The Golden Notebook (65 page)

said quickly: 'How do you know?' And then, just as if he hadn't said it: 'Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies.' 'I'm not asking questions, I read your diary.' He stopped in his striding walk around the room, and stood looking down at me. His face, which I watched with a cold interest, showed fear, then rage, then furtive triumph. He said: 'I wasn't screwing Dorothy.' Then it was someone else.' He began shouting, flapping his hands in the air, his jaw grinding over the words: 'You spy on me, you're the most jealous woman I've ever known. I haven't touched a woman since I've been here and for a red-blooded American boy like me, that's something.' I said, malicious: 'I'm glad you're red-blooded.' He shouted: 'I'm a mensch. I'm not a woman's pet, to be locked up.' He went on shouting, and I recognised the feeling I'd had the day before, of descending another step into will-lessness. I, I, I, I, I, he shouted, but everything disconnected, a vague, spattering boastfulness, and I felt as if I were being spattered by machine-gun bullets. It went on and on, I, I, I, I, I, and I stopped listening, and then I realised he had become silent, and was looking at me with anxiety. 'What's wrong with you?' he said. He came over, knelt beside me, turned my face to his, and said: Tor Christ sake's, you must understand sex isn't important to me, it just isn't important.' I said: 'You mean sex is important but who you have it with isn't.' He carried me to the bed, gentle and compassionate. He said, self-disgusted: 'I'm very good at picking up the pieces when I've knocked a woman flat.' 'Why do you have to knock a woman flat?' 'I don't know. Until you made me conscious of it, I didn't know it.' 'I wish you'd hire yourself a witch-doctor. I keep saying it, I keep saying it, you'll crack us both up.' I began to cry, I felt as I had in the dream the night before, held fast by the arms while he laughed and hurt me. Meanwhile he was kind and gentle. Then I knew suddenly that the whole thing, this cycle of bullying and tenderness, was for this moment when he could comfort me. I got off the bed, furious at being patronised and at myself for allowing it, and got a cigarette. He said, sullen: 'I may knock you down, but you don't stay down long.' 'Lucky for you, you can have the pleasure of doing it again and again.' He said, thoughtful, positively abstracted, looking at himself from a distance: 'But tell me, why?' I shouted at him: 'Like all Americans you've got mother-trouble. You've fixed on me for your mother. You have to outwit me all the time, it's important that I should be outwitted. It's important to lie and be believed. Then, when I get hurt, your murderous feelings for me, for the mother, frighten you, so that you have to comfort and soothe me...' I was screaming in hysteria. 'I'm bored with the whole thing. I'm bored with nursery talk. I feel nauseated with the banality of it all...' I stopped and looked at him. His face was the face of a child who has been smacked. 'And now you're feeling pleasure because you've provoked me into screaming at you. Why aren't you angry? You ought to be-I'm naming you, Saul Green, and I'm naming you on such a low level that you ought to be angry. You should be ashamed, at the age of thirty-three, to be sitting there taking this kind of banal over-simplification from me.' When I stopped, I was exhausted. I was inside a shell of anxious tension that I could positively smell, like a stale fog of nervous exhaustion. 'Go on,' he said. 'That's the last bit of free interpretation you're going to get from me.' 'Come here.' I had to go. He pulled me down beside him, laughing. He made love to me. I responded, to the fierce coldness of it. It was easy to respond to the coldness, because it could not hurt me, like tenderness. Then I felt myself grow unresponsive. Because I felt this, I knew, before I thought it, that there was something new here, he was not making love to me. I said to myself, incredulously: He's making love to someone else. He switched his voice, and began talking in a deep South accent, half-laughing, aggressive: 'Well, ma'am, you certainly are a lay, yes you certainly are that, I'll tell the world.' Touched me differently, he was not touching me. He ran his hand over my hips and buttocks and said: 'A good strong woman's shape, I'll say.' I said: 'You're getting us mixed up, I'm the thin one.' Shock. Literally, I saw him come out of the personality he had been. He rolled over on his back, his hand over his eyes, gasping a little. He was very white. Then he said, not in the Southern accent, but in his own, but the rake's voice, as he had said: I'm a full-blooded American boy, 'Baby, you should take me easy, like good whisky.' 'Then that defines you,' I said. Shock again. He fought to come out of that personality, gasped, made himself breathe slowly, then said normally: 'What's wrong with me?' 'You mean, what's wrong with us. We're both mad. We're inside a cocoon of madness.' 'You!' This was sullen. 'You're the sanest bloody woman I've ever known.' 'Not at the moment.' We lay a long time, silent. He was gently stroking my arm. The sound of lorries along the street below was loud. With the gentle caress on my arm, I could feel the tension leave me. All the madness and the hate had gone. And then another of the long, slowly darkening afternoons, cut off from the world, and the long, dark night. The flat is like a ship floating on a dark sea, it seems to float, isolated from life, self-contained. We played the new records, and made love, and the two people, Saul and Anna, who were mad, were somewhere else, in another room somewhere. (*17) We have had a week of being happy. The telephone has not rung. No one has been. We have been alone. But it's over now, a switch has been turned in him, and so I sit and write. I see I've written-happiness. That's enough. It's no use his saying, you manufacture happiness like molasses. During the week I had no desire to come near this table with the notebooks. There was nothing to say. Today we got up late, and played records and made love. Then he went upstairs to his room. He came down, his face like a hatchet, and I looked at it and knew the switch had been turned. He strode around the room and said: 'I'm restless, I'm restless.' It was full of antagonism, so I said: 'Then go out.' 'If I go out, you'll accuse me of sleeping with someone.' 'Because that's what you want me to do.' 'Well I'm going.' 'Go then.' He stood looking at me, full of hate, and I felt the muscles of my stomach tighten, and the cloud of anxiety settle down like a dark fog. I watched the week of being happy slide away. I was thinking: In a month Janet will be home and this Anna will cease to exist. If I know I can switch off this helpless sufferer because it is necessary for Janet, then I can do it now. Why don't I? Because I don't want to, that's why. Something has to be played out, some pattern has to be worked through... He felt I had withdrawn from him, and he became anxious and said: 'Why should I go if I don't want to?' 'Then don't go,' I said. 'I'll go and work,' he said, abrupt, with a frown. He went out. In a few minutes he came down and leant against the door. I had not moved. I was sitting on the floor waiting for him because I knew he would come down. It was getting dark, the big room full of shadows, the sky turning colour. I had sat watching the sky fill with colour as the dark came into the streets, and without trying I had gone into the detachment of 'the game.' I was part of the terrible city and the millions of people, and I was simultaneously sitting on the floor and above the city, looking down at it. When Saul came in, he said, leaning against the door frame, accusing: 'I've never been like this before, so tied to a woman I can't even go for a walk without feeling guilty.' His tone was remote from how I felt, so I said: 'You've been here for a week, without my asking you. You wanted to. Now your mood has changed. Why should my mood change too?' He said carefully: 'A week's a long time.' I realised from how he said it, that until I used the words, a week, he had not known how many days had passed. I was curious to know how long he thought it was, but was afraid to ask. He was standing frowning, looking at me sideways, plucking at his lips as if they were a musical instrument. He said, after a pause, his face twisted into cunning: 'But it was only the day before yesterday that I saw that film.' I knew what he was doing: he wanted to pretend that the week was two days, partly to see if I was convinced it had been a week, and partly because he hated the idea he had given any woman a week of himself. It was getting dark in the room, and he was peering to see my face. The light from the sky made his grey eyes shine, his square blond head glisten. He looked like an alert threatening animal. I said: 'You saw the film a week ago.' He said, cold: 'If you say so, I've got to believe you.' Then he leaped over at me, and grabbed my shoulders and shook me: 'I hate you for being normal, I hate you for it. You're a normal human being. What right have you to that? I suddenly understood that you remember everything, you probably remember everything I've ever said. You remember everything that's happened to you, it's intolerable.' His fingers dug into my shoulders and his face was alive with hatred. I said: 'Yes, I do remember everything.' But not in triumph. I was aware of myself as he saw me, a woman inexplicably in command of events, because she could look back and see a smile, a movement, gestures; hear words, explanations-a woman inside time. I disliked the solemnity, the pompousness of that upright little custodian of the truth. When he said: 'It's like being a prisoner, living with someone who knows what you said last week, or can say: three days ago you did so and so,' I could feel a prisoner with him, because I longed to be free of my own ordering, commenting memory. I felt my sense of identity fade. My stomach clenched and my back began to hurt. He said: 'Come here'-moving away and gesturing towards the bed. I obediently followed. I could not have refused. He said, through his teeth: 'Come on, come on,' or rather, 'come'n, come'n.' I realised he had gone back some years, he was probably about twenty then. I said No, because I did not want that violent young male animal. His face flared into grinning derisive cruelty, and he said: 'You're saying no. That's right baby, you should say no more often. I like it.' He began stroking my neck and I said No. I was nearly crying. At the sight of my tears his voice changed into a triumphant tenderness, and he kissed the tears, like a connoisseur, and said: 'Come'n baby, come'n.' The sex was cold, an act of hatred, hateful. The female creature who had been expanding, growing, purring, for a week, bolted into a corner and shuddered. And the Anna who had been capable of enjoying, with the antagonist, combative sex, was limp, not fighting. It was quick and ugly, and he said: 'Bloody Englishwomen, no good in bed.' But I was freed forever by being hurt by him in this way, and I said: 'It's my fault. I knew it wouldn't be any good. I hate it when you're cruel.' He flung himself over on his face and lay still, thinking. He muttered: 'Someone said that to me, just recently. Who? When?' 'One of your other women said you were cruel, did she?' 'Who? I'm not cruel. I've never been cruel. Am I cruel?' The person speaking then was the good person. I didn't know what to say, fearful of driving him away and bringing the other back. He said: 'What shall I do, Anna?' I said: 'Why don't you go to a witch-doctor?' And at that, as if the switch had been turned on, he gave his loud triumphing laugh, and said: 'You want to drive me into the loony bin? Why should I pay for an analyst when I've got you? You've got to pay the fee for being a healthy normal person. You're not the first person to tell me to get to a headshrinker. Well I'm not going to be dictated to by anyone.' He leaped off the bed and shouted: 'I am I, Saul Green, I am what I am what I am. I...' The shouting, automatic I, I, I speech began, but suddenly stopped, or rather halted, ready to go on: he stood, mouth open, in silence, said: 'I, I mean I...' the scattered last shots of gun-fire, then remarked normally: 'I'm getting out, I've got to get out of here.' He went out, jumping up the stairs in a frenzy of energy. I heard him opening drawers and crashing them shut. I thought: Perhaps he's leaving here altogether? But in a few moments he was down, and knocked on my door. I began to laugh, thinking this was a sort of humorous apology, the knock. I said, 'Come in, Mr. Green,' and he came in, and said, with a polite formal dislike: 'I've decided I want to take a walk, I'm getting stale, being shut in this flat.' I realised that while he was up in his room, what had happened in the last few minutes had changed in his mind. I said: 'All right, it's a perfect evening for a walk.' He said, with boyish candour, enthusiasm: 'Gee, but you're right.' He went down the stairs like a prisoner escaping. I lay for a long time, hearing my heart thump, feeling my stomach churn. Then I came to write this. Yet, of the happiness, the normality, the laughter, not a word will be written. In five or ten years time, reading this, it will be a record of two people, crazy and cruel. Last night, when I had finished writing, I took out the whisky and poured myself half a glassful. I sat taking small mouthfuls, drinking deliberately so that the liquor would slide down and hit the tension below my diaphragm, stun it into painlessness. I thought: If I stayed with Saul, I could easily become a drunkard. I thought: How conventional we are: the fact that I've lost my will, have spells of being a jealous maniac, that I'm capable of malicious driving joy in outwitting a man who is sick, none of this shocks me as much as the thought: You might become an alcoholic. Yet being an alcoholic is nothing, compared to the rest. I drank Scotch, and thought of Saul. I imagined him leaving this flat to telephone, from downstairs, one of the women. Jealousy drove through every vein in my body, like a poison, altering my breathing, making my eyes hurt. Then I imagined him stumbling through the city, ill, and I was frightened, thinking I shouldn't have let him go, although I couldn't have stopped him. I sat for a long time, worrying about his being ill. Then I thought of the other woman and the jealousy started to work again in my blood. I hated him. I remembered the cold tone of his diaries and hated him for it. I went upstairs, telling myself I should not, but knowing I would, and looked in his current diary. It was lying carelessly exposed. I wondered if he had written something for me to see, there were no entries for the last week, but under today's date: Am a prisoner. Am slowly going mad with frustration. I watched the spiteful anger