by Rachel Cusk
We had pulled out on to the broad, six-lane avenue along which the traffic thundered ceaselessly through the city, where the heat and noise were extreme. The car windows were wide open, and my neighbour drove with one hand on the steering wheel while the other rested on the window sill so that his shirtsleeve flapped madly in the wind. He was an erratic driver, lunging from one lane to the next, and turning his head entirely away from the road while he talked, so that red lights and the backs of other cars would come rushing up to the windscreen before he noticed them. I was frightened and fell silent, staring out at the dusty lots and verges that had by now succeeded the big glinting buildings of the centre. We passed over an arching concrete intersection in a blare of horns and engine noise, the sun pounding on the windscreen and the smell of petrol and asphalt and sewage flooding through the open windows, and for a while drove alongside a man on a scooter, who had a little boy of five or six seated behind him. The boy was clinging to the man with both arms around his middle. He looked so small and unprotected, with the cars and metal palisades and huge junk-laden lorries rushing inches past his skin. He wore only shorts and a vest and flip-flops on his feet, and I looked through the window at his unshielded tender brown limbs and at his soft golden-brown hair rippling in the wind. Then the arching road curved around and began to descend, and there was the sea, blazing blue beyond a khaki-coloured scrubland littered with low abandoned buildings and unfinished roads and the skeletons of houses that had never been completed, where skinny trees now grew through the glassless windows.
I’ve been married three times, my neighbour said, as the little car flew down the hill towards the glittering water. He was aware, he said, that in yesterday’s conversation he had only admitted to two, but he had come here today vowing to be honest. There had been three marriages, and three divorces. I’m the full disaster, he said. I was thinking about how to reply when he said that another thing he needed to mention was his son, who was presently living at the family house on the island and who was rather unwell. He was in an extremely anxious state, and had been calling his father all morning. Those calls would no doubt continue over the next few hours, and though he didn’t want to answer them he would, of course, be obliged to. I asked what was wrong with his son and his birdlike face grew sombre. Was I familiar with the condition called schizophrenia? Well, that was what his son suffered from. He had developed it in his twenties after leaving university, and had been hospitalised several times over the past decade, but for a number of reasons too complicated to explain he was currently in his father’s care. My neighbour had judged that he was safe enough on the island, so long as he didn’t get his hands on any money. People were sympathetic there, and still held the family in sufficient esteem to tolerate small difficulties, of which there had already been a number. But a few days ago there had been a more serious episode, as a consequence of which my neighbour had had to ask the young man he had hired to be his son’s companion on the island to keep him under, as it were, house arrest. His son couldn’t bear incarceration, hence the constant phone calls, and when it wasn’t his son phoning it was the companion, who felt that the job was exceeding the terms of his contract and wanted to renegotiate his salary.
I asked whether this was the same son his second wife had locked in the cellar, and he said that it was. He had been a sweet child, but then he had gone to university, in England as it happened, and had developed something of a drug habit. He left without completing his degree and came drifting back to Greece, where various attempts were made to find employment for him. He was living with his mother, on the large estate outside Athens she shared with her ski-instructor husband, and my neighbour didn’t doubt that she found him a trial and a drag on her freedom, as his behaviour was deteriorating by the day; but all the same her first move, which was to have him committed without discussing it first with his father, was somewhat extreme. He was put on medication that made him so fat and inert he became, in effect, a vegetable; and his mother departed Athens with her husband, to take up their customary winter residence in the Alps. This was, of course, several years ago now, but the situation hadn’t fundamentally changed. The boy’s mother would have nothing more to do with him; if his father chose to remove him from hospital and have him live in the world, that was his responsibility.
I said it surprised me that his first wife, whom my neighbour had seemed rather to idealise in our earlier conversation, should behave with such coldness. It didn’t seem to fit with the impression I had formed of her character. He considered this, and then said that she hadn’t been like that in the time of their marriage: she had changed, had become a different person from the one that he knew. When he spoke of her fondly, it was the earlier version of herself he was speaking of. I said that I didn’t believe people could change so completely, could evolve an unrecognisable morality; it was merely that that part of themselves had lain dormant, waiting to be evoked by circumstance. I said that I thought most of us didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out. But there must have been moments when he had glimpsed – even if only briefly – what she would become. No, he said, he didn’t think there were: she had always been an excellent mother, devoted above everything else to the children. Their daughter had become a great success and had been awarded a scholarship at Harvard; subsequently she was poached by a global software firm and was now in Silicon Valley, a place I must surely have heard of. I said that I had, though I had always found it difficult to envisage; I could never establish to what degree it was conceptual, and to what degree an actual place. I asked whether he had ever visited her there; he admitted that he had not. He never found himself in that part of the world, and besides, he would be worried about leaving his son for the length of time such a visit would require. But it was true that he hadn’t seen his daughter for several years, as she hadn’t returned to Greece. It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to it. I asked whether she had any children, and he said that she didn’t. She was in a partnership – was that what you called it? – with another woman, and other than that her work was everything to her.
He supposed, he said, now that he thought about it, that his wife was something of a perfectionist. One argument, after all, was all it had taken to end their marriage: if there was a sign of what she might become, perhaps it was that failure was something she was unable to tolerate. After their separation, he said, she had immediately taken up with a very rich and notorious boyfriend, a ship-owner, a relative of Onassis: he was really fabulously wealthy, this man, and good-looking, and also a friend of her father, and my neighbour had never been able to find out why the relationship had ended, for it was his impression that this man was everything she had ever wanted. In a way it had helped him to understand the failure of their marriage, her choice of this handsome billionaire; he could accept his own defeat at the hands of such an adversary. Kurt the ski instructor, on the other hand, was baffling, a man without charm or money, a man who only came alive for a few months a year, when there was snow on the mountains; a man, moreover, of fanatical religious beliefs and observances, to which he apparently insisted his wife and her children – while they still remained at home – submit. The children told him tales, of enforced prayers and silences, of being made to sit at table – for hours if necessary – until they had finished every piece of food on their plates, of being asked to call him ‘father’ and forbidden television and entertainments on Sundays. Once my neighbour had had the temerity to ask her what she saw in Kurt and she replied, he is the exact opposite of you.
We were driving along by the water now, past scruffy-looking beaches where families were picnicking and swimming, past roadside shops selling parasols and snorkels and swimming costumes. My neighbour said that we were nearly there; he hoped I hadn’t found the journey too long. He should mention, he said, lest I was expecting something grand, that his boat was quite small. He had owned it for twenty-
five years, and it was steady as a rock in a gale, but it was of modest proportions. It had a small cabin where one person could comfortably spend the night, ‘or two people,’ he said, ‘if they are very much in love’. He often spent the night there himself, and at certain times of year he would take the boat across to the island, a journey of three or four days. It was, in a sense, his hermitage, his place of solitude; he could motor just offshore, anchor it, and be completely alone.
At last we came in sight of the marina, and my neighbour pulled off the road and parked the car alongside a wooden pontoon where a line of boats were tied to their moorings. He asked me to wait there, while he went and bought some supplies. Also, he said, there were no facilities on the boat, so I should make myself comfortable before we left. I watched him walk back up toward the road and then I sat down on a bench in the sun to wait. The boats moved up and down in the bright water. Beyond them I could see the clear, crenellated shapes of the coast, and of a number of rocks and small islands that lay further out to sea, strung all across the bay. It was cooler here than in the city. The breeze made a dry, shuffling sound in the vegetation that stood in tangled clumps between the sea and the road. I looked at the boats, wondering which one belonged to my neighbour. They all seemed more or less alike. There were people around, mostly men of my neighbour’s age, padding up and down the pontoon in deck shoes or working on their boats, their grizzled chests bare in the sun. Some of them stared at me, slack-jawed, their great ropy arms hanging by their sides. I took out my phone and dialled the number of the mortgage company in England, who were processing an application I had made just before I left for Athens to increase my loan. The woman who was dealing with the application was called Lydia. She had told me to call her today, but every time I tried I got her voicemail message. The message said that she would be out of the office on holiday until a date that had already passed, which gave the impression that she didn’t listen to her voicemail very often. Sitting on the bench I got the message again, but this time – perhaps because I didn’t have anything else to do – I left a message myself, saying that I had called as agreed and asking her to call me back. After this apparently pointless exercise, I looked around and saw that my neighbour was returning holding a carrier bag. He asked me to take it while he made the boat ready, and then he crossed the pontoon and getting down on his knees drew a length of sodden rope out of the water, with which he proceeded to pull the boat attached to the other end towards him. The boat was white, with wooden cladding and a bright blue canopy. There was a large black leather steering wheel at the front and an upholstered bench seat along the back. When it was close enough my neighbour hopped heavily on board and stretched out his hand for the carrier bag. For a while he busied himself stowing things away and then he held out his hand again to help me over. I was surprised to find myself not especially sure-footed in this exercise. I sat on the bench seat while he took the covers off the steering wheel and lowered the engine into the water and tied and untied numerous ropes, and then he stood at the wheel and started the engine, which made a watery growling sound, and we began to reverse slowly out of the marina.
We would drive for a while, my neighbour called above the noise of the engine, and when we reached a nice place he knew, we would stop and swim. He had removed his shirt, and his bare back faced me while he drove. It was very broad and fleshy, leathery with sun and age, and marked with numerous moles and scars and outcrops of coarse grey hair. Looking at it I felt overcome with a sadness that was partly confusion, as though his back were a foreign country I was lost in; or not lost but exiled, in as much as the feeling of being lost was not attended by the hope that I would eventually find something I recognised. His aged back seemed to maroon us both in our separate and untransfigurable histories. It struck me that some people might think I was stupid, to go out alone on a boat with a man I didn’t know. But what other people thought was no longer of any help to me. Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and I had definitively left those structures.
We were out by now in the open water, and my neighbour put the boat into a different gear so that it suddenly leaped forward, with such force that unnoticed by him I nearly fell over the back. The thunderous noise of the engine instantly displaced every other sight and sound. I grabbed the rail that ran along one side and clung on as we roared across the bay, the front of the boat rising and thumping down again repeatedly on to the water and a great spray fanning out to all sides. I felt angry that he hadn’t warned me of what was about to happen. I couldn’t move or speak: I could only cling on, my hair standing up on end and my face growing stiff with the pressure of wind. The boat thumped up and down and the sight of his bare back at the wheel made me angrier and angrier. There was a certain self-consciousness in the set of his shoulders: this was, then, a performance, a piece of showing off. He didn’t once glance back at me, for people are at their least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them. I wondered what he would have felt if he’d arrived at our destination to discover that I was no longer there; I imagined him explaining this latest piece of carelessness to the next woman he met on an airplane. She kept pestering me to go out on the boat, he would say, but it turned out she didn’t know the first thing about sailing. To be perfectly honest, he would say, it was the full disaster: she fell overboard, and now I am very sad.
At last the sound of the engine died away; the boat slowed, and puttered towards a small rocky island that rose steeply out of the sea. My neighbour’s phone rang and he looked quizzically at the screen before answering it. He began to speak mellifluously in Greek, pacing about the small deck and occasionally checking the steering wheel with a finger. I saw that we were approaching a clear little cove where many seabirds perched on the rocky promontories, and where the glittering water whirled and retreated against a tiny curl of sand. The island was too small to have anything human on it: it was untouched and deserted, except for the birds. I waited for my neighbour’s conversation to conclude, which took a considerable amount of time. Eventually, though, he hung up. That was someone I haven’t spoken to in many years, he said – in fact I was very surprised that she should call me. He was silent for a while, his finger on the steering wheel, his face sombre. She just heard about my brother’s death, he continued, and she was calling to give her condolences. I asked when his brother had died. Oh, four, five years ago, he said. But she lives in the States and hasn’t been back to Greece for a long time. She’s here now on a visit, so she’s only just got the news. His phone rang again almost immediately, and again he answered it. It was another Greek conversation, this one also lengthy but a little more businesslike. Work, he explained when it concluded, making a brushing gesture with his hand.
The boat drifted to a halt in the lapping water. He came to the back and opened a compartment, inside which lay a small anchor, and he hauled it by its chain over the side. This is a good place to swim, he said, if you would like to. I watched the anchor fall down through the clear water. When the boat was secured my neighbour stepped up on to the stern and dived heavily over the side. Once he had gone I wrapped a towel around myself and changed awkwardly into my swimming costume. Then I jumped in, swimming out in the opposite direction all the way to the perimeter of the island so that I could see the open sea beyond it. The other way, the distant shore was a bobbing line full of tiny shapes and figures. In the meantime another boat had arrived and was anchored not far from ours, and I could see the people sitting out on deck and hear the sound of their voices talking and laughing. They were a family group, with numerous children in bright costumes jumping in and out of the water, and now and again the sound of a baby wailing echoed thinly around the cove. My neighbour had got back on the boat and was standing there with his hand screening his eyes, watching my progress. It felt good to swim, after the tension of sitting still, of the heat of Athens and of spending time with strangers. The water was so clear and still and cool, and the shapes of the coastline so soft and ancient, wi
th the little island nearby that seemed to belong to nobody. I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had. The thread led nowhere, except into ever expanding wastes of anonymity. I could swim out into the sea as far as I liked, if what I wanted was to drown. Yet this impulse, this desire to be free, was still compelling to me: I still, somehow, believed in it, despite having proved that everything about it was illusory. When I returned to the boat, my neighbour said he didn’t like it when people swam too far out: it made him nervous; there were speedboats that could come out of nowhere, without warning, and such collisions were not unheard of.
He offered me a Coke from the coldbox he kept on deck, and then proffered a box of tissues, from which he took a large handful himself. He blew his nose lengthily and thoroughly, while both of us watched the family on the neighbouring boat. There were two little boys and a girl playing there, shrieking as they leapt off the side and then clambering one after another back up the ladder, their bodies glittering with water. A woman in a sunhat sat on deck, reading a book, and beside her in the shade of the canopy was a baby’s pram. A man in long shorts and sunglasses paced up and down the deck, speaking into his phone. I said that I found appearances more bewildering and tormenting now than at any previous point in my life. It was as if I had lost some special capacity to filter my own perceptions, one that I had only become aware of once it was no longer there, like a missing pane of glass in a window that allows the wind and rain to come rushing through unchecked. In much the same way I felt exposed to what I saw, discomfited by it. I thought often of the chapter in Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff and Cathy stare from the dark garden through the windows of the Lintons’ drawing room and watch the brightly lit family scene inside. What is fatal in that vision is its subjectivity: looking through the window the two of them see different things, Heathcliff what he fears and hates and Cathy what she desires and feels deprived of. But neither of them can see things as they really are. And likewise I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own. When I looked at the family on the boat, I saw a vision of what I no longer had: I saw something, in other words, that wasn’t there. Those people were living in their moment, and though I could see it I could no more return to that moment than I could walk across the water that separated us. And of those two ways of living – living in the moment and living outside it – which was the more real?