by Rachel Cusk
We arrived at the town in good time, and ate our sandwiches sitting on the seawall, and then at the appointed hour went down to the port to find L. We stood in the arrivals area and asked what boats were scheduled to arrive, but no one seemed to know about anything that sounded like it might have L on board. We settled down for a long wait: since we weren’t quite sure how he was arriving, we didn’t expect much in the way of punctuality.
I ought to try to describe to you, Jeffers, what we looked like, so that you can imagine this arrival from L’s point of view. Tony, at least, is not a usual-looking person at all! He is very big and tall, and strong from all the physical work he does, and he has long white hair that would never be cut unless I occasionally took the scissors to it. He says his hair turned white when he was still in his twenties. It is quite fine and silky, almost womanish, and has a faintly blue tint to it. He is dark-skinned, the only dark-skinned person for miles around, having been adopted as a baby by a marsh family. He has no idea what his origins are and has never tried to find out. His parents didn’t tell him he was adopted, and no one else ever referred to it, and since they lived a life of considerable isolation he says it wasn’t until he was eleven or twelve that he worked out what it meant that he was a different colour to them! I have seen photographs of Native Americans, and more than anything he looks like one of them, though how that could be I don’t know. He is more of an ugly than a good-looking man, with the permanence and dignity of ugliness, but he makes a handsome entity overall, if you see what I mean. He has a big face with heavy prominent features, except for his eyes, which are small and hard and look like they’re focused on something very far away. His teeth are crooked, from lack of visits to the dentist in childhood. He remembers his childhood as perfectly happy. He grew up near the house we live in now, and he didn’t really go to school, since his parents had certain beliefs about education and taught him at home themselves. They had another, biological child, a boy the same age as Tony, and these two boys grew up side by side, one white and one dark. I have never met Tony’s brother and know next to nothing about him, except that he left the marsh when he turned eighteen and hasn’t come back. I sense that a falling-out happened between them, but I don’t know what. I think Tony must have been his parents’ favourite, from the few details he’s given me. I wonder what it feels like, to adopt a child and then prefer it to one’s own. It seems, somehow, completely understandable. The parents died, both at the same time – they drowned, Jeffers, in one of the tidal surges that sometimes burst along our coast and can wrong-foot even people entirely familiar with the terrain. It was summer and they were out on their boat together, and the sea rose up and swept them away. Tony is always out on the water in his boat too, fishing or setting crab and lobster traps, but I believe that deep down he is afraid of it.
Tony has never – as far as I’m aware – purchased an item of clothing, since his adoptive father and grandfather happened to be big men also and left behind them such a sufficient store that Tony has rarely opened the wardrobe and found himself lacking anything. It does, however, make for some eccentricities of dress: on this particular occasion – the drive to collect L – he was wearing one of his grandfather’s three-piece suits, complete with tartan waistcoat and watch chain. With his enormous size and his long white hair and his dark, rough-hewn face, he must have looked quite uncanny – I’m so used to him I can’t always tell. I myself was presumably dressed as I always am, in either black or white, I can’t remember which. I like to wear soft, draping, shapeless clothes which I can add or remove in layers, depending on the weather. I have never understood clothes terribly well, and have found the element of choice especially unmanageable, so it was a great day for me when I realised I could just wear everything all at once, and that by limiting the colours to black and white I need never think about the aesthetics again.
You know what I look like, Jeffers, and I looked then much as I did before and do now. I’ve always felt rather fatalistic, looks-wise, as though I were shuffling and reshuffling the same old set of cards, though in the difficult years before I met Tony I did lose a proportion of the deck in weight, which has never come back to me. That day at the harbour, the cards were dealt in the pattern of my fiftieth year. I had some creases on my face, but not all that many: the oily skin that plagued me in my youth has defended me at this stage of life from wrinkles, a rare instance of fairness in the human lot. My long hair had some grey in it, a horrible, witch-like combination, I always think, but Tony’s one wish as far as my appearance goes has been for me not to cut or dye my hair, and he’s the one that has to look at it, after all. That day, the day of L’s arrival, I do remember being unusually aware of the feeling that I had never once lived in the moment of my beauty, to the extent that I possess any. It had always felt like something I might find, or something I had temporarily lost, or something I was pursuing – it had felt, occasionally, immanent, but I had never had the sensation of holding it in my hand. I see that I am suggesting, by saying that, that I believe other women do have that sensation, and I don’t know whether that is really true. I have never known another woman well enough to know, with the internal kind of knowledge a girl might have, for instance, of her mother. I imagine, somehow, the mother handing it to the girl, the pearl of her particular beauty.
To return to the business of L’s arrival: there we were, sitting in our plastic chairs in the arrivals area, when a man and a woman walked in through the main doors. Since we were expecting L to come from the other direction we didn’t take much notice of them, but then I did look, and realised the man must be L! He came over and said my name enquiringly, and I stood up all flustered to shake his hand, and at the same moment he stepped aside and brought the woman forward and said:
‘This is my friend Brett.’
So I found myself shaking hands not with L but with a ravishing creature somewhere in her late twenties, whose air of poise and fashion was entirely unequal to her surroundings, and who offered her varnished fingertips as blithely as though we were meeting not at the ends of the earth but at a cocktail party on Fifth Avenue! She began to talk, gushingly, but I was so wrong-footed I couldn’t really hear what she was saying, and I kept trying to look at L but he had sort of hidden himself behind her. Tony had by then got to his feet. Tony is never any help in that kind of situation – he just stands there and says nothing. But I can’t bear any form of social awkwardness or tension: I become blank inside, so that I’m no longer aware of precisely what is being said or done. So I can’t tell you, Jeffers, what exactly was said by us all in those moments, only that when I introduced Tony to the young woman – Brett – she seemed astonished, and gave him the most frankly assessing, up-and-down look I had ever seen in my life! Then she turned to me and gave me the same look, and I saw that she was imagining me and Tony together sexually, and trying to work it out and see what it was like. She had a curious mouth that hung open in a kind of letterbox shape – the mouth of a comic-book gunman, I often thought afterwards. I caught little, piercing glimpses of L in those frantic moments, hiding and dodging there behind her. He was quite wiry and small – smaller than me – and seemed dapper and goatish, in white trousers rolled up at the cuffs and leather deck shoes and a fresh blue shirt and a colourful scarf tied around his neck. He was very well groomed and cared for, which surprised me. Also he had a kind of light, capering demeanour, when I had imagined him swarthier and heavier, and his eyes were nuggets of sky blue from which the most arresting light came. They shone out at me like two suns whenever they happened to meet mine.
Somehow I got them all out of the arrivals area and up the hill to the truck, in the course of which they managed to communicate that they had come not by boat but by private plane, Brett’s cousin being some billionaire or other who owned one, and who had dropped them off the day before and then buzzed off somewhere else. They had spent the night at a hotel in town, which accounted for their fresh, groomed appearance that had so caught me off guard, since
people usually arrive in our part of the world draggled at least to some degree by the effort it takes to get here. It also explained their lack of luggage, which they had stored at the hotel and which we agreed we would collect on our way. I found it strange to think that they had been here a whole day and night without my being aware of it – I don’t know why, Jeffers, but it seemed to give them some kind of power or vantage point over us. We arrived at the truck, which is usually such a dependable and friendly sight, and I looked at it, and looked at Tony standing in his three-piece suit next to it, and a great misgiving went through me, the way lightning can pierce all the way through a tree from top to bottom and hollow out its core. Oh, it wasn’t at all how I’d planned it! I feared, suddenly, that my belief in the life I was living wouldn’t hold, and that all I’d built up would collapse underneath me and I’d be unhappy again – I didn’t know, in that moment, how I was going to manage. The first thing, obviously, was the presence of the woman Brett, which had come as a complete surprise to us and which was already creating a second difficulty, by increasing the elusiveness of L. I immediately saw that he would use her as a foil and a shield, and had probably brought her along for that purpose, to protect himself from the unknown circumstances he was travelling into, which was tantamount to protecting himself from me!
I should add, Jeffers, that I didn’t generally need or expect any special attention from my visitors, not even from L, in whom I’d had such a long interest and with whose work I had a particular rapport. But in an arrangement such as ours there are certain necessary conditions, without which a range of abuses becomes possible, and the safeguarding of our privacy and our dignity of life was the first and foremost of them. I had the impression, from various things he had said in the course of our correspondence, that L was not above accepting favours from his friends and acquaintances, of whom a large number appeared to be wealthy. We were far from poor, but we lived simply and in a great degree of trust with those around us – we weren’t, in other words, offering him a high-class holiday, or a luxurious place to use as his own. All our visitors so far had understood this immediately and naturally and there had been an unmarked line where all of us had instinctively met, between privacy and togetherness. But looking at L and even more so at Brett, I wondered whether we hadn’t for the first time invited a cuckoo into our nest.
The first thing was to try to get us all into the truck, and then, once we’d called at the hotel, to get their luggage in as well. They had a large number of suitcases and bags, and Tony spent a long time planning how to fit them in, while the rest of us stood on the road, casting around for things to say. L had turned his back to me and put his hands in his pockets, and stood looking down at the crashing sea while the breeze made his shirt billow and flap and his short, fine greying hair lie flat against his head. I was left with Brett, who I had already understood was an insinuating kind of person who liked to get herself into your bodily space and make herself comfortable there, like a cat winding itself around your leg and then leaping into your lap. She was English: I remembered L alluding in one of his letters to his ‘English friend’ and wondered if this was she. She talked a great deal but didn’t very often say anything you could reply to, and she was, as I have said, ravishingly beautiful, so the whole thing felt rather in the way of a performance, with you as the audience. She had very blonde, soft, waving hair and an exquisitely moulded little face with a tipped-up nose and startling large brown eyes, and then that strange and violent mouth. She was wearing a tailored dress of patterned silk tightly belted at the waist, and a pair of red, very high-heeled sandals – I had been surprised by how quickly she had moved in them while we were walking up the hill. She kept offering advice to Tony about the suitcases and getting in his way, until L unexpectedly turned around and said gruffly over his shoulder:
‘Keep out of it, Brett.’
Well, Tony did take the longest time to manage it, and at a certain point when it looked like we could finally leave he suddenly shook his head and took everything out and started again; and meanwhile the breeze had picked up and it was becoming cold, and I thought about the long jolting journey in front of us and about my quiet, comfortable house and garden and about how this could have been just a pleasant ordinary day, and all in all managed to feel quite miserable about what I had brought about. Finally we got in, with L and Brett crushed together into the bench seat after all and Tony and I in front, where I relied on the noise of the engine to make further conversation impossible. All the way home I nursed my impression that there had been some kind of crash or clash, and my head spun with all the jarring sensations and disharmonies it had thrown up, and I had the blank, dead feeling I always get at such times. Tony’s face in profile, looking impassively out at the road ahead, is usually a great comfort to me when I feel this way, but on this occasion it almost made things worse, because I wasn’t sure L and Brett would ever get the hang of Tony, nor he of them, and the last thing I wanted to have to do on top of everything else was explain them to each other.
I don’t remember all that much about the journey – I have blotted it out – but I do recall Brett leaning forward at one point and saying into my ear:
‘I can colour your hair for you to hide the grey, you know. I know how to do it so that no one would ever guess.’
She was sitting directly behind me, and had obviously had ample opportunity to scrutinise my hair from the back.
‘It’s really quite dry,’ she added, and she even ran her fingers through it to prove her point.
I have mentioned, Jeffers, my relationship to commentary and criticism and the feeling of invisibility I very often had, now that I lived a life in which I was rarely commented on. I suppose I might have developed an oversensitivity or allergy to commentary as a result – whatever the reason, I could barely stop myself from screaming and lashing out at the feeling of this woman’s fingers in my hair! But of course I simply drove those feelings down inside of me and sat there like an animal in dumb torment until we finally reached the marsh and could get out.
Justine and Kurt had done everything exactly as I had hoped – the trouble was, what I had hoped for no longer applied. They had lit the candles and the fires and decorated the table with the first spring flowers from the marsh, and filled the house with warmth and the good smells of cooking. They were completely unruffled, with that acceptingness of the young, by the presence of an extra person, and they laid an extra place for her, and before we sat down to eat I took L and Brett across to the second place to settle them in, while Tony drove the truck around to unload their luggage. How I wished I could just leave it all to him, and go and get into my bed and pull the covers over my head and not have to say another word! But it is not Tony’s business to change places with me, nor I with him. We are separate people, and we each have our separate part to play, and no matter how much I yearned on occasion for that law to be broken, I have always known that the very basis of my life rested on it.
When we opened the door to the second place and went in and turned on the lights, it all suddenly looked rather poor and shabby to me, as though with their smart luggage and expensive clothes and their air of acquaintance with luxury, L and Brett had imported a new standard, a new way of seeing, in which the old things could no longer hold their shape. The wooden cupboards and shelves looked rough and higgledy-piggledy and the stove and table and armchairs stood bleakly in the electric light. Our reflections glared out from the windows, for it was more or less dark by then and the curtains weren’t drawn. I drew them, averting my eyes from the images the glass held. L looked around and said nothing, and there was nothing to say, though I had already understood it was physically impossible for Brett to repress her urge to comment, so was not in the least surprised when she gave a tittering laugh and exclaimed:
‘It’s a cabin in the woods, straight out of a horror story!’
You will remember, Jeffers, that L’s fame came strongly at the beginning of his career, when he was only in hi
s twenties. After that, it must have felt as though he’d been given some heavy object he had to carry around for the rest of his life. Such things distort the flow of experience and misshape the personality. He told me that he left his family home when he was still a child, fourteen or fifteen years old, and went to the city, though how he survived in that period I don’t know. His mother had several children from a previous marriage and those older children had apparently attacked him and threatened his life in some way, and so he ran away. His father had been his friend and protector, but the father died, of cancer, I think.
They lived in a desolate part of the world, a small town plunked down in miles and miles of empty plain. His parents owned a slaughterhouse and the family lived across from it. Some of his earliest memories were of looking out of his bedroom window at the chickens in the yard, pecking at pools of blood. The violence of his early work that so shocked people and drew their attention, and that was understood to be a production of societal violence generally, was probably rooted in this much more primitive and personal source. I wonder whether this explains L’s failure to ever hit quite the right note with the critics again, since they expected him to go on shocking them, when in fact he had been introspective all along. So his celebrity and his success were a sort of uphill trudge after that, always accompanied by a sense of reservation and half-spoken disappointment; yet partly because of his virtuosic talent he never lost his prestige or his artistic honour, even as painting went in and out of fashion over the years. He survived those changes in taste, and people have often wondered why he did, but I believe it was because he had never prostituted himself to them in the first place.