Transit

by Rachel Cusk

  When he gave up his university place to stay in Paris, and told his parents the truth about what had happened, they had responded with absolute condemnation and disgust. I didn’t care, Oliver said. His thirst for love, he went on, was such that he became convinced his parents had never really loved him at all. Putting himself entirely into Marc’s hands, he effectively orphaned himself. Waking each morning in the beautiful apartment in Saint-Germain, in the sunny rooms full of paintings and objets d’art, with the sounds of Beethoven or Wagner – Marc’s favourite composers, whose music was played often – streaming through the opened windows out into the street, he often felt like a character in a book, a person who has survived ordeals to be rewarded with a happy ending. It was a complete reversal of everything he had felt that night on the beach in Nice. Yet he frequently caught himself mentally offering it up to his parents, Marc’s good taste and intelligence, his wealth, even his car, an open-topped Aston his father would have greatly admired, in which they roared together up the Champs-Élysées on summer evenings. These things corresponded to his deepest sense of reality, for the reason that they were his parents’ values.

  It had never even occurred to him that the relationship could end. He remembered it coming, a feeling of incipient coldness, like the first hint of winter, a bewildering sensation of wrongness, as though something had broken deep down in the engine of his life. For a long time he pretended that he couldn’t hear it, couldn’t feel it, but nonetheless his existence with Marc inexorably ground to a halt.

  He paused, his face pinched and white. His bow-like mouth was downturned, like a child’s. His round eyes behind their long, dark lashes were shining.

  ‘I don’t know how long ago you wrote the story you read tonight,’ he said, ‘or whether you still feel those same things now, but –’ and to my astonishment he began to weep openly, there at the table – ‘but it was me you were describing, that woman was me, her pain was my pain, and I just had to come and tell you in person how much it meant to me.’

  Enormous, shining tears were dripping from his eyes and rolling down his cheeks. He didn’t wipe them away. He sat there, his hands in his lap, and let the water run down his face. The others had stopped talking: Julian leaned over and put his large arm around Oliver’s puny shoulders.

  ‘Oh dear, it’s the waterworks again,’ he said. ‘It’s all wet, wet, wet this evening, isn’t it?’ He took a handkerchief from his pocket and held it out. ‘There, there, duck. Dry your eyes for me now – we’re going dancing.’

  The others were standing: Louis was zipping up his jacket. A friend was taking them to a local club, Julian said, retying his mauve cravat with a flourish; heaven knew what they might pick up there, but like he’d said, he wasn’t one to turn down an invitation.

  He held out his hand to me.

  ‘We enjoyed having you in our sandwich,’ he said. ‘You were less chewy than I expected,’ he added, without releasing my fingers, ‘and tastier.’

  He smacked his lips while Louis watched with a guilty, cowed expression. When Julian had withdrawn his hand Louis held out his in turn.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said, with what was either gravity or its imitation.

  They turned to leave and I was surprised to see the Chair return to the table and sit down. I said immediately that he mustn’t feel he had to stay and keep me company. If he wanted to go with the others I was quite happy to go back to the hotel.

  ‘No, no,’ the Chair said, in a tone that failed to clarify whether he would have preferred to go or not. ‘I’ll stay here. You were talking to Oliver for a long time,’ he added. ‘I was getting quite jealous.’

  I did not reply to this remark. He asked if I had read Julian and Louis’s books. He had unbuttoned his jacket and was sitting back in his chair with his legs crossed, swinging his foot back and forth. I noticed his shoe as it came towards me and receded again. It was a lace-up boot, new, with a long pointed toe and holes punctured in the brown leather. The rest of his clothes were expensive-looking too: perhaps it was the flamboyance of Julian’s attire that had prevented me from noticing the Chair’s well-cut, slim-fitting jacket, his clean dark shirt with its sharp collars, his trousers made of some soft-looking, opulent material. His face was alert and he moved his small head often, watching me.

  ‘What did you think?’ he said.

  I said that I liked them, though their differences suggested there was more than one way of being honest, which I wasn’t sure was true. I hadn’t expected to like Julian, I added, any more than he had expected to like me.

  ‘Julian,’ the Chair said, ‘or his book?’

  As far as I was concerned, I said, they were the same thing.

  The Chair looked at me with an ambiguous glint in his button-like eyes.

  ‘That’s a strange thing for a writer to say,’ he said.

  I asked him about his own work and he talked for a while about the publishing house where he was an editor. Next week the editor-in-chief was going away for a few days: the Chair was being left to run things on his own. It happened two or three times each year, which was enough to convince him – or rather to remind him, since he required no convincing – that responsibility was something he ought to avoid. Likewise, his sister would sometimes ask him to look after his little niece for a day or two, which gave him as big a dose of parenthood as he needed, as well as having the immense advantage that the child – who he liked a great deal – was returnable.

  I asked him what he used his freedom for, since he defended it so assiduously, and he looked somewhat taken aback.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting that,’ he said.

  He’d have to think about my question, he went on. There was probably an element of selfishness to it, he could admit, as well as immaturity. But really, if he were honest – honesty being tonight’s theme, he said, with a barking laugh – it was fear.

  Of what? I said.

  He looked at me with a strange grimacing smile.

  His father, he said after a while, had had a propensity to behave in public situations in a manner that caused the utmost embarrassment to the people with him. In restaurants and shops, on trains, even at school parents’ evenings: there was no knowing what he might do. Any such occasion could only be viewed in advance with dread by the members of his family. But the Chair had dreaded it more than the others.

  I asked what exactly it was his father did that was so embarrassing.

  There was a long silence.

  I don’t know, said the Chair. I can’t explain.

  Why, I asked, did he think he suffered more anxiety than, say, the sister he had mentioned earlier?

  I don’t know, the Chair said again. I just know that I did.

  He didn’t know why he had told me that, he added after a while. It was something he didn’t usually talk about. His foot was still swinging back and forth and I watched the slender, beak-like toe as it advanced and retreated. All this time the Chair had been pouring wine into our glasses and now the bottle was empty. I said that I ought to be going back to the hotel: I had to catch an early train the next morning. The Chair reacted to this news with obvious surprise. He looked at his watch. His wrist, I noticed, had strong knuckle-shaped bones and the white skin was covered with vigorous black hairs. I saw thoughts passing through his mind but I didn’t know what they were. I guessed he was calculating whether he was too late to join the others at the club. He stood up and asked which hotel I was staying in.

  ‘Can I walk you back there?’ he said.

  I repeated that there was no need, if he had something else to do.

  ‘You haven’t taken your coat off all evening,’ he said, ‘so I can’t even help you on with it.’

  Outside it was so dark that it was barely possible to see the pavement in front of us. The rain had stopped but water dripped thickly from the foliage overhead. In the darkness the mass of heavy trunks along the roadside with their serpentine roots seemed impenetrable as a forest. The Chair took out his phone and used the
light as a torch. We had to walk very close to one another to be able to see where we were going. Our arms and shoulders were touching. I felt a realisation begin to arise, a dawning of understanding, as if some incomprehensible component had suddenly slotted into place. We crossed the road into the brighter light that came from the hotel. I opened the gate and the Chair followed me into the gravelled courtyard. There was a flight of wide stone steps that rose to the front door. I paused at the bottom. I thanked the Chair for bringing me back and I turned away from him and walked up the steps. He followed me up; I felt him just behind me, a dark attendant shape, like a hawk hovering and rising. When I turned around again he took two rapid strides towards me. He seemed to be crossing some unfathomable element or chasm-like space, where things fell and broke far down in the darkness against its deeps. His body reached mine and he pushed me back against the door and kissed me. He put his warm, thick tongue in my mouth; he thrust his hands inside my coat. His lean, hard body was more insistent than forceful. I felt the soft, expensive clothes he was dressed in and the hot skin beneath them. He moved his face away from mine for a moment in order to speak.

  ‘You’re like a teenager,’ he said.

  He kissed me for a long time. Other than that remark, no one said anything. There were no explanations or endearments. I became aware of my musty, damp clothes and my tangled hair. When our bodies eventually came apart I moved away and twisted the door handle and opened the door a few inches. He stepped back; he seemed to be grinning. In the bright darkness he was a silhouette filled with white light.

  Goodnight, I said.

  I went inside and closed the door.

  The student’s name was Jane. She was sitting on the sofa, apparently not noticing that it – and everything else in the room – was covered with white dust sheets.

  Thank you, she said, accepting a cup of tea and placing it carefully on the floor beside her.

  She was a tall, slim, narrow-bodied woman with surprisingly generous firm breasts that her tight turquoise sweater accentuated. She smoothed her lime-green pencil skirt frequently over her thighs. She wore no make-up: her bare, lined face with its neat features was like the face of a worried child. Her pale hair was piled on top of her head in a way that revealed the elegance of her long neck.

  She was grateful, she said, that I’d agreed to work with her – she’d had a suspicion they would try to palm her off on someone else. Last term she’d had a novelist who kept trying to make her rewrite the endings of other people’s books. The term before that it had been a memoirist whose own life had so preoccupied him that he never actually managed to attend one of their meetings. He would sometimes call her from Italy, where he kept going to see his girlfriend, giving her exercises to do over the phone. He always wanted her to write about sex: perhaps it was just a subject that happened to be on his mind at the time.

  The thing is, she said, I know what I want to write about. She paused and sipped her tea. I just don’t know how to write it.

  Outside the sitting-room windows the afternoon sky was a motionless grey blank. Occasionally sounds came from the street, the slamming of a car door or a fragment of passing conversation.

  I said it wasn’t always a question of knowing how.

  She arched her eyebrows, which had been plucked into fine, dark, perfectly drawn curves.

  Then what is it a question of? she said.

  The material, she went on, which she’d been collecting for the past four or five years, had by now grown into a set of notes more than 300,000 words long: she was keen to start the actual writing. It concerned the life of the American painter Marsden Hartley, someone surprisingly few people here had heard of, though in the States his work could be found hanging in most of the major galleries and museums. I asked whether she had been there to look at them.

  I’m not that interested in the paintings, she said, after a pause.

  She had seen, she went on, some of his work in Paris: there had been a retrospective there. She had happened to be passing and saw one of the posters outside. The image they’d used had caused her immediately to enter the gallery and purchase a ticket for the exhibition. It was early in the morning – the gallery had only just opened – and no one else was there. She had walked alone around the five or six large rooms of paintings. When she came out, she had undergone a complete personal revolution.

  She fell silent again. She sipped her tea with an air of equanimity, as though in the confident belief that I would not be able to resist asking her to continue and tell me precisely what had caused the personal revolution to occur. I could hear the neighbours moving about downstairs beneath our feet. There were occasional thumps that sounded like doors being opened and shut, and the rise and fall of voices.

  I asked her what she had been doing in Paris and she said that she had gone there for a few days to teach a course. She was a professional photographer, and she was often asked to teach on short courses. She did it for the money, but also because these trips away from home sometimes proved to be staging posts, even if she didn’t see it at the time. They gave her a distance on her own life: it became something she could see, instead of being immersed in it as she usually was, though she didn’t particularly enjoy the teaching itself. The students were generally so demanding and self-obsessed that afterwards she felt completely drained. At the beginning she would feel she was giving them something, something good, something that might change their lives – the drained feeling felt at first like a virtuous kind of exhaustion. But as she was successively emptied over the four or five days of the course, something else would start to happen. She would begin to view them – the students – with greater objectivity; their need for her started to look like something less discriminating, more parasitical. She felt duped by them into believing herself to be generous, tireless, inspiring, when in fact she was just a self-sacrificing victim. It was this feeling that often brought her to a position of clarity about her own life. She would start to give them less and herself more: by draining her, they created in her a new capacity for selfishness. As the course drew to a close she would often have started to care for herself differently, more tenderly, as if she were a child; she would begin to feel the first stirrings of self-love. It was while in this state that she had walked past the gallery and seen the reproduction of Marsden Hartley’s painting on the poster.

  There had been a man, she added, teaching with her on the course; an older man – she had a susceptibility for them – who was a well-known photojournalist and whose work she admired. There had been something between them from the start, an electricity, though he was married and lived in America. She had just broken up with her partner of two years, someone who knew her with sufficient thoroughness that his demolition of her character in their final arguments could not fail to undermine her opinion of herself; she clung to the photojournalist’s attention as if it were a life raft. He was a man of intelligence – or at least a reputation for it – and power: his notice of her acted as a counterweight to her ex-boyfriend’s contempt. On the last night they had walked together around Paris until three o’clock in the morning. She had barely slept: such was her arousal and excitement that she had got up early and walked some more, all through the deserted city in the dawn, walked and walked until the poster had caused her to stop.

  I asked her what she took photographs of.

  Food, she said.

  The phone rang in the next-door room and I told her to excuse me while I went to answer it. It was my older son and I asked him where he was. Dad’s, he said, sounding surprised. What’s happening there? he said. I said I was in the middle of teaching a student. Oh, he said. There was a silence. I could hear a rustling sound and the sound of him breathing into the receiver. When are we coming back? he said. I said I wasn’t sure: the builder thought it might be possible in a couple of weeks. There’s nobody here, he said. It feels weird. I’m sorry, I said. Why can’t we just be normal? he said. Why does everything have to be so weird? I said I didn’t
know why. I was doing my best, I said. That’s what adults always say, he said. I asked him how his day at school had been. Okay, he said. I heard Jane clear her throat in the next-door room. I said I was sorry but I had to go. Okay, he said.

  When I went back to the sitting room I was struck by the sight of Jane’s jewel-coloured clothing amid the white landscape of dust sheets. She had remained very still, her knees together and her head erect, her pale fingers evenly splayed around the teacup. I found myself wondering who exactly she was: there was a sense of drama about her that seemed to invite only two responses – either to become absorbed or to walk away. Yet the prospect of absorption seemed somehow arduous: I recalled her remarks about the draining nature of students and thought how often people betrayed themselves by what they noticed in others. I asked her how old she was.

  Thirty-nine, she said, with a defiant little lifting of her head on her long neck.

  I asked her what it was about this painter – Marsden Hartley – that so interested her.

  She looked me in the eyes. Hers were surprisingly small: they were lashless and unfeminine – the only unfeminine thing about her appearance – and the colour of silt.