Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

  The box was really quite an awkward and heavy thing to haul up the rise through the glade. The door to the second place stood open in the sun, and at the threshold I stopped and put the box down just inside and paused to get my breath back. From there I had a view of the windows that ran across the front of the big room, and I couldn’t stop myself from crying out:

  ‘My curtains!’

  The curtains had vanished – just the bare poles remained! At the sound of my voice L, whom I hadn’t even noticed sitting with his back to me in the far corner of the room, turned around. He was hunched on a wooden stool, wearing a great paint-stained apron, with a canvas on an easel in front of him. He had no brush or other implement in his hand: as far as I could tell, he had simply been sitting staring at it.

  ‘We took them down,’ he said. ‘They got in the way. They’re quite safe,’ he added, and then said something under his breath which sounded like my curtains, uttered in an unpleasant mocking tone.

  The canvas in front of him was a muddy, indistinct ground with ghostly escarpment shapes cascading down into its centre. It was very faint, as if it was only just beginning to emerge, so it was difficult to decipher much about it except that its mountainous shapes bore no relation to what could be seen through the bare windows.

  ‘That came for you,’ I said, pointing at the box.

  His expression lifted at the sight of it, and the light in his eyes came on.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘It must have been heavy to carry.’

  ‘I’m not a weakling,’ I said.

  ‘But you’re very slight,’ he said. ‘You could have hurt your back.’

  It may just have been the quiet and indistinct way he spoke, or it may have been my difficulty in accepting commentary on my person, but the instant he made that remark about my size I became unsure that he had said it at all – and remain unsure to this day! It was so characteristic of him, Jeffers, this blurring of the interface of what I can only call the here and now. Things became formless and impalpable, almost abstract, where normally they would sharpen into focus. Being with him in a particular time and place was the very opposite of being with other people: it was as if everything had either already happened or was going to happen afterwards.

  ‘Someone had to bring it,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That’s inconvenient for you.’

  We stood and stared at one another, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Tony it is a certain stamina for a contest of that kind. But in the end I was ready to admit defeat, and I started to say that I was going back to the house, when at exactly the same moment he said:

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’

  He offered a stool next to his, but I went and sat in the old ladder-back chair beside the empty fire instead, a piece of furniture I have held on to throughout my adult life and that for reasons I have forgotten I had chosen to put there, in the second place. Perhaps it had reminded me too much of the life before Tony, and therefore didn’t seem to belong in our home: whatever the reason, I was comforted to encounter it again that day, and to remember that it had existed before all of the things that were happening now, and would continue to exist in the future.

  ‘We call that the electric chair,’ L said. ‘The shape is uncannily similar.’

  ‘I’ll have it taken away if you like,’ I said coldly.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘I was only teasing.’

  Unmoved, I sat there and took my first good look at L. How can I describe him to you, Jeffers? It’s so hard to say how people appear, once you’ve come to know them – far easier to say what it’s like to be near them! When the east wind blows on the marsh it makes everything feel very cool and contrary, even in the warmest weather – well, L was something of an east wind, and like that wind he fixed himself to the spot and settled in to blow. Another thing about him was the way the question of male and female felt somehow theoretical in his presence, I suppose because he made his disregard for convention so apparent. He undermined, in other words, one’s automatic ideas about what men and women are.

  He was very small and neatly made and not at all physically imposing, yet there was always the sense that he could burst out at any minute in some violent physical act – a feeling of impulses under continual restraint. He had a careful way of moving, as though he had been injured in the past, but in fact I think this was just the way age had come to him, perhaps because he had thought he would be young forever. And he did still seem youthful, partly because his features were so finely drawn, especially the dark brows arching markedly over the very wide-open eyes that were filled with the light I have described. His nose was small and aristocratic-looking: the nose of a snob. He had quite a sweet, small mouth with full lips. There was something Mediterranean in his appearance – a quality, as I have said, of sharp drawing. He was always very clean and groomed, not at all how one imagines an artist to be. By contrast his painting apron was the grisliest garment, caked with gore like a butcher’s smock. I noticed for the first time that the fingers on his left hand were slightly deformed – they were crooked, and flattened at the tips.

  ‘An accident in childhood,’ he said, seeing me look at them.

  Yes, he was an attractive man, though somehow illegible to me: he emanated a kind of physical neutrality that I took personally and interpreted as a sign that he did not consider me to be truly a woman. As I have said before, he made me feel acutely unattractive, and I admit I had dressed that day with care, anticipating that I might see him. Yet he was so diminutive and self-contained, not at all the sort of man I myself might be physically drawn to – I could have defended my vanity if I’d wanted to! Instead I succumbed to a feeling of abjection, within which there was an illogical sense of hope. I wanted him to be more than he was, or to be myself somehow less than I was, and because I wanted those things my will was aroused – in any case, there was the feeling of some unknown lying between us that awoke a dangerous part of me, the part that felt that I hadn’t truly lived. It was this same part – or an aspect of it – that had drawn me to Tony, who likewise I hadn’t entirely recognised at first or imagined myself attracted to. Tony also awoke me, but to the presence in myself of a fixed male image, to which he did not correspond. To see him, I had to use a faculty that I did not entirely trust. All my life this image, I came to realise, had in various forms caused me to recognise certain people and to consider them real, while others remained unnoticed or two-dimensional. I understood that I should no longer trust it, and the mechanism of not trusting and not believing and then being rewarded for it came over time to supplant my actual trust and belief: this, I think, more than Tony himself and more than the geographical distance from my previous life, formed a great part of the gulf separating me from the person I had been.

  I have often wondered, Jeffers, whether true artists are people who have succeeded in discarding or marginalising their inner reality quite early on, which might explain how someone can know so much about life with one side of themselves, while understanding nothing about it at all with another. After I met Tony, and learned to override my own concept of reality, I became aware of how widely and indiscriminately I was capable of imagining things, and how coldly I could consider the products of my own mind. The only experience I had had of such a phenomenon in my previous life was the luridness with which, at a certain point, I had imagined doing some violence to myself: it was, I suppose, at this very point that my belief in the life I was living and my inability to live it any longer were fighting a sort of duel to the death. I believe I glimpsed something in those moments, a horror of or hatred for myself, that was like the threshold to a whole underside of personality: it was a monster I saw, Jeffers, an ugly, thrashing colossus, and I banged the door on it as fast as I could, though not fast enough to stop it taking a big gouge out of me. Later, when I came to live at the marsh and looked back on my memories, I found that I viewed myself in the cruellest light. Never have I yearned more to be capable of cre
ating something than at that time. It felt as though only that – to express or reflect some aspect of existence – would atone for the awful knowledge I seemed to have acquired. I had lost the blind belief in events and the immersion in my own being that I realised had made existence bearable up to that point. This loss seemed to me to constitute nothing less than the gain of perceptual authority. It felt as though it was an authority beyond language: I was so certain I could visualise it that I even bought painting materials and set myself up in a corner of the house, but what I experienced there was the opposite of release, Jeffers. Instead it was as if a total and permanent disability had suddenly taken hold of my body, a paralysis within which I would have to live wide awake for evermore.

  As Sophocles said it – how dreadful knowledge of the truth is, when the truth can’t help you!

  But my aim here is to give you a picture of L: my thoughts about perception and reality are useful only insofar as they advanced my clumsy understanding of who and what L was, and of how his mind worked. My suspicion was that the artist’s soul – or the part of his soul in which he is an artist – has to be entirely amoral and free of personal bias. And given that life as it goes on works to reinforce our personal bias more and more in order to allow us to accept the limitations of our fate, the artist must stay especially alert so as to avoid those temptations and hear the call of truth when it comes. That call, I believe, is the easiest thing in the world to miss – or rather, to ignore. And the temptation to ignore it comes not just once but a thousand times, all the way until the end. Most people prefer to take care of themselves before they take care of the truth, and then wonder where their talent has disappeared off to. This doesn’t have all that much to do with happiness, Jeffers, though it must be said that the artists I have known who have come closest to fulfilling their vision have also been the most miserable. And L was one such: his unhappiness stood around him like a thick fog. Yet I couldn’t help but suspect that it was bound up with other things, with his age and fading manhood and the change in his circumstances: he wished, in other words, that he had taken more care of himself, not less!

  He began to talk, sitting there on the stool, about a time he had spent in his younger years in California, just after the first dramatic peak of his early success. He had bought a place on the beach, so close to the water that the breaking waves would surge white and foaming almost into the house itself. The mesmerising sound and action of the ocean cast a kind of spell or enchantment, in which he had lived the same day over and over until he was no longer aware of their passing. The sun beat down and was frothed back up into a sort of mist by the pounding waves, to make an encircling wall of phosphorescence that was like a bowl of light. To live in a bowl of light, outside the mechanism of time – this, he recognised, was freedom. He was with a woman called Candy, and the edible-sounding sweetness of that name defined her – everything about her was pure delicious sugar. For a whole long summer the two of them lived on the sand and rolled in the luminous water, barely dressing, turning so brown it was as if something inside them had become eternal, like two clay figures baked in a kiln. He could spend all day just watching her, the way she stood or lay or moved, and he didn’t draw her even once, because she seemed to have plucked that thorn from his heart and brought him to a condition of stunned intimacy. She was already the most accurate possible representation of herself, and he submitted to her like a baby submits to its mother, and the sweetness he got in return was a kind of narcotic that made him know for the first time what it was to be oblivious.

  ‘She moved to Paris,’ he said, pinioning me to my chair with his eyes, ‘and she married some nobleman there, and I hadn’t seen her or heard from her in decades. But last week she suddenly wrote to me. She got my details from my gallerist and she wrote to tell me about her life. She and her husband live in some out-of-the-way place in the country, and their daughter lives in the family house in Paris. The daughter is the same age Candy was that time when we lived on the beach, and it had made her think about those months again, because her daughter reminds her so much of herself at the same age. She had thought about trying to see me, she said, but in the end she decided not to. Too much time has passed, and it would be too sad. But if I found myself in Paris, she said, she was certain her daughter would love to meet me and show me around. I’ve been wondering,’ L said, ‘about how to get there, and about what it would be like to meet this girl. The mother reborn in the daughter – it’s so wonderfully tempting, so preposterous! Could it possibly be true?’

  He was smiling, a great chillingly luminous smile, and his eyes were blazing – he looked suddenly uncanny and alive, dangerously so. I had found his story painful and horrible, and I half hoped he had told it with the intention of being cruel, because otherwise I would have to conclude he was a madman! To rush off to Paris, an ageing man down on his luck, with the expectation of meeting a re-creation of his former lover and being gloriously restored to potency and youth – it would have been laughable, Jeffers, had it not also been so disturbing.

  ‘I don’t know about getting to Paris,’ I said, rather stiffly. ‘I don’t know if it’s possible. You’d have to find out.’

  How I hated having that stiffness forced on me! Did he understand that by parading his freedom and the fulfilment of his desires in front of me, he was making me less free and less fulfilled than I had been before I walked in the door? He looked startled when I spoke, as though he hadn’t expected me to raise such a practical objection.

  ‘It’s all so silly,’ he said softly, half to himself. ‘You get tired of reality, and then you discover it’s already gotten tired of you. We should try to stay real,’ he said, smiling that awful smile again. ‘Like Tony.’

  He gave a strange giggle, and pulled out the picture of Tony from behind the easel and leaned it up against the wall for me to see. It was a small canvas, but the figure was even smaller – he had made Tony tiny! He was shown full-length and in meticulous detail, like an old-fashioned miniature, all the way down to his shoes, so that he seemed both tragic and insignificant. It was merciless, Jeffers – he made him look like a toy soldier!

  ‘I imagine you yourself see him like Goya would,’ he said, ‘at arm’s reach. Or is it arm’s length?’

  ‘I’ve never seen Tony all at once,’ I said. ‘He’s too big.’

  ‘He didn’t give me enough time,’ he said brusquely, seeing my disappointment at the picture, just as I had intended he should. ‘He seemed to be very busy.’

  There was a certain mockery in that remark, as though he were accusing Tony of aggrandising himself.

  ‘He only came because he thought I wanted him to,’ I said miserably.

  ‘I’m trying to find something in the figure, but perhaps it isn’t there,’ L said. ‘Some brokenness or incompleteness.’ He paused. ‘You know, I’ve never wanted to be whole or complete.’

  He was studying the picture of Tony while he spoke, as though it represented this wholeness that he couldn’t or wouldn’t attain and was therefore, perversely, a failure. It was a completing that betrayed the ongoing fragmentation or mutation of his own personality.

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  ‘I always imagined it was like being swallowed,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps it’s you that does the swallowing,’ I replied.

  ‘I haven’t swallowed anything,’ he said calmly. ‘Just taken a few bites here and there. No, I don’t want to be completed. I prefer to try outrunning whatever’s after me. I prefer to stay out, like kids on a summer evening stay out, and won’t come in when they’re called. I don’t want to go in. But it means that all my memories are outside me.’

  He began then to talk about his mother, who he said had died when he was somewhere in his forties. He had always found her physically loathsome, he said – she was forty herself when she had him, her fifth and last child. She was very fat and coarse, where his father was delicate and small. He remembered the feeling that his parents didn’t match, didn’
t go together somehow. When his father was dying, L was often alone at his bedside, and he frequently noticed fresh bruises and other marks on his father’s skin that only his mother could have put there, since no one else visited the sickroom. He sometimes wondered whether his father had died just to get away from her, but he couldn’t believe that his father would have wanted to leave him there by himself. He realised later how much his father had tried to keep him out of his mother’s path, which is how L came to start drawing: while his father did the accounts or the yard work L was nearly always by his side, and it was something his father thought of to occupy him with.

  His mother used to ask him to touch her: she complained that he never showed her any affection. He sensed she wanted him to serve her. He felt compassion for her, or at least pity, but when she asked him to rub her feet or knead her shoulders he was revolted by the physical reality of her. In this way she revealed to him what she wanted that no one would give her. He didn’t count – for her, he had no real existence. He had a memory of standing as a small child at the kitchen window, making paper-chain figures out of old newspaper with a big pair of scissors, his father elsewhere, his mother doing something at the stove. The discarded scraps of paper rained down on the floor like snow as he cut. He remembered the sound of her voice, calling him over to hug her. Occasionally she would summon him in this way, as though her own loneliness had suddenly become unbearable to her. She had been strangely moved by the sight of the figures when he unfurled them, all joined together by the hands. She kept asking him how he had done it; he realised then that he had made her credit him with a certain power, because she didn’t understand him.