Second Half First Read online

  About the Book

  Beginning with the disastrous events of the night before her fortieth birthday, Drusilla Modjeska looks back on the past thirty years. In asking the candid questions that so many of us face – about love and independence, growing older, the bonds of friendship and family – she reassesses the experiences that have shaped her writing, her reading and the way she has lived. The result is a memoir that is at once intellectually provocative and deeply honest; the book that readers of Poppy, The Orchard and Stravinsky’s Lunch have been waiting for.

  ‘Second Half First offers a diaphanous and nuanced vision of the layers of a life, and of life writing. Its magnificent collective portrait reveals Modjeska’s life as part of those it intersects with, including the women writers she lives with and reads … [a] luminous and captivating work’ Australian

  ‘Modjeska’s memoir Second Half First is warm, intelligent and open-hearted, and provides a rarely captured perspective … Like Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, Modjeska takes the reader to the close grain of an older woman’s life … Also examined are the complexities of the literary form, including those of the memoir’ The Monthly

  ‘[A] thoughtful and thought-provoking memoir … blending stream-of-consciousness with passionate argument and astute self-reflection’ Sydney Review of Books

  ‘Second Half First is a beautiful, sometimes profound, and always engaging memoir by a great writer’ Mark Rubbo, Readings Magazine

  ‘Second Half First is on my shelf near the poet Elizabeth Bishop, who also wrote despite tragedy and liked travelling in remote, unmapped regions … Modjeska’s work, with its unanswered questions, is a beacon’ Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘This enthralling memoir … is a remarkable literary work … Modjeska’s eloquent reckoning not only of her own history, but of her intellectual life, reaffirms her as a lucid, formidable thinker … Wise, vital and relayed in Modjeska’s restrained, sophisticated prose [the book is] a major contribution to a literary lineage traceable to Virginia Woolf, one of Modjeska’s own heroes, herself a constant presence throughout this remarkable book’ Books+Publishing

  ‘With an amazing lightness of touch [Modjeska] takes her reader on a journey across continents and centuries … a deeply crafted narrative, not only in its weave and structure, but also in the ways in which Modjeska invokes the visual arts to articulate her concerns … Second Half First has a soul. It is both solid and expansive. Modjeska assembles her stanzas masterfully to create a poem of great insight, intelligence, and beauty’ Australian Book Review

  Of course I may be remembering it all wrong after, after – how many years?

  Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Santarém’

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Praise for Second Half First

  Epigraph

  The House on the Corner

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Making Shapes Square Up

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  A Dangerous Road

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Now

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Drusilla Modjeska

  Copyright Notice

  The House on the Corner

  1

  The night before my fortieth birthday I told him I couldn’t go on. I can’t go on, I said. Not like this, not over the line to another decade. I hadn’t intended to say it though it was long overdue and I’d been thinking it all day, and the day before. When he opened the door and walked up the hall into the room with the table, the words arrived – and there they were, brittle in the air around us. That’s ironic, he said, as I’ve just told Elena that I owe it to you, a time of monogamy. A time of monogamy, what does that mean, I thought, but beyond that it didn’t register; the tears had started again, and we were due at dinner. I don’t remember much about the dinner, though it was for my birthday. We came home, and sometime during the night he left and I slept, and woke alone in the house. He came back again, I don’t remember how often, and I wept, and hoped, and wanted him, and didn’t, and then he left for good. Gone. He’s married to Elena now, and has been for twenty years or more. They live in Brooklyn and they have a son. Elena was beautiful, and also rich I was told by the friend of his who told me that what Ross meant by a time of monogamy was that he was going to get me settled back down and then pick up with Elena again. As if that would have worked. For a long time I put everything down to my lack of beauty, or of wealth, or of both, but Lynne, a friend of mine who was once a lover of his, said that no, it wasn’t that. Unlike me, Elena had got Ross’s measure. The balance of insecurity had tipped his way. He, it seems to everyone’s astonishment, has become utterly uxurious. There are stories of him watching her at meals as others claim her attention; stories Lynne and I have returned to sometimes, for she was once stung by his infidelities, though not to the state of misery I found myself in. When he slept with someone else, he didn’t lie, which he thought made it okay as he wasn’t deceiving anyone. It was the tail end of an era, a sub-era, of free love and sexual revolution, so back then, in that world, it wasn’t as brutal as it sounds; there was a certain political rectitude to his position, not just a strategy that removed an arena of guilt, though it was certainly that. The problem became my insecurity rather than his infidelity.

  Lynne had known Ross at Sydney University, students together before she went to London. Leaving Sydney didn’t have anything to do with him. An extremely conservative professor told her he’d make sure she never got ahead; even that wasn’t the reason, not on its own, but it made a good story, for in London Lynne had done well. That winter of 1986, before I turned forty in October, she was back in Sydney, just for a few months, on a fellowship at Ross’s university. She stayed with me, as I did with her, and sometimes still do, when I’m in London. I was trying to get pregnant with Ross. Don’t ask what I thought I was doing; the clock was ticking, I was in love, and it was a love that seemed at the time to exorcise the grief that had come with my mother’s death, so shocking and unexpected, just two years before. What better salve than love? And imagine, a baby to secure it, to bed it all down, so to speak; why would I not want to get pregnant? Imagine was all I did, a sleepwalker in the grip of longing.

  I’d first met Lynne a decade earlier when I’d turned up on her London doorstep in the company of another man who’d known her at Sydney University. Are you sure it’s okay? I’d asked George when he’d said he had a place we both could stay. Of course, he said, it’s a communal house, as if that explained everything. Are you sure? I asked again as we stood with our cases on the steps of the tall house in Highbury. When Lynne opened the door and George lugged the cases in, I could tell at once that Lynne had no idea we were coming, let alone that we were in London for a whole semester.

  George was my first experience of a man unfaithful by principle and I didn’t like it, and as soon as Lynne spotted the tension between us she said I could stay but he could not. She, it turned out, found him exhausting with his pipe and his political certainties, always at the kitchen table, always talking. Communal, in her mind, didn’t mean anyone, anytime, could lob in without warning. So George moved out and I carried the vacuum cleaner up two flights of stairs to the small room where we’d been sleeping. I changed the sheets, found a bright Indian bedspread and bought a bunch of flowers, most of them for Lynne, a few for a vase for the desk in the room upstairs. I was ther
e for six months.

  So that’s how I met Lynne, and despite the mode of arrival it was a good beginning. She was a few years older than me, with plenteous dark-red hair. She wore loose clothes, layered in colours and shapes, jumpers several sizes too large slipping off her shoulders: not a hippy style; more how a nineteenth-century pre-Raphaelite might look transported to the 1970s. I learned to shop at markets with her, for vegetables, and for clothes made by the artisans of a new age: colour and flair. And I went with Lynne to a women’s centre in a basement in Essex Road, Islington, where we raised our consciousnesses – which is easy to make fun of from this distance, but was in fact a significant passage in the lives of many of us. It was on cushions in rooms like the one in that basement that we learned we weren’t alone in our humiliations, our longings, our crisscrossing, aberrant desires. At a time of sexual liberation and communal living, a great deal was said about the infidelities of men. As we wanted, or partly wanted, our own freedoms, the question became whether, and how, such liberations might work for us, and not leave us without control. Were there models of women who’d succeeded? Simone de Beauvoir? That was a tough standard. What about rosters? Agreements and limitations? There were women at those meetings who arranged their sexual lives along those lines, some with remarkable success – if only in the short term – and though I was awed, I couldn’t imagine it for myself, at least not with a man I loved. Which makes it all the more strange that it was Ross I chose at that moment of grief and dread in the wake of my mother’s death. In every way, it was just about the worst possible choice.

  When Lynne had the fellowship at Ross’s university that winter before my fortieth birthday, where else would she stay but with me? At first it was good to have her there, borrowing my clothes and my books as I did hers when I stayed with her. Every morning Ross would drive off with her to his university, and in the evening they’d return full of stories of their day, and little by little, as days went by, weeks, I could see they were enjoying themselves, having far too happy a time, while I was trudging into my university to do my classes and trudging home again on the bus, stopping to buy more food, mopping the kitchen floor. Ross said I was being possessive even to raise the question, and in response the tears came pouring. Lynne said, He’s a friend going back years, and besides James would soon be arriving from London; it was no threat. And then of course I assumed the inevitable had happened and they’d ended up in bed, though maybe they hadn’t, but I thought they had, and Ross equivocated, and whether they had or whether they hadn’t didn’t much matter as the effect was the same.

  A veil of tears usually refers to grief, and maybe that’s what it was; I saw the world through salt and tears: a stream, a veil, a pour, that was beyond will or control. Lynne sat beside me, her face concerned, and even though I knew that for her whatever it was that had, or hadn’t, happened with Ross was a making good of her own youthful experience with him, I had no words. It made no sense. I made no sense. When James arrived, Lynne moved out of my house and into Ross’s, and Ross moved into mine. Not that he was there much; he’d come back late after meals with them, or with Elena, who flew up from Melbourne each week to teach at the same university, and also needed lifts back and forth. His car filled up with women with shiny hair, who smiled and laughed and flirted. Little wonder he preferred to be with them than with me and my tears. When Lynne and James went back to London, I didn’t say goodbye.

  Many years later, in 2003, I spent a year watching artist Janet Laurence work with her large veiled glass works. She, it turned out, had been living in London around the time I was living in Lynne’s Highbury house. She’d read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves there – I’d read A Room of One’s Own – and it had set her thinking and experimenting with the idea of washy veils: washes of paint, like waves, partly obscuring, partly revealing. She wanted to get away from the clarity with which we think we see: not to be rid of clarity but to challenge us into another way of seeing. ‘A way of looking within the world rather than at it.’ ‘What do we see when a veil falls?’ she wrote in a notebook back then. What do we see if the layers open and we step between the veils into the hidden or partly hidden places?

  ‘Is it

  Still space?

  Slow space?

  A membrane?

  The resistance?

  The hesitation?’

  It didn’t occur to me to think of Ross or my veil of tears while I was watching Janet work. Why would I? It was long ago, and besides I was working, preparing an essay for a book on her art.1 There was nothing in Janet’s studio to take me back to that distant time, and I didn’t then make a connection between her veils and my tears. Yet, writing here, the images that come to me, insistent and repetitious, are of veils and pours, occlusions and opacities. I used to say that Ross had been a mirror in which I’d seen not him, or even myself, but an image of what I thought I wanted, an imagined future that would make good all that lay unresolved with my mother’s death in England, and me here, alone, on this far side of the world. A distorting mirror with its reflective glitter peeling away underneath. A mirror? Or a veil? And if a veil, rather than a reflection in an ill-chosen mirror, was it – as I thought at first – proof of the misery I’d been reduced to? Or was it, as I came to think, a hesitation, a resistance, a necessary slowing?

  One night not so long ago, I looked up Ross on the internet. I rarely hear of him any more, and it’s years since I saw him, he’s been away so long. Occasionally someone I know visits him and Elena in Brooklyn and reports that he enjoys the life there. They both have positions at prestigious universities. They are a fashionable pair, I’m told; they write papers together and he is still devoted. When I hear these reports I feel almost entirely nothing, though I do occasionally have dreams that come unbidden and that invariably take the form of lying in bed with Ross. He gets up and leaves, he kisses me, not erotically, just sadly, and he goes, back to her. There’s a house where they live in these dreams and he walks back to it, and sometimes I walk past it, or even into it. In the dream it is in a street in Glebe, down towards the point, but it is unlike any house ever built in that part of Sydney. It has a long, narrow dream garden in front rather like a garden in a Glover painting, a garden belonging somewhere else, more a garden my father might have, but he was in England and knew nothing of any of this. In the morning when I’d wake after one of these dreams, I’d lie there sad, but not as I was: a wistful sort of sad that says, Who was he? Who was I?

  And when I look back to my young weeping self, I say to her that it had to happen, a tough way to find whatever it was I had to find, which I suppose was myself: my not-rich, oddly shaped self who left England way too young, didn’t find what she thought she wanted, but found a good deal else: wealth of other kinds, a life that has gone on to shape itself in words and in forms of love I couldn’t have so much as imagined from behind that obscuring veil. And if I have painted an unfair picture of Ross and Elena, which I almost certainly have, it is because I never knew them. I only met her once. She came to my house, a corner terrace in (then) unfashionable Enmore one weekend afternoon – I’ve no idea why she was in Sydney seeing as she had a husband and a son in Melbourne – when I was watering the tubs in my garden: parsley, rosemary, a lemon tree. I heard Ross’s car pull up in the street along the side of the house; the gate opened, and there they were in my garden. We were going to Bondi, the three of us. I sat in the front, so that’s an indication of the state of things. It must have been the summer before the winter Lynne stayed, that clear blue day when we went to Bondi with Elena. We lay on the beach, with Ross and my towels touching, and hers a little distance away on the other side of him. We walked across the grass, up to the Gelato Bar, the best gelato in Sydney in those days, maybe still today. And I remember walking back to the car in that sweep of parking along the front where you now have to pay, but then was free. And this is the odd thing. It came back to me afterwards as if it were a clue, though at the time I thought it was merely odd. Elena went into the
toilets at the Pavilion to put on her make-up. Ross and I, salty and dishevelled, stood in the sun and talked and joked and kissed, and he put his foot on the back fender of the car, which was a Jackaroo we called Jill, a four-wheel drive before its time. He pressed down on the fender and when he took his foot away the car bounced in a solid, earthy kind of way, and we laughed, and oh I was happy, and eventually Elena returned. We got in the car and drove to Newtown, where Ross’s house was, and I don’t remember what happened after that. A snapshot of memory, that’s all.

  The weird thing about looking Ross up on the web was how old he looked. There’s a photo of him sitting on a chair in front of a window. There’s a cat beside him, and a radiator on the wall to the side. His hair is thin, but it always was so that’s not odd. His face is longer than I remember, and the skin is slack. He doesn’t look at all like the Ross of memory, which he isn’t, of course; that’s the disconnect. If he were to look me up, I’d look old and not at all the girl he knew, or – more accurately – didn’t know. I came across an old staff card from the 1980s at the back of a drawer recently and I didn’t look like me, even to me. It wasn’t just the long brown hair; the shape of my face was different. I look young. But when I look at myself as I am now, I don’t look old. I might to others, but I don’t to me. And friends I live beside don’t look old either. They look as much themselves as they ever did, although I know this isn’t true when I look at photos.