by Rachel Cusk
We sat around and talked for a while. I don’t know what we talked about – I never do, in a situation like that. Tony imperturbably made drinks for people and acted as though nothing was wrong. Brett downed two cocktails one after the other, which seemed to have the curious effect of sobering her up. L accepted one drink, which he placed fastidiously on a side table and didn’t look at again. I glanced frequently over at Justine, who was sitting in a low chair beside the fire with her guitar laid flat across her knees and a meditative expression on her face, even while Brett kept bursting out into shrill laughter next to her. At a certain point she picked up her guitar and began to play softly, and then to hum to herself. L, as usual, had sat as far away from me as he could get, and Kurt was beside him. The two of them were talking, or rather L was talking and Kurt was listening: L had turned his head and was speaking straight into Kurt’s ear, which I suppose he had to do as his voice was so indistinct and there were other noises in the room. Justine’s playing eventually started to have a calming effect, on Brett as well as on Tony and me, and when she began to sing in her sweet voice we fell quiet and listened. Kurt, too, turned his head toward Justine, so that L had to change position to keep talking in his ear. After a while Kurt turned away from her again to listen to L, but he kept glancing back at her with a strange, cold expression in his eyes, and I saw then that his loyalties had somehow become divided, and I sensed L was to blame for it.
The song Justine was playing was a familiar song, and we began to sing along with it, as we often did in that situation. These times were very dear to me, Jeffers, because I always felt deep down that it was me Justine was singing for, and that her song was the song of our wanderings together through time, from her first day of life to the present moment. And in this particular moment I admired her more than ever, since she seemed to have disclosed a new power in bringing righteous order back to our situation. Brett had pulled a coat on over her slip and sang along in a husky, pleasant kind of voice, and Tony struck chords with his strong, low voice, and I matched my singing to Justine’s as best I could. Even Kurt joined in eventually, if only out of habit. The only person who wasn’t singing was L, and I didn’t believe for a minute that this was because he didn’t know how to sing or didn’t know the tune. He wouldn’t sing, and the reason he wouldn’t was because everyone else was singing and it was in his nature not to be coerced. Another person might at least have gone to the trouble to appear charmed or entertained by the scene, but L merely sat there with a weary look on his face, as though he were using this as an opportunity to think about all the other tiresome things he had been made to sit through. Sometimes he would look up and meet my eye, and something of his separation would become my own. The strangest feeling of detachment, almost of disloyalty, would come over me: even there, in the midst of the things I loved best, he had the ability to cast me into doubt and to expose in myself what was otherwise shrouded over. It was as though, in those moments, his terrible objectivity became my own and I saw things the way they really are.
It almost goes without saying, Jeffers, that part of L’s greatness lay in his ability to be right about the things that he saw, and what confounded me was how, at the plane of living, this rightness could be so discordant and cruel. Or rather, what was so liberating and rewarding in looking at a painting by L became acutely uncomfortable when one encountered or lived it in the flesh. It was the feeling that there could be no excuses or explanations, no dissimulating: he filled one with the dreadful suspicion that there is no story to life, no personal meaning beyond the meaning of any given moment. Something in me loved this feeling, or at the very least knew it and recognised it to be true, as one must recognise darkness and acknowledge its truth alongside that of light; and in that same sense I knew and recognised L. I haven’t loved very many people in my life – before Tony, I never really loved anyone. I was only now learning to love Justine with something other than the usual mother-love and to see her as she actually was. True love is the product of freedom, and I’m not sure a parent and child can ever have that kind of love, unless they decide to start over again as adults. I loved Tony and I loved Justine and I loved L, Jeffers, even though the time I spent with him was so often bitter and painful, because he drew me with the cruelty of his rightness closer to the truth.
Brett and Justine sang their song together very charmingly, and then they sang it again since I begged them to, and when that was over Kurt stood up in his black velvet housecoat and came to stand in front of us beside the fireplace to read. He had a block of pages an inch thick which he placed solemnly on a table beside him, and he began to read without introduction, in a loud and doleful voice, lifting one page after another from the top of the block and afterwards placing them facedown on the other side, until we realised he must be intending to read the whole thing! We all sat without moving or speaking, a captive audience, as this knowledge dawned on us – I couldn’t understand how he had managed to produce so much writing in so little time. It was set in an alternate world, Jeffers, with dragons and monsters and armies of imaginary creatures interminably fighting one another, and great lists of names like in parts of the Old Testament, and pages of oracular-sounding dialogue which Kurt spoke out very slowly and solemnly. After an hour or so of this I sort of came to and began to look around out of the corner of my eye. The fire had gone out, and Tony was asleep in his chair, while Brett and Justine sat with glazed faces, their heads leaning together. Only L appeared to be paying attention: he sat very still in his chair with his hands folded in his lap and his head cocked slightly to the side. Finally, after nearly two hours, Kurt had read his way through the whole block and he laid down the last page, heaving a great sigh with his arms hanging by his sides and his head thrown back, while we roused ourselves to applaud.
‘That’s it so far,’ he gasped. ‘What do you think?’
It was one o’clock in the morning by then, and whether or not any of us had anything to say, I for one was reluctant to prolong the evening much further! I tried to think of a comment to make for politeness’s sake, but I wasn’t sure I remembered anything at all about what he’d read. I expected Justine at least to contribute something, but she just sat with Brett’s head on her shoulder and an air of abstraction, as though whatever it was she might have said couldn’t be uttered out loud. Tony had opened his eyes, but that was all. L appeared quite composed, remaining very erect and wide-awake in his chair, with his fingers laced beneath his chin. The silence extended until I felt sure it would snap, and just before that happened L spoke.
‘It’s really far too long,’ he said, in his quiet, unhurried voice.
I guessed that Kurt had never once considered length to be a matter of concern in the production of literature – on the contrary, he had probably taken it as a sign that things were going well!
‘It has to be,’ he said, rather stiffly.
‘But it’s over now,’ L said. ‘So why does it? Why does it have to take up time?’
‘It’s how the story goes,’ Kurt said. He looked rather confused. ‘That was only the first section.’
L lifted his eyebrows and gave a small smile.
‘But my time belongs to me,’ he said. ‘Be careful what you ask people to endure.’
And with that he calmly stood up and bid us all goodnight and vanished into the darkness! For a few moments Kurt just stood there, white-faced and stricken. Justine stirred herself and embarked on some propitiatory comment or other, but he put up a hand to silence her. He began to cast terrible glances around the room, as though it were full of enemy assailants closing in on him. Then he grabbed the sheaf of paper and tucked it under his arm and bolted out into the darkness too! Justine told me later that Kurt’s novel was in fact quite a faithful copy of a book the two of them had read a few months earlier: she believed he hadn’t really been aware of what he was doing, and that when the ideas had come into his head he had thought he was imagining them himself rather than simply remembering them. The next day he w
as no longer to be seen in the study window. He appeared in the kitchen wearing his normal clothes, and kept at a distance from everybody. I saw him wandering forlornly in the garden and I went out to find him, since I felt sorry for him by this point and wondered whether I should have done more to look after him. How guilty a man like that can make you feel, Jeffers! The truth was that in another compartment of my mind I was considering making him disappear altogether by marching him down to the train station, buying him a ticket and sending him straight back to the bosom of his ideal family; and my guilt-reaction sat across from this impulse and the two of them stared at one another gloomily.
‘It’s all that man’s fault,’ he surprised me by saying, when I discovered him sitting perched on a rock by the stream that runs through the orchard, like an oversized garden gnome. I asked him if he meant L, and he nodded miserably. ‘He gave me all kinds of strange advice.’
‘What did he tell you?’ I said.
‘He told me to stop being such a – such a milquetoast,’ Kurt said. ‘That was the word he used. I didn’t know what it meant but I looked it up. He told me if I wanted to improve things with Justine I needed to find a mistress, and that the best mistress of all was work. It was because I admitted to him that I thought Justine didn’t love me any more,’ he said. ‘That’s how it started. He said I should try writing, because it was cheap and you didn’t need any particular talent.’
‘What else did he say?’
‘He said that I should never let Justine know what I was thinking. He said that if Justine was nice to me then I could be nice back. But if she wasn’t nice, I should break her. He said I had to break her will, and that the way to do it was to always do the opposite of what she expected or wanted me to do. He’s a terrible man.’ Kurt was looking at me in wide-eyed terror. ‘He says he intends to destroy you.’
‘Destroy me?’
‘That’s what he says. But I won’t let him destroy you!’
Well, I didn’t know where to begin with this outburst, except that I did recognise the part about breaking people’s wills. The thing was, Jeffers, part of me wanted to be destroyed, even as I feared that a whole reality would collapse along with it, the reality shared by other people and things – the whole web of deeds and associations that contained both past and future and was clogged with all the evidence of the great dirty passage of time, yet always failed somehow to capture the living moment. What I wanted to get rid of was the part of me that had always been there, and I believe that this was the essence of the feeling I shared with L, as he himself had explained it in our first conversation. There was a greater reality, I believed, beyond or behind or beneath the reality I knew, and it seemed to me that a lifelong pain would be ended if only I could break through to it. It didn’t seem to me any longer that this was something you could think your way into – the psychoanalyst had carried that idea away with him, when he ran off down the street. It needed violence, the actual destruction of the ailing part, just as the body sometimes needs surgery to cure it. It seemed to me that this was the form freedom took out of necessity, the final form, when every other attempt to attain it had failed. I didn’t know what this violence was or how it could be inflicted, only that something in L’s threat seemed to promise it.
I asked Kurt whether he thought he would like to go home for a while, and if so whether he would like me to help him arrange it.
‘I can’t leave you,’ Kurt said. ‘It would be too dangerous.’
I assured him that I would be perfectly fine, and that if necessary I had Tony to protect me, but he was adamant that he had to remain in order to avert the possibility of my destruction. Later that day Justine came to me full of indignation, asking why I was trying to send Kurt home behind her back. I tried to defend myself, and one way or another the little structure of love we had been building together was knocked down and would have to be built all over again.
After I met Tony for the first time, he wrote to me nearly every day for a month or more, until circumstances allowed me to come and meet him again, since at that time I was living some distance away. I was very surprised by his letters, which were extremely well written and poetic, and also by the regularity with which they came. It was as if he were beating a drum, steadily and without cease, that I heard across all the miles that separated us until I recognised that it was summoning me. Tony’s letters gave me the first experience I had ever had of satisfaction – of my most secret hopes and desires, and my sense of life’s possibility, being met. They were always prompter and more numerous and longer and more beautiful than I expected, and they never disappointed me. Whatever I imagined getting from Tony, it wasn’t this sparkling river of words that flowed through me and irrigated me and began to bring me slowly back to life. It has allowed me ever after to live with his silence, because I know that the river is there, and that only I am permitted to have this knowledge.
During those strange weeks with L, I thought often back to Tony’s letters and to the time when our love began. Though it was only a matter of months, that time was so large and luminous that it dwarfed entire decades of my life, like a great edifice in the middle of a city that can be seen from miles away. In a sense its abundance took it outside of time altogether, and by that I mean that it’s still there: I can visit it and live in it for hours, and part of the reason I can is that it is built on a foundation of language. I’m making another building here, Jeffers, out of the time I spent with L, but I’m not sure quite what kind of a building it is, nor whether I will ever be able to come back to visit it. There’s a certain point in life at which you realise it’s no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life’s illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal – or can be. An image is also eternal, but it has no dealings with time – it disowns it, as it has to do, for how could one ever in the practical world scrutinise or comprehend the balance sheet of time that brought about the image’s unending moment? Yet the spirituality of the image beckons us, as our own sight does, with the promise to free us from ourselves. In the midst of the practical reality of my life with Tony, I felt the lure of abundance again, emanating from L – yet where Tony’s language had flowed toward and into me, L’s call was the reverse. It was the inchoate call out of some mystery or void.
That call had grown very faint as the days passed, and just as I had started to believe that I could no longer hear it at all and that L had become once more a stranger to me, I met him unexpectedly out walking on the marsh. I was down there collecting leaves from some of the edible sea plants that grow around the creeks, to cook them for dinner – I am always quite proud of this activity, Jeffers, which sometimes feels like the only proper use I ever make of myself – and he came around a bend in the path. He was more casually dressed than usual, and his face was quite ruddy from the sun, and altogether he looked more human and less of a devil than he generally did. His trousers were rolled up and he carried his shoes in his hand, and he told me he had gone out to one of the sandbars while the tide was coming in and had had to wade back!
‘And then,’ he said, quite breathlessly, and seeming to find it all rather exciting, ‘as I was walking back up, I heard people shooting. I looked around for a while but I couldn’t see anyone. The shots seemed to be coming one at a time from different places. I was thinking, first I nearly drown, then I have to face down a gunman, or several of them. Is there someone I should tell?’
As he spoke, the sound of a single loud report rang into the air from the field behind him and he flinched.
‘There it is again,’ he said.
I told him it was only one of the stationary gas guns the farmers put in their fields at that time of year to keep the birds off their crops. I was used to the sound and was barely startle
d by it, and in that half-conscious state I could hear it as all kinds of things. Sometimes I liked to imagine, I told him, that it was the sound of wicked men blowing their brains out, one after another.
‘Huh,’ he said, with a grudging half-smile. ‘Wicked men don’t do that. Anyway, you’d probably like those men if you got to know them. Nothing evil ever dies. Especially not of remorse.’
His calves were streaked with mud up to the knee, and I told him he needed to be careful of the tides, which were dangerous if you didn’t know where the paths were.
‘I was trying to find the edge,’ he said, looking away from me toward where the horizon lay smudged and indistinct in haze, ‘but there is no edge. You just get worn down by the slow curvature. I wanted to see what here looks like from there. I walked a long way out, but there is no there – it just sort of dissolves, doesn’t it? There are no lines here at all.’
I waited in silence for him to say something more, and after the longest time he resumed:
‘You know, a lot of people get a bad idea right around when they’ve just passed the middle of their lives. They see a kind of mirage and they go into another building phase, but in fact they’re building death. That’s maybe what happened to me after all. I suddenly saw it, right out there,’ he said, pointing toward the distant blue shape of the receded tide, ‘the illusion of that death-structure. I wish I had understood before how to dissolve. Not just how to dissolve the line – other things too. I did the opposite, because I thought I had to resist being worn down. The more I tried to make a structure, the more it felt like everything around me had gone bad. It felt like I was making the world, and making it wrong, when all I was doing was making my own death. But you don’t have to die. The dissolving looks like death but in fact it’s the other way around. I didn’t see it to start with.’