Second Half First

by Drusilla Modjeska

  Sophie laughed when I told her this story – an excellent example of what she called the English English. They think they are Greenwich Mean Time, she said. Like men. There was something to be said, we agreed, for living on the periphery, even if we periphery-dwellers were the only ones who knew it.

  4

  Don’t get the idea that our household disavowed men. On the contrary, men were frequent and welcomed visitors, even temporary inhabitants. Garry was often there, as he and I slid into something that was more than a friendship, less than a love affair, and certainly not a marriage. He was funny and clever and had good stories. Sophie liked him, and he fitted around that table more easily than some of the women who came, driving their cars from miles away, from Canberra, or the Victorian border towns, with enormous dogs, and some with girlfriends who drank whisky by the bottle, and argued that the mere fact of being female was always a greater point of disadvantage than class, or education, or race, or disability; a ridiculous position that neither Sophie nor I came anywhere near to agreeing with – nor did Ali, or most of the others who were regulars at that table. Having painted those walls in the women’s refuge back in the 1970s, and having lived and studied in Papua New Guinea, I was impatient with the whole noisy business, but it wasn’t until my cat, Hackney, was chased under the house by one of the dogs that I managed to put a stop to it. For an entire weekend, the dog sat growling by the fallen-in grate through which Hackney had escaped into the dark underbelly of the house, and nothing would keep the dog away, or persuade the woman who’d brought it to tie it up. After that I banned dogs, which dealt with that, but not with poor Hackney, who came out a nervous wreck and must have got something under there, for not long afterwards, she had to be put down, suffering some chronic, unfixable disease. I held her while the vet prepared the needle, a more monstrous task than I could have imagined; no easy death this, as she struggled and fought. Before the needle went in she bit me, or scratched, or both, a deep gash in that soft fold of skin between the thumb and finger. Wash it, the vet said, pointing me to a sink. His assistant passed the bottle of disinfectant soap. I scrubbed, the water ran rusty red from the blood and by the time I returned to the table Hackney was dead.

  Who says we wait for karma? That was where I got, or probably got, the toxoplasmosis that attacked my eyes a few years later, when I sold the house on the corner and bought a flat on the hill behind Bondi – the worst possible move in financial terms, downsizing exactly as the property market began its boom, but I didn’t think in those terms then. None of us believed in unregulated capitalism, or could imagine that its inequities and the money-makers would triumph as they have; hadn’t the battle of extreme inequality been won, and the lesson learned, through the two World Wars and a Depression? Hadn’t a new way been born of social democracy? Even as I child I knew what the Beveridge Report was, which had ushered in the Welfare State; we all did, the new order we celebrated with the Festival of Britain. Such hopefulness. Such naïveté. There we were in the late 1980s, the money tide already beginning to rise around our ankles, exactly as I gave up a tenured position at the University of Technology to embark on a life of writing. An individualist choice, nothing communal about it at all, which is why, I suppose, it felt necessary, even essential, to eliminate the mortgage I had which, with no guarantee of income, seemed enormous, though a fraction of an average mortgage today.

  So I moved into a small flat and almost immediately regretted it, not because of the financial error but because I missed the house on the corner and everything about it – though Sophie had left by then, and so had Helen who’d moved in after her. In that house there had always been room for others, and there was room for parties, which there wasn’t at the flat, and while it might sound trivial – what’s a party when all’s washed up and done? – actually it wasn’t. The gathering of people together, the flow in and out of that house, was rich and enriching. We got good at cooking up bowls of chickpea salad, and we bought beans and olives and tomatoes from the market, loaves from the new bakeries, rye and sourdough, slabs of unsalted butter. You can, or could then, throw a party on very little and everyone brought grog (as it was called) and our standards weren’t high. The talk was of art and books, of politics and ideas, of news and gossip as people visited who were newly arrived in Sydney from England, or were visiting from Melbourne, or returning from travelling through Asia. Love affairs began at those parties, flirtations and friendships, all kinds of collaboration. I still meet people who remember coming to that house, brought by someone who knew someone who knew one of us. I met Hilary McPhee that way when she was in Sydney, visiting Helen. McPhee Gribble, the independent publishing house she and Di Gribble had started, was still in its prime, not yet defeated by interest rates of 17 per cent. Helen’s Monkey Grip had been one of their first books, and Poppy would be one of the last before the imprint went to Penguin, in a move Hilary described as like having your head cut off and waking in the morning to find yourself still alive.

  She told this story at a wake for McPhee Gribble, another party in another house. So powerful was the image of a head coming off that she thought she must have been hallucinating when she heard on the radio, or thought she’d heard, a taxi-driver in Adelaide say exactly that had happened to him at the end of the war, in Malaya. He was lined up to be executed with other prisoners-of-war, but the Japanese soldier who wielded the sword was either tired, or inept, or merciful. He was injured – badly, of course – but critical arteries weren’t cut. He fell in the trench and played dead until some Malay villagers came and rescued him. We laughed; such imaginings! Then the writer Jessica Anderson raised her voice to say that she had heard this story on the radio too.

  They were good parties, the parties we had at the house on the corner, even if I had to get out the broom late in the evening and start sweeping the kitchen before the last of the men, still drinking, propped against the sink, would leave. Sophie said it was a passive-aggressive English way of doing things and I’d be better off telling them to leave. So after that I’d get out the broom and say that if they didn’t leave soon I’d start sweeping – and when they didn’t, I did, until eventually they did. Oh, they’d say, we’re enjoying ourselves. We like this house. Why don’t you girls have another drink and talk to us? Because we’re going to bed, I’d say, still with the broom, no invitation this, as they shuffled out the gate to the street at the side.

  Yes, there were men in that house, and those we liked returned, calling out as they opened the gate. Some came with tools and did chores for us. The pergola in the garden went up that way – three blokes, a ladder, a saw and a drill – and all I did was brew up large pots of tea and butter more slabs of bread. The men seemed to enjoy themselves sawing and hammering – activities in which I had no interest – and when it was finished they drank beer with Sophie while I planted the grapevine that gave us shade in the summer and produced small, rather sour grapes. Another man, someone’s boyfriend, unblocked the drain under the sink where the washing machine I’d bought with the money that came after Poppy’s death had been badly installed. Poppy was right, a washing machine could transform a woman’s life even if you had the use of a laundromat as I had – except in Papua New Guinea, where I’d had to boil up the copper as Poppy had when we were children, and put everything through a mangle. All these years later I can still remember the pattern of sun coming through the door of the dark laundry at the back of the house where we lived when Poppy came out of hospital and I was sent away to school. The light was dappled from the tree outside, a memory of summer, a canopy of trees, and the fields beckoning where I could be alone, or with a book, and not in that dark laundry with my mother’s face set firm to the task, and Mrs Hill, who came to help, turning the mangle until she was red and sweating, and Poppy calling to me, Make yourself useful, and the chance of that door closed, and the clouds coming over, and the shadow of trees and leaves disappearing into the worn, uneven tiles as sheet after sheet went through the wringer, two for each
bed, and the pillowcases and tea towels. On and on it went, and when at last it was done and the sheets were on the lines, propped up with poles cut from the woods, the best of the day was gone and a kind of inertia hung over us all.

  Years later, when I’d married and was living way out in the Highlands of PNG, where Nick, my husband, was doing his fieldwork, we were given an old mangle by a mission further up the valley. We set it up outside in the long grass so that while we turned the handle I could see across the airstrip to the lake and the mountains, a view that, when it came to the mangle, never entirely overrode that memory of laundry and longing. Not that we used the mangle often. Mostly we were out in a hamlet a day’s walk away and the river would do, our clothes laid out on the rocks with everyone else’s, and when it came to sheets, well, they just got browner and browner, until they smelled so bad that as soon as we got back to the house by the airstrip, we’d put them in the copper and boil and poke at them with long sticks until the water bubbled the brown away and they emerged, not white exactly, but pleasingly clean, when they were hitched up under the roof to dry.

  The worst thing about living with Sophie – who was otherwise verging on perfect in that regard – was that she was a terrible washer. She’d mix up loads, scoop in too much soap, never separate her whites, so that if I wasn’t diligent and something of mine got in with hers, it inevitably came out grey. Though in her case what was so annoying was that she always looked crisp and clean and elegant. I don’t know how she did it, given the clothes that were pegged any old how on the line. I was in PNG recently with her and her daughter, who was then thirteen, and Martha, my niece, who was in her thirties, and on the last day in the village Sophie appeared in a white shirt, looking as if she was ready for a fashion shoot. Martha, who is a very good washer, and has a similar capacity with clothes and rarely looks less than her best but was distinctly dishevelled that day, was so astonished she took a photo to prove it. Men, not surprisingly, fell for Sophie, not just because of her clothes, or even her very blue eyes; it was the spirit of her that drew so many to her, as if she had life to spare, and that took some managing when it came to the men who’d drink it in, all of it, given the chance.

  Men. Oh, they were difficult years, so many of us wounded − them as much as us. But while we had each other and our conversations, our table, the men, many of them it seemed, needed a woman, one particular woman or another, to listen to them, sympathise. It’s much harder for us, they’d say, with you women wanting to be independent. Look at this house, they’d say; what role was left for them? We wanted it both ways, they’d say, and maybe we did. But hadn’t men always had both, lives of work and travel, independent movement, other affairs of the heart, and certainly the body? And didn’t all that depend on the domestic and emotional support, the servitude, of women? Do you want mothers all your lives? Not a sophisticated line of thought, I admit, and it didn’t always go down well, an indication of our defensiveness as well as of theirs, perhaps. There were also men, a few, with whom we could talk, and even if they were stuck on Greenwich Mean Time, even if it became argument, or worse, the conversation could go two ways – as long as we weren’t sleeping with them – and be instructive. But when we slept with them, and even if we didn’t, we were full of wild feeling, perverse responses, wanting and not wanting, testing them, challenging, finding ourselves repulsed – by one meaning of the word, or the other. We were insulted, we found them repulsive; we found them laughable; we found them enraging. There were also men we found endearing, and interesting, and sometimes we could take them as lovers and enjoy them, even if we kept them at bay, protecting our wounded selves; yet when they touched some deep region of our hearts, and when we were the most satisfied, it was then, often enough, that we’d want more. No easy pattern this, words inadequate to express the shifting moods and feelings that came with the dilemma of knowing the value – the essential value – of those rooms of our own, and yet being ambushed, despite everything, by the dream of the shared bedroom, or mourning for the baby’s cot. From this distance I can feel sorry for the men who encountered us, but remembering back to that time I see myself standing there in the room with the table as someone recounted the next maddening encounter, hands on my hips, saying, What is the matter with them?

  I still sometimes wonder what goes on in the minds of men (some men), which might be why I like Philip Roth as a writer. I hated him back in those days in the house on the corner, still outraged by Portnoy’s Complaint and at the mere title of books I didn’t read, The Breast or The Professor of Desire, which is a pity as I might have learned something useful, both about writing and about the minds of men. I read him now on the sorrow of old men who realise they’ll never again know the breast of a young woman. I have friends who laugh when I say I’m moved by this. Sob, they say. Poor dears. And it’s true, there’s little need for sympathy when the professor can no longer enact his desires. But still, there’s something, maybe not sympathy, that I feel, though to some extent it is, but mostly it’s curiosity about the vulnerability that lies within these strange beings, in some ways like us and in others so profoundly different.

  No one has given shape to the paradoxical vulnerability of men more eloquently than the artist Louise Bourgeois with her great sculptured penis, Fillette. Robert Mapplethorpe took a wonderful photograph of her in her monkey coat, holding it under her arm.14 Fillette, small girl: a latex and plaster penis, 59.9 x 19.5 cm. I saw it with Obelia, Nick’s daughter, early in 2008 at the Tate Modern, when we were in London for Amy’s wedding – my niece, Obelia’s friend – a woman of the next generation marrying at thirty-two, knowing what she was doing – if not entirely, marriage being as it is, but knowing a great deal more than her grandmother or her aunt had done when they married at twenty. That day at Tate Modern, Obelia and I stood in front of Fillette. It was hung by a hook through the shaft; we had to look up to see it, with nothing to obscure the testicles, and between them soft feminine folds that could be labia. A tender, vulnerable being, Fillette. Of course, Louise Bourgeois said. Was she not married to a man? Did she not have three sons?15

  I was living in the house on the corner when I first discovered Louise Bourgeois. She’d been there all the time, of course – the Mapplethorpe photo was taken in 1968 – but it was a discovery for many of us when the catalogue of her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York reached Sydney. The work that struck me then, in the mid-1980s when so much in my life was awry, was not Fillette, but the tall, thin sculptured Personages, made of wood – shaved and rubbed rather than carved – until she could afford to cast some in bronze. If I were an artist – a fantasy I still sometimes have – I’d make personages just like hers, I’d say, and I’d move them around, as she did, so they faced each other in different combinations: lovers, parents, friends, enemies − categories that were not fixed as she realigned them first this way, and then that. Oh, to be able to give shape to feelings and confusions – would that not be better than words with their relentless march onwards, one by one? I’d imagine my large downstairs workroom stripped of its chairs, its desk and tables, its shelves of books. Even then I doubt that it’d have accommodated those tall thin beings, let alone the table for the Art Gallery of New South Wales with a handmade book for each woman of my city. Ridiculous imaginings for someone who couldn’t even draw, though maybe imagining what we are not can be a part of finding who we are. Maybe.

  Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911, and in September 1938, a year before the start of the Second World War, she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved with him to New York. It was there, after the war, after the birth of her sons, that she began work on her Personages, which she assembled on the roof of the apartment where they lived in Manhattan, the city spread out around her, giving shape and pattern to her life: her exile, her maternity, her irritation – and loathing, often enough – of the masculine certainties of the artists she encountered through her well-connected husband. Ambivalence. Ra
ge. Determination. Later she’d say that the Personages, tall and unbending, were the work of someone ‘scared stiff’. Of what? Of the need to understand, as Ali might say, what was not yet known? The unconscious pressure that had to be released before she could work in shapes and materials more pliable? So you can see why I responded to those works, even before I tell you that Robert Goldwater, who would became the first director of the Museum of Primitive Art in New York, published a key book called Primitivism and Modern Painting, one of the first books I read on Oceanic art.16 And there in Personages were echoes of the art I’d seen on my one trip near the Sepik with Nick. We saw carvings, house poles, carved canoe prows and paddles in the villages and on the rivers, but it wasn’t until we were taken into a shed near Maprik – I think by a mission, though my memory is hazy – that I saw their majesty. When the door opened, light flooded in, illuminating carvings alight with the spirit of the world outside that shed: some were indeed tall and thin, others elaborately carved, some boat-like, some as large as canoes. All I could afford – for to buy was why we were taken there – was a small clay pot carved like a drinking vessel with four faces moulded into the sides of the bowl, one for each quarter of the sky. It is on my desk, a small chip in its pedestal, otherwise complete: a holder, these last forty years, for my pens and pencils.