changes

Mentor: So you decided to stay put? 

Man: I received a call from the publisher I sent my MS to, much earlier than I expected, and he expressed interest, and talked about editors and the possibility of a contract, and as you can imagine this was all a bit overwhelming. It seemed that my brilliant career had begun. Naturally this made me rethink the Sydney or interstate thing, but on reflection I decided I should go interstate, because I still needed a shake-up, and the editing and the contractual stuff could surely be managed by mail, email and so forth. In fact, this news meant that I could go forth on an interstate adventure with a modicum of confidence - unusual for me. So, I waited for the news from interstate, fully expecting to have a choice of places. The responses trickled in, and they were all negative. Nobody wanted me. I considered contacting them again to tell them I now had a publisher, but that wasn't official, and I wondered if maybe that info wouldn't be more negative than positive for my chances. Better for their rep to take on newbies and guide them to greatness than to take on someone already guaranteed publication. Where would be the kudos in that? But the final nail in the coffin of my interstate dream came in the form of another call from the publisher. He asked me how I was off financially and suggested I apply for a state grant, letting it be known that he might be able to use his influence... This made it seem more clear to me that my book would be published, but I realized that if I applied for a state grant, it would tie me, morally if not physically, to the granting state. Forces were conspiring to keep me in South Australia. I applied for a grant, and was successful.

Mentor: And Zelda was in the loop about all this?

Man: Oh yes. I mean, she was privy to the confusion and provisionality of my plans. Let me see now. I moved in with Zelda in October 1995, and it might be that I'd already started writing to creative writing courses before that. I must have sent my MS to the publisher in late 95 and received a call within a couple of weeks. I received an arts grant for either the first half or the second half of 96. Probably in the second half but I was informed about it in the first half. I was thirty-nine years old, and it was all happening for me. I felt rejuvenated. No doubt my relationship with Zelda benefitted from that. I was lively, enthusiastic, confident, open-hearted, gregarious, more like the sort of person I'd always wanted to be. You see, to be recognised as a writer, that had been my great desire for so long, it had so shaped my existence that I was almost beginning to think it a burden, a weight I'd been forcing myself to carry around, wearing me out, making me crabbed and anxious, unappreciated and vaguely ashamed. At last I felt accepted and released, I'd come out in a sense, and on top of this, rarety of rareties, I was in an actual relationship, with an actual woman, and had become an accepted part of her community, in from the cold. 

all quite normal

Man: Yes, it seems so. Even when you're getting old and fat and smelly and ugly yourself. The fact is, it wasn't long at all before I was mostly thinking of someone else while having sex with Zelda. 

Mentor: Someone younger.

Man: Younger women, more attractive. The stock characters of my masturbatory fantasies. Often I got stuck on a particular one. There was a young woman I was haplessly chasing in the few years before I moved in with Zelda. Ridiculously young in fact, and ridiculously beautiful, but I'd managed to put myself forward and befriend her for a time, which was very daring for me. I knew I had no hope of bedding her, so I just tried to maintain the friendship, to keep close to someone so beautiful and sexy, but she chose to reject me completely, which created an obsession for a time. In fact I've never gotten over that. So, yes, I fantasised about her, but there were plenty of others to toss in the mix. A waitress I glimpsed regularly, a woman at the bus stop, the lovely Eveline, Geena Davis, etc etc.

Mentor: So when you were fucking Zelda you were imagining fucking her daughter.

Man: Sometimes. Yes, I have sinned in my heart. All quite normal, surely. And sometimes, depending on her response and how my emotionally labile mind was working, I imagined I was fucking Zelda. Anyway, I expected it to be temporary. I moved in on the understanding that it would be temporary. I was on my way to Sydney, to start a new life. That's what I told her, and myself. I was feeling wildly confident at the time about my writing. I'd almost finished writing a novel, and I fully expected it to be published, though I knew all about the odds. I'd had the first chapter published in a magazine. Extraordinarily easy success after years of writing and avoiding publishers and publications. One of the first things I did after moving in with Zelda was to apply to every creative writing program in every state other than my own [which didn't have any such programs anyway]. Creative writing courses had become all the rage, and they seemed the obvious course for me, and moving interstate would shake me up, rejuvenate me, set me back on my resources. This sense that I was moving on somehow made it easier to take advantage of the situation with Zelda. And it was a good situation. It made me feel normal and healthy for the first time in a long long time. And I was giving her something too, quite a deal in fact, and she was lapping it up. 

Mentor: But you didn't get to Sydney.

Man: No, well... I say Sydney but that was my first choice. I applied for all these courses, two or three in Sydney, but also in Melbourne, in Queensland, in Western Australia. Some of these universities, I had no idea where they were located. I sent them bits of my manuscript, and the piece I had published in the magazine. I knew the writing was pretty good, I was sure I'd have a choice of places. I didn't know how I was going to pay for the course, getting in was the first concern. And then there was the book. I'd picked out a local publisher, and then wondered if moving interstate was such a good idea after all. What if the local mob agreed to publish it? The book was set in South Australia, after all...  

blame evolution

Man: No, really, I moved in with her, purely as a lodger, and I knew it would happen, and from the start I was wondering how I could extricate myself... And yet, and yet, we got on brilliantly, and I was of course flattered by her interest, and impressed with her hard-won wisdom, and she was a thorough sensualist, and she loved my cooking, we shared many epicurean delights. She didn't have quite my intellectual bent, and she was continually apologetic about this, while I felt apologetic about my years of impotent dilettantish self-indulgence, though I wasn't so vocal about that. 

Mentor: What about physical attraction?

Man: Ah, there's the nub. She had an attractive face, a warm, loveably attractive face, and when we first kissed her face flushed and her eyes shone. I'll never forget that. She was dazed and excited like a child. Her body was, as she described it, middle-aged and matronly, and I  must admit to not finding it overly exciting. Of course now I myself am older than she was then, and my body has gone almost, but not quite, the way of the Marquis, so it would be churlish to complain. I personally think it would be a crime to offer this body I have now to any woman. Of course I intend to work it into shape, sometime. But there were other things about Zelda; she had no illusions about herself, she dealt with herself with humour and realism, and sexual relations with her were easy, gentle, affirming. I've described it before as a healing relationship. Sexual healing, that's really what it was, and I'll always be grateful for that.  

Mentor: And yet?

Man: Hah. I suppose my problem was that after years of sexual fantasy, my ideal woman hadn't changed. At nineteen, at twenty-nine, at thirty-nine, my ideal woman was young, smart, taut, and twenty or so. Of course I could stretch the ideal, to thirty, thirty-five.  Approaching fifty though, that was a real stretch. Needless to say, I hadn't come to terms with myself approaching forty.   

Mentor: So you liked her, you were very fond of her, you were grateful to her, but you weren't sexually excited by her?

Man: Well, I was sexually excited by her, by her excitement, and her lovingness, for a time, but I didn't think I'd be able to keep it up, so to speak. It was a bit like being a prostitute, I imagine - if you're with a customer who's in one way or another not quite ideal, you start fantasising about someone else. And all this made me feel very guilty, and I never felt like a prostitute, and it was only the body thing. I never felt that I wanted someone gentler, or kinder, or more sensitive. Or rarely. She was pretty well ideal in those respects.

Mentor: You can always blame evolution.

Man: Sounds good. What do you mean?

Mentor: The sex drive is about spreading the seed. You're programmed to anticipate with the maximum of pleasure sexual relations with the woman best equipped to successfully carry your seed. Middle aged and matronly generally doesn't cut it, no matter what your age. 

problem fathers

Man: How could she be a Christian when her sister was? I was intrigued to observe the divergent paths these siblings took to carve out their niches. Esther the religio-spiritualist, Eveline the political activist, Christopher the scientist. Not entirely defining characteristics of course... Anyway, they were a treasure trove for a compulsive diarist like me. All three were magnificently intelligent and complicated and vulnerable and puzzling. I mean, they all struggled not to fit in and to stay on top, to deal with family and to overcome its limitations in their case. 

Mentor: A typically unorthodox bunch.

Man: Absolutely typical. I don't suppose there's really any orthodox lower middle class trajectory, if that's how you'd classify this family. In this case, no father - he'd flown the coop, finally, after a good few years of trying to tame Zelda into fitting into his life of dreaming of money-making schemes and never holding down a job and trying to force her to be a housewife and a devoted mother while he did bugger all. Of course I only heard Zelda's side of this, but he really seems to have been a very poor sort, and none of the kids thought much of him, clearly. Zelda had essentially brought these kids up herself while fending off and covering for this adult kid. He was Austrian I believe, but possibly with gypsy blood. It took her a while, once she realized they were better off without him, to get him out of her hair. He even tried to kidnap the kids at one stage, causing much trauma. When he was finally out of the picture, Zelda hooked up with an old friend, who she apparently didn't realize was an alcoholic. They married and she fell pregnant with Lola. She described her bond to this her final child as fanatically intense, but unfortunately the girl grew up out with all the social gaucherie and addictive nature of her old man, who was also a compulsive gambler who began selling Zelda's furniture on the sly to feed his habit. Exit husband number two. Both of them complex and sympathetic victims of difficult families themselves when seen in the round, no doubt. I never really met these gentleman, though I did have them pointed out to me on one or two occasions. I think it's reasonable to say that even the kids saw me as a vast improvement, at first. All complicated by genetics of course. Anyway, I felt so warmly welcomed in those early days that... I felt a strange of achievement somehow. I never thought it wouldn't last, which was strange, because I never really expected my sexual liaison with Zelda to last. Anyway, obviously the kids' lives were massively affected by their mum's failed relationships, but whether for the better or the worse who can say?

Mentor: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But may I remind you that we're supposed to be talking about sex?

Man: Sorry. Theoretical sex. So I started banging this Zelda chick. 

 

some children and their children

Mentor: I think I know the allusion.

Man: You would of course. Anyway, more on Eveline anon. Finally there's Zelda's third child, Christopher, the last of the brace of three from her first marriage. When I moved in, Zelda had not long returned from a cheapie trip to Europe - to get away from her family, as she described it. I'm not sure what the arrangement was with Lola, who would've been rather young to be left alone. I didn't want to inquire too deeply into all that. Now, I'm sorry to introduce so many names here, but there are more. Zelda not only had four kids but also two grandkids when I first met her, to which have been added an extra five since my advent. Esther, the Christian, had a six year old child, Andrew, out of a disastrous relationship. The father chose to deny paternity, and when it was proven in the usual way, he disappeared, never to be seen again. When I arrived on the scene, Esther was in a relationship with an odd handsome wannabe writer, excruciatingly untalented. He'd had a book self-published at some expense, and its awfulness made him a laughing-stock. As someone about to have my own book published, in more traditional and 'legitimate' fashion, I naturally kept him at arm's length, which was easy enough given my solitary disposition. Their relationship was very volatile, due to both characters' characters. No doubt it would've died the death, but Esther fell pregnant again. Actually, this may have been the event that doomed the relationship or brought it to a quicker conclusion, for the handsome bad writer insisted that Esther had deliberately fallen pregnant [and others in the family, most notably Eveline, had their strong suspicions]. I tell you all this as a taste of the dramas I’d dropped myself into, through Zelda, the mother hen as she called herself. It was all very fascinating. I tried to keep out of the various controversies, but with the Esther case, yes I had my own suspicions, as Esther was the traditionalist of the family, after getting over her youthful flights. Christianity was clearly part of that tradition which also involved marriage, family, home ownership, the whole shebang. She was very much into catching her man. It might have seemed manipulative, but it was also sad in its desperation. In any case, if she'd wanted to entrap, it didn't work, and Esther was soon left, single and struggling, with a hyperactive seven-year-old and a baby girl, and a perennially precarious housing situation. 

And then there was Eveline, also a single mum when I arrived, with a daughter of six or seven months. This little girl, Sophie, was the product of a liaison between Eveline and a Greek medical student who turned out to have severe psychological problems. The relationship had already foundered by the time I came along, though they still used each other for sex on a semi-regular basis. Eveline worked casually as a nurse, struggling to make ends meet, and like her older sister, moving from house to house in the rental market. 

Mentor: But she wasn't a Christian.           

introducing zelda and eveline

Mentor: So, you're in a period of readjustment.

Man: Well, that's for sure. You see, my wife became my best friend. Or rather, she became my best friend, then my wife, then my best friend again, but she wanted still to be my wife, but it was too painful for her I suppose. And there was a lot to complicate matters. Like, her daughter.

Mentor: Her daughter.

Man: Yes, her daughter is key. My wife has three daughters in fact. And one son. By two previous marriages. I don't know if you can imagine a single forty-year old man, rather detached and isolated in the world, an avoider of other people largely, completely estranged from his family, suddenly finding himself in a relationship with a woman almost a decade his senior, with three children in their twenties and a youngest daughter around fourteen, a teenage runaway whose vacant room I'd moved into. And these children all popping in and out regularly, with their friends and boyfriends and domestic dramas and pregnancies and sibling spats. It was instant storyville. My journal was working overtime. And perhaps I was more enamoured of this new environment than I was of my new partner, though she was the eye of the storm, if you will. The initial generator of all this family activity. 

Mentor: So you took an interest in one the daughters?

Man: Well, yes I did, but it's a long story. Okay, there I was, having moved into this house as just an ordinary tenant, a lodger. Anxious from the start because I knew my landlady, a friend of a friend, had a romantic interest in me. An attractive older woman whose sullen youngest daughter resembled Lolita, and was even halfnicknamed such by her amused elders. But I was no Humbert Humbert and my future wife was certainly no Charlotte Haze. No, at the beginning my sexual focus was very much on Charlotte - I mean, sorry on my future wife. Let's call her Zelda. That's the name of my grandmother, actually. Who died in childbirth at twenty-six. Besides, Zelda’s youngest, whom I’ll call Lola, wasn’t much in the picture. She only turned up now and again to collect something and flounce off again. Her bust bustin out all over. Zelda’s eldest child, a troubled soul upon whom I shall bestow a pleasant biblical name, Esther, was when I first met her a still newly minted Christian, though she has since confided to me that she always felt the spirit move within her. She too had been a teenage runaway, lost for some years in the ways of wickedness, but in recent times she has managed to support her youngest sister in returning to the right path and accepting the lord into her heart. But I mean not to mock her nor anyone, she is as complex and unfathomable as we all are, and she has a good heart, a liberal nature and all her mother's pragmatism. Zelda's second child is the daughter in question. Let us call her - not Bertha, nor Beryl, nor Bridget. No, I shall call her Eveline. I doubt she'll like that, nor know the allusion.  

reality bites

Man: Yes, I suppose I wanted someone like myself, only smarter, though not too much smarter, and more beautiful - they could be infinitely more beautiful, I didn't mind that at all - and more outgoing, someone who could drag me outside of myself and bring me to the party. Someone who could draw out my best features, because of course inside my shy self was a brilliant wit and raconteur, a genius of language, an incisive, streetwise analyst, all that stuff. Someone who wasn't possessive either - I imagined us, this couple, to be great friends at the heart of a whole host of great friends, and we wouldn't be monogamous but we would be loyal to each other...

Mentor: You had this fantasy as a kid?

Man: By my teen years, yes. It was ridiculously far from my life as it was at the time. In fact I've never really come close to it. The closest I came, and it was still far, was around the time my first and only book came out, eleven years ago. The launch party, that was the closest to a taste of what might have been. Not that anything dramatic happened, just a lot of friendly, smart, happy people with myself and my wife at the centre. 

Mentor: So what happened? Why weren't you able to build on that?

Man: Well, I wasn't able to get my second book published, that was the first problem. But there were so many other things. My wife, who was several years older than myself, and a constant sufferer from chronic fatigue syndrome, and a woman of great practical knowledge and common sense and wit and sensitivity, was not, for all that, anything like the fantasy figure I'd too long contemplated - she was fundamentally monogamous for one thing, and I felt kind of trapped, and guilty. I knew she felt more strongly toward me than I felt toward her, but what we all fall for in another is never quite that other, but some version of ourselves that we want that other to be. I think that's why she fell for me, and to tell the truth I never really fell for her, I just drifted into acquiescing in the relationship, with a mixture of strong affection and guilt. Even marriage - I never wanted to marry, but I new she wanted it, she asked me to marry her but I refused. Then I asked her to marry me, to please her, because she'd been so kind and supportive to me, and my sexual relationship with her had been gentle and healing, after so many years in the sexual desert. It wasn't the great fantasy I'd yearned for but it was so so much better than nothing.

Mentor: And how is that relationship now?

Man: Well, we separated some years ago, but up until recently we maintained a close friendship. Then a few weeks ago she told me she wanted to see much less of me, and she informed various people by email that she was reverting to her maiden name - which I don't think she should ever have given up.