by Rachel Cusk
‘My wife eyeballs the fellas, when she’s out for the night with her friends. I’d be disappointed if she didn’t. Take a good look, is what I say. See what’s out there. And she’s just the same – go on, feel free to look.’
I remembered then an evening I’d spent in a bar a few years ago, with a group of people that included a married couple I didn’t know. The woman kept identifying attractive girls and drawing her husband’s attention to them; they sat there and discussed the attributes of the various girls, and were it not for the grimace of utter desperation I glimpsed on the woman’s face when she thought no one was looking, I would have believed this was an activity both of them enjoyed.
He and his wife had a good partnership, Ryan said. They shared the work of the kids and the house – his wife was no martyr, as his mother had been. She went off on her own holidays with her girlfriends and expected him to take care of everything in her absence: when they gave one another freedoms, it was on the understanding that they would claim those same freedoms themselves. If it sounds a little bit calculated, Ryan said, that doesn’t worry me at all. There’s a business aspect to running a household. It’s best if everyone’s honest right at the start about what they’re going to need, to be able to stay in it.
My phone sounded on the table in front of me. It was a text from my son: Where’s my tennis racket? I don’t know about you, Ryan said, but I actually don’t have the time to write, what with the family and the teaching job. Especially the teaching – it’s the teaching that sucks the life out of you. And when I do have a week to myself, I spend it teaching extra courses like this one, for the money. If it’s a choice between paying the mortgage and writing a story that’ll only see the light of day in some tiny literary magazine – I know that for some people there’s a need, or so they say, but for a lot of them I think it’s more that they like the life, they like saying that’s what they are, a writer. I’m not saying I don’t like it myself, but it isn’t the be-all and end-all. I’d just as soon write a thriller, to be perfectly honest. Go where the real money is – one or two of my own students, he said, have taken that road, you know, written things that have gone global in some cases. Actually it was the wife who said it – wasn’t it you taught them how to do that? Obviously she doesn’t entirely understand the process, but in a way she’s got a point. And if there’s one thing I know it’s that writing comes out of tension, tension between what’s inside and what’s outside. Surface tension, isn’t that the phrase – actually that’s not a bad title, is it? He sat back in his chair and stared meditatively out towards the street. I wondered whether he had already decided on Surface Tension as the title for his thriller. In any case, he continued, when I think back to the conditions that made me write The Homecoming, I realise there’s no point me trying to get back to that place because I never could. I could never reproduce that particular tension in myself: life is sending you in one direction and you’re pulling away in another, like you’re disagreeing with your own destiny, like who you are is in disagreement with who they say you are. Your whole soul is in revolt, he said. He drained his glass of beer in one swallow. What am I in revolt against now? Three kids and a mortgage and a job I’d like to see a bit less of, that’s what.
My phone sounded again. It was a text from my neighbour on last night’s plane. He was thinking of taking his boat out, he said, and wondered whether I’d like to join him for a swim. He could come and collect me at my apartment in an hour or so, and drive me back there afterwards. I thought about it while Ryan was talking. What I miss, Ryan said, is the discipline itself. In a way I don’t care what I write – I just want that feeling of being in sync again, body and mind, do you know what I mean? As he spoke I saw the imaginary staircase rising in front of him once more, stretching out of sight; and him climbing it, with a book suspended tantalisingly ahead of him. The perimeter of shade had receded and the glare of the street advanced, so that we now sat almost at the interface of the two. The commotion of heat was just at my back; I edged my chair in towards the table. When you’re in that place you make time for it, don’t you, Ryan said, the way people make time to have affairs. I mean, you never hear someone say they wanted to have an affair but they couldn’t find the time, do you? No matter how busy you are, no matter how many kids and commitments you have, if there’s passion you find the time. A couple of years ago they gave me six months’ sabbatical, six whole months just for writing, and you know what? I put on ten pounds and spent most of the time wheeling the baby around the park. I didn’t produce a single page. That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up. In the end I was desperate to get back to the job, just for a break from all the domestic business. But I learned a lesson there, that’s for sure.
I looked at my watch: it was a fifteen-minute walk back to the apartment and I needed to go. I thought about what I ought to take for a boat trip, how hot or cold it would be and whether I should bring a book to read. Ryan was watching the waitress moving in and out of the shadows, proud and erect, the tresses of her hair hanging perfectly still. I put my things in my bag and moved to the edge of my seat, which seemed to catch his attention. He turned his head to me. What about yourself, he said, are you working on something?
III
The apartment belonged to a woman called Clelia, who was out of Athens for the summer. It stood in a narrow street like a shady chasm, with the buildings rising to either side. On the corner opposite the entrance to Clelia’s building was a café with a large awning and tables underneath, where there were always a few people sitting. The café had a long side window giving on to the narrow pavement, which was entirely obscured by a photograph of more people sitting outside at tables, so that a very convincing optical illusion was created. There was a woman with her head thrown back, laughing, as she raised her coffee cup to her lipsticked mouth, and a man leaning towards her across the table, tanned and handsome, his fingers resting lightly on her wrist, wearing the abashed smile of someone who has just said something amusing. This photograph was the first thing you saw when you came out of Clelia’s building. The people in it were slightly larger than life-size, and always, for a moment, exiting the apartment, they seemed terrifyingly real. The sight of them momentarily overpowered one’s own sense of reality, so that for a few disturbing seconds you believed that people were bigger and happier and more beautiful than you remembered them to be.
Clelia’s apartment was on the top floor of the building and was reached by a curving marble staircase that passed the doors to the apartments on the other floors one by one. Three flights of stairs had to be climbed and three doors passed before Clelia’s was reached. At the bottom the hallway was darker and cooler than the street, but because of the windows at the back of the upper storeys, as it rose it became lighter and warmer. Outside Clelia’s door, just beneath the roof, the heat – with the strain of the climb up – was faintly stifling. Yet there was also the feeling of having accessed a place of privacy, because the marble staircase ended here and there was nowhere further to go. On the landing outside her door Clelia had placed a large sculpture made of driftwood, abstract in shape, and the presence of this object – where the landings on the lower floors were completely bare – confirmed that no one ever came up here who wasn’t either Clelia or someone she knew. As well as the sculpture there was a cactus-like plant in a red earthenware pot, and a decoration – a charm made of woven strands of coloured material – hung from the pewter door knocker.
Clelia was a writer, apparently, and had offered her flat to the summer school for the use of the visiting writers, even though they were complete strangers to her. And in fact it was obvious, from certain features in her apartment, that she regarded writing as a profession worthy of the greatest trust and respect. To the right of the fireplace was a large opening through which Clelia’s study could be accessed, a square secluded room whose large cherry-wood desk and leather swivel chair faced away from the single window. This room contained, as
well as many books, several painted wooden models of boats, which had been mounted to the walls. They were very intricately and beautifully made, down to the miniature coils of rope and tiny brass instruments on their sanded decks, and the larger ones had white sails arranged in curving attitudes of such tension and complexity that it did indeed seem as though the wind was blowing in them. When you looked more closely, you saw that the sails were attached to countless tiny cords, so fine as to make them almost invisible, which had fixed them in these shapes. It required only a couple of steps to move from the impression of wind in the sails to the sight of the mesh of fine cords, a metaphor I felt sure Clelia had intended to illustrate the relationship between illusion and reality, though she did not perhaps expect her guests to go one step further, as I did, and reach out a hand to touch the white cloth, which was not cloth at all but paper, unexpectedly dry and brittle.
Clelia’s kitchen was sufficiently functional to give the clear message that she didn’t spend much time there: one of the cupboards was entirely filled with esoteric whiskies, another with relatively useless things – a fondue set, a fish kettle, a ravioli press – that were still in their boxes, and one or two were completely empty. If you left so much as a crumb on the counter-top, columns of ants would spring out from all directions and descend on it as though starved. The view from the kitchen window was of the backs of other buildings with their pipework and washing lines. The room itself was quite small and dark. Yet there was nothing you really needed that wasn’t there.
In the sitting room Clelia’s formidable collection of recordings of classical music could be found. Her hi-fi system consisted of a number of inscrutable black boxes, whose blankness and slenderness left one unprepared for the enormity of the sound they made. Clelia favoured symphonies: in fact, she possessed the complete symphonic works of all the major composers. There was a marked prejudice against compositions that glorified the solo voice or instrument, very little piano music and virtually no opera, with the exception of Janáček, of whose complete operatic œuvre Clelia had a boxed set. I wasn’t sure I would choose to sit through symphony after symphony any more than I would spend the afternoon reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and it occurred to me that in Clelia’s mind they perhaps represented the same thing, a sort of objectivity that arose when the focus became the sum of human parts and the individual was blotted out. It was, perhaps, a form of discipline, almost of asceticism, a temporary banishing of the self and its utterances – in any case, Clelia’s symphonies in their serried ranks predominated. When you put one on, the apartment instantly seemed to grow ten times its actual size and to be accommodating a full orchestral assembly, brass, strings and all.
Clelia’s bedrooms, of which there were two, were surprisingly spartan. They were small, box-like rooms, both of them painted pale blue. One of them contained bunk beds, the other a double bed. The bunk beds made it evident that Clelia had no children, for their presence, in a room that was not a child’s room, seemed to suggest something that otherwise might have been forgotten. The bunk beds, in other words, stood for the concept of children generally rather than for any child specifically. In the other room, one entire wall was taken up with a set of mirrored wardrobes that I never looked inside.
In the centre of Clelia’s apartment was a large light space, a hall, where the doors to all the other rooms converged. Here, standing on a plinth, was a glazed terracotta statue of a woman. It was large, around three feet tall – more if you included the plinth – and showed the woman in a striking attitude, her face lifted, her arms half raised with the palms and fingers open. She wore a primitive robe that had been painted white and her face was round and flat. Sometimes she looked as if she were about to say something, sometimes as if she were in despair. Occasionally she appeared to be conferring some kind of benediction. Her white garment glowed at dusk. You had to pass her frequently, going from one room to another, yet it was surprisingly easy to forget that she was there. Her white looming figure with its raised hands and its broad flat face, with its swiftly changing mood, was always slightly startling. Unlike the people in the café window downstairs, the terracotta woman made reality seem, for a moment, smaller and deeper, more private and harder to articulate.
The apartment had a large outdoor terrace that ran across the full width of the building’s façade. From this terrace, high above the pavements, the surrounding rooftops with their baked, broken angles could be seen, and further away the smoggy distant hills of the suburbs. It faced, across the chasm of the street, the windows and terraces of the apartments opposite. Sometimes a face would appear at one or other of the windows. Once, a man came out on to his terrace and threw something over the side. A young woman came out after him and looked down over the railings at what he had thrown. Clelia’s terrace was private and leafy, filled with big tangled plants in terracotta urns and hung with small glass lanterns: in the middle there was a long wooden table and many chairs, in which it could be imagined Clelia’s friends and associates sat during the hot dark evenings. It was shaded by a huge vine in which, sitting one morning at the table, I noticed a nest. It was built into a fork amidst the tough, knotty stems. A bird was sitting in it, a pale grey dove: every time I looked, night or day, there she was. Her small pale head with its dark bead-like eyes moved around as though fretfully, yet for hour after hour she kept her vigil. Once I heard a great rustling overhead and looked up to see her clambering to her feet. She thrust her head through the canopy of leaves and gazed around her at the rooftops. Then with a snap of her wings she was gone. I watched her fly out over the street and then, circling, land on the rooftop opposite. She stayed there for a little while, calling, and then I watched her turn back and look at the place from which she had come. Having got this view of it, she opened her wings again and flew back, and with another great rustling and flapping overhead resumed her station.
I wandered around the apartment, looking at things. I opened a few cupboards and drawers. Everything was highly orderly. There was no confusion or secrecy: things were in their correct places and complete. There was a drawer for pens and stationery, a drawer for computer equipment, a drawer for maps and guides, a filing cabinet with papers in neat dividers. There was a first-aid drawer and a drawer for sellotape and glue. There was a cupboard for cleaning materials and another for tools. The drawers in the antique oriental bureau in the sitting room were empty and smelled of dust. I kept looking for something else, a clue, something rotting or breeding, a layer of mystery or chaos or shame, but I didn’t find it. I wandered into the study and touched the brittle sails.
IV
My neighbour from the plane was a good foot shorter than me and twice as wide: since I had got to know him sitting down, it was difficult to integrate these dimensions with his character. What located me was his extraordinary beak-like nose with the prominent brow jutting out above it, which gave him the slightly quizzical appearance of a seabird, crowned with his plume of silver-white hair. Even so it took me a moment to recognise him, standing in the shade of a doorway opposite the apartment building, dressed in buff-coloured knee-length shorts and a red checked shirt, immaculately ironed. There were various points of gold around his person, a fat signet ring on his little finger, a chunky gold watch, a pair of glasses on a gold chain around his neck and even a flash of gold when he smiled, all immediately noticeable, and yet I hadn’t been aware of any of them during our conversation on the airplane the day before. That encounter had been, in a sense, immaterial: above the world, objects didn’t count for so much, differences were less apparent. The material reality of my neighbour, which up there had seemed so light, was concretised down here, and the result was that he seemed more of a stranger, as though context were also a kind of imprisonment.
I was certain he saw me before I saw him, but he waited for me to wave before he acknowledged me in return. He looked nervous. He kept glancing up and down the street, where a fruit seller stood yelling inchoately beside a cart mounded with peaches a
nd strawberries and chunks of watermelon that seemed to grin in the heat. His face took on an expression of pleased surprise when I crossed the road towards him. He kissed me slightly drily and fumblingly on the cheek.
‘Did you sleep well?’ he asked.
It was nearly lunchtime, and I had been out all morning, but it was apparent that he wished to create a sphere of intimacy in which our knowledge of one another was continuous and in which nothing had happened to me since we had said goodbye at the airport taxi rank the evening before. In fact I had slept very little in the small blue bedroom. There was a painting hanging on the wall opposite the bed, of a man in a trilby hat throwing back his head and laughing. When you looked you saw that he had no face, just a blank oval with the laughing void of his mouth in the middle. I kept waiting for his eyes and nose to become visible as the room got light, but they never did.
My neighbour said that his car was parked just around the corner and after a hesitation he placed his hand in the small of my back to guide me in the right direction. His hands were very large and slightly claw-like, and covered with white hair. He was concerned, he said, that I would not think much of his car. It had struck him that I might have imagined something far grander, and he was embarrassed if that was the case; but he himself didn’t set much store by cars. And for driving around Athens, he had found that this was all he needed. But you could never tell, he said, what other people expected; he hoped I wouldn’t be disappointed, that was all. We reached the car, which was small and clean and otherwise unremarkable, and got in. The boat, he said, was moored about forty minutes’ drive away along the coast. He used to keep it at a marina much closer to the city, but the mooring was very expensive and so a couple of years ago he had decided to move it. I asked him where his house was, in relation to the centre, and he gestured vaguely with his hand toward the window and said that it was half an hour or so away over there.