Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [74]
Is such the fate of all women who become mixed up with artists: to have their worst or their best extracted and worked into fiction? He thinks of Hélène in War and Peace. Did Hélène start off as one of Tolstoy’s mistresses? Did she ever guess that, long after she was gone, men who had never laid eyes on her would lust after her beautiful bare shoulders?
Must it all be so cruel? Surely there is a form of cohabitation in which man and woman eat together, sleep together, live together, yet remain immersed in their respective inward explorations. Is that why the affair with Jacqueline was doomed to fail: because, not being an artist herself, Jacqueline could not appreciate the artist’s need for inner solitude? If Jacqueline had been a sculptress, for instance, if one corner of the flat had been set aside for her to chip away at her marble while in another corner he wrestled with words and rhymes, would love have flourished between them? Is that the moral of the story of himself and Jacqueline: that it is best for artists to have affairs only with artists?
Two
The affair with Jacqueline is consigned to the past. After weeks of smothering intimacy he has a room of his own again. He piles Jacqueline’s boxes and suitcases in a corner and waits for them to be fetched. It does not happen. Instead, one evening, Jacqueline herself reappears. She has come, she says, not to resume residence with him (‘You are impossible to live with’) but to patch up a peace (‘I don’t like bad blood, it depresses me’), a peace that entails first going to bed with him, then, in bed, haranguing him about what he said about her in his diary. On and on she goes: they do not get to sleep until two in the morning.
He wakes up late, too late for his eight o’clock lecture. It is not the first lecture he has missed since Jacqueline entered his life. He is falling behind in his studies and does not see how he will ever catch up. In his first two years at the university he had been one of the stars of the class. He found everything easy, was always a step ahead of the lecturer. But of late a fog seems to have descended on his mind. The mathematics they are studying has become more modern and abstract, and he has begun to flounder. Line by line he can still follow the exposition on the blackboard, but more often than not the larger argument eludes him. He has fits of panic in class which he does his best to hide.
Strangely, he seems to be the only one afflicted. Even the plodders among his fellow students have no more trouble than usual. While his marks fall month by month, theirs remain steady. As for the stars, the real stars, they have simply left him struggling in their wake.
Never in his life has he had to call on his utmost powers. Less than his best has always been good enough. Now he is in a fight for his life. Unless he throws himself wholly into his work, he is going to sink.
Yet whole days pass in a fog of grey exhaustion. He curses himself for letting himself be sucked back into an affair that costs him so much. If this is what having a mistress entails, how do Picasso and the others get by? He simply has not the energy to run from lecture to lecture, job to job, then when the day is done turn his attention to a woman who veers between euphoria and spells of the blackest gloom in which she thrashes around, brooding on a lifetime’s grudges.
Although no longer formally living with him, Jacqueline feels free to arrive on his doorstep at all hours of the night and day. Sometimes she comes to denounce him for some word or other he let slip whose veiled meaning has only now become clear to her. Sometimes she is simply feeling low and wants to be cheered up. Worst are the days after therapy, when she rehearses over and over again what passed in her therapist’s consulting room, picking over the implications of his tiniest gesture. She