Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

  I’m telling you all this, Jeffers, because it was what L told me: I don’t know if these facts about his childhood – if facts they are – are generally known. It’s important to me that I only tell you about what I can personally verify, despite the temptation to enlist other kinds of proof, or to invent or enhance things in the hope of giving you a better picture of them, or worst of all making you identify with my feelings and the way I saw it. There’s an art to that, and I have known enough artists to understand that I’m not one of them! Nonetheless I believe there is also a more common ability to read the surface of life, and the forms that it takes, that either grows from or becomes an ability to attend to and understand the works of the creators. One can feel, in other words, a strange proximity to the process of creation when one sees the principles of art – or of a particular artist – mirrored in the texture of living. This might go to explain some of the compulsion I felt toward L: when I looked at the marsh, for instance, which seemed to obey so many of his rules of light and perception that it often resembled a painted work by him, I was in a sense looking at works by L that he had not created, and was therefore – I suppose – creating them myself. I’m unsure of the moral status of these half-creations, which I can only hazard is akin to the moral status of influence, and therefore a powerful force for both good and evil in human affairs.

  I woke up early the morning after L’s arrival and saw the sun rising pink and golden through the glade, and so I got up and left Tony still asleep and went outside. I felt a great need to soothe myself and reconnect with my place in the world, after all the jars and jolts of the previous day – and of course, in that lovely morning light, none of it seemed quite as bad as I had felt it to be. I walked down through the shining wet grass to the point at which the trees give way to a wide view of the marsh and where the old boat stands with its prow lifted, yearning out toward the sea. There was a high tide and the water had stretched out to cover the land, in that silent and magical way of the tides here, that is somehow like a body turning and stretching and opening in sleep.

  There, standing beside the boat and looking at the same thing I was looking at, was L, and I had no choice but to go to him and greet him, despite the fact that I was not at all ready for an encounter and was still wearing my nightclothes. But I had already understood that this was to be the keynote of my dealings with him, this balking of my will and of my vision of events, the wresting from me of control in the most intimate transactions, not by any deliberate act of sabotage on his part but by virtue of the simple fact that he himself could not be controlled. Inviting him into my life had been all my affair! And I saw suddenly, that morning, that this loss of control held new possibilities for me, however angry and ugly and out of sorts it had made me feel so far, as though it were itself a kind of freedom.

  He heard my approach and he turned and spoke to me. I have not mentioned, Jeffers, how quietly L spoke: it was a murmur, like the sound of voices in a next-door room, something halfway between music and speech. You had to concentrate to hear him. Yet while he spoke, that arresting light from his eyes kept you riveted to the spot.

  ‘It’s lovely here,’ he said. ‘We’re very grateful.’

  He was all fresh and clean-shaven, in a well-ironed shirt with another colourful scarf knotted at the throat. His mention of gratitude filled me instantly with shame, as though I had offered him something by way of a bribe which he had politely declined. It made the fact of his presence here entirely my responsibility, as I have said. I was used to our visitors either finding or feigning their own independence very quickly, and making it clear there was something – egotistically speaking – in it for them. L, by contrast, was behaving like a well-brought-up child who had been taken somewhere against his will.

  ‘You don’t have to be here,’ I said, or rather heard myself say, since it was the kind of thing I never usually said.

  He looked startled, and the light in his eyes went out for a second and then came back on again.

  ‘I know that,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want gratitude,’ I said. ‘It makes me feel dowdy and ugly, like a consolation prize.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘All right,’ he said, and a mischievous smile came over his face.

  I stood there in my crumpled nightdress, with my hair unbrushed and my bare feet growing cold from the dew, and felt I would like to have burst into tears – such strange, violent impulses were coming over me, one after another. I wanted to lie down and hammer my fists on the grass – I wanted to experience a complete loss of control, while knowing that I had lost control, in my exchange with L, already.

  ‘I thought you would be coming alone,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ he said softly, ‘that’s right, you did,’ as though there were nothing more to it than that he had forgotten to inform me. ‘Brett’s all right,’ he added.

  ‘But it changes everything,’ I wailed.

  It is hard to convey to you, Jeffers, the sense of intimate familiarity I felt with L from that very first conversation, an intimacy that was almost kinship, as though we were brother and sister – almost as though we shared the same root. The desire I had to cry, to let myself go in front of him, as though my whole life until that moment had merely been a process of controlling myself and holding things in, was part of this overpowering feeling of recognition. I felt acutely conscious of my own unattractiveness, as I would in all my dealings with L, and I believe this sensation has some significance, painful though it is to recall it. Because I was not in fact unattractive, and certainly no more so then than at any other time of my life: or rather, whatever my object-value as a woman, the powerful feelings of ugliness or repulsiveness that beset me were coming not from some outward scrutiny or reality but from inside my own self. It felt like this inner image had suddenly become visible to other eyes, specifically L’s, but also Brett’s – the thought of her invasiveness and her suggestive commentary, in that state, was unbearable! I realised that I had had this ugliness inside me for as long as I could remember, and that by offering it to L, I was perhaps labouring under the belief that he could take it from me, or give me some opportunity to escape it.

  Looking back on it now, I see that what I was experiencing might simply have been the shock of being confronted by my own compartmentalised nature. All these compartments in which I had kept things, from which I would decide what to show to other people who kept themselves in compartments too! Until then, Tony had seemed to me like the least divided person I had known: he had at any rate whittled it down to two compartments, what he said and did, and what he didn’t say and do. But L felt like the first entirely integrated being I had encountered, and the impulse I had was to catch him, as though he were a wild creature that needed to be ensnared, while at the same time realising that his very nature was not to be caught, and that I would merely have to abide by him in a dreadful freedom.

  He began to talk, turning his eyes away from me and out toward the water and the marsh, and I had to strain and stand very still to hear what he said. The sun had risen higher and was driving back the shadows of the trees across the grass where we stood, and the water was likewise advancing, and so we were held between them, in one of those processes of almost imperceptible change that occur in the landscape here, whereby you feel you are participating in an act of becoming. The stillness mounts and mounts, and the air becomes more and more charged with intensity, and finally the sea begins to give back its light like a shield. I cannot reproduce L’s words for you, Jeffers: I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to retain an accurate record of that deep kind of talk in any case, and I am determined not to falsify anything, even for the sake of a narrative. He talked about his weariness with society and his continual need to escape it, and the problem this posed in determining any kind of home for himself. As a younger man his mild homelessness hadn’t troubled him, he said, and in later life he had watched the people of his acquaintance create homes that were like plaster casts of th
eir own wealth, with humans inside. Those structures sometimes exploded and sometimes merely suffocated their occupants – but personally, he could never be anywhere without sooner or later wanting to go somewhere else. The one place that was real to him was his studio in New York, the same one he had had all the way through. He had built a second studio at his country house but he couldn’t work there: it was like being in a museum of himself. He had recently been forced to sell that house, he told me, along with his house in the city, which left him back where he had been at the beginning, with just the original studio. Likewise he had never been able to build anything permanent with other human beings. He knew plenty of gluttons for living who gained and lost and gained again and lost again in such quick succession that they probably never even noticed that none of it lasted; and he knew, too, enough examples of the rot that could be concealed within an outward-seeming lastingness. What interested him was his suspicion not that he might have missed out on something, but that he had failed entirely to see something else, something that had ultimately to do with reality and with a definition of reality as a place where he himself did not exist.

  He had been forced to go back and think again about his childhood in light of this, he said, though he had long since realised that the particular details of his life were so much clutter, from which the essence merely needed to be extracted and the specifics thrown away. Yet there was something there, he felt certain, that he had overlooked – something to do with death, which had been a prominent feature of his early life. Right from the start, he had taken from death the impulse to live: even the deaths of the animals in the slaughterhouse, which might have horrified another child, gave him time and again a sensation that was like a note being struck, a confirmation of his own being. He supposed his lack of horror and emotion could be attributed to the deadening that results from repeated exposure to something, but in that case he had been dead almost from the beginning. No, in the striking of that note there was something else, a feeling of equality with all things that was also an ability to survive them. He himself could not be fatally touched, or so he had always believed: he could not be destroyed, even as he was witness to the destruction. He had taken his survival as freedom, and run away with it.

  I told him that Tony had also had early experience of death, and had responded the opposite way, by staying exactly where he was forever after. I had sometimes chafed at this rootedness, which I took at first for caution or conservatism, but it had shown me its resilience enough times for me to treat it with respect. I had great trouble respecting anything, I said, and instinctively rebelled against what was presented to me as immovable or fixed. In the period of difficulty before I met Tony, I told him, I was sent to see a psychoanalyst who drew a map of my character on a piece of paper. He thought he could sum it up, on a crumpled piece of A4! It was his gimmick, and I could tell he was proud of it. The psychoanalyst’s map showed a central pillar of what appeared to be objective reality, around which numerous arrows shot off into space and then met and crossed over to form an endlessly conflicting circle. Half these arrows were obeying the impulse to rebel, the other half the impulse to comply, the suggestion being that as soon as I was brought into compliance with something I rebelled against it, and having rebelled, felt a great urge to comply again – round and round in a pointless dance all of my own! He thought his explanation was sheer genius, but at that time I was possessed only by the desire to harm myself: it had me by the throat like a dog. And so I stopped seeing the psychoanalyst, because I could see he wasn’t going to get that dog off me. It grieved me to prove him right about rebellion, though, or so I supposed he had the satisfaction of thinking.

  Months later I met the psychoanalyst in the street, I told L, and he came over and with a little air of reproach asked me how I was, and I stood there in broad daylight and denounced him. I spoke as though some god of speech had taken possession of me on the pavement – I declaimed, the sentences falling from my mouth in great wreaths of significance. I reminded him that I, the mother of a young child, had come to him in distress, afraid that I might destroy myself, and he had done nothing, nothing to safeguard her or me, just doodled on a piece of paper and come up with the proof of my authority complex – as though I didn’t have proof enough from the suffering I was in! Partway through my speech the psychoanalyst raised his arms in a gesture of surrender: he had turned completely white, and looked suddenly frail and aged, and began stepping backwards away from me on the pavement with his arms still raised, until he was far enough to turn and run. The image of this running man, I said to L, with his arms raised in surrender, had remained with me as the representation of everything I had failed to reconcile myself to. For me, there was no escaping my physical body. But he could simply run away!

  L was listening, with his bright eyes fixed on mine and his hand over his mouth.

  ‘How awfully cruel,’ he said, though because of his hand I couldn’t tell whether he was smiling or frowning, nor which of us he was accusing of cruelty.

  We stood in silence for a while, and when L spoke again it was to resume the account of his childhood, so that it was as if my interruption were being politely set aside. I don’t think this was because L was incapable of taking an interest in other people – he had listened carefully to my story, I felt sure. But the game of empathy, whereby we egg one another on to show our wounds, was one he would not play. He had decided to explain himself to me, that was all, and it was up to me what I offered in return. I understood I was not the first person to have received this explanation – I could imagine L being interviewed in a gallery or on a stage, giving much the same account of himself. A person only speaks like that when they feel they have earned the right to. And I hadn’t, at least in his eyes – or not yet!

  He began to tell me about a time in his childhood when his father had fallen ill, and he was sent away to live with an aunt and uncle for a time, to lessen the burden on his mother. This couple had no children of their own and were a rough and rambunctious pair of characters, he said, whose chief entertainment and motivation lay in each seeing the other meet with misfortune. He remembered watching his uncle howl with satisfaction and rub his hands together when his aunt burned herself on the oven; she would double over with laughter if he banged his head on the doorframe, and when they argued, chasing each other around the kitchen table with the poker or the frying pan, they could cheerfully draw blood. He wasn’t sure the concept of character, as illustrated by these two, even existed any more. They were rather like animals, and it made him wonder whether character itself was an animal quality that humans had become distanced from in the modern age. His uncle and aunt didn’t care especially about him, though they wouldn’t have hurt him, and neither did they have any idea how to comfort him in this difficult period of his father’s illness: he was expected to do his share of the hard physical work on top of his schoolwork, and indeed after a while they stopped sending him to school at all. He gradually came to realise that if his father died while he was staying at his uncle and aunt’s house, they would very likely merely shrug at the news and carry on. They might even fail to tell him, and he was desperate to return home before this event took place, so clearly could he imagine it. He did succeed in getting home, and by the time his father died he had forgotten about his uncle and aunt, but it came back to him later, this time he had spent among people for whom he had no particular significance, and the urgent need he had felt to return to where he could play his role in the story. It was a clearer glimpse of death than any of the bloodier sightings he had had of it so far. He had discovered that reality would occur whether he was there to see it or not.

  The sun had risen up above us by now and we stood together and looked out at the marsh and the loveliness of the day, and I felt the rare peace of living entirely – however briefly – in that moment.

  ‘I hope we don’t get in the way,’ L said then. ‘I’d hate to spoil this for you.’

  ‘I don’t see why you would spo
il it,’ I said, affronted again. How I wished he wouldn’t say such things!

  ‘It’s felt like my luck has run out, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Things have been awfully sordid these past months. But now I’m starting to wonder whether I even care. The wheel could turn again, but I have the feeling I’m going back in time, not forward. I feel lighter every day. It isn’t so bad, dispossession.’

  I said that was a sensation only a man – and a man with no dependents – could enjoy. I managed not to add, Jeffers, that in addition it relied on the generosity of burdened people such as myself! But I might as well have said it, because he heard me anyway.

  ‘Don’t mistake my life for anything other than a tragedy,’ he said softly. ‘In the end I’m nothing more than a beggar, and I never have been.’

  I didn’t see it that way at all, and I said so. Not to have been born in a woman’s body was a piece of luck in the first place: he couldn’t see his own freedom because he couldn’t conceive of how elementally it might have been denied him. To beg was a freedom in itself – it implied at least an equality with the state of need. My own experiences of loss, I said, had merely served to show me the pitilessness of nature. The wounded don’t survive in nature: a woman could never throw herself on fate and expect to come out of it intact. She has to connive at her own survival, and how can she be subject to revelation after that?