the diaries, but carelessly, out of a kind of contempt, as I had put away the letters, and came downstairs to write this. But I'm too confused to write sensibly. I've just been up to have another look at the diary-he wrote 'I don't like sleeping with her' in the week that he didn't come downstairs. Since then, he's been making love as a man does when he's attracted to a woman. I don't understand it, I don't understand anything. Yesterday I forced myself to challenge him: 'Are you ill, and if so in what way?' He said, and I'd almost expected this: 'How do you know?' I even laughed. He said, carefully: 'I think if you're in trouble you should put it under your belt and not afflict other people with it.' He said this seriously, the responsible man. I said: 'But in fact you're doing just that. What's wrong?' I feel as if I were caught in a sort of psychological fog. He said seriously: 'I was hoping that I didn't put it on you.' 'I'm not complaining,' I said. 'But I think that it's no good locking things up, you should get them into the open.' He said, suddenly abrasive and hostile: 'You sound like a bloody psycho-analyst' I was thinking how, in any conversation, he can be five or six different people; I even waited for the responsible person to come back. He did, and said: 'I'm not in any too good a shape, that's true. I'm sorry if it's shown. I'll try to do better.' I said: 'It's not a question of doing better.' He turned the conversation determinedly; there was a hunted, wounded look on his face; he was a man defending himself. I rang up Dr Paynter, and I said I wanted to know what was wrong with someone who had no sense of time, and seemed to be several different people. He replied: 'I don't diagnose over telephones.' I said: 'Oh come off it.' He said: 'My dear Anna, I think you'd better make an appointment.' 'It's not for me,' I said. 'It's a friend,' but there was a silence. Then he said: 'Please don't be alarmed, you'd be surprised how many charming people are walking our streets, the mere ghosts of themselves. Do make an appointment.' 'What's the cause of it?' 'Well, I'd say, hazarding a guess, and not saying a word too much, it's all due to the times we live in.' 'Thanks,' I said. 'And no appointment?' 'No.' 'That's very bad, Anna, that's spiritual pride, if you're several different people whose bootstraps are you going to pull yourself up on?' 'I'll convey your message to the right quarter,' I said. I went to Saul and said: 'I've telephoned my doctor and he thinks I'm ill. I told him I had a friend-you see?' Saul looked sharp and hunted, but he grinned. 'He says I should make an appointment, but that I shouldn't be in any way alarmed at being several different people at once with no sense of time.' 'Is that how I strike you?' 'Well, yes.' 'Thanks. I expect he's right, at that.' He said to me today, 'Why should I waste money on a psychiatrist when I get treatment from you, free?' It was said savagely, with triumph. I said to him it was unfair to use me in this role. He said, with the same triumphant hate: 'English woman! Fair! Everyone makes use of each other. You make use of me to create a Hollywood dream of happiness, and in return I'm going to use your experience of the witch-doctors.' A moment after we were making love. When we quarrel, we hate each other, then sex comes out of the hate. It's a hard violent sex, like nothing I've known before, nothing (*16) to do with the creature who is the woman-in-love. She disowns it completely. Today he criticised me in bed for a movement, and I realised he was comparing me with someone. I remarked that there were different schools in love-making, and we came from two different schools. We were hating each other, but all this was quite good-humoured. For he began thinking about it, and then he roared with laughter. 'Love,' he said, sentimental as a schoolboy, 'is international.' 'Screwing,' I said, 'is a matter of national styles. No Englishman would make love like you. I am referring of course to the ones that do make love.' He began making up a pop-song-'I'll like your national style if you'll like mine.' The walls of this flat close in on us. Day after day we're alone here. I'm conscious that we are both mad. He says, with a yell of laughter: 'Yeah, I'm crazy, it's taken me all my short life to recognise it, and now what? Suppose I prefer being crazy, what then?' Meanwhile my anxiety is permanent, I've forgotten what it is like to wake up normally; yet I watch this state I'm in, and even think: Well, I'll never suffer from my own anxiety state, so I might just as well experience someone else's while I get the chance. Sometimes I try to play 'the game.' Sometimes I write in this and the yellow notebook. Or I watch the light change on the floor, so that a grain of dirt or a knot in the wood magnify and symbolise themselves. Upstairs Saul walks up and down, up and down, or there are long periods of silence. Both silence and the sound of feet reverberate along my nerves. When he leaves the flat 'to go for a little walk' my nerves seem to stretch out and follow him, as if tied to him. Today he came in and I knew by instinct he had been sleeping with someone. I challenged him, not out of being hurt, but because we are two antagonists, and he said: 'No, what makes you think that?' Then his face became greedy, cunning, furtive, and he said: 'I'll produce an alibi if you like.' I laughed, although I was angry, and the fact that I laughed restored me. I am mad, obsessed with a cold jealousy which I have never experienced before. I am the sort of woman who reads private letters and diaries; yet when I laugh, I am cured. He didn't like my laughing, for he said: 'Prisoners learn to talk a certain language.' And I said: 'If I've never been a jailor before, and if I've now become one, perhaps it is because you need one.' His face cleared, he sat down on my bed, and he said, with the simplicity he can switch into from one moment to the next: 'The trouble is, when we took each other on, you took fidelity for granted, and I didn't. I've never been faithful to anyone. It didn't arise.' 'Liar,' I said. 'You mean, when a woman began to care about you, or found you out, you simply moved on to the next.' He gave his frank young laugh, instead of the hostile young laugh and said: 'And perhaps there's something in that, too.' I was on the point of saying, Then move on. I was wondering why I didn't, what sort of personal logic I was following, through him. During the flash of a second, when I almost said: Then move on, he gave me a quick, frightened glance, and said: 'You should have told me that it mattered to you.' I said: 'Then I'm telling you now that it matters to me.' 'O. K.,' he said, carefully, after a pause. His face had the furtive cunning look. I knew perfectly well what he was thinking. Today he went out for a couple of hours, after a telephone call, and I went straight upstairs to read the recent entries in his diary. 'Anna's jealousy is driving me mad. Saw Marguerite. Went home with her. A nice kid. Marguerite cold to me. Met Dorothy at her house. I'll sneak out when Anna goes to visit Janet next week. When the cat's away!' I read this with cold triumph. And yet, in spite of this, there are hours of affectionate friendliness, while we talk and talk. And we make love. We sleep together every night, and it's a marvellous deep sleep. Then the friendliness switches to hate in the middle of a sentence. Sometimes the flat is an oasis of loving affection, then suddenly it's a battleground, even the walls vibrate with hate, we circle around each other like two animals, the things we say to each other are so terrible that thinking about them afterwards I am shocked. And yet we are quite capable of saying these things, listening to what we've said, and then bursting out into laughter so that we laugh and roll on the floor. I went down to see Janet. All the way I was miserable because I knew Saul was making love to Dorothy, whoever she was. I was unable to shake this off when with Janet. She seems happy-remote from me, a little school-girl, absorbed in her friends. Coming back in the train, I thought again how strange it is-for twelve years, every minute of every day has been organised around Janet, my time-table has been her needs. And yet she goes to school, and that's that. I instantly revert to an Anna who never gave birth to Janet. I remember Molly saying the same thing: Tommy went for a holiday with some friends when he was sixteen, and she spent days walking around the house astonished at herself. 'I feel as if I'd never had a child at all,' she kept saying. Getting near my flat, the tension in my stomach increased. By the time I reached the house I was sick. I went straight to the bathroom to be sick. I've never in my life been sick from nervous tension. Then I called upstairs. Saul was in. He came down, cheerful. Hi! How was it, etc. As I looked at him, his face changed into furtive caution, with triumph behind it, and I could see myself, cold and malicious. He said: 'Why are you looking at me like that?' Then: 'What are you trying to find out?' I went into my big room. The-what are you trying to find out, was a new note in the exchange, a step downwards into a new depth of spite. Pure waves of hatred had come from him as he said it. I sat on my bed and tried to think. I realised the hatred had made me physically frightened. What do I know about mental sickness? Nothing at all. Yet an instinct told me there was no need to be frightened. He came after me into the room and sat on the bottom of the bed, humming a jazz tune and watching me. He said: 'I've bought you some jazz records. Jazz'll relax you.' I said: 'Good.' He said: 'You're such a bloody Englishwoman, aren't you?' This was sullen and disliking. I said: 'If you don't like me, then go.' He gave me a quick startled look and walked out. I waited for him to come back, knowing how he would be. He was calm, quiet, brotherly, affectionate. He put a record on my record-player. I examined the records, early Armstrong and Bessie Smith. We sat quiet and listened and he watched me. Then he said: 'Well?' I said: 'All that music is good-humoured and warm and accepting.' 'Well?' 'It's got nothing to do with us, we aren't like that.' 'Lady, my character was formed by Armstrong, Bechet and Bessie Smith.' 'Then something has happened to it since.' 'What has happened to it is what has happened to America.' Then he said, sullen: 'I suppose you are going to turn out to have a natural talent for jazz too, it just needed that.' 'Why do you have to be so competitive about everything?' 'Because I'm an American. It's a competitive country.' I saw that the quiet brother had gone, the hatred was back. I said: 'I think it would be better if we separated for tonight, sometimes you're too much for me.' He was startled. Then his face controlled itself-when this happens, the defensive, ill face literally seems to take itself in hand. He said quietly, with a friendly laugh: 'Don't blame you. I'm too much for myself.' He went out. A few minutes later, when I was in bed, he came down, walked up to the bed and said, smiling: 'Move over.' I said, 'I don't want to fight.' He said: 'We can't help ourselves.' 'Don't you think it's odd, the issue we choose to fight over? I don't give a damn who you sleep with, and you're not a man who punishes women sexually. So obviously we are fighting about something else. What?' 'An interesting experience, being crazy.' 'Quite so, an interesting experience.' 'Why say it like that?' 'In a year's time, we'll both look back and say: So that's what we were like then, what a fascinating experience.' 'What's wrong with that?' 'Megalomaniacs, that's what our lot are. You say I am what I am because the United States is such and such politically. I am the United States. And I say, I am the position of women in our time.' 'We're probably both right.' We went to sleep, friendly. But sleep changed us both. When I woke he was lying on his side, watching me with a hard smile. He said: 'What were you dreaming about?' I said, 'Nothing,' and then I remembered. I had had the terrible dream, but the malicious irresponsible principle was embodied in Saul. Throughout a long nightmare it had taunted me, laughing. It had held me tight by the arms, so I couldn't move, and said: 'I'm going to hurt you. I enjoy it.' The memory was so bad I got out of bed and away from him, and went to the kitchen to make coffee. He came in, dressed, about an hour later, his face like a fist. 'I'm going out,' he said. He hung around a little, waiting for me to say something, then slowly went down the stairs, looking back for me to stop him. I lay on my back on the floor and played early Armstrong, and envied the easy, blithe, good-humouredly-mocking world that music came from. He came in, four or five hours later, and his face was vivid with vindictive triumph. He said: 'Why don't you say something?' I said: 'There's nothing to say.' 'Why don't you fight back?' 'Do you realise how often you ask why I don't fight back? If you want to be punished for something find somebody else.' And then the extraordinary change, when I say something and he thinks it over. He said, interested: 'Do I need to be punished? Hmmmm, interesting.' He sat on the foot of my bed, plucking at his chin, frowning. He remarked: 'I don't think I like myself very much at the moment. And I don't like you either.' 'And I don't like you and I don't like me. But we're neither of us really like this at all, so why bother disliking us?' His face changed again. He said, cunning: 'I suppose you think you know what I've been doing.' I said nothing, and he got up, and walked fast round the room, giving me quick fierce glances all the time: 'You'll never know, will you, there's no way you'll ever know.' My saying nothing was not a determination not to quarrel, or to keep self-control, but an equally cold weapon in the battle. After a long enough silence: 'I know what you've been doing, you've been screwing Dorothy.' He