Outline: A Novel

by Rachel Cusk

  We were by now approaching the marina, and he asked whether I wouldn’t like to stop for some coffee or a drink before we set sail. There was no need to hurry, after all; we had all the time in the world. He seemed to remember hearing there was a new place that had just opened, somewhere along the beach; he took his foot off the accelerator and dawdled, peering through the windscreen at the dusty roadside and its string of bars and restaurants, beyond which lay the sand and the water with its frill of surf. Abruptly he steered off into the dirt at the side of the verge and stopped, outside a place with palm trees in white cubic planters and a terrace open to the sea with arrangements of white cubic furniture. There was the sound of jazz, and waiters dressed in black were gliding around the empty furniture, in the shade of an asymmetric white canopy like a giant sail. He asked me if this was all right. I said it looked very impressive, and we got out of the car and went and sat at a table, beside one of the palm trees.

  It was important, my neighbour said, to remember to enjoy yourself along the way: in a sense, this had become his philosophy of life these days. His third wife, he said, had been so puritanical that he sometimes felt no amount of pit-stops and pauses would make up for the years he spent with her, in which every event was faced head-on, unanaesthetised, and every little pleasure interrogated and either deemed unnecessary or else written down – with tax added on, he said – in a notebook she kept with her at all times for the purpose. Never had he met someone who was so unmediatedly the product of their family, a Calvinist household obsessed with thrift and the avoidance of waste, though she did, he said, have one weakness, for Formula One racing, which she would sometimes indulge by watching on television, being particularly riveted by the scenes of the winner spraying the cheering crowd with wasted champagne. He had met her at a time when his finances had been devastated by his second divorce, and so her song of parsimony had been, briefly, music to his ears. At the wedding, asked by friends what it was she saw in him – a pertinent enough question, he conceded, at the time – she had replied, I find him interesting.

  He ordered two coffees from one of the circling waiters, and for a while we watched the people on the beach from our shady seclusion, their bare bodies smudged by the haze of heat, so that they looked somehow primordial, lying or moving slowly, half naked, along the shore. I said that it didn’t sound such a bad reason to marry someone, and he looked somewhat darkly out to sea. She knew nothing whatever of the physical side of life, he said, despite the fact that she was nearly forty when they met. Her purity and simplicity attracted him, after the knowing seductiveness of his second wife, but in fact she was a woman entirely without romance, entirely without sex, and the nun-like existence she had led previously – and as far as he knew, had resumed when they parted – was not the consequence of a lack of opportunity but was the accurate reflection of her nature. The intimate side of their marriage was an unmitigated disaster, for once they had conceived a child, which they did almost straight away, she simply could not understand why there was any further need for them to have relations. It was a blow for him, and one he tried hard to forestall, but one night she asked him very frankly how many more times she ought to expect that he would require her to participate in an act she evidently found unenjoyable as well as incomprehensible, and after that he lost heart.

  Yet he did concede, he said, that through this woman he had had his first and only glimpse of a different kind of relationship, indeed a different kind of life, one that was based on principles he had never paid any heed to: decency, equality, virtue, honour, self-sacrifice, as well as thrift of course. She had a great deal of common sense, and an infallible grasp of discipline and routine and household management, and he found both his finances and his health in better order than they had been for years. Theirs was a calm and well-run home, with predictability – something he had always actively avoided, something he had, one could almost say, feared – as its cherished principle. She reminded him of his mother, and in fact it transpired that that was what she expected him to call her, ‘mother’, while she likewise would address him as ‘father’, for it was how her parents had always addressed one another and was all she knew. That was obviously, for him, another nail in the coffin, but all the same he had to admit that she was never exploitative, or silly, or selfish: she was and remains an excellent mother to their son, who is the only one of his children – he had again to admit – that he could call stable and well-adjusted. She did not attempt to destroy him in the divorce proceedings, but instead accepted her share of responsibility for what had happened, so that together they could work out the best way to arrange things, for themselves and their child. I realised, he said, that my whole understanding of life had been, in some sense, profoundly adversarial: the story of men and women, for me, was ultimately a story of war, to the extent that I wondered sometimes whether I had an actual horror of peace, whether I sought to stir things up out of a fear of boredom that was also, you might say, a fear of death itself. I said to you, when we first met, that I regard love – the love between man and woman – as the great regenerator of happiness, but it is also the regenerator of interest. It is what you perhaps would call the storyline – he smiled – and so, he said, for all the virtues of my third wife, I discovered that a life with no story was not, in the end, a life that I could live.

  He paid the bill, waving away my offers of money after a brief but observable hesitation, and we stood to leave. In the car he asked how my class that morning had gone, and I found myself telling him about the woman who had attacked me, about my sense – all through the hour – of her growing resentment and anger and my increasingly certain knowledge that at some point she would strike. He listened, sombrely, as I relayed the details of her tirade, the worst aspect of which, I said, was its element of impersonality, which had caused me to feel like nothing, a non-entity, even while she was giving me, so to speak, her full attention. This feeling, of being negated at the same time as I was exposed, had had a particularly powerful effect on me, I said. It had seemed to encapsulate something that didn’t, strictly speaking, exist. He was silent for a while as we drove to the marina. He stopped the car and switched off the engine.

  ‘I was at home this morning,’ he said, ‘at home in my kitchen, making myself a glass of orange juice, and I suddenly had the very strong feeling that something bad was happening to you.’ He stared through the windscreen at the glittering water, where the white boats were moving up and down. ‘I find it quite extraordinary,’ he said, ‘this very clear signal that I received. I even remember looking at my watch: it must have been at exactly that time that I sent you the message asking if you would like to come out on the boat again today. Am I correct?’ I smiled and said that it was true, I had received his message at more or less exactly that moment. ‘That is very unusual,’ he said. ‘A very strong connection.’

  He got out of the car and I watched him make his way, with his slightly waddling walk, to the water’s edge, where he bent down to pull out the dripping rope. We repeated the previous day’s routine, me waiting while he made things ready on deck and then the courtly pas de deux whereby we changed places, the rope passing between our hands. When everything was done he started the engine and we chugged away from the mooring, from the heat of the jetty and the car park that looked like a field of brilliant metals in the dust, the sun flashing and glinting in the dark windows. We did not go so fast, this time, as the day before; whether through consideration or because, having demonstrated his power, my neighbour could now conserve his energies, I did not know. I sat on the padded bench, his naked back once more before my eyes, the wind scouring the deck, and thought of the strange transitions from enchantment to disenchantment and back again that moved through human affairs like cloudbanks, sometimes portentous and grey and sometimes mere distant inscrutable shapes that blotted out the sun for a while and then just as carelessly revealed it again. My neighbour called back to me, over the noise of the engine, that we were just now passing the promo
ntory and temple of Sounion, from whose cliffs, in Greek legend, the father of Theseus threw himself when he saw his son’s ship returning to land wearing the black sail that conveyed, wrongly, the news of his death. I looked and saw a ruined temple in the distance like a little broken diadem on the hilltop, just before the land tumbled down to meet the sea.

  Mixed messages, my neighbour continued, as we approached the cove and started to slow down, were a cruel plot device that did sometimes have their counterpart in life: his own brother, the one who had died a few years ago, a dear and generous person, suffered his fatal heart attack while waiting for a friend to come to lunch. He had given the man – who happened, moreover, to be a doctor – the wrong address, for he had just moved into a new apartment and hadn’t yet memorised the full details, and so while his friend was searching for him in a street of a similar name on the other side of town, he was lying on his kitchen floor with his life ebbing away, a life, what’s more, that apparently could easily have been saved had he been reached in time. His older brother, the reclusive Swiss millionaire, had responded to these events by having a complex system of alarms installed in his own apartment, for though he was a man who would never forget his own address he was also entirely friendless and miserly and had never had a lunch guest in his life; and indeed when his own heart attack came – which their family medical history made a likelihood – he simply pressed the nearest emergency button and within minutes was in a helicopter, being whisked to a top cardiac unit in Geneva. Sometimes it was as well, he said – and he was thinking of Theseus’s father here – not to take no for an answer, almost as a point of principle.

  I said that, on the contrary, I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible. One could make almost anything happen, if one tried hard enough, but the trying – it seemed to me – was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction they did not naturally want to go, and though you might argue that nothing could ever be accomplished without going against nature to some extent, the artificiality of that vision and its consequences had become – to put it bluntly – anathema to me. There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.

  My neighbour was silent for a considerable length of time. He steered the boat into the deserted cove, where the seabirds stood on the rocks and the water whirled in its little inlet, and took the anchor out of its compartment. He leaned over me to cast it over the side, and slowly paid out the chain until he felt it resting on the bottom.

  ‘Has there really been no one?’ he asked.

  There had, I said, been someone. We were still very good friends. But I hadn’t wanted to carry on with it. I was trying to find a different way of living in the world.

  Now that we had come to a stop, the heat had intensified. The sun shone directly on the padded bench where I sat, and the only patch of shade was directly beneath the canopy, where my neighbour stood with his arms folded, leaning against the side of the boat. It would have been awkward to go and stand there with him. I could feel the skin on my back burning. Just then he moved, but it was only to replace the lid of the compartment where he kept the anchor, and he returned to his original position. He understood, he said, that I was still in a great deal of pain. Being with me had reminded him of episodes in his own life he had not thought of for many years, and was causing him to revisit some of these feelings himself. His first marriage, he said, had really come to an end on a day when they had had a large family party, a lunch to which all the relatives on both sides had been invited and which they held at their home in the suburbs of Athens, a house big enough and grand enough to accommodate everyone. The party had been a success, everything had been eaten and drunk and cleared away and the guests had finally departed, and my neighbour, exhausted, had lain down on the sofa to take a nap. His wife was in the kitchen doing the last of the dishes, the children were out playing somewhere, there was a cricket match making its slow progress on the television, and amidst this scene of domestic contentment my neighbour fell into a profound sleep.

  For a moment he was silent, leaning against the side of the boat, his fleshy white-haired arms with their ropes of veins folded across his chest.

  ‘I believe,’ he resumed presently, ‘that what my wife did then was premeditated, that she saw me lying there and intended to force a confession from me by surprise. She came to the sofa and shook me by the shoulder, waking me up from this very deep sleep, and before I even knew where I was or had time to think, she asked me whether I was having an affair. In my bewilderment I was unable to make a sufficient pretence in time, and though I don’t think I actually admitted it, I left enough room for doubt to confirm her suspicions; and from there’, he said, ‘grew the argument that ended our marriage and caused me, shortly afterwards, to leave the house. I find that I still can’t forgive her,’ he said, ‘for the way in which she deliberately used a moment of vulnerability to extract something from me of which she already had a pre-formed idea. It still’, he said, ‘makes me angry, and in fact I believe that it gave the shape to everything that came afterwards, to her righteous indignation and her refusal to accept any blame whatsoever for our situation, and to the punishing way she treated me in the course of our divorce. And of course no one’, he said, ‘could say that she was wrong for simply waking me from a nap, even though there was no reason to wake me and I would have slept on for hours. Yet I believe, as I say, that it was precisely this underhand act that gave birth to her vitriol, for people are at their least forgiving when they themselves have been underhand, as though they would exact their innocence from you at any price.’

  I listened to this confession, if confession it was, in silence. I found that I was disappointed in him, and that discovery made me feel, for the first time, afraid of him. Some people, I said, might find that a slightly self-serving accusation. At least she woke you up, I said: she might have just cudgelled you to death then and there.

  ‘It was nothing,’ he replied, waving this away – ‘a piece of stupidity, an office flirtation that got out of hand.’

  I saw, as he said this, a look of such naked guilt cross his face that I felt as though the scene on the sofa were being re-enacted before my eyes, all these years later. He was, I could see, a bad liar, and it was hard, I said, not to sympathise with his wife, the mother of his children, though that was obviously not the response he wanted to his story. He shrugged. Why should he take all the blame, he said, for the fact that the marriage – which after all had as good as commenced with their engagement while they were still teenagers – had become, if not boring, then comfortable to the point of stupefaction? If he had known what the consequences would be – he tailed off. Well, even then something of the sort would have been inevitable, he admitted. His clandestine romance, insignificant as it was, had beckoned him like the lights of a city seen from far away. He was drawn not so much to this specific woman as to the concept of excitement itself, a prospect that seemed – as he had said, from far away – to welcome him with its largeness and brightness, to offer him an anonymity that might also constitute a re-evaluation of his whole persona, he who was known so thoroughly and yet so limitingly by his wife and before that by his parents, his siblings, his uncles and aunts. It was to be free of their knowledge of him that he sought that brighter world, which admittedly, in his youth, he had made the mistake of believing to be far more extensive than it actually was. He has been disillusioned more times than he could count in his relationships with women. Yet part of that feeling – the feeling of excitement that is also a rebirth of identity – has attended all his experiences of falling in love; and in the end, despite everything that has happened, these have been the most compelling moments of his life.

  I said I wondered how he could fail to see the relationship between d
isillusionment and knowledge in what he had told me. If he could only love what he did not know, and be loved in return on that same basis, then knowledge became an inexorable disenchantment, for which the only cure was to fall in love with someone new. There was a silence. He stood there, looking all at once grizzled and old, his hairy arms folded above his paunch, his swimming trunks sagging between his legs, his birdlike face almost fossilised into its quizzical expression. The silence extended itself, there amid the glittering water and the glaring sun. I became aware of the sound of the water sucking at the sides of the boat, of the harsh cries of the seagulls on their rocks, of the faint sound of engines coming from the mainland. My neighbour lifted his head and looked out to sea, his chin raised, his eyes searching the horizon. There was a certain stiffness in his manner, a self-consciousness, like that of an actor about to deliver a too-famous line.

  ‘I have been asking myself’, he said, ‘why it is that I find myself so attracted to you.’

  He spoke so momentously that I couldn’t help laughing out loud. He looked surprised and somewhat confused by this, but all the same he came towards me, out of the shade and into the sun, heavily yet inexorably, like a prehistoric creature issuing from its cave. He bent down, moving awkwardly around the coldbox at my feet, and tried to embrace me from the side, putting one arm around my shoulders while attempting to bring his face into contact with mine. I could smell his breath, and feel his bushy grey eyebrows grazing my skin. The great beak of his nose loomed at the edge of my field of vision, his claw-like hands with their white fur fumbled at my shoulders; I felt myself, momentarily, being wrapped around in his greyness and dryness, as though the prehistoric creature were wrapping me in its dry bat-like wings, felt his scaly mouth miss its mark and move blindly at my cheek. Through the whole thing I stayed rigidly still, staring straight ahead of me at the steering wheel, until at last he withdrew, back into the shade.