In the Fold

by Rachel Cusk

  Rick’s gallery was riding the wave of a middle-class spending boom. He changed the name, from Rick Alexander to discriminate. At that time he was setting up another, smaller gallery on the Dorset coast, where many of what he referred to as his artists lived, and so increasingly Rebecca was left to run things in the city on her own. I was surprised by her aptitude for it. Sitting at her father’s perspex desk in the big white space she was a creature in its natural habitat. It was as though her life had come in only two sizes: she had outgrown the first, and now the second fitted her perfectly. It was in this period that Rebecca first complained that I never asked her questions. One evening she said:

  ‘Why have you never asked me how it felt having Hamish?’

  I considered the question. My memory of Hamish’s birth remained also the memory of the first failure of authenticity in my feelings for Rebecca. For some reason it had never occurred to me that she might have undergone the same change.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘If you were hit by a car and were injured and in terrible pain, wouldn’t you think it was strange if I never asked you how you felt? Wouldn’t you think it was strange if I just never mentioned it again?’

  ‘That’s not a fair comparison,’ I said. ‘You don’t get any reward for being hit by a car.’

  ‘You might get compensation. You might get insurance money. Wouldn’t it be strange if you were suddenly very rich and in a wheelchair and I never mentioned it, or asked you how you felt?’

  ‘I don’t know why I didn’t ask,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d want to talk about it.’

  ‘Correction,’ she said, erecting a white, forbidding finger in the air. ‘You mean you didn’t want me to talk about it. You couldn’t stand the idea of me talking about it. That’s because the idea of me, of my subjectivity, is disgusting to you.’

  ‘Have you ironed your hair?’ I asked.

  There was a pause.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your hair looks different. It looks as though you’ve ironed it.’

  I had seen Rebecca’s new hairstyle everywhere lately. On the crowded pavements of Bath, which appeared to move, as though with infestation, in a single, avaricious body, I had seen it one day on nearly every female head and had concluded vaguely but regretfully that the hair with which I was familiar had become a thing of the past. I had had this feeling several times, the feeling that I had missed an episode in an important series; that, like someone rising from a coma, I had been made mysteriously destitute by the mere continuation of things. Women’s hair, as I remembered it, was remarkable for its diversity, and for the appearance it had of being a living thing, like a pet, that accompanied its owner with any and every degree of refinement, misbehaviour or submissiveness. Rebecca’s hair was light red and coarse and tangled and sometimes, when I was close to it, reminded me of the red rag rug I used to have in my student room. The ‘new’ hair hung like a pair of curtains on either side of the face, or like a pair of dismembered, glossy wings. It looked synthetic and slightly ghoulish. The style had spread almost overnight, like a virus that had struck within my own four walls before I had had time even to absorb the fact of its existence. Or rather, it was as though my seeing this fashion but failing properly to notice it had culminated in it taking possession of Rebecca’s head, much as her neglected feelings had. She had to constantly hold her head up to keep it in place, as though she were swimming and trying to keep her face out of the water. What irritated me, I realised, was not the prospect of Rebecca’s subjectivity, but her expectation that I myself should have emerged from Hamish’s birth completely unaltered.

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘you’ve never –’

  I was about to observe that Rebecca had never asked me how I felt about having Hamish either, but by this time she had risen and was towering unexpectedly over me where I sat on the sofa. In her hand she held my large black-leather ring binder, into which I had the habit of writing every necessary or important piece of information that came my way, and which over a period of years had therefore come more or less to represent my brain. She raised her arm and dashed it violently to the floor. The binding snapped open and a blizzard of paper bloomed out into the air. For some seconds the dry, densely written pages snowed softly and heavily over every available surface.

  ‘I can’t believe you did that,’ I said.

  Two or three weeks later she threw a heavy crystal fruit bowl at me, which hit the wall behind my head and separated instantly into a million little diamonds that sped purposefully away across the floor in different directions. We had to get Ali to come and take Hamish for a couple of hours while we found them all.

  ‘Come on, you guys,’ she said, on the doorstep. ‘You’re being really stupid. You’ve got to sort this out.’

  ‘No one else knows how despicable you are,’ said Rebecca, to me.

  ‘Everyone goes through these patches,’ said Ali. ‘Honestly, everyone does.’

  ‘You’re worse than the worst Nazi,’ said Rebecca, to me. ‘Hitler was better than you.’

  ‘What you guys really need,’ said Ali, ‘is to spend some more time together.’

  ‘If they knew what you were like they’d take me away from you,’ said Rebecca, to me.

  ‘Rick knows this sweet little hotel in Cornwall,’ said Ali, grabbing both our arms and squeezing them desperately. She put her face close to ours and spoke in an urgent voice. ‘Look, you just need to go to bed. You need to spend all day in bed. You need to work it out. All right? All right?’ she reiterated, squeezing harder.

  ‘All right,’ I said evenly. I was holding my breath. I felt that if Ali didn’t go soon my lungs would explode.

  Rebecca bought a pair of boots that looked as though they had been commissioned to effect my particularly horrible murder. They were black and went up to her knees, and had heels like knitting needles. The toes were sharpened to a point that extended two or three inches out at the front. For a year she wore these boots nearly every day. She clicked menacingly off to the gallery, with her hair in curtains and a devious expression on her face. She mentioned a whole galaxy of men she met there; she charted for me, at length, their ever-changing positions in the heavens of her favour, where they stood governed by the sun of emotion and the moon of art. At length these stars receded back into their darkness, leaving Rebecca to the contemplation of a new artist Rick was selling, a man called Niven. He had only a single name, like a planet. It was Niven, I think, who introduced Rebecca to the concept of the big wheel. I believe I also have him to thank for the discreet retirement of the black boots. Niven admired only what was natural. He was often to be found in Rick and Ali’s kitchen, his long, attenuated body, from which a voice of unexpected power and solidity issued like the proboscis of a predatory insect, draped over two or more chairs, pouring wine down his tanned and prominent gullet. Niven had a large, roughly made head and a massive, meaty chin and a nimbus of thin, curly, brown hair. His eyes were like a pair of small shallow puddles. Ali claimed to find him irresistibly attractive.

  ‘He’s such a shit,’ she said. ‘I always go for the shits, don’t I, darling?’

  ‘You’re too much like hard work for Niven, darling,’ said Rick. ‘He says he wants a handmaiden.’

  ‘A handmaiden?’ said Rebecca. Her tone was very sour. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘A helpmeet,’ said Rick. ‘A slave to his talent.’

  ‘He’d be better off finding someone with some money,’ said Rebecca. ‘Or some connections.’

  I rolled my eyes. This sort of comment had, apparently overnight, become Rebecca’s speciality.

  ‘Now how did he express it?’ said Rick. ‘I think he said, “I put in the fuel, I get to drive the car.”’

  ‘God, I bet he’s a fantastic lay,’ said Ali dramatically. ‘Don’t you think, Becca?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, listen to you,’ said Rebecca. ‘You’re such a fake. You’re such a sad old woman.’

  ‘That’s really
unfair,’ wailed Ali. ‘You don’t know what it’s like being married to Rick! He’s got all these gorgeous young female artists just throwing themselves at him to get space in the gallery.’ She leaned forward confidentially, though Rick had wandered upstairs by now. ‘He told me that the other day this really beautiful girl came in and sat on his desk and said, you know, what do I have to do? What do I have to do to get in here?’

  I snorted with laughter. Ali and Rick always tried each to promote the attractiveness of the other, as though it were a consignment of something they needed to get off their hands before the market crashed. In fact Ali was by far the better looking of the two. Rick was perfectly charismatic, but it was hard to imagine anyone flinging themselves at him, even for the sake of career advancement.

  ‘It’s not funny,’ said Ali mildly. ‘It’s really difficult for him to resist.’

  ‘What Niven needs is someone who can structure his creative life,’ said Rebecca. ‘That’s very different from being a doormat. He needs someone who understands what an artist is, who can stop him consuming himself.’

  I lifted my eyes to my wife’s face and wondered whether she was considering offering herself for the position. A few weeks later, sitting in the pub one evening with some people we knew, I became aware again of the way Rebecca was talking. This time she was pouring her heart out to someone called Mike, the boyfriend of a friend of ours. We’d met him for the first time that evening. He had a white, startled face, and round, wire-framed glasses that may have contributed to his look of alarm as Rebecca bared herself to him. She said things I had never heard her say before. She appeared to believe herself to be visibly involved in some disaster or emergency, as though it were plain to everyone that she had come to the table buried in rubble or trapped in wreckage, and could be expected to be candid about it. On the way home I said to her:

  ‘You can’t talk like that to other people.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You make yourself look ridiculous. You make me look ridiculous.’

  There in the street Rebecca swung at me with her handbag. I hadn’t noticed the handbag until that moment; it was new. It was a little pink leather thing on a long strap. On the front it was decorated with a pattern of raised metal studs in the shape of a pair of lips. These lips met my cheek in a hard and painful sort of kiss.

  ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you!’ I shouted, with my hand to my face. ‘But you’re upsetting me and you’re upsetting our son! He can’t even speak any more!’

  It was true: Hamish was nearly four and made virtually no sound except a loud ringing noise like that of a bicycle bell. It was extremely startling when he did it. The teachers at his nursery school frequently expressed their concern, though I myself wasn’t entirely mystified by it. In fact, sometimes I wanted to make the same noise.

  ‘I feel erased,’ said Rebecca. She began to weep.

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more about your problems,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing to do with me. It’s up to you to make your life how you want it.’

  ‘You’re so cold. You’re like a room I’m trapped in that just gets colder and colder. You don’t touch me or hurt me – no one could ever say you’ve done anything wrong. That’s what matters, doesn’t it? It’s really very clever, Michael. No one can connect you with the crime!’

  ‘I haven’t committed any crime.’

  ‘You see!’ she shrieked triumphantly. ‘Do you see how you move to protect your reputation? You want to come out of this with exactly what you had when you went in. You don’t want to pay the price. But that isn’t living, Michael. You can’t live without getting your hands dirty.’

  ‘You seem very confident that you know what living is.’

  ‘Everything has to furnish your sense of reality. Yours is the only consciousness. Your morality is the only morality.’

  ‘I think you only feel alive when you’re destroying something.’

  Rebecca laughed.

  ‘That’s an old tactic, Michael. I’m not going to fall for that one.’

  ‘I think it has something to do with your unsatisfied need to free yourself from your parents.’

  At this she looked virtually ecstatic.

  ‘That’s right! That explains it! It isn’t your fault – it isn’t your fault you’ve messed up your life!’

  ‘I haven’t messed up my life.’

  ‘Look at your violin!’ she cried. We were inside the house by now and Rebecca was walking up and down in front of me with her arms folded. ‘Look at it sitting there in its little case!’

  I learned to play classical violin when I was younger, but for years I had played folk and Irish music and every other Friday I spent the evening at a pub in Bath where a group of us played together. Sometimes a tiny freckled girl called Dolores sang with us, when the strange scribble of her life happened to cross our more linear arrangements. We were paid in beer from the bar. I had an old leather jacket and a red scarf and cap I kept for these occasions. It might have seemed that my Friday evenings were a hobby but I had a sense of them that was disproportionate to their frequency, a feeling that when I addressed myself in the privacy of my own consciousness it was to the figure in the jacket, scarf and cap that I spoke. I attributed to that figure particularly sustaining qualities of loyalty. Playing the violin was the only real skill that I possessed. I often thought that if my life ever became intolerable I could always put on my cap, sling my violin case over my shoulder and wander out into the world to make my way. Rebecca herself played the piano, quite soulfully: at least, she started well, but before long the music would begin to unravel in her fingers, and the image I had of us playing together would come apart in separate pieces. When this happened I felt that I partook momentarily of her artistic frustrations: I felt that I understood what it was to hold something in the mind that I was unable to bring to life.

  ‘Sometimes I want to take that violin and break it over the table,’ said Rebecca. ‘Do you want to know why? Because it represents control. It represents perfectionism. It represents the selfish way you possess things.’

  The case was lying open. Rebecca was standing right next to it. It did not strike me as being out of the question that she actually would take out my violin and break it over the table.

  ‘When I hear you playing scales on that violin I want to weep. A grown man, practising his scales!’

  ‘If you’d kept up your piano you could accompany me,’ I said.

  Rebecca shrieked and clawed the air with her fingers.

  ‘The arrogance!’ she said. ‘The presumption!’

  ‘I thought you were the one who cared about art.’

  ‘You think I’m the enemy of self-expression?’ she cried. ‘You think I’m the enemy of art? That isn’t art! That’s the triumph of methodology! The only thing you can do on that violin is play tunes that have been played a thousand times before. It should be smashed – it should be broken! Better to be broken than to be the slave of method!’

  ‘You’re not actually that original, you know. That’s what everybody wants. Everybody wants to destroy things! You think destruction is an honourable response to your feelings of containment but it isn’t. What you’re destroying is the chance to understand yourself.’

  Rebecca appeared to give this idea momentary, involuntary consideration, as though it were something I had thrown towards her which she was unable to prevent herself catching.

  ‘I’ll say one thing for you, Michael,’ she said finally, as though regretfully. ‘You’re consistent. You always have been.’

  *

  The houses in Nimrod Street had balconies on the first floor at the front. They were large, ornamental Georgian things: each one was made of a single slab of limestone fifteen feet long and four feet wide that extended across nearly the entire width of the house. They had cast-iron railings around them that bowed slightly outwards and then curled around delicately at the top in the shape of a stave. They gave the houses a privileged, slightly exot
ic appearance, extending out into the air with a little clean wedge of shadow underneath. I never looked at our house without this lofty shape imprinting its stony grace on me. It registered itself silently, repeatedly, as the symbol of some aspect of miracle, some necessary excess that embellished my existence yet could never entirely be within my possession; so that my comings and goings at Nimrod Street were always accompanied by the vague sense that my life was both more beautiful and more difficult than it needed to be. Often, when it rained, Rebecca and I had sat on our doorstep in the evenings with the stone roof overhead, but increasingly I stood under it alone, shutting myself out of the house in order to consider the possibility that my life with Rebecca was unsustainable, a thought that was like a small, panicked pet I wasn’t allowed to keep indoors, and hence was forced to exercise outside, where it ran crazily up and down the front steps in the dark, occasionally venturing a few feet out into the street.