Jenny Diski* is super focused on her memories of what she was looking for as a young woman – in this case ‘older men’. Her energy rebounds and bounces around the court and somehow I manage to have a whack at the ball and off it goes over the high fence, across the railway line. then magically someone or other throws it right back and here it is at my feet. And here I am, about eighteen and asking myself ‘what am I looking for? Well, certainly a woman but I had little confidence as to my desirability so it was almost any woman yet that’s not quite true either – part of that lack of confidence was an unwillingness to actually identify what I was looking for. And then it comes down to the chance events of meeting and availability. And when I did meet a woman who seemed willing to entertain the idea of some sort of relationship and willing to initiate me into the wonders of sex we ended up getting married though I don’t think that is what I really had in mind – let’s try living together was more to the point, but there was her grandmother on hand so marriage it had to be. We were probably hopelessly out of our depth. The language available to us individually did not really converge into a shared language of relationship in a way that made communication possible beyond the ‘what shall we eat’ or ‘shall we go for a drink’ or ‘shall we have sex’. I continued to look for a woman or women I could talk to (and have sex with).
As I reflect on this question as to what I was looking for I increasingly narrow the focus to the notion of “growing up” – one of those concepts that melt into thin air on trying to define what we might mean beyond the chronology of ageing. But I have an idea that the process of it comes from the gap between me and the woman and it has to be a gap, a space in which we can dance our shared meanings or our different meanings. I am here waiting at the airport for my flight to Pisa and then on to Florence to stay with B for a month and it is in and through that space that we communicate, or as I might prefer to put it, we dance and somehow I arrive at the sense that this work is what I am calling growing up though presumably I don’t have any sense of there being a “grown up space” as such – ahhhh work finished! at the end of it. Of course, there is no end – there is what we call death or system failure of some sort.
*LRB 6 June 2013