I'm Dying Laughing

by Christina Stead

  ‘Sisters? Eh? And the terrible aching poignancy of knowing, in a way, for they know, it’s all a mistake, and these hectic, drab lives are living for nothing because the Country’s mindless, and life here is without a system; and it could be better. What waste! Oh, what a splendid book though. Eh-hay, maybe, I’d hit the publisher’s jackpot—maybe not, too bitter, too true, eh? We’re all so pressed down on every side, like a fish at the bottom of the ocean, as Mike Gold says, with dollars, dollars—I guess a flounder doesn’t know why he is flat and has two eyes on one side. He thinks that’s fishrightness. Of course, life is not a dream, it’s a nightmare.’

  Maurice asked her about it and said he liked the sound of it. She knew he admired her and she fired up, especially as she saw in the distance Cousin Charlotte being genteel with Stephen. She said, ‘It is pathetic, touching, eh, the way they have been hawking Cousin Charlotte for twenty years. Why don’t they get her married?’

  ‘The young men used to wait for her father to die, to get more money. He’s always been ill; but he’s still running the business.’

  ‘What business is it exactly?’

  ‘Nitrates.’

  ‘Millions?’

  ‘A few.’

  She said, ‘Oh, Maurice, life, life! What it is. I have a lovely husband, children, home and good servants. I’m a good cook, I’m a success. I’ve just come through a wild, impossible love-affair—oh, Stephen’s not blind, though he didn’t know what I felt—who would? Anyone to look at me—’ She changed this unprofitable line of talk. ‘Yes, every one of my clan is fascinating and gives me the horrors, fills me with love and pathos. And a great curiosity. The dilemma is great, Maurice. If you stick to the rules, a woman, I mean, you know nothing and you’re in actual danger of being a bore, a moral tyrant. And if you don’t stick to the rules, you learn something, but you’re in danger of sinking very low and having nothing to judge by, no standards. Oh, my family are all magnificent. They have standards and they escape by being mad. Every one of them is mad, even if it is a madness of sameness. They are not, thank God, though, of basic floury goodness with tasteless insides, like commercial pies. They are humans and strange. Oh, I hate the ads, Maurice, showing the lady wondering whether her wash is telltale grey, or her toilet paper crude, the man going home to mother because wifey let the sink get stopped up and the young couple who drift apart because he had dandruff or she—excuse me! And then the mother who reunites them by mentioning trade-names and baking an old-fashioned, fluffy, dee-licious bunch of goo with banana whip and ice-cool guzzle. That’s the only life my family admits. But they have another. And why not? Can’t Americans, too, have passion in middle age and die for love at seventy? Oh, Maurice, Maurice—the lovelessness of our lives.’

  She said this earnestly, gave one sob, said, ‘Never mind! Tell Paolo to bring me a drink, darling. Pretend it’s for you, or Stephen will yell.’

  She walked about feverishly while waiting for Maurice. When he returned she said, ‘For example, Grandma’s sly boasting, her slanders, lies, the dramas she concocted quite without foresight, so that she got into messes, the way she kept her friends apart, so that there was no comparing of notes: the manoeuvres, the chances she took. It was magnificent. She was trying to live. In my “Mama” I have to make them so mediocre to make them credible to my public. Americans are not mediocre but they love the ordinary. It’s socially safe. Do you want to know a good formula? An ordinary girl meets a man, maybe unusual, but he’s a failure, he tells her so. She’s an ordinary, pretty girl, that goes without saying, she likes ordinary things, soda-shops, dates, little jackets, a little hat and high heels, and she’s got a little nose, not much of a hairdo, some—there’s a fascinating story opening; every editor and movie director would fall for it. Let’s see? H’m-h’m! She goes for an ordinary job on an ordinary bus and there she meets an ordinary jerk, in fact a regular fella this time. He sells iceboxes, not too successful, of course. She gets into ordinary unemployment and has a damn ordinary time … Isn’t that melancholy, Maurice? Take another start. A damn bright precocious girl, graduates high school three years ahead of the others and is as well valedictorian. She’s not erudite, never read Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, I mean she doesn’t wear horn-rim glasses. She gets a magazine scholarship, goes to town, gets the year’s prize for journalism, goes to New York, wows them, goes to Hollywood, licks the cream off it, marries the handsomest man she ever saw, and they inherit more or less ten million dollars! That’s a true story but it don’t suit. It won’t wow them. It’s not ordinary. Even though the town itself is full of small-town successes, with swimming pools, Japanese servants and governesses. But I’ve got to write about ordinary punks. Pah! What a dull life! Maurice, I long for another life. Will someone explain why our country, which is crazy for success, is also crazy about the ordinary punk and failure? Why is it? Oh, Maurice, I’m so unhappy, so miserable. I said I had a wild love-affair. It isn’t true. It was just a flirtation, nothing but a tease. I couldn’t credit it. A European, a man of experience, a courteous, refined, cultured man, with sweet manners, behaving like a high-school tease. Maurice, why, why am I so dumb? The freckled valedictorian always hungry, for some reason, met her fate, and had the wildest good luck and can’t be satisfied; but now must dream of exotic and mysterious romance, of someone who lives in your heart.’

  She turned to Maurice, put her head on his chest and sobbed. He looked down at her for a long moment and then put his arms round her, ‘Don’t cry, dear.’

  She lifted her red face streaked by wet hair, ‘Maurice, I’ve a hunch. At the end of my road, there’s a smash-up! I’ll run into a rock and never know what hit me.’

  He soothed and consoled her.

  ‘Oh Maurice, I know that you are always there. The thought of you consoles me. I know you are my friend. I don’t see you often; but you stand there, in my heart, good and kind. If you knew my gratitude to you. You help me to live. My life is such a struggle. Thank you, dear Maurice, for being my friend.’

  Maurice stood back, eyeing her quietly, but with shining eyes and a faint smile. They stood looking at each for a few moments; then both turned and went towards the guests.

  When they had all gone, Emily, who was very tired, could not sleep. Her ideas, both for a new book, for a chapter of her present book and for a movie, restlessly moved about in her skull. She had to go upstairs and work on the typewriter. It calmed her and made her feel worthwhile and fit. She wrote a letter to one of her friends who had been at the party. This finished, she sat thinking of Maurice, how kind he was, how he helped her to live. She intended to play him, keep him always by her side. She needed someone and someone in the family was better still.

  Stephen, in his flannel dressing-gown, opened the door and stood there. He said weakly, ‘Come to bed. You’re doing nothing. Are you going to stay up all night thinking of your romance with that fellow?’

  She broke into a smile. ‘Oh, he’s out. He’s a nasty little man. I’ve got to have some time to myself, after the people have raged and gone. I’ve got such a good idea for a book.’

  ‘You can think of it just as well in bed. I must sleep and I can’t sleep when I think you’re here with puerile, giddy, spoony nonsense between your ears.’

  She burst out laughing, and said meekly, ‘Oh, all right. Not a minute to myself.’

  In the bedroom, she undressed fast, then sat in her dressing-gown before the mirror looking into her own face, though not at herself. After a while, she said in her warm crusty tones, ‘I’ve got the characters mixed, I must untangle them. With three girls you have to do a superb storytelling feat, so it’s not We Three, or Girls Together. One is led into a first sordid adventure, more from exasperation than curiosity even, just so as not to be cheated; and one believes all the rules, no necking on the side; she holds out till the fellow marries her, she has children, she follows all the rules and then smash-up, something goes wrong and she never knows what hit her. She read the ads, she washed her kids’
clothes with No-work, she didn’t have telltale grey. And now? It’s too bitter, eh? Or so real they’ll lap it up? No. No.’

  She cried, crushing out her cigarette. ‘No, it’s cheap and wrong. I want a human book people will read. Would she be exhausted in the end—the vital one? Or would she just subside into a normal life, take it all for granted? It’s a grand ironical end in a way. But my public’s used to the consolation end.’

  Stephen screamed, ‘I’m ill, I’m ill, my ulcer’s playing up. For God’s sake, come to bed!’

  ‘The other. Would she relapse into some kind of sex racketeering or social success? Or whine, be embittered or sick or suffer a fatal boredom? Would she too lapse into the wife and mother game? Then suppose she could. Think of the meaning of it! That all she went through, her sorrows and struggle meant nothing. We put up the youth, energy, hope and agony but society gives us nothing in return, only the age-old treadmill? One becomes a prematurely aged cynical sex-racketeer, though of course she’s married. One tries everything and is a success and then, just when life opens out—well maybe it does. Let’s have a picture of all the hopes offered to any young one who wants to take them, the wave of the future, Poh-poh! Pshaw! As they used to say and with truth. Take the living pants off all these chattering pompous sinister dopes, these semi-skilled radicals. A capsule analysis … and oh, the freckled one, the valedictorian, her deleerious sweeping through those easy long ago days of youth, the élan, the bravado and the packaged millennium for tomorrow, the enthusiasm, the easy success of belonging and belonging to heaven and the angels. Oh, my God!’

  She burst out crying.

  ‘What’s the matter, you goddamn nuisance, stop shouting and come to bed! I’m so sick, I’m ill,’ said Stephen.

  After waiting for some time, Stephen said drily, ‘It’s nearly three in the morning. Don’t you think it’s time you got some sleep?’

  Feeling callous towards her husband and with some contempt for him, Emily got into bed and, thinking of the incident with Uncle Maurice, she slid into a blessed sleep, full of light and harmony and without sound. She woke an hour later, in the middle of a dreamed conservation about a classic figure of a young girl in America, a sort of figurehead for our ship, for all her tragedies are explicit in the dying corrupt civilization of our times. ‘She is a victim, I am a victim but I have grown up—’

  No, no: she must sleep. She thought again about Maurice, whom she now suddenly called ‘saviour’ and again suddenly fell into the same magnolia-white sleep. She woke an hour later, with early dawn, and her brain went to work at once, for work was calling; but fatigued with the dreary soulless writing she had to do, she began to think once more impatiently of her new ideas.

  ‘She is a victim, an American woman, exactly as an exploited steel-worker is a victim of the American modern imperialism he cheers for. He cheers for it because it feeds him. Her husband sees she’s exploited, but he thinks she gets away with it. And who is there to sympathize? Greed is the recognized value; greed is personality, quantity is success, possession is what prevails. Any hopes she had as a child are crushed, foolish as kites which only fly when there’s a breeze. She’s Mrs Blueberry-Pie now, prematurely white-haired with a big white apron over her big white stomach … Freckles is her daughter—she tries to escape and evade. Must this struggle forever end in nothing? Their sufferings are real but are laughed to smoke and powder. Who says any one of us is cheaper than the others? We spring from the same fresh dark water of tragedy. Well, some of us are cheaper: those who know, like me. Alas! Oh, hell, I’ve got to get up in the morning—oh, hell, I must sleep. Oh, hell, hell. And I’m a success! What would you call a failure?’

  Supposing she had married Maurice and not Stephen? She thought of Maurice, the kisses, the kindness, and was asleep again before she knew it. Coriolis had asked her to telephone him. She did not know what to make of it. She was tired of his teasing. She had to compose menus for that week, get up the laundry list, check Olivia’s clothes because she was growing out of them, call up Bonwit’s about some new clothes for Olivia, telephone Giles’s teacher at the break to see if he was getting on all right at school, telephone dear Anna out of courtesy. She should, she knew, have been telephoning people about their manifesto, as they called it, finding out their ‘reactions’. Now that it had gone out, she could think of a dozen things wrong with it, or that would sound a false note with others. She could recite many of the passages by heart. She would think of them for a moment:

  William Z. Foster states in his report to the national committee that the most important of all questions is the fight to maintain world peace. There is no world peace. There is already in the east a focus of world war being fanned into fire by the United States. The civil war in China is already an international war—the diplomatic or so-called Cold War being waged by the US against the Soviet Union and all workers’ governments, consisting in some part of the occupation of territory which is now or would at once turn democratic if not socialist, without American military occupation and intervention and is tantamount to shooting hot war—what is the use of speaking of preserving peace? Let us fight for peace but not pretend that peace exists … The fact is that the flabby, vague and perhaps disingenuous announcements of the committee conceal only very slightly an intention to do nothing at all, to bide their time, to pursue the old line of ‘notorious reformism’, to quote. Browder has gone, Browderism remains. Indeed Browder himself is only the casualty of the Duclos letter … We must mobilise labour’s allies in other sections of the population. What sections? And what elements in the labour movement itself? They are all porkchop chauvinist when not self-satisfied, scared for their deep-freezes.

  She remembered it hopelessly. All was lost. This manifesto of theirs would get nowhere. ‘Forget it. I’ve got Olivia’s party and Anna coming and the whole house to turn upside down. I’m crazy, I guess, I guess.’

  That day she did not work on the typewriter at all. But all day she had ideas. Supposing, she thought, while ironing a Swiss muslin for Olivia, I wrote about a woman’s life in 1946? At last she hastily put aside something she was doing and ran upstairs to her workroom. She wrote two-thirds of a page of a letter to Maurice, inspired, joyful words; and then downstairs, full of gratitude to Maurice; and she thought, ‘What is wrong with our current morality? It deplumes all joy. Look how I can work! Why, with my energy—I could turn out ten times the work if I were happy and in love. What is wrong with passion for others? Our lives are dull and Stephen and I even fight, because our lives are drained of all true joy, the kind you are allowed to have in adolescence before you’re tethered to one adult. Then everyone smiles, beams with fellow-feeling. And now it’s wrong. We grow up longing for men, we slowly and with what miseries get to know them; and then just when we know them, we must never know them again. Men and women meet each other all day. They talk and laugh and kiss. But how can they know each other except by sex or divination, and I’m no mind-reader. Sex is easier and surer. Oh, how stupid now my wails and gnashings of teeth and what I said about married women who fell in love. Maurice, oh, my darling, you’ve cheered me up tremendously. I’ve written a beautiful page which you won’t see, but I’m full of ideas, I’m rich, I can work, I’m a full nature, a joyous woman, a full-grown fruiting tree, fruits and flowers and leaves. I’ve found out a secret and if ever I lead a dull monogamous bachelor life again I’m crazy. No more guilty feelings for straying from the pen. Oh, a crown of roses for you Maurice and even for poor Coriolis, dead stinking roses, and of laurel for me and even for Stephen—poor Stephen, who’s so glad when I feel strong, but I don’t give a damn for him! He’s my jailer. He caught me and he’s going to keep me. As a dog-owner can’t bear to observe that his dog likes anyone who hands him a bone. A good old nag between the shafts, the blinkered ox treadeth out the grain. Love story. Boy meets girl, but girl mustn’t nip a mean husk. Oh, poor Stephen, there he lies asleep at last, poor angel, with his nerves, his flu, his rheumatics, his clinging love, su
ch a darling—101.2° fever, I ought to worry; but oh, well, he’ll get better. In the meantime, I must love and work hard; there’s only one way. It’s economic. Only, Jehoshaphat, how I’ve ridden women who’ve gone astray.’

  Stephen got out of bed. He came down to lunch because he had to go to the dentist’s. A tooth had begun to gnaw in the night. He was for the moment feeling better. They laughed at lunch and wondered if they might not carry the decision in the Branch.

  Stephen said, ‘You look well, you look simply sparkling this morning. I guess I’m wrong about you. I ought to let you go your own way. But I’m afraid you’ll break down one of these days. Of course the secret, you poor old horse, is that yesterday you had a good day’s feed and hunger’s always the explanation of your deep psychological revolts, your mental abysses.’

  Emily said, ‘Ha-ha. I don’t mind work, one can say. I worked like a demon yesterday and all morning. I’m glad you’re going to the dentist. I can clean out the bedroom. Paolo and Maria-Gloria are off today. I don’t know what we pay them for. Maria-Gloria simply scamped the bedroom last time. I wish we could pay on result, but that’s unproletarian. I should have the stern nature of my stepmother. Why don’t I pay myself at $350 monthly as I pay them? On myself I don’t spend half that much each month, not a quarter. Listen, Stephen, stop toying with that milk and go to the dentist. Clear off. I’m busy.’