by S. J. Finn
SJ Finn is a social worker and writer.
THIS
TOO
SHALL
PASS
SJ FINN
Sleepers Publishing Pty Ltd
PO Box 1204
Collingwood Victoria 3066
Australia
www.sleeperspublishing.com
This Too Shall Pass
ISBN: 9781742700380
Copyright text © SJ Finn 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published by Sleepers Publishing, Melbourne Australia, 2011.
Printed and bound by Griffin Press.
The publishers wish to thank Luke Meinzen, Rafael Ward and Anton Sirianni.
This Too Shall Pass is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters depicted here and any real person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The text in the epigraph is taken from the introductory lecture presented by Jacques Lacan to the Vth James Joyce International Symposium at La Sorbonne, Paris on 16 June 1975. Text established by Jacques-Alain Miller on the basis of notes taken by Eric Laurent. Published with JA Miller’s consent in Joyce avec Lacan (Paris: Navarin, 1987).
Lines throughout are taken from TS Eliot’s ‘The Love Song ofJ Alfred Prufrock’. The lines on p. 172 are taken from Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Adrogue’ (Selected Poems, edited by Alexander Coleman, Penguin: 1999).
The lines on p. 233 are taken from Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’ (Ariel, 1965).
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australian-its funding and advisory body.
Sleepers Publishing is a proud member of SPUNC - the Small Press Network
To Billi.
For all sorts of reasons I’m not in the best of
shapes today.
Jacques Lacan
ONE
Through my bay window the sky is blanched and vague. Maimed beech trees flank the street, their branches parted around electrical cabling like giant skyward pigtails. I don’t know why I find them appealing, their limbs having been hacked away like that. Maybe it’s their ghostly centres, the suggestion of their shape that endears them. After all, my insides have become similarly nebulous and ill-defined, held together by an equally teetering outline.
Comparing myself to a tree? The part of the tree that’s missing? I shake my head, snort a laugh, but I’m unimpressed, seriously wondering if I can form a thought that will go some way to explaining. You could say I’m a walking mirage, a hologram that from certain angles you can’t see, and before my powers of reasoning dissolve – before I vanish altogether – I’m going to attempt to take stock.
Of course, there’s the possibility my efforts will come to nothing. Trying to round up details, to calculate their impact, could prove as productive as watching sand fall through my fingers. But excluding the bashing-out of a few choice chords on the guitar, the carolling-up of some anguish-filled lyrics to fit the key, I’m pretty much devoid of tricks. And the thought of talking to a professional – despite being one of those professionals – makes me feel bone weary, a little nauseous. So, what remains? Floating as I am on this unmarked day, the light flat and lacking expectation, I guess I’ve concluded it’s better to bleed on the page than in the brain, if that makes sense.
I inhale. Realign my chair, which slides a little too easily under me. I do have one niggling concern (there are probably several but this is the one that comes to mind): while I will go on feeling as transparent as air, what I’m about to put in writing will show itself in a dense hue, one that might even shock me. The alternate plan? Spending the day in a catatonic fugue metaphorically propped on my haunches. Well, (and thank God for saving graces) I’m a doer and the prospect of inertia won’t suffice.
So, with a saying to bolster me… to take the tide at theflood… I’ll not dally. And given that – given everything, actually – I’ll begin at an intersecting point, at a place that cleaves right through the middle of it all.
TWO
I‘ve heard people say there’s no nice way to leave a marriage. It’s something I hang onto as I scour the details of my own departure. I wish I could claim to just having left on a train – that after careful consideration, the giving of explanations and apologies, I coolly slipped away. But while the actual exit was carried out with some semblance of calm… guilty on many counts but free to go… I left under the illuminating glow of fecklessness.
It had been fourteen years and a good swag of happiness that had tied my husband and I together. I’d been in love with him – the father of my child, which is how I now describe him. Back then his name was Dave.
Dave was a moderate person, stable. (Still is. He’s good.) In fact before things fell off the rails for us he was – almost – the perfect husband. He absorbed stress well, responded caringly, never lost his temper, and he was measured when faced with the most challenging people. Certainly on the surface, Dave was mature, deeply mature, while I. well. I had a lot more of the eternal adolescent in me.
One characteristic of his flew in the face of this goodness. Under some odd illusion that he was being humorous, usually to people we didn’t know, he had a tendency to say inappropriate things. When asked, for instance, what he’d been up to, he’d respond with a common conversation-stopper like, ‘Minding my own business, ever tried it?’ Or conversely (clearly not taking his own advice) he’d turn to a woman we’d just met and say, ‘I don’t understand why women worry about hair on their upper lip. You obviously feel the same way.’
After clangers like these, the fact that I was associated with him, let alone intimately connected, would resonate in me like a gong going off, long-lasting embarrassment vibrating percussively. Ears ringing, face glowing, I would look around hoping to be subsumed into the closest physical object.
I can’t say this led to us splitting up. After all, most of our conversations were composed of intelligent and insightful communication. So? The reason? And I hesitate to put it on the page… the gauntlet already showing its gnarly protrusions… because it makes me sound capricious – worse than that: unreliable. But there wasn’t any getting away from it. Still isn’t. Therefore, appeals aside, admissions pecking… write it!… I woke one morning with a well-defined sexual attraction to my next-door neighbour who – and you’ve probably guessed by now (as if I expect that sort of thing to be tattooed between the lines) – was female. This was the beginning of the end for Dave and me, except that somehow – some gaping black hole appearing in my frontal lobe, perhaps – I completely missed that subtlety and thought it was just a middle part, an along-the-way distraction.
In defence of my ignorance I’d always been someone who’d assumed and said “forever”. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t catch on when “forever” began failing, first by temptation and, in the end, I do admit, from necessity. Nevertheless, I was faltering; the fast held principle of tenacity was disassembling in me. I was trampling, not so much over myself as inside myself, up and down on beliefs I’d steadfastly held.
The trampling.
The dreadful trampling.
THREE
Call it coincidence, but I was thirty-three when this epistle kicked off: the age of rebirth, apparently – so called because Jesus was thirty-three when nailed to the cross.
Rebirth? Bet the Christian fraternity wouldn’t like that. Then again, there’s a type of Christian in the western world – indeed the born-again type – who may well embrace the idea. These Christians surreptitiously smile at the sound of an exclamation such as, Oh my God! In fa
ct, these expletives are, with the slightest adjustment, no longer blasphemous or profane or even irreverent but prayerful: a calling up, a raising to halleluiah, a salutation!
Rebirth? I’d decided to change my name from Jen to Monty. I can’t explain this fully except to say that for a long time Jen had felt wrong and, like an apotemnophile with a leg that shouldn’t be there, I wanted to get rid of it. I needed, I told myself, something with greater specificity (I knew six other Jens at the time, four of whom were in my workplace) and given that my surname is Montgomery, Monty seemed like the natural choice.
Despite the name thing, I’m not known for being superficial and frivolous about things or for being merely my persona. Actually, I’m mostly seen as serious, a little dour and in need of a good dose of lightening-up. Don’t worry so much, my friends have often said to me. You can’t fix it.
But there it is: I have a tendency to belly-on about prejudices and inequalities, oppression and unfairness – all the negative ‘isms’ that circulate our human world. And who knows, there may never have been enough of us pushing for social justice. Even harping on about it may have become a lost art. After all, in the middle class, misanthropy floats easily. I’ve heard the choruses: Same opportunities exist for everyone! No one MAKES the poor poor!
Most, mind you, aren’t interested. Capitalism covers all corners: Market forces, that’s what sorts the world-out. What is it you call them?… momentary eye contact… inequities?
By the time I was in my last year of school I’d learnt to calibrate my opinions, which didn’t mean anything much had changed. Welfare was, without a second’s contemplation, a natural path to follow. A social worker, I told myself, must be endowed with healthy rage as well as compassion. And it seemed to me that if I had an interest in the plight of the individual, even better.
Getting started, I volunteered on the phones at Lifeline. I was seventeen and like a young enlistee, keen enough to fudge the date of my birth. During all-night stints I took long and sad, if not utterly depressing, calls. I had conversations with people much older than I was who could hear the youth in my voice but gave me the benefit of the doubt. Constructing meaningful and productive exchanges with strangers is not, after all, as straightforward as it might appear. Listening on its own certainly won’t do it. Skills are needed, attributes that aren’t easily installed in someone. Apart from basic compassion there are things like curiosity, patience, lack of expectation – even the arc of a discussion is important. As for me, I was poised (almost always, back then) to be the helper. I had to learn to back off, to quieten down, to be the net for people who were falling, rather than the skyhook that was hoicking them out of their situation. Doing too much was counterproductive. People needed a delicate interaction, one that often required the listener to slowly ease themselves into the caller’s predicament.
Once I’d mastered a few things though, I felt, all in all, I was on a path that would sustain my interest, provide me with gainful employment and serve as an outlet for my bloodletting. As such, for the most part – and everything comes with some revelations, but, certainly in those early years – things knitted together perfectly.
Between that time and now, it’s fair to say, however, that I’ve vacillated in regard to my chosen profession. I was perhaps not as altruistic as I’d claimed or believed. I’d been known to get sick of people’s stories, their inability to raise themselves from the mire, tiring of their corollary of excuses – excuses that allowed them to remain stuck in appalling situations no matter how unhappy or dissatisfied they were. A lot could have been done and much suffering was experienced, often by children, when nothing was.
Fed up, I’d want to throw my do-gooder career in – dig holes, knit jumpers, bake, bird watch, anything but face the complexity of someone’s beleaguered circumstances. Still, apart from a necessity to eat, to afford basic luxuries, I got over these troughs, rallying with a second, third, fifty-fifth wind for the whole deal. Listening for money, treating maladies of the emotionally fraught – despite my difficulty, sometimes, in saying it – was my vocation.
Putting this aside, running parallel, there was my personal metamorphosis.
FOUR
Imet my current partner, Renny, while still ens conced in the dual reality of being both attached to Dave and acting as if I was single. I was, to put it bluntly, completely outward bound – a state for which I have no excuses. My band – four women, all of us married, all of us with children – had been cranking out ear-splitting notes to get a break from domesticity for a couple of years. We had a gig in the local hall of the town Renny was living in. It was the annual Reclaim the Night march (significant on many fronts).
Her Irish name suited her, not least because of her bold figure, robust nature and the drop of ginger that tainted her features. She’d been living in the rural town halfway between Melbourne and the town I lived in, for four years, managing an outreach service to women living with violent partners. She was also a member of the local fire brigade and generally well known for a bloody-good-time-to-be-had at the pub. Renny was the opposite of Dave: larger than life, protective, an organiser from hell, and a social magnet. Do lessons come from opposing corners of the ring?
The evening in question wasn’t my first foray into women’s events. By then I was well versed, certainly in a country way, to these kinds of social gatherings, so, although I don’t quite remember, I probably bounced up the stairs, brimming with confidence.
Renny was sitting at a small rickety table getting ready to collect and store the proceeds of the night.
‘Wondered if I could get some help?’ I asked her rather dumbstruck face – a look I assumed was born from aggravation but came, she assured me later, from having been struck by a myriad of possibilities at the sight of me.
She rose, fumbling to close and lock the money tin.
‘My amp is a fucking lead weight,’ I said as we headed outside.
(I have an inclination to swear when I’m self-conscious, which by then – perhaps a little overcome – I was.)
Love is an odd thing. I can’t imagine picking Renny from a crowd. But looking her in the eye and being sufficiently close to brush up against her was enough. I returned to her many times during the evening and, at three in the morning, when she asked if she could kiss me – a group of us having made our way to the town’s one nightclub, full of gaudy decor and men celebrating a bucks’ night – I melted, both from the kiss and the chivalry of being asked.
Aided by the fact that Renny and I weren’t into acknowledging what was going on – denial on tap – we didn’t hold back. Dave was away a lot and such was the level of my warped thinking – a level easily reached when justification is fed by need and that need is a conflagration inside – I’d convinced myself he was making himself scarce. Was I also so naive to think my marriage could sustain my dalliance? Obviously. Or perhaps I wasn’t paying attention to what was changing, what already had changed.
Whatever my premise, according to me everything would be fine. According to other laws – and I’d prefer to leave nature out of it – I was systematically heading for a crash site. Lights, sirens, maps of dangerous pitfalls: there was nothing and nobody that could have talked me out of it.
FIVE
It was mid-December and about six weeks after I’d met Renny when Dave found a steamy letter from her to me. It was in the left-hand pocket of my favourite orange corduroy shirt, which was thrown distractedly – as if love had minced my thinking powers – on the front seat of my car. We were having a party for our son, Marcus. It was his sixth birthday and fifteen five-to-seven-year-olds from his small rural school were shouting, eating and giggling their way through the two-hour gathering in a rush that brings motor neurons to mind.
I wasn’t being my usual helpful self. The roles of carer, cook and organiser had taken a huge flip already. While for years I’d done most of this work, a new order had established itself. As I withdrew, he took up the slack. He could cook and clean, as
it turned out, wonderfully. Added to housework, the art of bringing home flowers surfaced. In fact, in those last months he presented more bunches of irises, tiger lilies, gerberas and chrysanthemums to me than he had in the whole fourteen years we’d been together. Unfortunately, by then, I couldn’t appreciate either the work or the flowers. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him being housekeeper extraordinaire – I did; it was more that I couldn’t feel it. The rocky ledge had been tilted beyond my powers to hang on. I saw how quickly life could pivot – how, after so much stability, as easily as a coin being flipped, everything seemed to be altering.
He got through the party and, with me paying little attention – by the finishing line I was cleaning up inside, ploughing through dishes, nodding and waving from the house as he got the kids into their parents’ cars – I knew something was wrong, but not exactly what.
‘I found this.’ He put the letter on the kitchen table, calm as always, if not a little fluttery.
I glared at it, alarm fixing my muscles.
‘Well?’ he asked, still neutral as if we were choosing a colour to paint the wall. ‘It’s that woman. I picked you up from her place. It’s her, isn’t it?’
And I’d forgotten – he had picked me up from Renny’s three weeks earlier, on his way back from the city.
‘Yes,’ I managed.
‘So?’
Unable to speak, my heart throbbing palpably, I shrugged.
‘I’ll ring her.’ He nervously propelled himself to the phone. ‘What’s her number?’
I scoffed. ‘You can’t do that.’
‘Why not? I’ve got a right. I met her. I’m going to ring and ask her what she thinks she’s doing.’
Who knows why I gave him the number – perhaps it was defiance, perhaps cowardice, perhaps the need for something to happen while not being the one to initiate it. He punched in the digits as I spoke them, his resolve steely. The thought of what was to come scorched. Dry ice to my skin.