Violet Morel’s notebook
She sits at her table past twilight, the unnamed cats leaping and flitting like shadows across the room, before her a notebook, a pen, and the remains of the dinner so carefully prepared for her by the young woman who has become to her like the daughter she never had.
No. I sit here, Violet, I sit here, having finished the food Sarah so kindly prepared and hating her as I have never hated anyone but him and there is nothing I can do about it. I have no reason and every reason. She is so good to me, she was good to him. I know perfectly well he wanted to get her into bed with him—he certainly got plenty of his other students over the years, did he think I didn’t know, but I know he didn’t get her and she probably wasn’t terribly polite about it, either, probably gave him holy hell, which in his own perverse way he must have thoroughly enjoyed and which made it so much worse because then he became fond of her—just as I did. It was an outrageous theft of affection, outrageous because she did it unknowingly, and took mine as well as his, and because whatever one could call what was between us, Lord knows one couldn’t call it affection.
Everything about her is hateful. I look at that long black hair of hers and I want to stroke it with a brush, I want to rip it out of her head in great heaping handfuls and then beat that handsome unlined face of hers with a brush. When she puts an arm around me—and how can she, when I am so deliberately filthy, when I can see in others’ faces—even in hers, that I am now, to say the very least, pungent—how can she touch me, why does it make me feel like weeping with love and gratitude at precisely the same moment it stirs in me a hatred so scalding I’m amazed it doesn’t bubble the skin right off her face?
In this house lie hundreds of other notebooks like this one, filled with observations, thoughts, dreams, the passions of moments I can no longer recall; they list errands, financial minutiae, catalogues of his every work down to the barest squiggle—and they contain stories beyond number. Stories I created. Which he shook his head at, and then handed back to me—without a word, those first couple I was foolish enough to show him. As if they weren’t worth even one of his words. Naturally I never showed him any others, never even mentioned writing others. But what in the world did he think I did in this utterly empty house all day? He didn’t think. He assumed his was the only lived life. Perhaps he assumed that when he left I simply slumped down in one of the empty corners—and there were all so pristinely empty then—and stopped breathing until the moment of his return, like some toy that needed the battery of his presence in order to come to life? But no. It was far worse than that—he simply did not think of me at all from the instant he departed until the instant he opened the door again and noticed I was there.
Ah, but her?
He came home and burst into talk about her work. He was interested in her work, he made sure her work got out into the world—absurd for one so young, a showing of those painting/collages based on her imaginings of the life her friend, Beryl’s, child would have had, had she lived.e Yes, I’ll admit they were accomplished but anything more—all the nonsense he spouted about them? I think not. I think not. Too odd, far too strange, for my taste, at least. Helping her as he had never helped anyone else and meanwhile the basement (where he never went) filled with boxes of my notebooks, with my lifetime of work that he plainly didn’t want to hear about, much less see and much less help me to birth into the world, any more than the children he so adamantly refused to even consider having. And which she, no doubt will one of these fine days have with that husband of hers who seems to feel everything for her that mine could not—or would not?—feel for me.
It is intolerable.
Or was. Was. At least here, in my notebook, I am devising my revenge. And it is so deviously, so utterly sweet that I can taste in like raw wild honey in my mouth.
But I must truly guard against that other face in the mirror, the lying one that whispers that she loves me, that I love her in return. Or my story could be ruined.
next, Sarah Asleep
previous, 23 September
The Nature of Things 