The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  Spent today playing “the game.” Towards afternoon reached the point of relaxed comprehension I was aiming for. It seems to me that if I can achieve some sort of self-discipline, instead of aimless reading, aimless thinking, I can defeat my depression. Very bad for me, Janet’s not being here, no need to get up in the morning, no outer shape to my life. Must give it an inner shape. If “the game” doesn’t work, I’ll get a job. I must anyway, for financial reasons. (Find myself not eating, watching pennies, I hate the idea of working so much.) I’ll find some sort of welfare work—it’s what I’m good at. Very silent here today. No sign of Saul Green. Molly rang late—says that Jane Bond has “taken a fall over” Mr Green. She added that she thought that any woman who got involved with Mr Green was out of her senses. (A warning?) (*3) “That’s a man to go to bed with for one night and be damned sure you lose his telephone number afterwards. If we were still the sort of women, that is, who went to bed with a man for one night. Ah well, those were the days…”

  This morning I woke up feeling as I never have before. My neck was tense and stiff. I was conscious of my breathing—had to force myself to breathe deeply. Above all, my stomach pained me, or rather, the region under my diaphragm. It was as if my muscles there were clenched into a knot. And I was filled with a kind of undirected apprehension. It was this feeling that finally made me dismiss self-diagnosis of indigestion, having caught cold in my neck, etc. I rang Molly and asked her if she had any sort of book with medical symptoms in it, and if so, would she read me a description of an anxiety state. It was in this way I discovered I am suffering from an anxiety state—I told her it was to verify some description in a novel I’d read. Then I sat down to find out why I have an anxiety state. I am not worried about money, being short of money has never in my life upset me, I’m not afraid of being poor, and anyway one can always earn it if one sets one’s mind to it. I’m not worried about Janet. I can see no reason at all why I should be anxious. “Naming” the state I am in as an anxiety state lessened it for a while, but tonight (*4) it is very bad. Extraordinary.

  Today the telephone rang very early—Jane Bond for Saul Green. Knocked on his door, no answer. Several times he hasn’t been in at all, all night. Was going to tell her that he hadn’t been in, but it occurred to me that wasn’t tactful, if she has really “taken a fall” over him. Knocked at the door again, looked in. He was there. Struck by how he slept, in a tight curve under neat bedclothes. Called him, but no answer. Went close, put my hand on his shoulder, no response. Suddenly frightened—he was so still that for the second I thought he was dead, there was such a quality of absolute stillness. What I could see of his face paper-white. Like fine slightly crinkled paper. Tried to turn him over. Very cold to the touch—could feel the cold striking up into my hands. I felt terror. I can feel, even now, on the palms of my hands, the cold heavy quality of his flesh through his pyjamas. Then he woke—but suddenly. He simultaneously put his arms up round my neck, in a frightened child’s gesture, and was sitting up, his legs already swinging over the edge of the bed. He looked terrified. I said: “For goodness sake, it’s only Jane Bond on the telephone.” He stared—it took a long half minute for the words to get through to him, and I repeated them. Then he stumbled to the telephone. He said: “Yeah. Yeah, no”—very abrupt. I went past him down the stairs. The thing had upset me. I could feel the deadly coldness on my palms. And then his arms around my neck speaking a language different from anything he was when awake. I called up to him to come and have some coffee. Repeated it several times. He came down, very quiet, very pale, on guard. Gave him coffee. I said: “You sleep very heavily.” He said: “What? Yeah.” Then he made a half-remark about the coffee, tailed off. He was not hearing what I said. His eyes were at the same time concentrated and wary and absent. I don’t think he saw me. He sat stirring his coffee. Then he began talking, and I swear it was at random, he might have chosen any other subject. He was talking about how to bring up a small girl. He was very intelligent about it all, and very academic. He talked and talked—I said something, but he did not know that I had. He talked—I found myself absent-minded, then with my attention half on what he said, realised I was listening for the word I in what he said. I, I, I, I, I—I began to feel as if the word I was being shot at me like bullets from a machine gun. For a moment I fancied that his mouth, moving fast and mobile, was a gun of some kind. I broke in, he didn’t hear, I broke in again, saying: “You’re very well-educated about children, have you been married?” He started, his mouth was slightly open, he stared. Then the loud, abrupt young laugh: “Married? Who are you kidding?” It offended me, it was so clearly a warning to me. This man, warning me, a woman, about marriage, was quite a different person from the man compulsively talking, compulsively spinning out intelligent words (but punctuated every second by the word I) about how to bring up a small girl to be “a real woman,” and quite different again from the man who had undressed me with his eyes on the first day. I felt my stomach clench, and for the first time I understood that my anxiety state was due to Saul Green. I pushed aside my empty coffee cup, and said it was time for my bath. I’d forgotten how he reacts, as if he’s been hit or kicked, when one says one has something else to do. For he again scrambled off his chair as if he had been ordered. This time I said: “Saul, for the Lord’s sake, relax.” An instinctive movement towards flight, which he controlled. The moment of his self-control was a visible physical struggle with himself in which all his muscles were involved. Then he gave me a charming shrewd smile and said: “You’re right, I guess I’m not the most relaxed person in the world.” I was still in my dressing-gown, and had to pass him to the bathroom. As I went past he instinctively assumed the “mensch-pose,” thumbs hooked in his belt, fingers arrowing down, the consciously sardonic stare of the rake. I said: “I’m sorry I’m not dressed like Marlene Dietrich on her way to the back room.” The offended loud young laugh. I gave it up and went to have a bath. Lay in the bath, clenched up with every sort of apprehension, but watching the symptoms of an “anxiety state” with detachment. It was as if a stranger, afflicted with symptoms I had never experienced, had taken possession of my body. Then I tidied the place up and sat on the floor in my room, and tried “the game.” I failed. It then occurred to me I was going to fall in love with Saul Green. I remember how I first ridiculed the idea, then examined it, then accepted it: more than accepted it—fought for it, as for something that was my due. Saul was in all day upstairs. Jane Bond telephoned twice, once when I was in the kitchen and could hear. He was telling her, in his careful detailed way, that he couldn’t go to dinner at her place because…then a long story about a trip to Richmond. I went to supper with Molly. We neither of us mentioned Saul in relation to me, from which I understood that I was already in love with Saul, and that the man-woman loyalty, stronger than the loyalty of friendship, had already imposed itself. Molly went out of her way to tell me about Saul’s conquests in London, and there was now no doubt she was warning me, but there was also possessiveness in it. As for me, with every woman she mentioned he had impressed, a calm, secretly triumphant determination grew, and this feeling was related to the rake’s pose, thumbs in his belt, and the cool sardonic stare, not at all to the man who had “named” me. When I got back, he was on the stairs, could have been deliberate. Invited him to coffee. He made a wistful remark about my being lucky, with friends and a settled life, referring to my having had supper with Molly. I said we hadn’t invited him because he said he had an engagement. He said quickly: “How do you know?” “Because I heard you tell Jane so on the telephone.” The defensive startled stare—couldn’t have said more clearly, What’s it to do with you? I was angry and said: “If you want to have private telephone conversations all you have to do is lift the telephone into your bedroom and shut the door.” “I’ll do that,” he said, grim. Again the jarring and unpleasantness, the moment I really do not know how to cope with. I began asking questions about his life in America, and persisted through the barrie
r of evasions. At one point I said: “Do you realise that you never answer a question directly—what’s the matter?” He replied, after a pause, that he was not yet used to Europe, in the States no one ever asked if someone had been a communist.

  I said it was a pity to come all the way to Europe and use the defences of America. He said I was right, but that it was hard for him to adjust, and we began talking about politics. He’s the familiar mixture of bitterness, sadness, and a determination to keep some sort of balance that we all are. I went to bed deciding that to fall in love with this man would be stupid. I was lying in bed examining the phrase “in love” as if it were the name of a disease I could choose not to have.

  He has a way of being about at the time I am making coffee or tea, he goes up the stairs, very stiff, with a stiff nod. At such times he exudes loneliness, isolation, I can feel the loneliness, like a coldness around him. I formally ask him to join me, he formally accepts. This evening, sitting opposite me, he said: “I have a friend back home. Just before I left to come to Europe he said to me that he was tired of affairs, of getting laid. It gets very dry and meaningless.” I laughed and said: “Since your friend is so well-read, he must know this is a common condition, after too many affairs.” He said, quickly: “How do you know he is well-read?” The familiar jarring moment: first, because it was so obvious he was talking about himself, and at first I thought he was being ironical. Then, because he jerked into himself, all suspicion and caution, as over the incident with the telephone. But worst of all because he didn’t say: “How did you know I was well-read?” but “he was well-read,” and yet it was clearly himself. He even, after the quick warning stare at me, looked away as if staring at someone else, at him. By now I recognise these moments not by the pattern of words, or even looks, but by the sudden tightening of my stomach into apprehension. First I feel the sick anxiety, the tension, then I quickly re-hear something we’ve said, or think over an incident and I realise there’s been the jar, the shock, like a crack in a substance through which something else pours through. The something else is terrifying, hostile to me.

  I said nothing after the exchange about the well-read friend. I was thinking that the contrast between his cool analytical intelligence and the moments of gaucherie (I used the word gaucherie to conceal from myself what was frightening) are incredible. Literally, so that for the space of a breath I am silent. Always, after such moments, when I am afraid, there is compassion, and I think of when he put his arms up to me, the lonely child, in his sleep.

  Later he came back to the “friend.” Just as if he had not mentioned him before. I had the feeling he had forgotten talking about him, only half an hour before. I said: “This friend of yours—” (and again he looked into the centre of the room, away from us both, at the friend) “—does he intend to give up getting laid, or is it just another little impulse toward self-experiment?”

  I had heard the emphasis I had put on the words getting laid, and realised why I was sounding irritable. I said: “Whenever you talk about sex or love you say: he got laid, I got laid or they got laid (male).” He gave his abrupt laugh, but not comprehending, so I said: “Always in the passive.” He said, quick: “What do you mean?”

  “It gives me the most extraordinary uneasy feeling, listening to you—surely I get laid, she gets laid, they (female) get laid, but surely you, as a man, don’t get laid, you lay.”

  He said slowly, “Lady, you sure know how to make me feel a hick.” But it was the parody of a crude American saying: You sure know how to make me feel a hick.

  His eyes gleamed with hostility. And I was full of hostility. Something I’ve been feeling for days boiled up. I said: “The other day you were talking about how you fought, with your American friends, about the way language degraded sex—you described yourself as the original puritan, Saul Galahad to the defence, but you talk about getting laid, you never say a woman, you say a broad, a lay, a baby, a doll, a bird, you talk about butts and boobs, every time you mention a woman I see her either as a sort of window-dresser’s dummy or as a heap of dismembered parts, breasts, or legs or buttocks.”

  I was angry, of course, but felt ridiculous, which made me angrier, and I said: “I suppose that’s what you’d call being a square, but I’m damned if I see how a man can have a healthy attitude to sex if he can’t talk about anything but butts and babies being stacked or packed and so on and so on. No wonder the bloody Americans are all in trouble about their bloody sex lives.”

  After a while he said, very dry: “It’s the first time in my life I’ve been accused of being anti-feminist. It’d interest you to know that I’m the only American male I know who doesn’t accuse American women of all the sexual sins in the calendar. Do you imagine I don’t know that men blame women for their inadequacies?”