The Man has invited an assortment of people over for dinner this evening. He went liquorice allsorts in that, for each guest at the table, three-quarters of the party is anonymous, strangers, the relationship we bare to The Man is what binds us. This is what I think at the start, but by the end of the entrees I am made to see there is much more, that our experience as white, upper-middle class, inner-city dwellers are so matching and aligned the conversation flows as easily as the wine. All evening I feel very much as though I am experiencing my class. In doing so, I am more quiet than usual. I feel intellectually paralysed in front of the other guests who sweep the international landscape, every injustice and current issue from global trade to climate change to the housing market, all the way to the forecast for the dollar. They seem to speak on behalf of everybody and nobody at once. When they move on to discussing macroeconomics, I quietly rise from my chair to attend to the salad. I am reassured by the cool sheets of radicchio and the way the knobs of garlic break under the weight of me.
I step into a long, hot shower to escape the task of cleaning up. I recognise, in the sound of the falling water, that I consumed far too much wine for a Wednesday. I used to think I was not the kind of person who lets the days of the week dictate their behaviour, though the title of the day is the first thing I locate when I emerge from sleep. The weather is next. On those deep-sleep mornings where I struggle to locate where I am in time, I experience an acute and disorienting panic. The Man has more products in his shower at this moment than I have known in the past year of my life. As I bring each bottle to my nose, I am confronted by the many layers of him. I lean against the cold tiles wondering about stamp duty, and macroeconomics. I consider all the things I do not understand, have not tried to unpack. Things like GDP, GST, Internet Cookies, or how to change a tire when it becomes flat. I once asked The Man about Internet Cookies. The only thing I recall about this exchange was being impressed by his capacity to bring forward an eloquent explanation on demand. This is something he does often, something which makes me feel increasingly incompetent. As he went on to answer my question, a blankness swallowed me. I stared back at him with what probably looked like interest and comprehension while his words failed to impart any meaning and so today, I still do not know what internet cookies are.
At a party, I stand outside on a balcony with someone I wouldn’t be if it weren’t for the cigarette being passed between us. I strike a small conversation and the woman asks about my week, specifically: if it is busy. The days of the week stretch out before me like a ladder. I wonder what this woman’s idea of being busy is and what knowledge of my schedule will make her feel about her own. I don’t feel entitled to claim busyness after having witnessed Em’s life so closely for so long. Though, when I verbalised this to my therapist, she replied I am entitled to my own modicum of distress, that we all are. I disclose a small fact of my life to the woman on the balcony: I am seeing The Picture of Dorian Gray stage play on Wednesday, I say. This woman hasn’t seen the play but has decided she will not be based on the trailer she saw on television. The subsequent way this woman roasts the play and denies the artistic genius every single review and critic has awarded it, upsets me. I take a deep drag of the cigarette and return it to her stamped decoratively with the two shades of our red lipsticks. I tell her I am returning inside; the wind pulls the door shut behind me in a way that probably seemed deliberate to the girl on the balcony. I pause here for a moment before returning to the party. Nausea, perhaps the start of heartburn, stirs in the base of me. In the car service home, I turn over my contemporaries and their dispositional signature, which seems to be one of increasing hostility, one preoccupied with error.
Tell me, what is news? my aunt Anne asks. It’s 4 o’clock, a Tuesday and she is holding a sieve above a tea cake, which she taps lightly against her hand so sugar falls on the bench like snow. At home later, when reflecting on this scene with my pen, I will spend the best part of 6oclock trying to decipher a less cliché image than snow. After racking my brain, and pouring over the internet thesaurus, I tell myself to get a grip and just call it snow. When Anne has her back to me, I drag my index finger through the powder on the bench and place the finger in my mouth, feeling the way the sugar first becomes a paste, then dissolves into the rest of me. Well, lightness and laughter are on the outs, I say, and moral indignation feels very in. I tell Anne about the dinner party and then the house party, specifically the way the two seem to serve as little more than an opportunity to impart one’s opinion – one’s genius. I’ve been turning over this observation inside myself all week, though, saying it out loud just now makes me feel disparaging and I become embarrassed. Anne looks up at me, her wrist is limp; the heavy knife she has picked seems too severe a choice for the delicate tea cake. She lowers it and the cake divides like a boiling knife would butter. I’m afraid it’s always been that way, she says.
At the restaurant, there is a language barrier in the way of ordering, so we mostly point and repeat ourselves and hope it will go well. This restaurant is so authentic, someone says after the waiter leaves the room and it occurs to me that we like to measure things by their degree of authenticity. I am sitting beside one of the only two people I know who also happens the host of this dinner party. For reasons unbeknown to me, the theme of the dinner is après-ski, which I had to type into a search engine when The Man informed me. He prefaced and succeeded the dress code with an apology. The idea that he thought I might judge him because of this made me feel odd for the remainder of the day and makes me feel odd still. When I scrolled the après-ski images on the internet, I adjusted my expectations for the dinner. And so now, the bourgeois conversation doesn’t afflict me. At one point, the host asks me if I am looking to buy. Buy what, I reply. I am thankful for having worn the black top rather than the light yellow one, which has been known to stain. I do my best to keep up with the conversation, which circles around mostly work, clients, cars, and Baz Lehrman’s latest indiscretions. I don’t understand the industry they belong to but pretend to all the same. We’re on a sake flight, the host says to me. I board with enthusiasm. When I wake up the next morning, my breath is sour and my energy levels the most depleted they’ve been in some time.
Think pseudo-intellectual tennis, I say to Daisy at the Deli’s front window. I stare outside, quietly pleased with this analogy. Daisy nods. The lights hanging above us are the only ones I’ve switched on, which conjures in me the feeling Daisy and I are on stage. The subsequent way people on the pavement and in cars double-take and stare at us confirms this feeling in me. I stood in the shower after dinner thinking I know them no more than the stranger who stands aside for me to get off the train. Daisy produces a low hum and asks for the second time: should we order? I say she should choose, that I have no idea what to make of any of this. One glass of wine after dinner, I walk Daisy to her car, wave goodbye, and the quiet arrangement of our dinners confronts me. When invited to dinner by other friends, we each must preface the acceptance of the invitation with our early start tomorrow, or our very heavy workloads, so nobody bothers to try and change our minds when, at 10 pm, we abruptly call it a night. Considering this now, I think this time-sensitive tolerance for other people might be the only way Daisy and I resemble one another.
After a long hot shower, I lie on my back stroking the swell of my stomach, tracing the outline of the pad-Thai, fish cakes, coconut rice. I turn on my side, open my journal and write Pseudo Intellectual Tennis under a list at the back of the journal called ‘Salient’. The list is a strategy I borrowed from an author I heard interviewed on the radio, whereby she writes items down that spark her interest; concepts that stir something in her. When a pattern emerges, she plucks the theme, and it becomes the premise for a story, article, or book. On a different page is a quote from Sheila Heti’s new book, which reads, “one thing that has always been abundantly clear but has been made especially clear to me today, is that it is important to know what you think of things, what you believe the world to be, and what you think it should be”. I remember writing this down for the way it was disclosed to me like a confession. Perhaps also to remind myself Mira, the protagonist of the book, and by extension Heti herself, do not know what they believe the world to be.
Ava places a cellophane bag of chocolates in my lap and I realise my jaw has been hanging very open, that it is dry of saliva. We are sitting in the front row of Dorian Gray the stage play. Our mothers’, who are becoming increasingly indistinguishable as the years go one, are seated directly behind us. I’ve never known genius until this night, I declare to them all over a sparce, overpriced cheese plate afterwards. There is a chill in me, so all I can think about is getting home and stepping into a long hot shower. The showers are becoming not only more frequent but longer. Last week, I told The Man I could stand in a shower for a whole business day if someone delivered me food. He disagreed while applying soap to my back. On the tram home, I type ‘Dorian Gray quotes’ into a search engine. It was 134 years ago when Wilde declared “there is no doubt genius lasts longer than beauty, this accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed Man – that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing”. I turn over this idea of intellect as an accessory at the same time an email banner from the University of Melbourne pops up on my screen. I open it -a receipt of my printing account recharge from this afternoon.
It is a Friday and I feel relieved I do not have to be out. I can feel the cool winter evening on my neck despite the window being very shut. The hours of evening stretch out before me, hours in which I can just sit and be. I slide my phone to aeroplane mode, and the knowledge that nobody can reach me imparts an entirely new silence to my living space. I assemble a simple dinner of lamb fillets and ratatouille, which I sit down at my late grandmother’s blonde table to eat alone under an obnoxiously large candle Anne insisted I take home. I find myself becoming transfixed by its flame, which elongates as I eat. I hop into bed prematurely, at a juvenile 8.30 pm, with a pot of tea, strawberry ice cream and Annie Ernoux. A line quickly pricks me, it is a moment in which she feels society has ceased to function naively. I re-read it a second time, starting again from the top of the page while I carry small teaspoons of ice cream, which is more like strawberry milk by now, from the bowl to my mouth. I imagine Annie once sat in the comfort of her own bed consuming ice cream like I am right now. I picture her sitting at dinner parties and breakfasts and feeling disappointed. I picture her horizontally in baths contemplating her own vessel. Then later laying languidly on the grass, overcome with doubt. Society has ceased to function naively, she wrote of 1965 France. I think of Anne too at this moment; the vanilla flavour of the sponge and the icing sugar that has, by now, left me, and the fact that it has always been this way.
A Werribee line train pulls into Richmond station, a brand new one that feels as though it is has arrived on this platform on this day from the future. I tuck my bike and myself in the corner, turning over what the Man might have planned for our evening. There is an animated group of three sitting directly behind me who are so blonde and sun-kissed they look like they’ve been plucked right out of a Puberty Blues episode. The man is declaring something to the two women, one of which I think might be his girlfriend based on the way she is looking at him like he is an artwork she made and is un-humbly very proud of. They must have just returned from overseas, I reason, just like everyone else in this town, myself included. This is confirmed when the Man pulls out a packet of slim Vogue cigarettes. The three have caught my attention because of the way he is moving his hands and the way the women are hanging off his every word. He is talking about The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a dramatic historical text on Nazi Germany, which I studied in year ten English. It is a text and film I found very moving and for this reason, admire. This man, however, is outrightly appalled by The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and is presenting it to these women as a culturally insensitive narrative, though, from where I stand, he seems to be speaking on behalf of a culture he does not belong to. An insult, he says lowering his fist fast as if there were a table below him. The passivity of the two women makes me think they haven’t read or seen the story, and now, thanks to this young man, they probably never will.
Yellow Days 