Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘Oh Tony, I’m sorry to have said such terrible things. I know how good you are to me and I don’t want ever to hurt you. It’s just that sometimes I need to talk in order to feel real, and I wish you would talk to me.’

  He was silent, lying on his back in the darkness and staring up at the ceiling. Then he said:

  ‘I feel like my heart is talking to you all the time.’

  So there you have it, Jeffers! Truly I think Tony believes that talk and gossip are a poison, and this is one of the reasons the people who come here like him so much, because he acts as a kind of antidote to their habit of poisoning themselves and others and makes them feel much healthier. But for me there is a healthy kind of talking, though it’s rare – the kind of talking through which people create themselves by giving themselves utterance. I often had this kind of talk with the artists and other people who came to the marsh, though they were quite capable of the poisonous talk too, and did talk like that a lot of the time. There were enough instances of being in sympathy with one another, of transcending our own selves and mingling through language, for me not to mind it.

  In the autumn I was surprised to get another letter from L:

  M

  So okay, paradise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I got tired of all the sand. Also I got an infected cut and had to be rescued by a seaplane and flown to hospital. I spent six weeks in the hospital, time wasted. Life passed outside the windows. Now I’m going to Rio, for my show there. I’ve never been to that part of the world but it sounds like it could be a ball. I might stay the winter.

  L

  Just as I’d settled down again, now I had to walk around with Rio de Janeiro in my head day and night, all hot and noisy and carnal and full of licentious fun! The rain had started to fall and the trees grew bare and the winds of winter moaned across the marsh. Sometimes I would get out the catalogue of L’s work and look at the images and feel the sensation they always gave me. And of course there were a million other strands to life and things that happened and took up our thoughts and feelings, but it is my dealings with L that concern me here and that I want to make you see, Jeffers. I don’t want to give the impression that I thought about him more than I did. The thoughts about him – which were really about his work – were cyclical, like a consummation. They consummated my solitary self, and supplied it with a kind of continuity.

  All the same, I more or less gave up the idea of L ever coming to where I was and looking at it through his own eyes, which would have taken that consummation to a point of finality and given me – or so I believed – a version of the freedom I had wanted my whole life. He wrote to me a couple of times over the winter, telling me about all the things he was doing in Rio, and once even inviting me to go over there myself! But I had no intention of going to Rio, nor of going anywhere, and the letter annoyed me because it trivialised me and also because its tone forced me to conceal it from Tony. I think what it meant was that he was, somehow, afraid of me, and his treating me as he presumably treated other women was a way of getting himself back on firm ground.

  The events of that winter are familiar to everyone, and so I needn’t go over them, except to say that we felt their impact far less than most people did. We had already simplified our existence, but for others that process of simplification was brutal and agonising. The only thing that really irked me was that it was no longer so easy to go anywhere – not that we ever went anywhere in any case! But I felt the loss of that freedom nonetheless. You know, Jeffers, that I have no particular country and am not really a citizen of any place, so there was a feeling of imprisonment that came with knowing I had to stay where I was. Also, it made it harder for people to come to see us, but by that time Justine had been forced to return from Berlin, and had brought Kurt with her, and so we gave them the second place to live in, as had been ordained at the very beginning.

  In the spring I received a letter.

  M

  Well, hasn’t everything gone completely crazy. Maybe not for you. But I’ve gone tits-up, as my English friend likes to put it. All the value wiped off of everything like a layer of scum. I lost my house, and also my place in the country. I never felt like they belonged to me in any case. The other day I heard someone in the street say of this global pandemonium that it will completely alter the character of Brooklyn. Ha ha!

  Do you still have a space? I think I can get to you. I know a way. Do I need any money to be there?

  L

  Because this is partly a story of will, and of the consequences of exerting it, you will notice, Jeffers, that everything I determined to happen happened, but not as I wanted it! This is the difference, I suppose, between an artist and an ordinary person: the artist can create outside himself the perfect replica of his own intentions. The rest of us just create a mess, or something hopelessly wooden, no matter how brilliantly we imagined it. That’s not to say that we don’t all of us have some compartment in which we too are able to achieve ourselves instinctively, to leap without looking, but the bringing of things into permanent existence is an achievement of a different order. The closest most people come to it is in having a child. And nowhere are our mistakes and limitations more plainly written than there!

  I sat down with Justine and Kurt and explained to them what had happened, and that they were going to have to move into the main house with us after all – and of course Justine wanted to know why L couldn’t be in the house with us instead. Well, I didn’t entirely know why he couldn’t, just that the thought of it – of me and Tony and L all living at close quarters – made me want to shrivel up, and that the prospect of trying to explain it to Justine was almost as bad. It made me feel old, older than the most ancient monument, which is how children make you feel when you still presume to produce an original feeling of your own now and then. Language entirely fails me at such moments, the parental language that one way or another I’ve neglected to keep up and maintain, so that it’s like a rusty engine that won’t start when you need it. I didn’t want to be anyone’s parent in that minute!

  Kurt, unexpectedly, came to my rescue. I hadn’t had much to do with him up to that point, reasoning that it was none of my business who or what he was, though he had a way of making it obvious that he was thinking something very different from what he was saying when he talked to you that I wasn’t sure I liked all that much. It seemed to me that if that was what you were doing, you shouldn’t be so proud of its being obvious. He was quite thin and delicate, and a very elegant dresser, and there was something birdlike in his long fragile neck with the beaky face above it and in his fine plumage. He turned to Justine and cocked his head in that birdlike way and said:

  ‘But Justine, they can’t have a complete stranger sharing their house.’

  It was noble of him, Jeffers, considering that he was more or less a complete stranger himself, and I was pleased to have my point of view encapsulated in that way – it made me feel quite sane after all. And Justine, as good as gold, thought about it for a minute and then agreed that no, she supposed we couldn’t, so that Kurt’s well-brought-up-ness even had the unexpected effect of bringing out good manners in my own child – I was quite impressed. If only he would get rid of that sneaky two-faced look while he did it.

  We had another short letter from L, confirming his plans and giving us a date when he would arrive. So Tony and I went over to get the second place ready, with only a little less faith this time, because after all it seemed like a boon at this point to be having a visitor. The cherry trees were foaming all pink and white again in the glade, and lances of spring sunlight stood tall among the trunks, and the sound of birdsong was in our ears while we worked; and we talked about the year that had more or less exactly passed since we had first made these preparations for L and had expected him so innocently. Tony admitted that since then, he himself had started willing L to come, and I couldn’t have been more surprised to hear it, nor more cognisant of the fatal weakness that is love, for Tony is not someone who interferes
lightly in the course of things, knowing as he does that to take on the work of fate is to incur full responsibility for its consequences.

  One of the difficulties, Jeffers, in telling what happened is that the telling comes after the fact. This might sound so obvious as to be imbecilic, but I often think there’s just as much to be said about what you thought would happen as about what actually did. Yet – unlike the devil – these apprehensions don’t always get the best lines: they’re done away with, in about the time it takes to do away with them in life. If I try, I can recall what I expected of the meeting with L and what I thought it would be like to be near him and to be living alongside him for a period. I imagined it, somehow, as dark, perhaps because his paintings have so much darkness in them and his use of the colour black is so strangely vigorous and joyful. I believe also that I dwelt, in those few weeks, on the dreadful years before I met Tony, which I no longer thought about very often. Those years began, so to speak, with L’s paintings and my fevered encounter with them that sunny morning in Paris. Was this then to be some stately conclusion to the evil of that time, a sign that my recovery was now complete?

  These feelings led me to talk with Justine, in the days before L’s arrival, about what had happened more candidly than I ever had. Not that a parent’s candour guarantees all that much! I believe that as a rule children don’t care for their parents’ truths and have long since made up their own minds, or have formulated false beliefs from which they can never be persuaded, since their whole conception of reality is founded on them. I can credit any amount of wilful denial and self-deception and calling a spade an apple tree among family members, because thereby hangs our self-belief by the slenderest of threads. There were certain things, in other words, that Justine could not afford to know, and so she would not let herself know them, even though her twin motivations – to be close to me at all times, and to remain suspicious of me – were always contradicting one another.

  I have never needed particularly to be right, Jeffers, nor to win, and it has taken me the longest time to recognise what an odd one out this makes me, especially in the field of parenting, where egotism – whether of the narcissistic or the victimised kind – runs the whole show. It has sometimes felt as though, where that egotism should have been, I had only a great big vacuum of authority to offer. My attitude to Justine has been more or less the same as all my attitudes: dictated by the stubborn belief that the truth, in the end, will be recognised. The trouble is, that recognition can take a lifetime to arrive. When Justine was younger there had been a feeling of malleability, of active process, in our relations, but now that she was a young woman it was as though time had abruptly run out and we were frozen in the positions we had happened to assume in the moment of its stopping, like the game where everyone has to creep up behind the leader and then freeze the second he turns around. There she stood, the externalisation of my life force, immune to further alterations; and there was I, unable to explain to her how exactly she had turned out the way she had.

  Her relationship with Kurt, however, offered a whole new angle on the subject. I’ve said that he adopted this attitude of prior knowledge when I was there, and I took this to represent the sum total of everything Justine had told him about me that he was unqualified to know. At first he also treated Tony as a special case, a kind of exotic alien, and had the infuriating habit of wearing a tiny crescent smile on his lips whenever he watched Tony going about his business. Tony responded by dealing the card of masculinity, and forcing Kurt to take it.

  ‘Kurt, can you help me load up the woodpiles?’ Tony would say, or ‘Kurt, the fences in the bottom field need repairing and it’s a two-man job.’

  ‘Of course!’ Kurt would say, with a somewhat ironic air, scrambling out of his chair and carefully rolling up the hems of his beautifully pressed trousers.

  Predictably, he soon developed a childlike attachment to Tony in this mode, and started glorying in his own handiness and practicality, though Tony wasn’t going to let him off that easily.

  ‘Tony, shall we rake over the beds down by the orchard? I’ve noticed the weeds are starting to come through,’ he would say, when Tony was sitting reading the paper or otherwise unoccupied.

  ‘Not now,’ Tony would reply, completely unperturbed.

  You see, Jeffers, Tony refuses to see anything as a game, and by being that way he reveals how much other people play games and how their whole conception of life derives from the subjectivity of the game-playing state. If it sometimes means he can’t altogether join in the fun, it doesn’t matter: the needle always swings back in his direction, because in the end living is a serious condition, and without Tony’s common sense and practicality the fun would run out fairly quickly in any case. But I like fun and want to have it, and I’m not practical the way Tony is, and so I have often found myself with nothing to do. Nothing to do! It has been my cry ever since I came to live at the marsh. I seem to spend a lot of time simply – waiting.

  I decided to try to get to know Kurt, and found myself meeting an insurmountable obstacle straight away.

  ‘Kurt, what is your home like?’

  ‘I am lucky enough to come from an unbroken home.’

  ‘What does your mother do? How does she spend her time?’

  ‘My mother is at the top of her field, as well as having successfully raised a family. I admire her more than anyone else I know.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘My father has built his own business and is now free to do the things he enjoys.’

  And so on, Jeffers, ad infinitum – all these positives, each one with a tiny shard inside that felt like it had been put there just for me. Justine was surprisingly propitiatory and little-womanish toward Kurt, and would drop whatever she was doing and rush around at the merest word from him. Sometimes, watching them walk together through the glade or down toward the marsh, their heads inclining, they looked to my eyes almost elderly, a little old man and woman taking stock on the far shore of life. She even took him tea in bed in the mornings! But they had both lost their jobs, and they needed money, and however much we liked to have them there, until they came up with a new plan they were living off our land and off our dollar – and we all knew it.

  L wrote to say that he would be arriving by boat! We were somewhat mystified by this announcement, since most of the long-distance passenger boats still weren’t running in that period and we had imagined he would come some other way. But there it was – he said he would be arriving at the harbour town about two hours’ drive south of us, and were we able to pick him up?

  ‘Must be a private boat,’ Tony said with a shrug.

  The day came and Tony and I got in the car, leaving Justine and Kurt to their own devices until evening, when we would be back. They agreed to have dinner ready for us, and I wondered what that dinner would be like with L there. The ‘car’ isn’t really a car, Jeffers, more of a truck – a box-like old thing with enormous wheels that can go through or over anything and that is therefore very practical, except on the open road, where it starts to shake and judder as soon as you go more than forty miles an hour. Also the back seat is tiny, barely more than a bench, and I had already decided I would take it myself for the long drive home and allow L to sit in front with Tony. It was slow going, driving that distance, and Tony and I made sure to stop every now and then and get out, so that our shaken-up brains could settle down again. The road more or less sticks to the coast and the scenery is astounding from there, plunging and swooping all around, the great rounded green hills running right down to the sea with the ancient copses in their folds. It was the loveliest spring weather and when we got out of the truck the breezes coming up off the water were positively balmy. The sky was like a blue sail overhead and the waves crashed on the shore below and the water had that coruscation of the surface that is the surest omen of summer. How fortunate we felt to be there together, Tony and I – the debt of our isolation is paid back in an instant by times such as these. That ve
rtiginous green landscape so full of movement and light is a great contrast to the low-lying subtlety of our marsh, though it is just to the south of us: it always lifts us and energises us to go there, yet we don’t go as often as we could. I wonder why not, Jeffers? The pattern of change and repetition is so deeply bound to the particular harmony of life, and the exercise of freedom is subject to it, as to a discipline. One has to serve out one’s changes moderately, like strong wine. I had very little awareness of such things in my existence before Tony: I had no idea at all why things turned out the way they did, why I felt gorged with sensation at one minute and starved of it the next, where my loneliness or joy came from, which choices were beneficial and which deleterious to my health and happiness, why I did things I didn’t want to do and couldn’t do what I wanted. Least of all did I understand what freedom was and how I could attain it. I thought it was a mere unbuttoning, a release, where in fact – as you know well – it is the dividend yielded by an unrelenting obedience to and mastery of the laws of creation. The rigorously trained fingers of the concert pianist are freer than the enslaved heart of the music lover can ever be. I suppose this explains why great artists can be such dreadful and disappointing people. Life rarely offers sufficient time or opportunity to be free in more than one way.