The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Late that night the bell rang. Anna opened the door, saw the American. He apologised for not telephoning; she apologised for not being dressed.
He was young, about thirty, she judged; with close young brown hair, like healthy fur, a lean intelligent face, bespectacled. He was the shrewd, competent, intelligent American. She knew him well, “naming” him a hundred times more sophisticated than his English equivalent, by which she meant that he was the inhabitant of a country of desperation still uncharted by Europe.
He began to apologise, as they climbed the stairs, for going to his agent; but she interrupted by asking if he had enjoyed the party. He gave an abrupt laugh, and said: “Well, you’ve caught me out.” “You could always have said that you wanted to go to a party,” she said.
They were in the kitchen, examining each other, smiling. Anna was thinking: A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it’s for a half-second, Perhaps this is the man. That’s the reason I was annoyed because he lied about the party. How boring it all is, these ever-so-expected emotions.
She said: “Would you like to see the room?”
He stood with his hand on the back of a yellow-painted kitchen chair, supporting himself because he had had too much to drink at the party, and said: “Yes, I would.”
But he did not move. She said: “You have the advantage of me—I’m sober. But there are some things I must say. First, I do know that all Americans are not rich, the rent is low.” He smiled. “Second, you’re writing the epic American novel and…” “Wrong, I haven’t started yet.” “Also, you are in psychoanalysis because you have problems.” “Wrong again, I went to a headshrinker once and decided I could do better for myself.” “Well that’s a good thing, it will be possible to talk to you at least.”
“What are you being so defensive about?”
“I should have said aggressive, myself,” said Anna, laughing. She noted, with interest, that she might just as easily have wept.
He said: “I dropped in at this unseemly hour because I want to sleep here tonight. I’ve been at the Y, which in every city I’ve been in is my least favourite place. I’ve taken the liberty of bringing my case, which I have with transparent cunning left outside the door.”
“Then bring it in,” said Anna.
He went downstairs to fetch the case. Anna went into the big room to fetch linen for his bed. She went in without thinking; but when she heard him close behind her, she froze as she understood just how that room must look. The floor was billowing with newspapers and journals; the walls were papered with cuttings; the bed was unmade. She turned to him with sheets and pillowcases, saying: “If you could make your own bed…” But he was already in the room, examining it from behind shrewdly focused lenses. Then he sat on her trestle table where the notebooks lay, swinging his legs. He looked at her (she saw herself, in a faded red gown, her hair lying in straight black wisps around an unmade-up face) at the walls and at the floor and at the bed. Then he said, in a mock-shocked voice: “Gee.” But his face showed concern.
“They said you were a left-winger,” said Anna, in appeal; interested that this was what she instinctively said in explanation of the state of affairs.
“Vintage, post-war.”
“I’m waiting for you to say: I and the other three socialists in the States are going to…”
“The other four.” He approached a wall as if he were stalking it, took off his glasses to look at its papering (revealing eyes that swam with myopia) and said again: “Gee.”
He carefully fitted back his spectacles, and said: “I once knew a man who was a first-rate newspaper correspondent. If you very naturally want to know what his relation to me was, he was my father-figure. A red. Then one thing and another caught up with him, yeah, that’s one way of describing it, and now and for the last three years he’s been sitting in a cold-water flat in New York, with the windows draped, reading the newspapers. He’s got newspapers stacked to the ceiling. The floor space has dwindled to let’s say, at a conservative estimate, two square yards. It was a big flat before the newspapers took over.”
“My mania has only lasted a few weeks.”
“I feel it’s my duty to say, it’s something that can set in and take over—to wit, my poor friend. He’s called Hank, by the way.”
“Naturally.”
“A good man. Sad to see, someone going that way.”
“Luckily I have a daughter coming home from school next month, by which time I’ll be normal.”
“It might go underground,” he said, sitting on the table and swinging his lanky legs.
Anna began switching covers up on the bed.
“Is that for my benefit?”
“Who else?”
“Unmade beds are my specialty.” He approached her silently as she bent over the bed, and she said: “I’ve had all I can take of cold and efficient sex.”
He returned to the table, and remarked: “Haven’t we all? What’s happened to all that warm and committed sex we read about in books?”
“It’s gone underground,” said Anna.
“Besides, I’m not even efficient.”
“Haven’t you ever had it at all?” said Anna, making a point.
She turned, the bed made. They smiled at each other, ironic.
“I love my wife.”
Anna laughed.
“Yeah. That’s why I’m divorcing her. Or she’s divorcing me.”
“Well a man loved me once—I mean, really.”
“And so?”
“And so he ditched me.”
“Understandable. Love is too difficult.”
“And sex too cold.”
“You mean, you’ve been chaste ever since?”
“Hardly.”
“I thought not.”
“All the same.”
“Having made our positions clear, can we go to bed? I’m a bit lit, and I’m sleepy. And I can’t sleep alone.”
The I can’t sleep alone was said with the cold ruthlessness of someone in extremity. Anna was startled, then came out of herself to really examine him. He sat smiling on her table, a man holding himself together in desperation.
“I can still sleep alone,” said Anna.
“Then from the advantage of your position you can be generous.”
“It’s all very well.”
“Anna, I need it. When someone needs something you give it to them.”
She said nothing.
“I shall ask nothing, make no demands and go away when I’m told.”
“Oh quite,” said Anna. She was suddenly angry; she was shaking with anger. “None of you ask for anything—except everything, but just for so long as you need it.”
“It’s the times we live in,” he said.
Anna laughed. Her anger went away. His laugh was sudden, loud, relieved.
“Where did you spend last night?”
“With your friend Betty.”
“She’s not my friend. She’s the friend of a friend.”
“I spent three nights with her. After the second she told me she loved me and would leave her husband for me.”
“Very square.”
“You wouldn’t do a thing like that, would you?”
“I might very well. Any woman would who liked a man.”
“But Anna, you must see…”
“Oh, I see very well.”
“Then I needn’t make up my bed?”
Anna began to cry. He came over to her, sat beside her, put his arm around her. “It’s a crazy thing,” he said. “Moving about the world—I’ve been moving about the world, did they tell you?—you open a door, and behind it you find someone in trouble. Every time you open a door, there’s someone there in pieces.”
“Perhaps you choose your doors.”
“Even so, there have been an astonishing number of doors which—don’t cry Anna. That is, not unless you enjoy it, and you don’t look as if you do.”
Anna let herself fal
“What makes you think that on the morning of the second day I won’t say: I want you to stay with me.”
He said carefully, “You’re too intelligent.”
Anna said, resenting the carefulness: “That will be my epitaph. Here lies Anna Wulf, who was always too intelligent. She let them go.”
“You could do worse, you could keep them, like some I might mention.”
“I suppose so.”
“I’m going to put my pyjamas on and come back in.”
Anna, alone, took off her dressing-gown, hesitated between a night-gown and pyjamas, and chose the night-gown, knowing by instinct he would prefer pyjamas—a sort of gesture of self-definition as it were.
He came in, dressing-gowned, bespectacled. He waved to her as she lay in bed. Then he went to a wall and began stripping off the bits of newsprint. “A small service,” he said, “but one I feel that is overdue already.” Anna heard the small tearing of newsprint, a small tapping, as drawing-pins scattered to the floor. She lay, arms under her head, listening. She felt protected and cared for. She lifted her head every few minutes to see how he was progressing. White walls slowly became revealed. The job took a long time, over an hour.
At last he said: “Well, that’s fixed. Another soul for sanity.” He then stretched out his arms to gather in acres of soiled newsprint, heaping newspapers under the trestle table.
“What are those books? Another novel?”
“No. I wrote a novel once though.”
“I read it.”
“Did you like it?”
“No.”
“No?” Anna was excited. “Oh, good.”
“Meretricious. That’s the word I’d use, if asked.”
“I’m going to ask you to stay on the second morning, I can feel it coming on.”
“But what are these salutarily-bound books?” He began turning the covers back.
“I don’t want you to read them.”
“Why not?” he said, reading them.
“Only one person read them. He tried to kill himself, failed, blinded himself, and has now turned into what he tried to kill himself to prevent.”
“Sad.”
Anna lifted his head to see him. He had on his face a deliberately owlish smile.
“You mean, it’s all your fault?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Well I’m not a potential suicide. I would say I’m more of a feeder on women, a sucker of other people’s vitality, but I’m not a suicide.”
“There’s no need to boast about it.”
A pause. Then he said: “Well yes, as it happens, and having thought out the thing from all angles, I’d say it was something to state. Which I’m doing. I’m not boasting. I’m stating. I’m defining. At least I know it. That means I can beat it. You’d be surprised the number of people I know who are killing themselves, or who feed off other people, but they don’t know it.”
“No, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“No. But I know it, I know what I do, and that’s why I shall beat it.”
Anna heard the dull flap, flap, as the lids of her notebooks closed. She heard the young, cheerful shrewd voice: “What have you been trying to do? Cage the truth? Verity and so forth?”
“Something like that. But it’s no good.”
“No good either, to let that vulture guilt get at you, no good at all.” Anna laughed. He began to sing, in a sort of pop-song:
The vulture guilt,
Feeds on you and me,
Don’t let that old vulture guilt get you,
Don’t let him be…
He went to her record-player, examined her records, put on Brubeck. He said: “Home from home. I left the States all hot for new experience, but everywhere I find the music I left behind me.” He sat, a solemn cheerful owl in his spectacles, jerking his shoulders and pursing his lips to the jazz. “There is no doubt,” he said, “it gives one a sense of continuity, yes, that’s the word, a definite sense of continuity, moving from city to city to the same music, and behind every door, a nut like oneself.”
“I’m only temporarily a nut,” said Anna.
“Oh yes. But you’ve been there. That’s enough.” He came to the bed, took off his dressing-gown, got into it, like a brother, friendly and casual.
“Aren’t you interested to know why I’m in such bad shape?” he asked after a pause.
“No.”
“I’m going to tell you anyway. I can’t sleep with women I like.” “Banal,” said Anna.
“Oh I agree. Banal to the point of tautology and tedium.”
“And rather sad for me.”
“Sad for me too, surely?”
“Do you know how I feel now?”
“Yes. Believe me, Anna, I know, and I’m sorry. I’m not a square.” A pause. He said: “You were thinking: And how about me?”
“Oddly enough, yes.”
“Want me to screw you? I could, at that.”
“No.”
“No, I thought you wouldn’t and you’re right.”
“All the same.”
“How’d you like it, being me? The woman I like best in the world is my wife. The last time I screwed her was on our honeymoon. After that, the curtain came down. Three years later, she got sore and said Enough. Do you blame her? Do I? But she likes me better than anyone in the world. The last three nights I spent with your friend’s friend Betty. I don’t like her, but I do like a certain little wriggle of her ass.”
“Oh don’t.”
“You mean you’ve heard all this before?”
“In one way and another, yes.”
“Yeah, we all have. Shall I go into the sociological—yes, that’s the word, the sociological reasons for it?”
“No, I know them.”
“I thought you did. Well. Yes, well. But I’m going to beat it. I told you, I’m a great believer in the mind. I’d put it like that—with your permission? I’m a great believer in knowing what’s wrong, admitting it, and saying: I’m going to beat it.”
“Good,” said Anna, “so am I.”
“Anna, I like you. And thanks for letting me stay. I go nuts sleeping alone.” And then, after a pause: “You’re lucky to have that kid.”
“I know it. That’s why I’m sane and you’re nuts.”
“Yes. My wife doesn’t want a kid. At least, she does. But she said to me: Milt, she said, I’m not going to have a kid with a man who can only get a hard on for me when he’s drunk.”
“Using those words?” said Anna, resentful.
“No, doll. No, baby. Saying: I’m not going to have a baby with a man who doesn’t love me.”
“How simple minded,” said Anna, full of bitterness.
“Not in that tone of voice, Anna. Or I’ll have to go.”
“You don’t think there’s something slightly extraordinary about a state of affairs where a man walks into a woman’s flat and says: I’ve got to share your bed because I fall into space if I sleep alone, but I can’t make love to you because if I do I’ll hate you?”
“Any more extraordinary than certain other phenomena we might mention?”
“No,” said Anna judiciously. “No.” She added: “Thank you for taking that nonsense off my walls. Thank you. Another few days and I really would have gone round the bend.”
“It’s a pleasure. I’m a flop, Anna, at the moment of speaking, I don’t need you to tell me, but there’s one thing I’m good at, seeing someone in trouble and knowing what strong measures to take.”
They went to sleep.
In the morning she felt him deadly cold in her arms, a weight of terrible cold, like holding death. She slowly rubbed him warm and awake. Warm, awake, and grateful, he came into her. But by then she was already armed against him, she could not prevent herself from being tense, she could not relax.
“There you are,” he said afterwards, “I knew
“Yes, you were. But there’s something about a man with a whacking great erection that it’s hard to resist.”
“All the same, you should have. Because now we’re going to have to spend a lot of energy on not disliking each other.”
“But I don’t dislike you.” They were very fond of each other, sad, and friendly and close, like people who had been married to each other for twenty years.
He was there five days with her, sleeping in her bed at night.
On the sixth day, she said, “Milt I want you to stay with me.” She said it in parody, a kind of angry self-punishing parody, and he said, smiling and rueful: “Yeah, I know it’s time to move on. It’s time I moved on. But why do I have to, why do I have to?”
“Because I want you to stay.”
“Why can’t you take it? Why not?” His spectacles glinted anxiously, his mouth was carefully amused, but he was pale, and his forehead glinted with sweat. “You’ve got to take us on, you’ve got to, don’t you know that? Don’t you see it’s all much worse for us than it is for you? I know you are bitter for yourselves and you’re right, but if you can’t take us on now, and see us through it…”
“And the same to you,” said Anna.
“No. Because you’re tougher, you’re kinder, you’re in a position to take it.”