Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

  Well, Jeffers, it was in one way a great relief to hear all this, but at the same time I couldn’t bear the thought of L being consigned to the fate Arthur had described. If only he could have taken advantage of my goodwill, gotten along better with me, been nicer, kinder, more reciprocal …

  ‘You can’t expect to keep a snake as a pet,’ Arthur said, sympathetically but accurately enough.

  I was in turmoil nonetheless, believing somewhere inside me that if I could become capable of greater generosity, then L would be saved. But who or what did I think I was saving him from? I liked to think I was prepared to go to the ends of the earth for L – but only if he upheld his side of the bargain, and was grateful and polite and fitted in with the pleasant, comfortable vision of life I had offered him. Which he would and could never do!

  ‘He isn’t your responsibility,’ Arthur repeated, seeing my distress, while the tears began to flow down his cheeks. ‘He’s a grown man who took his own chances. Believe me, he’s always done exactly what he wanted and never given a thought to what anyone else felt about it. He’s had the opposite life to someone like you – he hasn’t inconvenienced himself for a minute on account of other people. Face it, he wouldn’t help you,’ he said kindly, wiping his eyes, ‘if you were dying in front of him in the street.’

  Despite everything, Jeffers, a part of me still believed that he would.

  ‘By the way, have you seen what he’s doing over there?’ Arthur said. ‘The self-portraits – they’re just incredible.’

  I have to say that worried as we were, we had a wonderful evening with Arthur, who was such fun, and when Justine came to join us and saw the handsome stranger she blushed to the roots of her hair and I saw how beautiful she had become, and that she was in a sense finished, and I wondered whether this was how a painter might feel, looking at a canvas and realising there was no more he could or ought to do to it. Arthur left the next morning, promising to be in touch very soon and to come back as soon as he could. And he did come back, but by then everything had changed again.

  By the middle of the summer L was much more himself, though a shrunken and very irascible version. He wore a look now on his face that is difficult to describe, Jeffers – put simply, it was the look of a creature who has been caught by a bigger creature and knows there is now no possibility of escape. There was no resignation in it, and I don’t suppose the creature feels terribly much resignation in the jaws of his captor either, despite the inexorability of his fate. No, it was more like the flash a bulb makes when the fuse gives out, illuminating and extinguishing in almost the same instant. L was caught in a long instant of illumination in which he realised, it seemed to me, his whole self and the extent of his being, because he was seeing at the same time the end of that being. In his expression, realisation and fear were indistinguishable from one another. Yet there was also a kind of wonder, as though at the original fact of his own existence.

  It was around then that Justine began to say that L was sleeping much more during the day and working later at night. The weather was very warm, and there were often great bright moons, and she had started to find him sitting out by the prow of the boat long after darkness had fallen. In the morning she would discover him asleep on the couch in the main room, while numerous sketches lay scattered across the table. They were watercolour sketches, and all she could say was that they were pictures of darkness, and that they reminded her of how frightened she had been of the dark when she was a child and believed she could see things in it that weren’t there.

  One day, L asked her whether she couldn’t find some bag or satchel for him to use so that he could take his materials outside with him, and she did find such a thing, and packed the materials he indicated into it. He had started to become very agitated, she said, at nightfall, and would move frantically around the room, sometimes knocking into the walls or upsetting the furniture, and though he was usually very kind and courteous to her he could sometimes shout at her if she happened to call by when he was in that state. Hearing this, I decided Justine needed a night off. Since it was so warm, I suggested that Tony could take care of L for the evening, while she and I went down to one of the marsh creeks for a swim. One way or another we hadn’t swum much that summer, though it was the thing I most liked to do. Usually we swam in the day – it had been years since I had done something so romantic as go down and swim in the moonlight! So after dinner Justine and I took our towels and left Tony to do the clearing up, and made our way down the garden and along the path to the marsh.

  What a night it was, the moon so bright that it cast our shadows across the sandy earth, and so warm and windless that we could barely feel the air against our skin. The tide was in and the creeks were full and an opalescent sheen lay all across the water, and the moon burned its cold white path to our feet from the furthest horizon. And then, amid all this perfection, we realised that in our hurry we had forgotten to bring our swimming costumes!

  The only thing for it was to swim naked, since neither of us wanted to go all the way back to the house, yet there was something taboo about this idea, at least for us, and I saw Justine hesitate as we realised our predicament. It is hard to understand, Jeffers, the physical awkwardness that grows up between a child and a parent, given the fleshliness of their bond. I had always been careful, once Justine was of an age to notice, not to impose my flesh on her, though it had taken me longer to accept her own need for privacy. I remember the surprise – almost the sadness – I felt, the first time she closed the door against me while she took her bath. How often I have been made to realise it is children who teach their parents, not the other way around! Perhaps this is not true of everyone, but speaking for myself I felt certain that of all bodies mine was the one Justine would least like to see unclothed, and I myself had not seen her naked for many years.

  ‘We won’t look,’ I said to her in the end.

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  And we flung off our clothes as fast as we could and ran shouting into the water. I believe there are certain moments in life that don’t obey the laws of time and instead last forever, and this was one of them: I am living it still, Jeffers! We quickly grew quiet, after that initial boisterousness, and swam silently through water that in the moonlight seemed as thick and pale as milk and that left great smooth furrows behind us.

  ‘Look!’ Justine cried out. ‘What’s this?’

  She had swum a little distance away from me and was floating and dipping her arms above and below the surface so that the water ran down them like molten light.

  ‘It’s phosphorescence,’ I said, lifting up my own arms and watching the strange light flow weightlessly over them.

  She cried out in wonder, for she had never seen this before, and it struck me, Jeffers, how the human capacity for receptivity is a kind of birthright, an asset given to us in the moment of our creation by which we are intended to regulate the currency of our souls. Unless we give back to life as much as we take from it, this faculty will fail us sooner or later. My difficulty, I saw then, had always lain in finding a way to give back all the impressions I had received, to render an account to a god who had never come and never come, despite my desire to surrender everything that was stored inside me. Yet even so my receptive faculty had not, for some reason, failed me: I had remained a devourer while yearning to become a creator, and I saw that I had summoned L across the continents intuitively believing that he could perform that transformative function for me, could release me into creative action. Well, he had obeyed, and apparently nothing significant had come of it, beyond the momentary flashes of insight between us that had been interspersed by so many hours of frustration and blankness and pain.

  I swam to the end of the creek and when I turned around I saw Justine coming out of the water onto the sandbank. She was either unconscious of my looking or had decided not to notice it, for she stepped unhurriedly to get her towel, her white form revealed in the moonlight. She was so smooth and sturdy and unblemished, s
o new and strong! She stood as a deer stands, proudly with its antlers lifted, and there in the water I quailed before her power and her vulnerability, this creature I had made who seemed to be both of me and outside and beyond me. She dried herself quickly and dressed while I swam to the shore, and I was dressing too when she grabbed my arm and squeezed and said:

  ‘Someone’s there!’

  We both looked into the long shadows beyond the path, and there indeed was a figure, sort of scurrying away.

  ‘It’s L,’ Justine said wryly. ‘Do you think he was watching us?’

  Well, I didn’t know whether he had been or not, but he certainly moved to get away faster than I might have expected him to! When we got back to the house we saw that far from looking after L, Tony had fallen asleep in his chair, and so I went across to the second place myself to make sure that all was well. There were no lights on, but the night was still so bright that I found my way easily through the glade, and as I approached could see quite clearly into the main room through the curtainless windows. Whether or not it was him we had seen on the marsh, L was now standing at his easel, and the moonlight fell in pale bands across him and across the furniture and the floor, so that he seemed almost to be a mere object among other objects. He was working in deep concentration, so deep that he barely moved, though I believe he was usually very kinetic and mobile in the act of painting. Nonetheless he was still, and watching him I realised that a certain kind of stillness is the most perfect form of action. He stood very close to the canvas, almost as though he were feeding from it, and therefore blocked my view of it. I stood there for a long time, not wanting to disturb him with any clumsy noise or movement, and then I very quietly went away, feeling that I had witnessed something in the way of a sacrament, the sort of sacrament that only occurs in nature, when an organism – be it the smallest flower or the largest beast – silently and unobserved confirms its own being.

  I wish, Jeffers, I had paid more attention in the period I am describing to you, not because I don’t remember it, but because I didn’t live it as I might have wished. If only something could tell us in advance which parts of life to pay attention to! We pay attention, for instance, when we’re falling in love, and then afterwards as often as not we realise we were deluding ourselves. Those weeks in which L painted the night paintings were, for me, the opposite of falling in love. I went about in a low, almost mindless state, heaving myself out of bed in the morning and feeling as though I were carrying something dead inside me. The feeling constantly plagued me that I had been duped or tricked by life, and I remember being unable to stop a wry, fatalistic expression from creeping onto my face, which I would catch sight of sometimes in the mirror. I even stopped trying to communicate with Tony, which meant that our evenings were silent, because if I don’t talk then no one will. Yet in those same days the very thing that I had wished for all along – that L would find a way of capturing the ineffability of the marsh landscape, and thereby unlock and record something of my own soul – was occurring.

  Justine told me that L was making a new painting every night, and that the same routine – the build-up of agitation over the course of a few hours, followed by him bursting out of the house with his bag of paints and plunging away into the dark – repeated itself each time. In other words, the paintings were produced almost as acts of performance, requiring this winding or working up of himself in advance, just as actors or other performers do. More than anything this should have told me that we were approaching an ending, since this extreme kind of behaviour was entirely unsustainable, but at the time all I felt was resentment at the labour and worry it was causing Justine. I did dimly perceive that L was travelling far outside himself in his nightly encounters, and that he must therefore have found something there that he went in pursuit of over and over again, but this only caused me to feel a vague suspicious kind of jealousy, the kind a wife feels when she suspects her husband of having an affair but won’t yet admit it to herself. All I knew was that L had gone away from me, was not even considering me, while he exercised his entitlement to live in my environs, as if I didn’t exist.

  Then I met him unexpectedly one afternoon, when I was out trudging aimlessly along the marsh paths – he was sitting on one of the small bluffs that overlook the creeks. The marsh was quite dry by now from the heat, and its faded, fawn colours had an air of nostalgia to them, so that you seemed to be looking at it across a distance of time as well as space. There was the smell of sea lavender on the breezes that for me is the smell of summers, and even that scent seemed to hold a melancholy note, as though everything that had been and could ever be joyous and good lay irretrievably in the past. I think I would have walked past L, so exiled from him did I feel, had he not turned his head as I approached and – after a few seconds in which I am certain he did not recognise me – looked at me quite kindly.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ he said when I sat down next to him. ‘We haven’t always gotten along too well, have we?’

  He spoke rather vaguely and distractedly, and though I was surprised by his remarks, I wondered at the same time whether he was quite conscious of what he was saying, and to whom.

  ‘I don’t know how to live my life any other way,’ I said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he said, patting my hand in an avuncular kind of fashion. ‘All that has gone. So many of our feelings are illusion,’ he said.

  How true, Jeffers, that observation felt to me!

  ‘I have made a discovery,’ he said.

  ‘Will you tell me what it is?’

  He turned his empty eyes on me, and the sight of those dead circles made an awful pain go through me. I didn’t need to hear what his discovery was – I could see it right there!

  ‘It’s so lovely here,’ he said after a while. ‘I like watching the birds. They make me laugh, they enjoy being themselves so. We’re awfully cruel to our bodies, you know. Then they refuse to live for us.’

  I don’t believe he was talking about death, but about the non-being in life that most of us go in for.

  ‘You’ve always pleased yourself,’ I said, somewhat bitterly, because it did seem to me that that was what he had done, and what most men did.

  ‘But it turns out,’ he said after a while, as though I hadn’t spoken, ‘that nothing is real after all.’

  I think I understood then that his illness had released him from his own identity and history and memory so violently and thoroughly that he had been able at last to really see. And what he had seen was not death, but unreality. This, I believe, was the discovery he had made, and it was what the night paintings told of – and the question I wish I had asked him that afternoon on the marsh was about what came after that discovery, but perhaps L didn’t know the answer to that question any more than the rest of us do. Instead we sat there and watched the birds floating and hovering on the breezes, and after half an hour or more of sitting in silence I got up while he stayed where he was, and seemed inclined to remain. He looked up at me, though, and he gripped my hand suddenly with his own strong, dry, bony hand and he said, in the same vague impersonal way:

  ‘I know you’re going to feel better soon.’

  And we said goodbye to one another, and I never saw L again.

  Tony had brought in a big crop of fruit and vegetables from the garden, and for two days after that I was imprisoned inside in the kitchen from dawn to dusk, sweating in clouds of heat and blanching and canning and preserving, which was what I was doing the morning Justine burst in and told me that L had gone.

  ‘How could he have gone?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know!’ she cried, and she handed me a note.

  M

  I decided to move on. I’ll try to get to Paris after all. Do what you want with the paintings, except for number seven. That one’s for Justine. Be so kind as to give it to her.

  L

  So! Half-crippled as he was, he had set off in pursuit of that old sexual fantasy, and decided to throw his tattered hat
in the ring of life once more! Well, Jeffers, there were all kinds of pandemonium while we tried to find out where he had got to and how, but in the end the mystery was solved simply enough when one of the men mentioned to Tony that he himself had driven L to the station, after L had accosted him in a field near the house a week or so earlier to ask the favour. They had arranged a time, and L had offered to pay and been politely refused, and the man had assumed it was all perfectly open and above board. Which in a way, I suppose, it was.

  I have never been able to find out the precise details of L’s journey and of how he managed to get so far out into the world from our tiny station in his weakened state, but it is well known that he died in Paris in a hotel room not long after he arrived, of another stroke. Soon after that news came, Arthur pulled up in our driveway again and together we went through everything, and packed up all the paintings and the sketches, and all L’s notebooks and other materials, and one day a big van arrived to take it away to L’s gallery in New York. It wasn’t long before the rumble that started over there became audible here, and I began to get all kinds of enquiries and demands for information, and to see my name appearing in the articles that soon started to come out about L’s last paintings. It turned out that he had corresponded with a number of people during his time in the second place, and had wasted no opportunity to tell them the most terrible and vituperative things about me and about the controlling, destructive kind of woman I was, and about Tony, whom he mentioned rather obsessively, always – and only just – stopping short of making fun of him and putting him down.