| london volume 2 part 2 - 1970 june-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
June, a Monday evening [undated journal] Something in Island made me think of our Christmas Eve programs at church, sitting in the front row of the right side benches, the tree on the platform to the left, so tall it touched the ceiling, and covered with decorations more beautiful than the ones at home, electric lights, and especially the candle shaped lights that bubbled, red, green, yellow, blue, when they grew warm - the tree an immense triangle of light rising across from my small self in a new (velvet?) Christmas dress, staring at the bubbles rising slowly, one by one, from their bulb into the glass candle-tube. Boys in the benches on the other side of the aisle. The Grown-ups behind us. Mother somewhere behind me, three benches from the back, or in the Kinderstube. Father probably on the back bench with Henry Siebert and the big boys, singing his beautiful bass for the carols - I sang too, but didn't think of either of them. We waited to say our piece, to be pushed into crooked lines for the Sunday school class song, then for the brown bags, stapled at the top, with a heavy square shape - full of peanuts and plain hard candy, sometimes in twists like this [sketch], wonderful if they had broken into long pieces, round flat candies, red around the outside, a flower in the centre that ran right through to the other side - were they all cut out of a long tube? Square candies in pastel colours and criss-crossed with a stamped waffle pattern. The more rare and glamorous things - one apple and one mandarin orange in each bag, a few almonds, a few niggertoes [Brazil nuts], hazel nuts. I ate the orange first, always. The peanuts and their jagged empty shells stayed longest in the bottom of the bag, while I bartered with Judy for the niggertoes and almonds she had carefully saved up. (The shy skinny generous gullible little girl she was then!) It was Henry Siebert and Mr Friesen who had something mysterious to do with the bags, each with a name called - cardboard boxes packed full of them. Presents from Sunday school teachers, usually silly things we thought no more of - flowered bookmarks with Bible verses. Going home afterwards, gathered together into the cold truck - very early, into the sleigh, with the horses warm from the long barn that outlived its use and stood as a boys' territory I never saw the inside of, where men went to pee, as out of bounds as their grey outhouse - it was dark and late, the lamp on the kitchen table, the box of matches on the wall behind the stove, felt out with the matches rattling to tell us when Mother had found them, the fire flickering, growing straight and even. Our bags taken into the bedroom, the tree in the living room, on the table, in the corner, held straight by a wire to the ceiling, Mother's rows of cards scallopping the wall above the chesterfield - the heater still warm, a large root inside it glowing into embers and crunching when Father knocked it over with a poker (what has happened to the poker? what happened to the horses' shed?). (Our house - we left for school one morning from the East Place and came home to it at the West Place - what has become of the view from the living room window, downhill over the garden to the oat field, the road, the bush, the ridge on the other side of the lake - there's a scar where the house stood - the grass grows differently there. The young trees outside our [bedroom] window, a small wood where the poplars all seemed young, but a wilderness when we were very little, underbrush, broken plates, carrot peelings, mosquitoes - later a place to swing from slim trees. The muddy path to the toilet dodging around trees, saskatoon and gooseberry bushes. The torn catalogues and Free Press Weeklies used for toilet paper.) And that pit in front of the house, a pit when we were young, then a slight depression softer than the sawdust-composted soil and long grass around it. The white picket fence that used to run all around the house, even through the woods on the west side, partly falling down. Did Father build it when he built the little white house? It was green and white like the old house, carefully finished - as nothing he ever built later was. A very simple little house, built while they lived in the granary I think - the grandfather clock, used to strike in that old house, the cupboard in the kitchen, the picture of the river with cows (sheep?) crossing it that hung over the living room couch, what's happened to them? Where did I sleep, before the attic where I spilled the potty and was terrified by a picture on the floor? (There were good things in the attic too, crepe paper, Mother's organdy wedding bouquet.) What was the kitchen like? Where was the door I saw my father bathing through? Was there a porch? But the outside: green and white, myself standing firmly beside Bingo the smelly dog. Thinking of that house makes me sad because it was full of my father's hopefulness - I'd never thought of it before, but it was his only real house, his only pretty house - the one he painted to sell was green and white too (no one would buy it) but it wasn't built to live in with Marichen. Did she stop adoring him when I was born, after he'd frightened her with his tempers? Did she start being dutiful then? What happened? I remember the young man with his moustache and the handsome pinstripe suit he had for his wedding (his next, only, suit, was a shabby bluish shiny charcoal, with no vest) - the suit, the house, the German poems, he believed in his luck and goodness then. Was it the sawmill, when I was six? He and mother lying laughing at me, he and Mother coming to the door when they had gone out and laughing at me through the window. She always kissed him goodbye at the door, called him Eddie, said "Komm' bald wieder." Twenty two when he married; twenty four when I was born? What happened in the meantime? How did they get along, those two inexperienced people who were more intelligent than anyone around them, and more beautiful too? Father advised to marry soon, when he asked advice about agonizing lust. Mother knowing only that her own mother cried "Ich will nicht!" at night, and [told M] that she must never complain of her husband. The firelight on the ceiling of the granary where they lay together in their first bed. Father remembers it as good, but how does she remember it? Now he sits alone on a chair pulled up to the table, drinking his lonely coffee, unshaven, in long underwear and suspenders, a still beautiful wreck I feel I must be kind to, but am not. I'm here imagining them because I'm there myself - the solid little girl about to open up like a Russian doll to reveal another solid little girl. It's Father I ache for, not Mother - his white house and picket fence for Marichen, and the rubble he lives in now! with Marichen lost to him in her middle age, her books and her loneliness. That solid little girl gone (like Ian's father, "She's finished"), and solid Judy gone too. His body that was so slim and nimble is wrecked from work and unhappiness, his face is undermined with distrust, righteous indignation, disappointment, ignorant self-defense - his two front teeth are gone and his beauty spoilt. He's almost fifty - since he was thirty he's been the same, twenty years of misery, but astonishing that it's only twenty. What can he possibly hope for? Is there anything he's not too late for? He'll soon die. If he hadn't shot the puppy would he have shot himself? That pathetic horrible man, I hate and love him so much! And it's myself I grieve for. Ian that night he had flu and was feverish and I went to look after him. The cartoon faces drawn in steam on the hall windows, Lonsdale Road winter, the day it snowed, nights coming home from the Electric, Christmas dinner with Mary and Jerry. How did it all become so real? Where's it gone? It's too soon. I sent him the Toulouse-Lautrec postcard from the Louvre because the two heads in that vast bed made me think so powerfully of him in that flat private lovers' bed with only one pillow. I was talking to Mafalda about Ian and Roy and discovered how delighted I was to talk about them both - men. Oxford Monday night - behind the green fence, a recess in the low scrub trees, and in the dark green and shadow, an alley and a stand of dried weeds like sunlight held still - the alley like a bottleneck - weeds held still. I wondered what the charm of that moment was. [scrap of typed journal - not sure it goes here] "Such a hunger to be drawn out," such boredom, impatience, anger. Everything thin and unsatisfying. Boredom as being preoccupied, but by what? Grudging intolerance of conversations, ungraciousness, anger with Roy. The only things that are real are cooking and cleaning and sometimes sewing. I'm tired and crossed. Olivia's asking has made me realize how desperately bored I am. Grumpy thoughts of how limited people are, harassed thoughts of how I'm to cope with this dislike of everything. Depression like last September's after Peter. Feeling myself thinned down to insubstantiality. I've been getting thinner and angrier, trying not to and trying not to admit it, for a long time, since Munich and maybe before, little poetry, Roy says; very little joy. Something souring, but it isn't Roy, it's me. Is it something to do with realizing - or fearing, I don't know which - that Roy isn't going to draw me out any more, isn't going to touch off play and language in me, isn't going to share all the childhood I want to share with him. I'm hurt when he doesn't listen to me. Two nights ago when he came in after being out all evening and came straight to cozy with Olivia without even saying hello to me, I was furious and so hurt I wanted to disappear. It seemed to me that I had nothing to look forward to with him, only more and more times when I come upstairs to find him silently holding someone. Don't know what to make of it, don't know what it means, don't want to leave, wonder if I'll ever feel myself again, wonder if he's ever serious about anything, wonder whether I'll get bored with him and whether it is possible to believe in him abstractly, with weeks and weeks going by without connection or spark. When he plays harem prince I'm not amused, and I don't like my own tight disapproval. The motorcycles don't amuse me either. His idleness makes me restless. He is out of love with me and I can't tolerate his distractions from that loss. I can't like anything else in him because that preoccupies me and I can't forgive it. I don't know what he's doing. We reassure each other, but we can tell the difference between reassurance and our touch-tone exuberance. I still feel how much is possible with him and how much would be possible if I interested him, if we could work at something together, if I became myself again so we could love each other without reassurance. I KNOW what it is like to be so sure of him that I don't care who he holds and who he titillates. It was being sure that we recognized each other and were extraordinary to each other. If it isn't that, if it is going to be nothing but banal struggle for tolerant acceptance, there's no point in it, child or no child. Struggling to adjust is all wrong. How long will it take to know? A Thursday It becomes clear sometimes - I had a dream the night before last in which I explained to myself lucidly, articulately and very calmly exactly what Roy is. I remember my even tone of voice but I remember very little of what I said. I think it was no more than what I know that I know. I feel a kind of echo of that dream in the way I feel now, and in my conversation with Mafalda. This morning he said "I don't love you well enough," meaning, for him, that he doesn't love me kindly enough, but meaning, for me, what I really do know, that he doesn't love me, he's not arrested by me, he'll never love me enough to give me any safety. The morning we woke in Amsterdam, after I'd calmed myself out of the sobbing evening before by thinking of the reeds along the canal tipping in the wind like waves, we fought about the baby for the first time. He claimed that he had not said what I remembered him saying, that he wanted to marry me and wanted a child with me. I found myself screaming with grief, because what I remembered as our joyful and mutual leap seemed to be deformed in his memory into a stupid and gullible mistake I made, on my own, and using him to make it. That night, driving through France to Calais, in the dark, I tried to explain how undermined, unsafe, unmade, I feel with him. I hardly need to find my own words for my terrorization, because I have Ian's - if I'm not special to you, then I must understand it, it must be clear and it must be made clear to everyone, I must know where I am. My child is far past the embryo it was when R and I cried in his room about his fear of it - it's 18 weeks, nearly halfway, long limbed and beginning to fit the sac, growing fast and pushing me out almost obviously. When I wake in the morning and feel for it, it has assumed its own firm hill-shape in my abdomen. I'm beginning to 'show'. I don't want to take my child away fatherless before it's even born; I don't want to make Roy a deserting father; I don't want to live on and on exhausted as I am; I don't want to struggle not to love him. On the ferry going to Ireland when we sat in our sleeping bags on deck, with seagulls swerving behind the ship like kites, he had half an hour's real, concentrated, tenderness for me, and it made me serene and witty - sky and ocean, gulls, spray, our limbs warm in the sleeping bags, he turned on his elbow to kiss me goodnight more spontaneously than he ever has. I was full of joy. This afternoon he took Maria to a movie, took her shopping for shoes, had supper in an Indian restaurant with her; if I'd been home I'd have waited from 5:30 to 9:30 for him. When he rang and I went downstairs to talk to him, he had flowers but nothing to say. I've come back upstairs not wanting to wait any longer for him to speak first, for once. As I've been getting thinner and more desperate, he's become gayer, more beautiful, more playful, more confident. I must live away from him. I can't live with him. If I live away from him I'll lose him within a week. He's only now beginning to be real to me; I'm only now beginning to see him; I'm beginning to be in love with him. I can live without him. Must I live without him? I must get my strength back. How long do I have? It's there whenever I leave; but when I leave, and when I'm strong, I'll feel all my strength longing to use itself on him, the dearest him who's the first to be able to follow me as far as I can go. Is he really the last man I'll gamble on? I'm almost without hope. To have any hope for him I think he'll have to pursue me. Somehow I'll have to be sure he wants me. But he doesn't. I can't make him. What's real? "I love you; I love you; I love you" he said this morning, to comfort me. What's real? Then he went downstairs and discussed with Maria her bartending job in Lisbon. When we lived in the flat before, with Ian there, I didn't find him beautiful. He wasn't playful, he was very silent, sad, serious. The flat was silent. We were chaste; he was shy. When I let myself go with him it had nothing to do with his beauty, charm, energy, flirtatiousness, daring - it was only the joy I felt when I talked to him; his life, his intelligence, his feeling. Where has this terrifying child come from? This vindictive happy indestructible caterpillar, is it me sustaining it? Where's the lever that overturns the structure and lets me breathe for a while? Is he worth the terror? No, of course not. ("Substitute adultery for adulthood," advertisement for Couples.) Can he ever grow up, is there any reason besides my pain, for him to be different than he is, what must I do. And our child, for whom my imagination turns in and out of all the complexities of geography, ethics, education, relationship? Friday morning - dreams of Grandfather Epp, Paul sad, with his haircut, Jenny Harcourt asking why I didn't stay with them ("Because I was too young; I thought there was too much to learn and see," and for some other reason that I've forgotten). This letter from Grandpa begins "Our Beloved" and says "Onkel Dr Walter is this time realle married." How will I manage not to hurt him too badly. Saturday We've turned. Roy has a flat up the road, to be, he believes, his own, private, sanctuary. To me it means peace and space to be myself. To Mafalda it means that within two weeks he'll have another woman and begin again. He does want to begin again, from the beginning. He says that doesn't mean me, but it does. It's a total risk; and that's good. 12 July Sunday morning Gamble lost. Roy now on the telephone, crying when I asked him to water my sunflowers, because the place is full of me, he says - his house full of rubble and ghosts. He says he wants to clean it and paint it for me. He hopes we can live happily up and down the road this autumn. (I will live happily in that flat, with a baby, bicycle, tenants, bills, pots.) He's very weary; I understand that. He says it has never been beautiful for me - now he wants to paint it, paint out the ghosts. He won't do it, but I will. He cannot bear to say what I say, that we are no longer lovers. It's Ian again, reversed - the path downstairs with my bags was already marked out. I liked sitting in the kitchen wrapped in the eiderdown this morning, cold and full of tight empty silence, the quiet of disaster, everything holding on, waiting. We talked very quietly and were formal but free - speech was coming into my head very clear and serene - how I've just come out of a strange and deep adventure, and how I have another one planted in me about to begin. The dreadful moment is passed. We have everything to invent, everything is new, everything is hard, no one has left us any tracks. There is no one like me for him and no one like him for me. Yet it is all patterns that we see afterwards, we're limited, not infinite, and we do our dialectic shifts within our explored space. Everything is new when we long for something so difficult that everyone else has given it up. Being at peace with Roy, caring for this baby well, making a shape for all our lives, being both Amazon queen and my eighteen - fourteen - ten - seven year old selves. I wanted to be married to him, I'm bitterly disappointed. I remember myself in Oxford market clutching a bouquet, wearing the opal, saying "I'm a bride!" I'm a widow. "In her way, she attracts me more than anyone ever has." This book was to be a catalogue of wonders begun with Roy. No thrashing, just things we saw, words, games, promises, myself being myself for him like a tree blooming. As it is I put down few of the wonders, I was too crowded by him, and scared stiff even from the day, Monday, I bought this book at Selfridges, away from him for the first time, thinking hard, resolving. He waited for the syringa to blossom, promised me the smell swimming up to our windows. We waited for the leaves on the lime trees, not knowing they were limes; we watched their tops beating in the wind like sea horses. Now the smell, as they bloom, makes women randy and men sleepy, so we decided. We woke in the mornings to look at clouds coming from what he called the Black Country, Birmingham and Liverpool. Long ago, when Ian was here, we spent an evening sitting on the floor, he, Paddy and I, with the Zen record on, watching the sky darken, in silence, feeling perfect peace with each other. I made good coleslaw, brought it like a priestess, and he said it was a rare moment. [Tony Scott 1964 Music for zen meditation MGM Records] Crying on the telephone, he said I must come back to live in the flat, because it is full of me. His eyes were red last night and this morning, he looked grey and chastened, he's thin, and lately he's been far more beautiful than ever before. He put on the big elephant's-eye shaggy coat to bring me to Greg's. In Oxford I walked behind him watching him move his arms in that coat, surprised and pleased; I'd never been outside the flat with him before. Almost four months, from early spring to this heavy mid-July. The poppy field on the way back from Holland - a mile of poppies, yellow daisies, thistles. He sat in them in his blue shirt; he took his shirt off and lay in the sun. On the motorway all the cars went by. Once in France, on the Norton, we stopped to sleep in the early poppies, our first hot day. In Germany we looked for chicken soup. Oh we were sad that trip. In Luxembourg, first I cried and then he, all the way out of the city. We had the van we'd been working for all spring - we were going to take constant honeymoons in it. Now he'll sell it. Everything's lost. Leslie's party, where we danced like mad and were a couple, sitting sweating on the sides, proud of each other. Running to collect mattresses in the German village, elated with the adventure, taken out of misery for a moment. The fey-feeler in the pub. [missing page] 1 begun. (Another way of forbidding mourning.) Almost exactly a year ago I ran away from Peter. The clock I bought for living alone when Ian left, stopped the morning I came here. One evening near the beginning we ate Sarah's spice cake, almost went to the fair, turned back - it rained, we went to the Heath, everything was gold and black, gleaming, rivers glittering down the paths, air full of ozone, it was a complete glory, we stood fixed by it, our blessing; I was full of joy at seeing it with him. The trees - the gleaming twigs, the black and blue sky. My wedding picture and an announcement to Mother - my terror when he didn't endorse it - the pine smell of the knoll in the Heath where I cried away my knowledge that he wasn't married, as I was. He asked once what I wanted, in all my struggles with him - "To be married with someone who meets me in all the places I can go to, and to work at something with him." Tears one night - "Because I don't think we can make it if we can't soon find some work to do together." In my memory the real clues to his absence and paranoid lint-sorting are all confused. Did I know all along, or did I bring about what I feared? In France, in the Hotel Wetter, on the 6th floor, in the bed floating among dormer windows, I told him finally what was behind my hysteria - that he was out of love with me. If he'd been a very wise man, he'd have said then that I had smelled it out right and that we must together reckon up its meaning. Saturday night, his evasive declaration (that I had to unbury myself) exploding in my stomach, more and more stubborn insistence that he wanted to be with Maria, my scream of grief and all the crying that made me hoarse even next morning. Stiff controlled talking; a still tight peace I wanted to share with him - I had to appeal to Maria myself, battle of wills, her cool questions and lecture on keeping "that kind of man." Roy left lying on her bed as we went to bed in my room - she chased him into his room, and I followed him from there back to mine, in my sleeping bag on the floor, stubborn and illogical, doing what seemed necessary however impolitic - until finally we half slept side by side, celebrating the wake as I'd wanted to, sometimes holding each other, sore and exhausted. Such sun on trees in the morning that I had to sit up and begin to pack. Roy waking afraid, where are you going, what are you doing? Always missing me when I go. I must remember that marriage is mutual. - Ruth Benedict again: hunger for effective action eats inward and leaves only a waste barrenness because no pivotal issues are articulated - because these hungerers and thirsters after righteousness are yet of that great class who cannot formulate their own issues, their own goals. And as their lives go barren - for they have the capacity for loyalty, for generous desire, but have not the capacity for that concentrated, pitiless analysis that divides the complicated sheep from the complicated goats of our modern issues. Is there anything my brain can do to play at complicated goat, for a change? I believe in myself as avant garde ethically, I suppose. My sincere but marriageless marriage, is it decadent in my own terms? Ought I to know better? Irrelevant. The real work in my life lately has been journal, Roy, casual making-things, pursuit of joy, escape from pain, wrestling with evidence to discover what threatens me. Mafalda - almost an alter ego - does exactly these things, but her journal is all abstract. The failed nun. (He said to her what he said to me?) I feel sorry for her and she feels sorry for me. We are both intelligent, ambitious, raw, talented, sexually hungry but too conscious to be either very funny or very sexy unless we're helped to it. There's not much future for us unless we become goats and find work outside the personal, and we both know. Tuesday, Paris Hello little baby (lit-tle ba-by, R's voice). I've come here to remember what it was like to be alone, before Ian and Roy; partly I want to be alone with the little baby I can still hardly believe is there (although my skin crushes like suede and my womb is nearly up to my navel). To see whether I can cure myself of the terror of the last four and a half months. To let Roy move on if he wants to, and to let both of us feel out our ambivalences, add everything up, give up if we want to, go on if we're lucky (?). I don't miss him, but he's in and out of my head all the time. I come back to Olivia and Maria and am angry, try to sweep it all out, but come back to it when I drift. I show him things, share things, but am relieved to be silent and invisible. Is it he who accuses me of ugliness and lifelessness, or is it myself? Today the streets are all praising my availability, cooks, truck drivers, pedestrians; and that crisp shiny Martin telling me Coldstream likes women with babies! "He says you're pregnant," declared in the doorway, no shyness - and suddenly I felt as though perhaps the art school will love me and pet my baby, another way to reassure myself that I don't need Roy. And what do I need him for? I'm rebellious today. He turned me on so that I stood on my head for joy. It's months since then. His rush toward me is repeated, and so cancelled, when he rushes toward everyone else who touches him. We didn't choose each other; we collided in one of those rushes. I blame myself for not being stronger and more resistant, but I was all centred and hopeful in that collision and if I'd been different I would have betrayed myself. I wonder if he feels centred and hopeful as I did, every time he makes a rush for someone? If he does, how can I argue. Does he feel given to them? As I did. I tell myself rebelliously that I'll just be firm and find someone else who'll turn me on. But I know better, or at least I fear that no one could turn me on without me turning myself off, stiff with jealousy. I'm struggling to imagine how I'll live with my child: who'll love me and make love to me; who can I love, cherish, talk to, be myself with? Is everything I want in bad faith? I mustn't ever lie, both for me and the child; we mustn't either of us be ashamed of being lonely. It's nonsense even to declare it. This little baby buried in its wet red sack in my belly won't be lonely for a long time. What I dread isn't being alone, it's being held half in love half in terror neither alone nor apart. There is the world to look at and play with, cherish - if we can't do that together, we shouldn't distract each other from it. I feel for him, he's troubled too. I'm curious about this month, because I say no but mean maybe. I wonder what he does with his days now? I think of the flat and how to make it beautiful, living space. All the things I can do when I have my days to myself a little. The piano, the little baby - December is so long, and yet it's more than half grown already. I wonder if Roy had a hard time in the womb, whether his mother was crying all the time - Paris Wednesday The Gestalt Therapy book makes sense - we are a flurry, to touch what we are we must hook into that flurry. Very literal dreams this morning, wrestling with Roy about the little blonde girl who turns him on - I ended up satisfied because I came back as the other woman and thus titillated him while she was ignored. Avignon Sunday Woke up in the youth hostel and my first thought was "I know it's finished with Roy." I'm full of grief these days. The night before I left Paris, the electricity went off and I lay awake most of the night with my body pinching me grief all over, crying "It's horrible, it's horrible" and burying my face in the little blue sleeper I bought that day ("Qu'est-ce que vous avez pour les nouveaux-nés?") I'm so hungry and sad and I'm so choked on Roy that it's angry bad tasting sadness much of the time. Or he will know himself and suffer until he can make an environmental change. - A child runs up the steps, a little boy in white cord pants, barebacked, brown, longhaired, calling "Maman!" The woman who follows him is muscular and fine, legs, arms, face brown, solidly curved and sleek, curly hair, big pointed eyes and a pointed smile, her face set in a big-eyed focused smile - and all my loneliness says "Oh ...." Is that her husband? No, he's come later, brown and curly haired too, big chest, arms held from his shoulders like a truckdriver's, big black eyes, and his face too is focused ready to laugh. She does a pirouette for him, he throws the child up and kisses his stomach. She stands with her legs wide apart and her hands on her hips. Is she a dancer? Is he? Where do they get those tight expressive faces and bodies? I stare, they know I'm staring. I'm both envious and generous in my admiration. This circle I make every day, blame, anger, desperation, grief, distraction, calm, happiness, serenity - I must not forget, or rather, I don't forget, how much I want to be one with him, a couple, a family; is the price always too high? That's something else - it isn't a question of price, there's no price I can pay even if I would: he doesn't want it enough, he doesn't want me enough. In his arithmetic my value isn't quite high enough. And that's true, it's what I struggle to understand and cannot accept - it's always there, I can't realize it by myself, he must help me and he hasn't the courage. At Porte d'Italie the bus driver told me the autoroute was closed. I stood on the pavement wondering where to go. A blue transport truck with a long trailer turned into the Avenue de l'Italie, carefully around the corner, I looked at him, just looked questioningly, and turned to see him pulling up. "Ah! Vous avez de la chance!" He was going to Lyon. >> 1975 Apologized for not speaking - "Oh non! J'aime ça." Bit off all my fingernails with excitement, reading the Gestalt book sitting under a tree beside the shingle factory waiting for the truck to be loaded. Lunch, a little watered wine and I rushed to tell him about my baby, about going into the store and blurting the "Qu'est-ce que vous avez pour les nouveaux-nés" I'd rehearsed in front of the all the windows. He's small, hard, brown and shiny in his undershirt and shorts and sandals. His silences are good, he doesn't say anything stupid. I like his strong legs and his expertise with the truck. He says he's 47 and has a grandchild. He won't flirt but he smiles. I soon feel safe enough with him to look at him. Outside of Blois we take a detour down a narrow straight road with forest close in on either side. At the end of the road, towers, and walls, and a castle more beautiful and elegant than we could have imagined, sitting flat on the same level as the road, like a mirage. Past the castle another narrow road, pine trees and their smell, but something else too, a wonderful strong smell of spices. He stops the truck and we jump out to locate the plant - but it isn't the stiff purple bunches, and we can't find it, but he's on his hands running along the ditch smelling the plants on the ground. Night, he stops for an hour's sleep, I lie in my sleeping bag in the grass beside the truck, big white stars, some slipping, I think of my white night with Desser. Trucks roaring and fading, the sound of stars. Sleeping in the couchette, the jolts to my breasts and belly easier lying down, curled around my sleeping bag with it wrapped around my head, waking early to see pink sky and alpine foothills, the South, and dusty golden farm buildings, faded orange tiles, deep valleys, hills roaring out of them. A handshake at Lyon and he's gone, smile like a proud father. Tuesday Morning dream - I come home, but not to home as I know it - and find Don and Olivia there. As I walk past I hear Don and Olivia whispering about how she's going to make up with me. I sit down and she comes up behind me and gives me a silver ring, snake shaped [sketch], from Don - I give her the speech I'd formed and practiced while awake: "I don't like you. I don't want to be friends with you. I'm more interested in Don than in you. You're more interested in Roy than in me. I'm not interested in you at all. We don't have anything to say to each other. I don't have anything to learn from you," feeling astonished as I pronounced it that it came out so uneasily. She put her hand forward and I bit her finger, surprised to find it so soft, and feeling my teeth meet under her skin as if I'd bitten into a wiener. She collapsed, Don took her off clinging to the outside of a trolleybus. I wandered through the flat looking for Roy feeling lost and abandoned, someone told me he was furious with me and had left. I sat down, Don came in, put his head in my lap and held me. He said "Are you noble?" I said "No." While he held me, Roy came in and stood in the lamplight looking quietly at us. Don got up and left, Roy and I faced each other and looked at each other steadily for a long time. I felt on my face the same expression that I saw on his, quizzical tenderness, kindness. I asked Fritz in the restaurant who those people were who came on Sunday. He said "I don't know them, but they're not what you were thinking they are. I looked very hard and I saw that they're not happy, and although they seem to be well with each other, the children haven't solved their problem," and he explained to Roland that I had been looking at them and thinking "If they can have it, I can too." "Hope, l'espoir" he said. And "Hier quant je t'ai vu je me suis dit que tu étais enceinte." "Je le suis." "Mais ce qui était bizarre, c'était que je n'ai pas regardé le ventre, je l'ai vue de ton visage." "Oui, il y a quelque chose, la peau est différente." "Oui quand je vois une femme qui est bien dans sa peau comme ça." At the swimming pool, turning from back to belly and side to side in the sun, plastered with wet and hot, reading the Gestalt book, I began to feel very powerful and decided to make a film about Father, because I need to do something with all my anger about him, and because it could be, will be, very good. In Paris again, September 10 Since Avignon, a month - I could leave Avignon suddenly on the night train because I really was there - here I am back in Paris with the farm, Kingston, the commune, Toronto, and London all unfinished in me - Roy too, some moments closer than we've ever had, in the roomette jiggling across Canada at night, in the bare room above the garage. His sadness derailed me, made me lose most of what there was in Canada. Yet his sadness makes him loving and gives me room to be loving too, sometimes extravagantly. How queer we are together. (He sat across the aisle on the Caledonian airplane, leaned his head back and cried - his mouth murmuring without sounds and the tears streaming down his chin - I sat and looked and loved him fiercely.) We got on the airplane, buckled in, took off, without speaking. I had to go find him, put my hands around his head, hold him, bring him back, kiss his neck, and finally get into the stewardess's way enough to be given seats across from each other. [letter] I'm ashamed not to have written since we were with you. This time my excuse is that there was so much to tell, so much detail carefully to remember and describe and not skimp over, that the magnificent letter you should have gotten was too formidable even to begin - I know you'd rather have had a postcard. (And it's always the same excuse isn't it?) Now at last I'm home again back from Paris, and am nesting energetically - painting and cleaning, looking for tenants, sewing, making furniture. Roy is busy with his version of nesting - looking after the van (someone smashed it when we were away) and looking after me - he discovered that liver is good for me so we've had it four times this week! And I came home one afternoon to find he'd bought me a bicycle, my first three-speed, second hand but good. I can go to school on it and it's exercise for my stomach muscles - and my neighbourhood is suddenly miles bigger, lots of things to photograph, junk furniture shops, libraries, my pottery classes, Greg and Brenda's place on the other side of the Heath. M, you must be very cross with me - if you aren't you should be I guess. We think of you often and wonder whether teaching is good this year. Roy has started a letter to you and nags me about writing! But we're equally bad at finishing letters so who knows when you'll get his. The letter you sent in care of Anne got there before we did and I lent it to Paul and to Anne - Anne's feelings about your earliest letter, the 1947 one, was the same as mine, "She sounds so happy," and you did, with the picket fence snowed over, Eddy going to Bush Wiebe's sale, two-year-old Ellie without rubbers and with a big tummy, the young Dr McCrum, and everyone getting engaged. I'm fascinated with them and want you to collect as many as you can, from everybody you ever wrote to - Anne says she has some in her files; I have bags full, some of them in the boxes I left this time. My passport and ticket were in Toronto when we arrived - Joan had sent them from Kingston, where I'd left them on the counter in the bus depot -
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