Miscellany

In Memoriam AGM b. May 1942 d. May 2006

Gerard

You say I cannot speak,
that I am mute,
and hide myself away from a pursuit
that aims at hunting down a secret part
that, for this time, must stay
inviolate.

The only language I can speak to you
is not the impact of a verbal flow,
but sanity and healing in a touch,
hand upon hand,
and long arms folding in
to hold me at your breast.

O comfort welling deep
to meet my need!

I catch the drops.
They nurture and sustain.
Do not expect to salve my inner scars
with this libation.
I must drink the cup
that's taken from your hand,
and drain it dry:
then I'll reply.

To turn away my glance seems to negate
this suit I prosecute to your regard.
The truth is, in your eyes I see
a shamed and pitied me.
I will not play the beggar to your king
because I have it in my power to bring
this benefice to you,
a mended self.

Conviction is too easily achieved
in this my plea.

That look to me which mothers all my being
into one craving
is not a merit made to me alone:
it's Duchess-of-Ferrara to the world.

Though Gerard is mon preux chevalier
and parfit gentil knyghte
and all to my delight
as gillyflowers or blossoms swinging high
against a blazoned sky,
this lyric impulse runs its course in me:

it's, in your view,
insensate.

© Jenny Argante

After the Act

Shaping how she will tell her story, she sits alone in the drab and dreary room. Around her is all the disorder of a temporary halt. Notes from a guitar play over and over on the radio-recorder.

These repetitions have released the sadness in her that, now and finally, must be mended by confession. She picks up her pen. And pauses.

She has given up those compulsive accounts insisted on by her therapist. She has given up her therapist - with no excuses, no regrets. For whom then is she writing?

Not for her children. She has been too wounded and affronted by their candours, by some incident repeating a folly of her own.For who then is she writing?

Not for her mother.No.She has kept from her, disclosed to her, too many secrets, both old and new. This is now unnecessary. What love there is between them rests no longer on such admissions of defeat.And she has learned the hard way to withhold her history from the latest, replacement lover.

If she had the energy - if the music could play on and on, and her hand slide for ever across the yellow notepad with its narrow ruling - she would make of her story a novel and call it A Year Away From Home.

No television play.She has cringed too often at some intensely personal drama-documentary recording Love, Terror, Grief and Abandonment. Faces of stone and faltering, faulty tongues; trivial and unbearable.

She has this interim space, and, to fill it, the overflow of pain that tomorrow will be banked down by new places, other faces. She must tell her story now. For whom, then, is she writing?

It must be, no matter what she thinks, that this story is for him. Forcing him to understand that his memory of what happened may differ substantially from her own. That she has carried the grief and anger for too long, and it's his turn now to take up the burden.

To make a distance between them, she must choose a name for the woman in her story - that character which is herself. She thinks about this carefully, and decides to be 'Helen'. It's a name with a cool resonance that she likes. Yes. In the story she will be Helen.

How will she begin this story about Helen? Go back too far and she will stretch it out too thin. Helen has a beginning and an end. She continues.
Where will she begin Helen's story?

She begins by dressing Helen in conventional black swimsuit, puts her in the water of the pool. Helen watches from the side the others at play. Helen wants to join in, but is scared of duckings and rough-house teasing; of being found out; marked down as inadequate. Helen watches from the side (as she had watched); forcing a smile when anyone gets too close to show she is having a good time.

Suddenly he is there, thrusting up from the water like a seal. Brown eyes; and Helen likes brown eyes. Skin warmly-toned, toast spread with honey. His wet hair shines black under the slanting window-roof, though when he walks her back to the hostel it dries ordinary brown.

Helen is thirty-one, recently divorced. Her two daughters are presently in the care of her own mother while she is away at college on a teacher-training course.For many reasons not directly related to the plot, she has struggled six years for this freedom. Now it's hers she can't think what to do with it.

Helen doesn't believe in love; but there's an ache inside when she says this. Helen writes poetry alone in her small study-bedroom. She misses her children, and she is frightened of failing on this course. Helen has heard too often, I told you so.Now a man looks at Helen and listens to her. A man with brown eyes, and Helen likes brown eyes. Even in the water she can see that he is tall, solid. Later on he may grow fat. Helen imagines him old and fat with grandchildren crawling over him, his smile forever placid and undemanding. At her door he says goodnight and lightly walks away.

Helen dreams she is making paper snakes, concentric circles cut out of sugar-paper and pulled down to bounce into spirals. She brushes them with glue, sprinkles over gold and silver glitter.And now the snakes are real, and in her bed. Helen cries out. This wakes only her. Out of bed, she cowers against the wall; somehow finds the courage at last to pull back the sheet and blankets. No snakes in her bed.

Two days later, coming away from the sociology tutorial, she meets Gerard in the corridor and he asks her to his room.(Gerard isn't really his name, of course.)

How carefully Helen dresses up in blue cotton trousers and white handkerchief top with broderie anglaise trim. Her hair is washed and smells of lemon, her eyes delicately lined with kohl. On her lips a pale pink shimmer.

Helen enters late a room full of people. She clutches her glass and sinks into a chair; watches Gerard, who is sprawled sideways on the bed with five others. How nice he is; nice to everyone. Nothing special in his being nice to her. Helen had wanted to be alone with him, solid and glowing; to fold herself in his arms and weep on his chest. A girl beside him casually offers a kiss.

Helen gets up and goes, taking with her somebody called Terry who makes love to her competently and indifferently before he departs.After that, whenever she sees Gerard, she turns away; turns aside. Her room offers silence and words on a page. If she cries, it doesn't show. She begins to visit the common-room, learning to play table-tennis. Unexpectedly Helen finds she is good at this. One night she beats everybody. She laughs, rosy and triumphant; flourishing her bat in triumph.

Gerard has come in. He puts himself opposite to Helen and briskly defeats her. (Her game has gone to pieces.)

Then he walks her again to her room, she without a word beside him. He speaks once."Are you scared of me, Helen?"Helen shakes her head. If he touches her, she'll break to bits.He touches her. His large and gentle hand presses down on the nape of her neck. From Helen's bowed neck the fallen hair swings forward and softly brushes his yellow sweatshirt.

Close enough to feel his heart beating, Helen trembles. Gerard releases her, angles off into darkness.Onto the ceiling of her room Helen projects a range of scenarios. In the Ice Age she knew him, and in ancient Rome. At the court of Queen Elizabeth they were secret lovers. Sometime, somewhere, he has always been waiting. Waiting for her.

This is imagination.Helen does not, can not, believe in love.Oh, yes; she loves her daughters. She is bonded to them. To be away from them is necessary grief and sorrow. But her husband was a man she was wary of, and whether he failed her or she failed him is not important except that it taught her the unreality of love. Helen is thirty-one, and she has let go of her illusions. Had them surgically removed in order to survive.

Wednesday is her first practice teaching. Helen has prepared a lesson on the Brontes. Her lesson is well planned. She has audio-visual aids and a handout.Gerard sits benign and smiling in the front row. Standing in front of the class, pretending to be a teacher as they are pretending to be pupils, Helen comes to a halt. Dries up. She can't get going again. Her fellow-students stare at her in self-fearing apprehension, but Gerard folds his arms and stares down at his shoes.

Released, Helen edges out of the room and throws up in the nearest toilet. Then she runs back to her room, to the safety of a locked door.Gerard knocks and speaks her name, but she won't answer. When he is gone, she drops to sudden sleep, waking to a great hunger seventeen hours later. Breakfast is long over and everyone gone to the Main Hall.

Helen settles on the bench beneath the maple tree. A drowsy brightness filters through the claret-coloured leaves and she yawns. Her eyes droop shut, opening as a deeper shadow falls over her.

Gerard has brought her coffee and a doughnut on a bent tin tray. He sits beside her as she eats, talking quietly of nothing in particular. When she is done, he looks at her, and says, "I told the teacher you were taken ill. She's put you down to repeat your lesson next week."

Picking up her hand he spreads out her fingers as if to count them. His own hand is warm and dry. His skin smells warm and clean.Helen shrugs, and smiles. "I can do it."

He smiles back absent-mindedly. "I know." He is still playing with her hand when he invites her to the Friday night disco. Helen nods agreement.Now he faces her directly.

"Why do you hide from me, Helen?"

"I don't know."

Helen does know.She is scared of her feelings.They are what she wanted when she was sixteen, and waiting to be happy. They are what she wanted with her husband. She would like to pull Gerard down with her on the newly-mown grass and slide him into her body. Instead she stares unhappily at the Mount House Annexe and murmurs again, "I don't know."

In two days, dancing in his arms, she will have legitimate reason to press her body against his.Helen's new dress has tiny white flowers scattered on a black ground. Puff sleeves match the ruffled, front-buttoned skirt. Drying herself, her body tingles and her skin feels moist and needy.

Regretfully she covers up her full breasts, and her legs that are long and white.

Later, when the strobe lights flicker, Helen blanks out. Gerard, concerned, takes her back to her room. He follows her in, but refuses tea and coffee. There is no wine.

Helen regards him numbly as he leans against the wall, arms folded tightly across his chest. When she begins to undress he shuts his eyes and flings wide his arms like a man newly crucified. Helen opens up his shirt to push her cold breasts against him. At last his arms close round her, and they lie upon the bed.

And nothing happens. Nothing happens.Twice this man has been made redundant. His wife has taken a lover, thrown him out. He misses his four-year old son. Gerard is a real person, and he has been hurt.

Modestly, and in sorrow, Helen touches him, here and there. First he stares at her, and then, as her hand closes on him, he flings an arm across his face. Helen puts her mouth on him and waits. Now she is open to his power and his belonging.

Afterwards Helen creeps in close. Is he safe? Does he know why she is there? Turning, he draws her to him, his hand curved strongly round her hips. Legs tangle together.They settle into sleep; both happy; both In Love.

(Here I begin to have problems with her text. Is it her, writing the story, or Helen, living it, who decides she can't risk the challenge of his weekends away, visiting his son.Necessarily visiting his wife.Is it her, or is it Helen, so in love her own children are at risk? Helen can now envisage a life without them; she wants nothing but Gerard.)

Helen is scared by how much she wants him; by the days when she's excluded. Days when he drives away to Southampton and she brightly hides her pain and he awkwardly hides his guilt.

Scared.

How will she survive if he goes away for ever? If he's not there to wake to? If she can't join him under the shower, or loll with him in Richmond's daisy meadows?

There are nights when she can't sleep for thinking of him somewhere she is not and she crosses the space between her hostel and the men's to drink wine with Terry.

Beds him, grateful to find there is something left when Gerard isn't around.

(I don't approve of Helen's behaviour, or the fears that swamp her once a month when he's away.)

When Gerard is there, Helen can let go of her fears; those she had when he first knew her; those he brought into her life.Making love with Gerard, Helen can let go.

(I don't approve of Helen's behaviour, but I begin to understand as she unfolds Helen's story. What Helen does with Terry is for insurance; to keep her safe for her daughters, able to continue. I decide to forgive Helen, but can she forgive herself?)

Helen's story is ordinary enough; she was half-ashamed to tell it. Except she knows love must be safely tucked away beneath the covers, converted into myth. Make it real and omnipresent and you'll never live without it.

With Gerard, Helen believes herself to be in heaven. With Gerard, only with Gerard. She is happy, in love.

But Gerard is struggling for a different kind of sense than hers. He tells Helen one night that he can't take his son from Emily, the mother; that he can't live without his son.

Dumb Helen. So it's all over. Gerard, she knows, will go back to Emily. How can Helen fight a four-year old boy?

At the last dance Helen wears bronze silk and Procul Harum sing A Whiter Shade of Pale. Even twenty years later, she can hardly bear to hear them. Helen and Gerard clutch and hold and make little swaying movements.

If he asked her to, she would lie down on the floor and let him take her, take her, take her. Instead, with every other goodbye said, they go back to her room and say their own, storing up a final knowledge of each other.

She must return to York and the daughters in her mother's care.

Standing with him on King's Cross station she carefully guards herself against excess of emotion. She is as fragile as the tissue rose he buys her.

He demonstrates by look and touch his anguished love and guilt. He talks of Brief Encounter. His brown eyes glisten with unshed tears. Helen excuses him; he didn't mean to undo her. Blame it on his sad brown eyes and all those past romances. Next time round she'll get him.

But hush.Gerard is speaking to Helen."Don't think it wasn't really love."

Now she is in the train, and looking down from the window. He grabs her hands and crushes them in his own. "How can you bear to let me go?"

But this is her question. She can't answer it for him. Her hands slip from between his and the train slides away. Helen can fight a grown-up wife; she won't fight a little boy.

(She should end the story here, but she will not. She wants to deal with the pain. When it comes, she cannot make it real.)

Helen has arranged for the girls to go to their father so she can cry without any holding back; howl and scream at midnight and bang with clenched fists on the blank surrounding wall until something snaps in her chest like a rubber band breaking under strain.

For Helen needs Gerard much more than any little boy ever can, ever will.

(Oh, why has she isolated Helen in that grimly dark house? She knows Helen has neighbours, and a mother just across the street. Is it to punish her? Or to make Helen's pain bearable by keeping it private?)

And Gerard doesn't play fair. Won't quite let go. He writes to Helen and Helen writes to him. Sometimes when the 'phone rings in her mother's house, it is him, and they talk for a long time together.

A line in his letter haunts her. "I do love you, Helen, but Jeez! you are a burden sometimes."

Years later - loved again, if not loving - she can understand. He is expressing his guilt as concern about her; he wants to be free of the worry.

Years later, and she still can't understand. Did he know what he threw away?

For he can't quite let go.

The first day is over in Helen's new job. She comes out, tired and drained, and he is there. In the rented cottage that waits for her children he makes love to her again. Her body remembers, arches beneath his; calls out and is comforted.

In the morning he is gone.He 'phones a few weeks later to plan a stay in London. She puts in her overnight bag a peach nightdress as new as the toothbrush she has bought. But when they meet he is gloomy and cuts the day short. Helen, embarrassed, hides the bag under the seat.

No pattern is formed by his visits. Sometimes he will love her, sometimes he will not; and never does it depend on what she is or what she does.
Beneath continuing sadness, Helen is beginning to learn anger. But you mustn't mix love with anger, and she presses it down.

The college reunion is coming up. One full year since they left that life behind. Gerard says he wants her with him. Yes. Oh yes.

Only five days later he admits his wife has decided to attend; and she has every right to. Helen has made herself a culotte dress in white and gold. She has bought a gold belt and gold sandals.

She gives them all away. She gives away the bronze gown and the black frock scattered all over with tiny white blossoms. She gives away the peach silk nightdress, but keeps the toothbrush. The bristles are worn down already.

On the night of the dance, Helen can't bear to be alone. There's a man who works with her, and she invites him to the house. Next month her children will return: tonight she is alone, and Helen can't bear to be alone.

The man surprises her. Being a man who knows women's bodies, he makes it possible to find something at least without Gerard. Helen doesn't understand, though a fleeting memory of Terry crosses her mind. She needs time to work it out. What is the difference that makes a thing love if she can find a splendid passion with a stranger? Why does she still want Gerard?

She has dreamed of him, waking with wet eyes as the alarm buzzes and they've only just begun to climb the stairs together.

The man asks to return; Helen puts him off. Soon she will have her children back as shield and excuse. She can hide away and think about it. Does she want the shadow if she cannot have the substance?

There is another problem.Helen is pregnant, and it isn't Gerard's baby. That is sorrow, too.The man has talked about his own unhappy childhood. He will never marry, he says, but someday he would like a child. Helen is scared. She cannot keep this baby; there's no excuse for it.

If the man will take it, she will care for the baby until it's old enough to go to him. Oh, yes, she can give it up. Helen has learned the hard way how to let go.She sees the man crossing the courtyard at work. She tells him she is pregnant. He is mildly curious. "Who's the father?" he asks, and Helen walks away.

That night the man comes round, and finally believes it is his baby. But he doesn't want it. She mustn't have it.

Helen agrees to an abortion. This isn't Gerard's baby and she has her other children to consider. She must do the right thing.

Before she goes into hospital she dreams of babies dropping from her body to be sliced in bloody pieces on the floor. The man is tender and regretful. He drives her to the hospital and leaves her to it.

After the act, he comes visiting, along with the fathers. He brings flowers and an uneasy smile. He is a man who wants to be liked; he is very likeable. Helen doesn't hate him, though she does wish he had meant what he said.

Back home and he is there, holding her through the bad dream that will repeat over and over in the years ahead. Endless babies born to death.

Four days later her other children return. Helen fears her mother's sharp eyes; fears that a sour justice will deprive her of her daughters. She washes up the dishes after the long evening meal, her insides hot and aching as she leans against the sink. She doesn't feel the sadness; can't stop the tears that fall and fall into the water.

(She should end the story here, but she's not quite ready to. She wants to record that last telephone call when Gerard tells Helen that he and Emily have a new daughter whose name will be Victoria Helen. She wants to record the silence before Helen puts down the 'phone.)

Now his love letters are burning and hot ashes drift on the wind. Men come and go. She can't record them all.

Shaping how she will tell her story, she sits alone in the drab and dreary room. Twenty years behind her. Time to let Helen go and learn to be happy again.

Once she thought the story was for him, forcing a share of Helen's pain and guilt.

Now she understands it's for herself that she has set it down. She stretches out and lays aside her pen. It is done. She has made of Helen's tragedy a commonplace story with ordinary characters, unimportant acts.The night is ended. Today she will move on.

(She picks up the pages of her story and begins to read them through.)

© Jenny Argante

Boxed

You made your decision thirty years ago.
I acquiesced, & every day was seasoned
with a thought of you. But the brain
won’t dream to order. Like the man
who loved Cynara, I was faithful
- in my fashion.

Nights would have been desolate
without those trivial consolations.

I’d check you out
in this year’s telephone book to see
if you were living at the same address,
& there you were, fixed & resolute,
cocooned & rounding,
something different
from what you should have been,
& I, the restless anchorite,
finding new prisons
everywhere I go
instead of building home
& sanctuary.

You told me once before I came out here
- the distance
still not far enough -
you had a box you dared not keep
at home. I wonder what went in it,
want to know
how you have codified me, what souvenirs,
what elements of air & fire & steam
have grounded me
within your definitions;
& whyI failed to be
enough to satisfy.

I am in the box
where you have placed me.

You said that I should talk
& open up
the floodgates of memory & desire. My dear,
floodgates are there to keep the depths
from drowning us, & memory is
a sharp master, desire a raging tool.

Beyond the floodgates there could be
truth, honesty – a moving-on
together, alone:
or pain so keen & bitter
it could terminate a life.

And yet inside the box
the girl who once was me
is still anticipating,
so unlike this old grey moth
I’ve faded to
whose candle has gone out,
& who has long forgotten
how light & heat can draw us fatally
to unwise explorations.

© Jenny Argante

posted by Jenny Argante @ 2:32 AM