Before I Forget

by Fahey, Jacqueline

  While whipping up inspiration in the life class, I began to see myself in a very different sort of role. I was thinking about those medieval-cum-early renaissance paintings of the indicator. I saw myself as this medieval indicator, standing on the edge of the scene showing the audience what to take note of. Some of those indicators are perfectly hilarious; they are so Jesuitical, so informative, as indeed they should be. In the medieval paintings, the indicator is, say, someone like John the Baptist. However, the position and stance of this device makes it clear that the designator isn’t what you’re supposed to be looking at. When playing the role, I point to what you should be looking at.

  As it evolved from my life classes what you should have been looking at was the infamous Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. What it’s all about is Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon in the bath on his return from Troy. She is assisted by her old black nurse. My hippy models were posed as Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, but their story wasn’t just about the Fall of Troy. Their story was also about the birth of a feminist consciousness. Setting up a life class in the university at that time could have been seen as unsupportive of the current women’s movement. I urged the students to view the models as a continuation of history, that the struggle to attain women’s rights went way back in history. That Clytemnestra brought about a platform where those rights had to be seriously looked at, at the trial for her murder by Arestis her son. In Athens, this became a real issue.

  For the students, the primary reason for attending the life class was to learn to draw, and besides teaching them how to draw, my creative development in the life class played out rather differently. My instinct was to analyse the conflict surrounding having a life class at all in the university at that time. As time went on what emerged was my own urge to bring the women’s movement into the class, that is once the students were more confident about their drawing. I felt it was important for the students to understand the politics behind this life class, now, in Auckland. I felt that we needed to go back to some point in history where a consciousness of women’s rights became apparent.

  The story of Clytemnestra is all about her struggle for equality in her home and in the eyes of the law. Agamemnon deceived and then sacrificed their lovely daughter to ensure fair winds for Troy. Clytemnestra never forgave him. I wouldn’t have let that prize hypocritical shit get away with it either. I, like her, would have waited ten years until the fucker returned for my revenge. That fucker who murdered their darling most beautiful daughter. Used her for political reasons. Jesus! His ego came before her and before what had been them. He sacrificed them when he sacrificed their darling Iphigenia. Anyone with any values would have applauded her.

  I really do not think that her lover Aegisthus had anything to do with it. The murder of Agamemnon was all about her revenge.

  Weaving this story into the life class was all about ways to see the nude, ways to see history from different angles. Male history sees Clytemnestra as an unfaithful wife, but from my point of view she is a grand political heroine. This was a life class after all, so the emphasis was on perception. Just as a slight shift in perception is all it took in Clytemnestra’s case, in drawing the illumination might come when you least expect it. An ancient Greek story was a good story to accompany the drawing. Naked, my ageing hippie models looked remarkably like the Greeks – the beard, the hair, the stance. It was all about allowing visual intelligence to function and giving the other overworked sphere of the brain a rest.

  At home, I was struggling with the paintings inspired by these issues in my life class. I was, I realised, breaking some sacred rules. I was doing something very wicked in these paintings. I was the indicator, not a Christian saint but a painter, and not just a painter, but a woman. I was not indicating the story of the Catholic Church but the story of the ancient world. Certainly those early Renaissance guys would not have approved of me. I was not enhancing the story of Christianity, I was enhancing the story of the old religion.

  Then something unexpected happened in the class. I became aware of some dirty-minded sniggering going on from three male students. I had made some mistaken assumptions – I’d assumed the attitude towards sexuality and the body among contemporary youth would be more unself-conscious than in my own generation. I now understood that these students were, at best, uneasy in the life room and, at worst, truly freaked out.

  In my day the life room was treated like attendance at Mass. I had not thought it necessary to impose that sort of restraint on students in 1990. Now I realised that the least I should have done was prepare them, set down some code of behaviour. I took these three guys outside and we had a defining chat. I told them what was what. Something like: Now, on K Road, if you went along to snigger and to insult the employees, the heavies on guard would see to you. You would pay for that one way or another. Maybe that’s where you guys belong, where you should be hanging out. Here, try another shift in your perception as that is what we have been talking about – that is if you want to be here. Remember she has her clothes off, she is naked in front of you and this is to assist you with your studies. You have clothes on. You are here to do that study. That is the only reason why she has her clothes off. Any demonstration of your immaturity or your aggression towards women makes you unsuitable for the life class. Perhaps your place is on K Road. You had better work that one out and do it quickly. Pure rage has its place.

  They were truly mortified. They said it would never happen again and it didn’t. They got it in one. I realised most of it had been shock and huge embarrassment. Here was a real live naked woman right there in front of them, so much more real than magazines or films. Their behaviour was never referred to again.

  My time at Elam was good – but, as I kept finding out, nothing lasts forever. My tendency to risk-taking and brinkmanship slowly began to come into play at Elam. That absurd urge, that push towards brinkmanship is the urge to present myself as I really am – a rather destructive way to leave a job. A self-punishing dissenter I certainly could be. I began to realise that my behaviour came out of a longing that I was denying, a longing for the isolation I needed to paint. Both Dick Frizzell and Bob Ellis seemed to be able to keep up their own creativity and be involved with students at the same time. Don, like me, had more problems with the dual roles of teaching and doing his own work.

  For the first few years at Elam I had enjoyed teaching very much, so much so that I had believed it was enough for me. It did in the beginning help to restore me to myself. I then began to harbour uneasy feelings, as if I had mislaid a baby and must go back to find it, find it no matter how dangerous. The conviction that I had something special to bring to Elam also began to evaporate. For purely practical reasons, I needed to get back to the drawing board, replenish my resources. I began painting again and I knew that was my current necessity.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘Old Age is not for Sissies’

  After Fraser’s coronary he was not himself, but then I was not myself either. The fact that I was not myself was quite difficult for me to grasp. I needed a new self for this new situation – and I could not find her in me. Fraser’s situation was more straightforward. He had not so much lost himself as become who he once was.

  It is true that young Catholic men often do suffer from arrested development, and Fraser’s regression would possibly have gone unnoticed in certain circles. Fraser’s life had been one of progressive enlightenment, leaving behind his more fundamentalist upbringing – a culture of football and beer, a deep unease with women and a pervasive xenophobia. In short, Fraser had lost what he had become, and become who he once was. After his coronary he was well aware that some awful shift in his consciousness had taken place, but he was seemingly trapped in this rednecked Kiwi male persona.

  Meantime, I had not found in me the compassionate and wise self who I believed resided somewhere inside. I understood in my head that Fraser had suffered a massive assault to his heart and to his brain, however, the empathy that that knowledge should
have brought was not there. I simply didn’t feel for this deconstructed guy.

  Here he was, slurping his drink and raging at the television with foul words, voicing racist opinions about Maori spokespersons and contemptuous remarks about the aged. It was all pretty shocking coming from someone who had often in the past been accused of being much too politically correct.

  I confess it here: my own response to all this was shallow and selfish. If Fraser was to find he wasn’t who he thought he was, so was I. And yet we could both of us do a convincing imitation of the people we once believed ourselves to be. We kept those imitations for other people but in private slumped back into what came naturally. At the time I had little insight into my own behaviour, but lots of course into Fraser’s.

  I suggested that he could behave the same way towards me as he did to other people.

  He said, ‘No, I can’t, you’re the only person I can be myself with.’

  I said, ‘And that, Fraser, is no privilege.’

  I did of course realise that he was not being himself with me, but was being this other person from way back when. Fraser had originally been given a year to live. He lived, however, for another six years and over that time he slowly returned to himself. It took me longer to come to terms with the lack of empathy in my nature that Fraser’s collapse had revealed.

  Did we adjust over those long six years? We both attempted to approximate what we could recollect about so-called normal behaviour. But we were always being distracted by that presence which accompanied us everywhere, that spectre of death, a distracting presence, a distorter of what we had assumed was reality. We hoped we could deceive death, that we might convince this creature that a mistake had been made.

  I had to keep telling myself that he had very recently suffered an appalling onslaught to his heart and his brain but sometimes that knowledge failed me. I would confront him with behaviour that struck me as devious. Mr Nice Guy in public, self-indulgent Kiwi guy at home. I was reminded of an old Irish saying my mother had often quoted apropos of my father: ‘A devil at home and an angel abroad.’

  Fraser loved to commune with the kahikatea and kauri forest we lived in. In French Bay one evening, sipping his pre-dinner drink, he gazed up the valley past the kauri, right into the void. Well, he said, ‘Soon I will be off into the void.’ Happy as I was that he was not the sort of person to drag religion into this I was beginning to believe we had shaken our companion, death. Here he was, nearly six years later, getting better. I was beginning to believe that this prediction of his death was premature.

  When, for a long time, you think something is going to happen and it doesn’t, then you think it is never going to happen. I said, ‘Let’s not sit around waiting, let’s pretend we are both going to live forever.’ Well, that is exactly how he behaved and how he looked during the last year of his life. He bought new clothes, exercised, stopped cheating on his diet and I believed that he would live forever, as would I of course.

  I had promised my daughter Augusta that I would be there in Atlanta, Georgia, for the arrival of her first baby. Now that I wasn’t at Elam, I took on workshops in different parts of the country that year to pay for my tickets. I did the provinces, some weekends and a few fortnights. I spent my time raving on, in those small towns, to frustrated women of real talent, often trapped inside the age-old systems in place to police women’s behaviour. Curiously, I found there was not a great deal I could teach them about how to paint: they had been doing these workshops for years with very able practising painters. The problem was motivation, or, more precisely, a lack of vision: how to put everything they had learnt into some independent way of seeing. I was always glad to get back to Auckland and was reminded of that old Argentinean saying: ‘Small towns are sheer hell.’ I had to remind myself why I was doing this – to get the money to go to America for Augusta’s baby.

  But I got a warning a few months before I was due to leave. I drove Fraser into Auckland Hospital for a check-up. Afterwards I spoke to the doctor on duty. She said there was nothing wrong with him. She knew he had been having problems in the last few days but she assured me they were minor. I protested that if Fraser was complaining about his health, he did so with a very good reason. She then directed me to a men’s dormitory, coughing groaning spitting old men on beds in a row. ‘There,’ she pronounced, ‘we have seriously sick men. Your husband is not seriously sick.’ I knew why she believed this; it was Fraser’s presentation. With his last remnants of energy he could pull together a convincing imitation of a healthy, in-control guy. Before his major coronary five years earlier, he had had his doctors totally fooled. They believed there couldn’t possibly be anything seriously wrong with him; he looked well and was charmingly articulate. This young Indian doctor was so contemptuous of my concern she treated me as an overindulged middle-class woman and I almost got around to believing her. However, I do not remember her kindly now – because Fraser died two months later.

  I was with Augusta and her new daughter in the US when Fraser died. His death was what you would call a happy death. It was a gift. He had had a good lunch with Emily and her current boyfriend, plus Alex and Alex’s husband. After all of them had left, from the evidence available, he died in his sleep that night. When they found him, his bed was not disturbed and he was still holding his current reading, a book about Culloden and the Forty-five.

  We had been talking about his ancestors, Fraser and I, before I left. They had been driven out of Skye after Culloden. He was fascinated by the hilarious description of the McDonalds on the battlefield, so wild and reckless, savage warriors who lost everything that had been theirs for thousands of years. Half the clan was Catholic, the chief was a Catholic, and the other half Presbyterian. It was not a religious issue, which Fraser felt very good about, as if it solved something for him in his own mind. He could then equate what had happened in the Highlands with the Irish on his mother’s side. That it was all about resisting oppression and the English idea of empire. After all, it was an Irish regiment who remained most protective and loyal to Bonnie Prince Charlie after the collapse of Culloden. It was about preserving a way of life.

  As the book lay open in front of him, death appeared, instant and benign. He had been dreading a paralysing stroke which, considering the state of his veins, was quite likely. He would picture himself as immobile and pathetic and cast into a nursing home, desperately babbling on, trying to make someone understand he wanted a glass of water. I would say something about how it wouldn’t come to that, and that anyway I was not totally useless. ‘You couldn’t lift me!’ he used to say. ‘But you won’t let it come to that. That won’t happen, will it? I will show you what to do. There is to be no nursing home for me. Now, do you understand that?’ We were very fortunate not to be faced with that dilemma.

  After living with death for six years its arrival came as another revelation. How grief and desolation make their appearance. I survived the funeral and the wake afterwards with no urge to weep and wail. I wasn’t feeling too good but was seemingly immune to tears. However, a few days later I had to take darling Ollie, our Sydney silky, to be put down. Fraser had written to me about Ollie’s rapid decline after my departure. The same morning that Emily phoned to tell me that Fraser had died, I received his letter. I have, of course, kept it.

  Ollie, adopted five years earlier, was by this time at least twenty. He had, in the last year, started banging into things and losing control of his bowels, waking in the night and crying out. The vet was expecting Ollie, and all was ready for his departure when I was sucked up into some gap in the spectrum, some desolate void, and clutching Ollie I wailed and wept like a mindless banshee, scaring the vet and his assistant.

  I don’t remember what followed but Ollie’s ashes were returned to me and joined Fraser’s ashes under the puriri and totara trees.

  The second visitation of grief was equally unexpected. The day following Ollie’s death, our gardener knocked on the door. He said, ‘So the Doc’s out, is he?’
and I was struck dumb. I found I could not say the words ‘Fraser has died’. In fact, I could not speak at all, and again that awful visitation. If I couldn’t speak, I could wail despair, produce racking sobs – and after that, complete calm.

  I said to the poor benighted gardener, ‘I am so sorry, I can’t imagine what came over me.’ By then he was backing off down the drive and sprinting to his car. I was glad of it: I still could not have said those words, ‘Fraser is dead’.

  Before Fraser died I did, however, comfort him with a joke he loved. It was Woody Allen’s quip, ‘I am not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’ Now that joke comforts me. It would seem that he wasn’t there when it happened.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Down in Grey Lynn

  Moving into town after Fraser died, I was compelled to start again. I took real solace in painting but knew that I must begin again, and begin looking again, to get any real satisfaction from it. I had to find a new stage set for my dramas.

  Walking my darling dog Ben down in Grey Lynn Park, I was entranced by the skateboarders. Flying through the air with such daring and grace. It was about that time, while I was having my evening gin, that I heard on the radio a hip-hop-cum-punk sort of a song. Penetrating my self-absorption came the words of that old prayer from the Dominican nuns of Teschemakers. These were the words that I realised they were singing: ‘If I die before I wake, at least in heaven I can skate, ‘cause right now on earth I can’t do shit, without the man fucking with it.’ I think that’s what they were singing. Emily cried out, ‘Sexists. Common, gruesome American band.’