by Rachel Cusk
‘COME BACK HERE!’
For a second I stood frozen to the spot, looking up into Tony’s eyes. Then I turned and ran off into the trees, skulking and shamefaced as a runaway dog. I went quickly through the glade toward the lighted windows, and since L and Brett had taken down the curtains I was able to see inside in more detail the closer I got. First I saw that the furniture had been pushed aside against the cupboards and shelves, and then I saw two figures, L and Brett, moving so strangely around the room that at first I thought they were dancing. But then, as I drew nearer, I realised they were painting – and what’s more, painting on the walls of the second place!
They were both barely dressed, L with no shirt on and great blotches of paint across his naked chest, and Brett in a camisole and briefs with a scarf tied around her hair. While I watched, L wiped the back of his hand across his nose with a savage gesture and left a long streak of paint over his face too. Brett pointed at it and doubled over with laughter. They had taken the little stepladder from the shed and were using it to reach all the way to the top of the walls, which were half-covered in a growing swirl of lurid colours and shapes. I stopped and stood, rooted to the spot, unable to help seeing what I saw through the glass. I saw the forms of trees and plants and flowers, the trees with great twisting intestinal roots, the flowers fleshy and obscene, with big pink stamens like phalluses; and strange animals, birds and beasts of unearthly shapes and colours; and in the middle of it all two figures, a woman and a man, standing beside a tree bearing violent red fruits like countless open mouths, with a great fat snake wound all around its trunk. It was a Garden of Eden, Jeffers, except a hellish one! I stepped closer to the windows – I could hear harsh music, and above that the sounds of their voices, which seemed to come in bellows and shrieks and gusts of shrill laughter – while the two of them moved around inside as though possessed by demonic energy, splashing and smearing paint over the walls. They were working on the Eve figure, and I heard L say:
‘Let’s give her a moustache, the castrating bitch!’ while Brett shrieked with laughter. ‘Cause of all the trouble,’ he said, blotting the figure’s upper lip with thick black strokes.
‘And let’s give her a nice fat little belly,’ Brett cried, ‘a barren belly like a middle-aged lady’s! She’s skinny all over, but that belly gives her away, the bitch.’
‘A big hairy moustache,’ L said, ‘so we know who’s in charge. We know who’s in charge, don’t we? Don’t we?’
And the two of them howled, while I stood in my wedding dress beyond the window in the glade where night was falling and trembled, trembled to the soles of my feet. It was me they were talking about, me they were painting – I was Eve! A terrible darkness flooded my mind, so that for a while I couldn’t see or think or move. And then a thought came, and it was that I had to get back to Tony. I turned and ran back down along the path through the trees, and as I was approaching the house I saw two red lights in the driveway at the front. They glowed for a minute and then began to recede, amid the sound of an engine. I realised that it was our truck, and that Tony was inside it, and was driving away! I ran out to the driveway and stood there calling his name, but the lights disappeared around the bend and I knew that he had left me and gone, and I didn’t know whether he would ever come back again.
Symbolically enough, the fine weather broke the very next day and it started to rain, and I sat and looked out of the window at the falling water without speaking or moving at all. At a certain point I heard the sound of a car at the front of the house and I bolted outside, believing that Tony had come back, but it was only one of the men, who had driven up to tell me that Tony had asked him to lend me a car, since he had gone away in the truck. Gone away! I went and sat and looked out of the window again. How sad the rain was, falling after all these weeks of warmth and sun. I thought about Tony’s irrigation system, and how he had kept everything alive day after day while the rest of us had rejoiced in the fine weather, and I began to weep while it dawned on me anew how responsible and good Tony was and how frivolous and selfish were the rest of us. Sometimes Justine came and sat beside me and looked out of the window too at the rain falling, and I saw that she was nearly as sad as I was that Tony was gone. She asked me if I knew when he would be coming back, and I said that I didn’t. When it got dark I went upstairs and lay on our bed and tried to talk to Tony. There in the darkness I concentrated my whole self on talking to him in my heart and hoping he would hear me, wherever he was.
The next day two more of the men came, to do Tony’s outdoor chores and the various pieces of work that always need to be done on the land. I remained very still and quiet, talking to Tony in my heart, as I had been doing all night. I did not for a minute doubt his loyalty or his reasons for acting as he had done – what I doubted was myself and my ability ever to convince him that I was still the person he had believed me to be. The thing is, Jeffers, that between two people as different as Tony and me there needs to be an act almost of translation, and at times of crisis it’s very easy for something to get lost in that act. How could we be sure we understood one another? How could we know that what we were seeing and responding to was the same thing? The second place was just one example of our attempts to accommodate those distinctions, because both of us realised that in a marriage like ours you couldn’t always be fed from the same source. There was a freedom in that situation but there was also a kind of sorrow that came if you ever suspected it of representing a limitation in your bond to one another.
For me, Tony’s differences were a test of my ability to contain my own will, which was always straining to make everything how I wanted and thought it should be, to make it conform to my idea. If Tony were to conform to my idea, he would no longer be Tony! I don’t know what, in me, represented a similar test to him, and it isn’t my business to know, but I remember when we were building the second place, and had come to start calling it that in a way I knew would never change if we carried on doing it much longer, I said to him that ‘second place’ pretty much summed up how I felt about myself and my life – that it had been a near miss, requiring just as much effort as victory but with that victory always and forever somehow denied me, by a force that I could only describe as the force of pre-eminence. I could never win, and the reason I couldn’t seemed to lie within certain infallible laws of destiny that I was powerless – as the woman I was – to overcome. I ought to have accepted it at the beginning, and spared myself the effort! Tony listened to me, and I could tell he was slightly surprised by what I was saying, and that he was thinking about why he was, and after a long time he said:
‘For me it doesn’t mean that. It means parallel world. Alternative reality.’
Well, Jeffers, I laughed heartily to myself at this perfect example of the paradox that is Tony and me!
When we got married, I remember the minister confidentially asking me whether I would prefer the word obey to be excised from the marriage vows – a lot of women these days did prefer it, he said, with a sort of wink. I replied that no, I wanted to keep it there, because it seemed to me that to love someone is to be prepared to obey them, to obey even the smallest child, and that a love that makes no promise of relenting or of acquiescence is either an incomplete or a tyrannical love. Most of us are perfectly happy to give our obedience without even thinking about it to almost any tin-pot thing that sets itself up over us as an authority! I promised to obey Tony and he promised to obey me, and what I didn’t know, as I sat there looking through the window at the rain, was whether this vow – as some vows are – was entirely dishonoured by being once broken. In my heart I was asking him to obey me and come back home, and it almost made me feel powerful to ask it, because by asking it I was forced to understand how he had felt that night when I ran away from him into the glade. I was asking, in other words, as a more knowledgeable person than the person I had been then, and this felt like a kind of authority, and I hoped he would hear it and recognise it.
It rained for five day
s straight, and the earth got darker and the grass got greener and the trees drank with their heads down and their branches bowed. The gutters once more dripped into the water butts, and everywhere you went you could hear the constant ticking sound the drops made when they fell. The marsh lay sullen in the distance, cloaked in cloud, although sometimes a bar of cold white light would appear there and frozenly burn. It was a mysterious sight, this opalescent form far, far out and all coldly alight. It did not seem to emanate from the sun, and there was a frigid godliness to it that things lit by the sun do not possess. I stayed mostly in my room, and saw no one but Justine, who sometimes came and sat with me. She asked me whether I thought Tony had left because of L.
‘He left because I made him look ridiculous,’ I said. ‘L just happened to be the cause.’
‘Brett wants to leave too,’ Justine told me. ‘She says L is a bad influence on her. She says he takes too many drugs, and sometimes she takes them with him and they’re affecting her. I don’t know how she can stand it,’ she said, shuddering. ‘He’s so old and dried up. There’s nothing he can give her. He’s just a vampire on her youth.’
I felt very bad, Jeffers, hearing this description of L – it made the whole business of his presence here seem sordid, a sordidness for which I was responsible and in which I had implicated us all. I decided then and there that I would ask him to leave. There was something so small and suburban in this decision that I hated myself for it straight away. It made me unequal to L, the inferior of his own base acts, and I could easily imagine him laughing in my face for it. He could refuse, and then I would have to compel him to leave, by physical force if necessary – that was where that kind of decision got you!
I asked Justine whether she’d been over to the second place and seen what they’d done there and she looked at me guiltily.
‘Are you very angry?’ she said. ‘It wasn’t Brett’s fault, not really.’
I said I wasn’t especially angry – it was more that I was shocked, and shock is sometimes necessary, for without it we would drift into entropy. It was true that my conception of the second place had been irreversibly altered by the sight of L’s horrible mural, and could never go back to what it had been, even if every trace of paint were to be buried beneath layers of limewash. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to turn it back to look exactly as it had been before, yet in that process it would somehow have become fake. A kind of forgetting – a betrayal of the truth of memory – would have been enacted, and this is perhaps how we become artificial in our own lives, Jeffers, by our incessant habit of deliberate forgetting. I thought of how much Tony would hate the mural, especially the snake wound around the tree in the middle – snakes being the only thing Tony is frightened of. The painting of this snake suddenly seemed to represent an attack on Tony by L, an attempt to defeat him. Was Tony defeated? Was that why he had gone away? I remembered how L had stood and stroked my hair and said ‘There, there’ to me while I cried my sorrow out. The memory made me falter, and for a moment I stopped talking to Tony in my heart. I wasn’t sure, in that moment, whether Tony had ever stroked my hair and said ‘There, there,’ nor whether he even could or was likely to do such a thing, and it seemed just then that it was the only thing I had ever wanted a man to do for me. This, in other words, wasn’t L’s attack on Tony – it was really my attack, made possible through L, who had enabled me to doubt him!
‘Oh Tony,’ I said to him in my heart, ‘tell me what the truth is! Is it wrong to want things that you can’t give me? Am I fooling myself into believing that it’s right for us to be together, just because it’s easier and nicer that way?’
For the first time, Jeffers, I considered the possibility that art – not just L’s art but the whole notion of art – might itself be a serpent, whispering in our ears, sapping away all our satisfaction and our belief in the things of this world with the idea that there was something higher and better within us which could never be equalled by what was right in front of us. The distance of art suddenly felt like nothing but the distance in myself, the coldest, loneliest distance in the world from true love and belonging. Tony didn’t believe in art – he believed in people, their goodness and their badness, and he believed in nature. He believed in me, and I believed in this infernal distance in myself and in all things, in which their reality could be transmuted.
Tony had told me, a few days before he left, about a strange encounter he had had with L in the glade. Tony had just shot a deer there, since deer were breaking in and eating the tree bark, which would cause the trees eventu-ally to die. Tony was glad he had managed to cull this deer, which he intended to skin and prepare for us to eat. He was walking through the glade carrying the dead deer over his shoulders when he met L on the path, and far from congratulating Tony on his catch, L had become angry, even after Tony had given him his reasons for shooting the deer.
‘I won’t have killing done near me,’ L apparently said, and he had gone on to say that as far as he was concerned the trees could fend for themselves.
He didn’t seem to recognise that this was Tony’s property and that Tony could do what he wanted here, and I believe the reason he didn’t was because L’s conception of property was as a set of inalienable rights attached to himself. His property was the radial sphere of his own persona; it was the environs of wherever he happened to be. He was defending his right not to be trespassed on by whoever might choose to come and let off a gun right next to his ear – or so I was able to surmise. What I said to Tony was that perhaps it was because L had grown up in a slaughterhouse and had an aversion to the deaths of animals.
‘Maybe,’ Tony said. ‘All he said was that what I did was worse than what the deer had done. But I don’t think so. There are some things you have to be able to kill.’
I thought about this story, while I sat on the bed and stared at the rain, and what I thought was that Tony and L were both right, but that Tony was right in a way that was sadder and harder and more permanent. Tony accepted reality and saw his place in it as something he was responsible for: L objected to reality and was always trying to free himself from its strictures, which meant that he believed himself responsible for nothing. And my own desire to be stroked and comforted and to have the bad things that had happened atoned for lay somewhere between the two, and that was the reason I had run away from Tony in the glade.
On the evening of the fifth day the door to my room opened and there on the threshold stood Tony, as large as life! We looked at each other, and both of us were remembering the last time we had looked at each other, Tony from the window and I from down below in the trees, and I saw that we each knew we had spent some part of ourselves in that moment that would never be restored to us, and that we were going to walk on in this humbler and more depleted condition.
‘Did you hear me?’ I said, holding my breath.
Slowly he nodded his big head, and then he held out his arms and I flew into them.
‘Please forgive me!’ I said. ‘I know that what I did was wrong. I promise never to make you go away again!’
‘I forgive you,’ he said. ‘I know you only made a mistake.’
‘Where have you been?’ I said. ‘Where did you go?’
‘To the cabin at North Hills,’ he said, and I bowed my head sadly, because the cabin at North Hills is my favourite place in all the world, and is where Tony took me when we first fell in love.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Was it very lovely?’
Tony was silent, and so I thought I would never know whether North Hills was still lovely if I wasn’t there, and it seemed right that I shouldn’t know, because I had hurt Tony and there was no point pretending that I hadn’t, or hoping that things had been ruined for him as a result. But then he said, stating what ought to have been obvious to me:
‘I came back.’
Well, we were very happy, and then we went downstairs and were happy some more, and Justine cooked a dinner for us, and even Kurt perked up a little at having T
ony home with us again. North Hills is four or five hours’ drive from the marsh, a lot of it on mud tracks, and it was late and I knew Tony must be tired, so when there was a knock at the door I told him just to go off to bed and went to answer it myself. There on the doorstep in the dark stood Brett, coatless and shivering and wild-eyed. I asked her what the matter was, and when she opened her mouth she shook so hard I could hear her teeth knocking together through the gash of her lips. She told me L was dead, or might be, she didn’t know – he was lying on the bedroom floor and he wasn’t moving, and she had been too frightened to go near him and check.
We all rushed up through the rain to the second place, and found L lying as Brett had described, except that now he was making great groans that showed at least he was alive, though they were the strangest and most terrible inhuman sounds I had ever heard. So Tony, after all his voyaging, got back in his truck and drove the two hours’ distance to the hospital, with L on the back seat where we had packed him in with cushions and blankets, and Brett up front. He returned at dawn, with Brett but without L, who the doctors said had had a stroke.
They kept him there at the hospital for two weeks and then Tony and I drove to get him. He was very thin and frail, though he could walk, and he seemed in those two weeks to have become an old man – he was utterly crushed, Jeffers, and he walked with a sliding kind of step, and his bent legs and hunched-over shoulders made him look cowed, as though he had been frozen in the act of flinching. But it was his eyes that were most shocking, those lamp-like brilliant eyes that had seemed to cast revelation wherever they looked. They were blackened now, like two bombed-out rooms. The light in them was extinguished and they were filled with a horrifying darkness. The doctors spoke to us about his condition while L kept his head strangely alert, as though he were listening, but not to them. And this other-worldly attentiveness, while his ghoulish eyes seemed to stare at nothing, remained a characteristic of his new self, even once he was able to talk and move around freely. His physical recovery, in fact, was quite rapid, except for his right hand, of which he would never regain full use. It was very large and red and swollen, as though it were engorged with blood, and it hung horribly from his thin arm, lurid and inert.