Outline: A Novel

by Rachel Cusk

  I said that I needed to get out of the sun and was going into the water, and he nodded wordlessly, watching me. I jumped over the side and swam out across the cove, remembering the family on the boat that had been here the last time, and feeling a strange ache almost of homesickness for them, which became a feeling of longing for my own children, who suddenly seemed so far away that it was hard to believe they even existed. I swam for as long as I could, but in the end I returned to the boat and slowly climbed the ladder. My neighbour was occupied with some task, untying and adjusting the narrow ropes to which the buoys were attached that ran along the sides. I stood on the deck, dripping, and watched him, a towel wrapped around my shoulders where my skin hurt from the sun. He had a penknife in his hand, a large red Swiss Army knife with a long ridged blade, and was cutting the frayed ends off the ropes with a sense of purpose, his thick upper arms bulging as he sawed. He retied the ropes while I watched, and then strolled along the deck towards me, the knife still in his hand. Had I had a nice swim, he asked.

  Yes, I said. Thank you, I said, for taking the trouble to bring me somewhere so lovely. But he had to understand, I said, that I was not interested in a relationship with any man, not now and probably not ever again. The sun beat uncomfortably on my face while I was speaking. What I valued most of all was friendship, I said, while he played with the knife in his hand, snapping the different blades in and out. I watched pieces of steel appear and disappear in his fingers, each one so distinctly shaped, some of them long and narrow and piercing, others strangely spiked and horned. And now, I said, if he didn’t mind, we probably ought to be going back.

  Slowly he inclined his head. Of course, he said; he also had things he needed to do. Perhaps I could wait until he just cooled off himself and then we would be on our way. While he was swimming, straight out in a furrow in his heavy, short-lived crawl, his phone rang somewhere on the deck. I sat there in the sun while it rang and rang, waiting for it to stop.

  VIII

  My friend Elena was very beautiful: Ryan was beside himself. He’d been ambling along the street and spied us sitting at a bar. She’s in a different league, he said, when she excused herself to go and make a phone call. Elena was thirty-six, intelligent, exquisitely dressed. She’s another proposition entirely, he said.

  The bar was on a narrow side street so steep that the chairs and tables slanted and wobbled on the uneven pavement. I had just watched a woman, a tourist, fall backwards into a planter, her shopping bags and guidebooks flying out to all sides of her, while her husband sat startled in his chair, apparently more embarrassed than concerned. He wore a pair of binoculars around his neck, and hiking boots on his feet that remained punctiliously tucked beneath the table while his wife flailed in the dry, spiky greenery. Eventually he put out an arm across the table to help her back up, but it was beyond her reach and so she was forced to struggle out on her own.

  I asked Ryan what he had done today, and he said that he had gone to a museum or two, and then spent the afternoon wandering around the Agora, though to be honest he was a bit the worse for wear. He’d had a late night with some of the younger students, he said. They’d taken him to a series of bars, each one a good forty minutes’ walk from the next. I was feeling my age, he said. I just wanted a drink – I didn’t much care where I got it or how it came, and I certainly didn’t need to walk to the other side of town to drink it off a lip-shaped sofa. But they’re a nice enough crowd, he said. They’d been teaching him a few words of Greek – he wasn’t sure how much change he’d get for them, his pronunciation being what it was, but all the same it was interesting to get a sense of things on the verbal level. He hadn’t realised how many English meanings came from Greek compounds. For instance the word ellipsis, he’d been told, could literally be translated as ‘to hide behind silence’. It’s fascinating stuff, he said.

  Elena came back and sat down again. Her appearance, this evening, was particularly Lorelei-like. She seemed to be composed entirely of curves and waves.

  ‘My friend will meet us shortly,’ she said, ‘in a place not far from here.’

  Ryan lifted an eyebrow.

  ‘You two off somewhere?’

  ‘We’re meeting Melete,’ Elena said. ‘You are familiar with the name? She is one of the pre-eminent lesbian poets of Greece.’

  Ryan said that actually he was peaked; he might have to leave us to it. He’d had a late night, as he’d said. And then he’d come back to the apartment at three in the morning to find great winged scarab-like creatures flying all around the place and had had to bash them all to death with his shoe. Someone – it wasn’t him – had left a light on and a window open. All the same, it had struck him how little he cared about cheerfully massacring the bastards: when he was younger, he would have been too frightened. You become brave just by being a parent, he said. Or maybe it’s just you become disinhibited. He’d felt this last night, socialising with people in their twenties. He’d forgotten how physically shy they were.

  The quick hot dusk was falling, and soon the narrow street had filled up with darkness. The man in the hiking boots and his wife had gone. Ryan’s phone rang and he picked it up, showing us the photograph of a grinning, toothless child that was pulsing on the screen. Must be bedtime, he said; I’ll be seeing you folks. He stood and with a wave of his hand walked away down the hill, talking. Elena paid the bill with her credit card from the office – she was an editor at a publishing house and so strictly speaking, she said, we could consider our meeting to be work – and we walked up towards the light and noise of the main street. She trod beside me with quick, light steps in her high-heeled sandals; her dress was a shift of a knitted material the same dark gold colour as her long waving hair. All the men we passed looked at her, one after the other. We crossed Kolonaki Square, which was empty now except for one or two dark figures lying huddled on the benches. A woman sat on one of the low concrete walls, her legs strangely spattered with dried mud, eating crackers from a packet. A little boy stood near her at the kiosk, looking at the chocolate bars. We walked up an alleyway and came out in a crowded little square filled with the noise of people packed into the restaurant terraces all around its four sides, their faces in the darkness garish with electric light. The heat and the noise and electric light in the darkness produced an atmosphere of unvarying excitement, like a wave continually breaking, and though the restaurants looked indistinguishable from one another, Elena passed several before stopping very decidedly at one. This was the place, she said; Melete had said we should get a table and wait for her here. She wove her way through the tables and spoke to a waiter, who stood there implacable as a policeman and began shaking his head while she talked.

  ‘He says they are full,’ she said, crestfallen, her arms dropping to her sides.

  Her disappointment was so intense that she didn’t move, but stayed standing among the tables and staring at them as though willing them to yield to her. The waiter, observing this performance, appeared to change his mind: there was, he decided, room, if we were happy to sit – Elena translated – over in that corner. He showed us to the table, which Elena scrutinised as though she might not take it after all. It is a bit too close to the wall, she said to me. Do you think we will be all right here? I said I didn’t mind sitting next to the wall: she could sit in the place further out if she preferred.

  ‘Why do you wear these dark clothes?’ she said to me, once we had sat down. ‘I don’t understand it. I wear light things when it is hot. Also you look a little sunburned,’ she added. ‘Between your shoulders, just there, the skin is burned.’

  I told her I had spent the afternoon on a boat, with someone I didn’t know well enough to ask to put sun cream on my back. She asked who this person was. Was it a man?

  Yes, I said, a man I had met on the airplane and had got talking to. Elena’s eyes widened with surprise.

  ‘I would not have thought it likely’, she said, ‘that you would go off on a boat with a complete stranger. What is he li
ke? Do you like him?’

  I closed my eyes and tried to summon up my feelings for my neighbour. When I opened them again Elena was still looking at me, waiting. I said that I had become so unused to thinking about things in terms of whether I liked them or whether I didn’t that I couldn’t answer her question. My neighbour was merely a perfectly good example of something about which I could only feel absolute ambivalence.

  ‘But you still let him take you out on his boat,’ she said.

  It was hot, I said. And the terms on which we had left the harbour were strictly – or so I thought – the terms of friendship. I described his attempt to kiss me, when we were anchored far out to sea. I said that he was old, and that though it would be cruel to call him ugly, I had found his physical advances as repellent as they were surprising. It had never occurred to me that he would do such a thing; or more accurately, before she pointed out that I would have to be an imbecile not to have seen it as a possibility, I thought he wouldn’t dare do such a thing. I had thought the differences between us were obvious, but to him they weren’t.

  She hoped, Elena said, that I had made that fact clear to him. I said that, on the contrary, I had come up with all manner of excuses to spare his feelings. She was silent for a while.

  ‘If,’ she said presently, ‘you had told him the truth, if you had said to him, look, you are old and short and fat, and though I like you the only reason I am really here is to get a ride on your boat –’ she began to laugh, fanning her face with the menu ‘– if you had said those things to him, you understand, you would have heard some truths in return. If you had been frank you would have elicited frankness.’

  She herself, she said, had visited the very depths of disillusionment in the male character by being honest in precisely this way: men who had claimed one minute to be dying of love for her were openly insulting her the next, and it was only, in a sense, when she had reached this place of mutual frankness that she could work out who she herself was and what she actually wanted. What she couldn’t stand, she said, was pretence of any kind, especially the pretence of desire, wherein someone feigned the need to possess her wholly when in fact what he wanted was to use her temporarily. She herself, she said, was quite willing to use others too, but she only recognised it once they had admitted this intention in themselves.

  Unseen by Elena, a slender woman with a fox-like face was approaching our table. I took this to be Melete. She came stealthily behind Elena’s chair and rested her hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Yassas,’ she said sombrely.

  She wore a mannish black waistcoat and trousers, and her short straight hair fell in two glossy black wings on either side of her narrow, shy, pointed face.

  Elena twisted around in her seat to greet her.

  ‘You as well!’ she exclaimed. ‘These dark clothes, both of you – why do you always wear dark things?’

  Melete took her time replying to this. She sat down in the vacant chair, sat back and crossed her legs, withdrew a packet of cigarettes from her waistcoat pocket and lit one.

  ‘Elena,’ she said, ‘it is not polite to talk about how people look. It is our own business what we wear.’ She reached across the table and shook my hand. ‘It’s noisy here tonight,’ she said, looking around. ‘I’ve just taken part in a poetry reading where the audience numbered six people. The contrast is quite noticeable.’

  She picked up the wine list from the table and began to study it, the cigarette smoking in her fingers, her fine nose twitching slightly, her glossy hair falling forward over her cheeks.

  One of the six, she added, glancing up, was a man who came to nearly every public appearance she gave, and would sit in the front row making faces at her. This had been happening for several years now. She would look up from her lectern, not just in Athens but in other cities that are quite far away, and there he would be right in front of her, sticking his tongue out and making rude signs.

  ‘But do you know him?’ Elena said, astonished. ‘Have you ever spoken to him?’

  ‘I taught him,’ Melete said. ‘He was an undergraduate student of mine, a long time ago, when I lectured at the university.’

  ‘And what did you do to him? Why does he torment you in this way?’

  ‘I have to assume’, Melete said, puffing gravely on her cigarette, ‘that he doesn’t have a reason. I did nothing to him: I barely even remember teaching him. He passed through one of my classes, where there were more than fifty students. I didn’t notice him. I’ve tried, obviously, to remember some particular incident but there isn’t one. You could spend your whole life’, she said, ‘trying to trace events back to your own mistakes. People in legend thought that their misfortunes could be traced back to their failure to offer libations to certain gods. But there is another explanation,’ she said, ‘which is simply that he is mad.’

  ‘Have you ever tried to talk to him?’ Elena said.

  Melete slowly shook her head.

  ‘As I said, I barely remember him, though I don’t forget people easily. So you could say that this attack has come from the place I least expected. In fact it would almost be true to say that this student was the very last person I had ever considered to pose a threat to me.’

  At times, Melete continued, it had almost seemed to her that this fact was what had created his behaviour. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created an attack on itself, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis.

  ‘I prefer to call it madness,’ she said, ‘whether his or my own, and so instead I have tried to become fond of him. I look up and there he always is, waggling his fingers and sticking out his tongue. He is in fact entirely dependable, more faithful to me than any lover I’ve ever had. I try to love him back.’

  She closed the wine list and put up her finger to summon the waiter. Elena said something to her in Greek and a brief dispute ensued, which the waiter joined halfway through and in which he appeared conclusively to take Melete’s side, taking the order from her with much brusque nodding of his head despite Elena’s continued petitions.

  ‘Elena knows nothing about wine,’ Melete said, to me.

  Elena seemed to take no offence at this remark. She returned to the subject of Melete’s persecutor.

  ‘What you have described,’ she said, ‘is complete subjection. The idea that you should love your enemies is patently ridiculous. It is entirely a religious proposition. To say that you love what you hate and what hates you is the same as admitting you have been defeated, that you accept your oppression and are just trying to make yourself feel better about it. And saying you love him is the same as saying you don’t want to know what he really thinks of you. If you talked to him,’ she said, ‘you would find out.’

  I watched the people at the other tables and at the tables on the adjoining terraces, all packed so tightly that the whole square seemed to be aflame with conversation. Here and there beggars moved among the talking people, who often took some time to realise they were there, and then either gave them something or brushed them away. Several times I saw this repeated, the wraith-like figure standing unnoticed behind the chair of the person obliviously eating, talking, absorbed in life. A tiny, desiccated, hooded woman was moving among the tables close to us, and presently she approached ours, murmuring, the little claw of her hand outstretched. I watched Melete place some coins in her palm and say a few words to her, gently stroking her fingers.

  ‘What he thinks is of no importance,’ she continued. ‘If I found out more about what he thinks, I might start to confuse him with myself. And I don’t compose myself from other people’s ideas, any more than I compose a verse from someone else’s poem.’

  ‘But to him this is a game, a fantasy,’ Elena said. ‘Men like to play this game. And they actually fear your honesty, because then the game is spoiled. By not being honest with a man you allow him to continue
his game, to live in his fantasy.’

  As if to prove her point, my phone sounded on the table. It was a text from my neighbour: I miss you, it said.

  It was only when you got beyond people’s fantasies, Elena continued, about themselves and one another, that you accessed a level of reality where things assumed their true value and were what they seemed to be. Some of those truths, admittedly enough, were ugly, but others were not. The worst thing, it seemed to her, was to be dealing with one version of a person when quite another version existed out of sight. If a man had a nasty side to his character, she wanted to get to it immediately and confront it. She didn’t want it roaming unseen in the hinterland of the relationship: she wanted to provoke it, to draw it forth, lest it strike her when her back was turned.

  Melete laughed. ‘According to that logic,’ she said, ‘there can be no relationship at all. There can only be people stalking one another.’

  The waiter brought the wine, a small unlabelled bottle the colour of ink, and Melete began to pour it out.

  ‘It’s true,’ Elena said, ‘that my own need for provocation is something other people seem to find very difficult to understand. Yet to me it has always made perfect sense. But I do admit that it has brought nearly all of my relationships to an end, because it is inevitable that that end is also – as you say, by the same logic – something I will feel driven to provoke. If the relationship is going to end, in other words, I want to know it and confront it as soon as possible. Sometimes,’ she said, ‘this process is so quick that the relationship is over almost as soon as it has begun. Very often I have felt that my relationships have had no story, and the reason is because I have jumped ahead of myself, the way I used to turn the pages of a book to find out what happens in the final chapter. I want to know everything straight away. I want to know the content without living through the time span.’