by Rachel Cusk
A lot of the paintings were of women, and of one woman in particular, and my feelings about those were more recognisable, though even then somehow painless and disembodied. There was a small charcoal sketch of a woman asleep in bed, her dark head a mere smudge of oblivion in the tousled bedclothes. I admit a kind of silent bitter weeping did come from my heart at this record of passion, which seemed to define everything I hadn’t known in my life, and I wondered if I ever would. In many of the larger portraits, L paints a dark-haired, quite fleshy woman – often he is in the painting with her – and I wondered whether this smudge in the bed, almost effaced by desire, was the same person. In the portraits she usually wears some kind of mask or disguise; sometimes she seems to love him, at others merely to be tolerating him. But his desire, when it comes, extinguishes her.
It was in the landscapes, though, that I heard the phrase the loudest, and it was these same images that stayed smouldering in my mind over the years, until the time came that I want to tell you about, Jeffers, when fire broke out again all around me. The religiousness of L’s landscapes! If human existence can be a religion, that is. When he paints a landscape, he is remembering looking at it. That’s the best I can do to describe the landscapes, or describe how I saw them and the way they made me feel. You would doubtless do far better. But the point is for you to understand how it was that the idea of L and his landscapes recurred all those years later and in another place, when I was living on the marsh with Tony and thinking quite differently. I realise now that I fell in love with Tony’s marsh because it had precisely that same quality, the quality of something remembered, that shares and is inextricable from the moment of being. I could never capture it, and I don’t know why I needed it to be captured at all, but that is as good an example of human determinism as we’re likely to lay our hands on for now!
You will be wondering, Jeffers, what the phrase was that came out of L’s paintings and spoke itself so clearly to me. It was: I am here. I won’t say what I think the words mean, or who they refer to, because that would be to try to stop them living.
One day I wrote to L, inviting him to come to the marsh:
Dear L
Richard C gave me your details – I think we are both friends of his. I first came to know your work fifteen years ago, when it picked me up off the street and put me on the path to a different understanding of life. I mean that quite literally! These days I and my husband Tony live in a place of great but subtle beauty, where artists often seem to find the will or the energy or just the opportunity to work. I would like you to come here, to see what it looks like through your eyes. Our landscape is one of those conundrums people are drawn to, and end up missing the point of entirely. It is full of desolation and solace and mystery, and it hasn’t yet told its secret to anyone. Twice a day the sea rises over the marsh and fills its creeks and crevices and bears away – or so I like to think of it – the evidence of its thoughts. I have walked on the marsh every day for these past years and it’s never looked like the same place twice. They’re always trying to paint it, of course, but what they end up painting is the contents of their own mind – they try to find drama or a story or a point of exception in it, when those things can only ever be incidental to its character. I think of the marsh as the vast woolly breast of some sleeping god or animal, whose motion is the deep, slow motion of somnambulant breathing. Those are just my opinions, but they make me bold enough to suspect that you might share them and that there is something here for you – and perhaps only for you.
We live simply and comfortably, and have a second place where people can stay and be quite alone if they want to be. We’ve had a number of guests here to do their own kind of work, one after another. They stay sometimes for days and sometimes for months. We don’t keep a calendar and so far haven’t seemed to need one – it all goes quite naturally. I repeat, you can be entirely alone if you wish to be. The summer is the best time and we have more visitors asking to come then. If you’re at all interested in coming I can write again with more details of where we are, how we live, how to get here, etc. We are quite remote, though there is a small town a few miles away where you can find amenities if you need them. People often say this is one of the last places.
M
He replied, Jeffers, almost straight away, which came as somewhat of a surprise. It made me wonder who else I could summon up, simply by sitting down and directing my will at them!
M
I got your note, and read it on the terrace of that new restaurant in Malibu, shielding my eyes from a bloodletting of a sunset that brought hellfire and brimstone to mind. I’m in LA to hang my new show, which opens in a couple of weeks. The pollution is obscene. Your woolly marsh sounded nice by comparison.
I haven’t seen Richard C in years. I don’t know what he’s doing now.
As it happens I’m alone, and free to try something different. I’d like to try something. Perhaps what you’re suggesting is it. I wonder what it was you saw that took you off the street.
Give me the details, anyhow. The place you describe sounds isolated, but I’ve never yet found anywhere I can be freer and more alone than New York. Are there really no people, or does that small town you mention harbour a cluster of arty types?
Let me know, anyhow.
L
ps: My gallerist says she’s been somewhere that might be where you are. Is that possible? From how you described it, it didn’t sound like somewhere she would go.
I wrote back, telling him more about Tony and me and about the life here and what he could expect of us, and trying to describe what the second place was like. I made sure not to exaggerate, Jeffers: Tony has taught me that my habit of wanting to please people by saying that things are better than they are just creates disappointment, mine more than anyone else’s. It’s a form of control, as so much of generosity is.
We built the second place when Tony bought a parcel of wasteland that bordered our land, to prevent it from being misused. The rules here about development are strict, but of course people find all kinds of ways to get around them. The most usual one is to plant trees in order to cut them down again for money, pale and sapless trees that grow fast and straight up in rows like soldiers and then are quickly felled like soldiers too, so that what’s left is a shorn mess of amputated stumps. We didn’t want those poor soldiers marching past our windows to their deaths day and night! So we bought it, intending to turn it over to nature, more or less, but once we’d started clearing away all the brambles and fallen trees we came upon a whole different story. Tony has a group of men he knows who all help one another when there’s physical work to be done. Some of those bramble clumps were twenty feet high, Jeffers, and they scratched the men to death trying to defend themselves, but when they were cut away all sorts of things were hidden underneath them. We found a beautiful half-rotten clinker-built sailboat, and two old classic cars, and then finally an entire cottage buried beneath a mountain of ivy! It was the integuments of a life we uncovered, complete with a lovelier view of the marsh than our own. I have often wondered about the person who lived that life that had been so deeply forgotten it had been allowed, literally, to rot back into the earth. The cars were in profound and interesting stages of decay and we let them be, and mowed the grass around them so that they became objects of display; and likewise the boat, which stood at the top of an incline with its prow lifted toward the sea. I found the boat a little melancholy, since it always seemed to be calling to someone or something out of reach; but the cars continued to collapse majestically over time, as though bent on discovering a truth of their own. The cottage was quite sordid and quite sad, and we quickly realised it would have to be done over to rid it of that awful human type of sadness. The inside was entirely blackened by fire, and the men had the theory that therein was written the fate of the previous incumbent. So they took the whole thing down and built it back up again by hand, with Tony giving the directions.
You and Tony have never met, Jeffers, bu
t I believe you would get along: he’s very practical, as you yourself are, and not bourgeois, and not at all neglectful in the sense that the very souls of most bourgeois men are neglectful. He doesn’t show the weakness of neglect, and nor does he need to neglect something in order to have power over it. He does have a number of Certainties, though, which come from his particular knowledge and position and which can be very useful and reassuring until you find yourself opposing one of them! I have never met another human being who is so little burdened by shame as Tony and so little inclined to make others feel ashamed of themselves. He doesn’t comment and he doesn’t criticise and this puts him in an ocean of silence compared to most people. Sometimes his silence makes me feel invisible, not to him but to myself, because as I’ve told you I’ve been criticised all my life: it’s how I’ve come to know that I’m there. Yet because I am one of his Certainties, he finds it difficult to believe that I could doubt my own existence. ‘You are asking me to criticise you,’ he will sometimes say at the end of one or other of my outbursts. And that’s all he’ll say!
I’m telling you all this, Jeffers, because it has to do with the building of the second place and with what we decided to use it for, which was as a home for the things that weren’t already here – the higher things, or so I thought them, that I had come to know and care about one way or another in my life. I don’t mean that we envisaged starting some kind of community or utopia. It was simply that Tony understood I had interests of my own, and that just because he was satisfied with our life on the marsh it didn’t automatically follow that I would be too. I needed some degree of communication, however small, with the notions of art and with the people who abide by those notions. And those people did come, and they did communicate, though they always seemed to end up liking Tony more than they liked me!
When people marry young, Jeffers, everything grows out of the shared root of their youth and it becomes impossible to tell which part is you and which the other person. So if you attempt to sever yourselves from one another it becomes a severance all the way from the roots to the furthest ends of the branches, a gory mess of a process that seems to leave you half of what you were before. But when you make a marriage later it is more like the meeting of two distinctly formed things, a kind of bumping into one another, the way whole landmasses bumped into one another and fused over geological time, leaving great dramatic seams of mountain ranges as the evidence of their fusing. It is less of an organic process and more of a spatial event, an external manifestation. People could live in and around Tony and me in a way they could never have entered and inhabited the dark core – whether living or dead – of an original marriage. Our relationship had plenty of openness, but it posed certain difficulties too, natural challenges that had to be surmounted: bridges had to be built and tunnels bored, to get across to one another out of what was pre-formed. The second place was one such bridge, and Tony’s silence ran undisrupted beneath it like a river.
It stands across a gentle slope up from the main house, separated by a glade of trees through which the sun rises into our windows every morning; and the sun sets, through those same trees, in the evenings into the windows of the second place. Those windows go from the floor to the ceiling, so that the huge horizontal bar of the marsh and its drama – its sweeping passages of colour and light, the brewing of its distant storms, the great drifts of seabirds that float or settle over its pelt in white flecks, the sea that sometimes lies roaring at the very furthest line of the horizon in a boiling white foam and sometimes advances gleaming and silent until it has covered everything in a glassy sheet of water – seem to be right there in the room with you.
The windows were one of Tony’s Certainties, and I disagreed with him and stood against him over them from the beginning, because I believe a house ought first and foremost to be cosy and to allow you to forget the outside when you’re in it. The lack of privacy was troubling to me, especially at night when the lights were on and whoever was in there could forget that they could be seen as clear as day. I have a great fear of seeing people when they don’t know they’re being observed, and finding out things about them I’d be happier not knowing! But for Tony a view has a kind of spiritual significance, not as something you describe or talk about but as something you live in correspondence with, so that it looks back at you and incorporates itself in everything you do. I watch him pause when he’s cutting wood or digging over the vegetables and lift his eyes to the marsh for a while, and then go back to what he’s doing; and so we eat the marsh along with our vegetables, and warm ourselves with it in our fires in the evening.
Tony wouldn’t hear me about the windows, and even went so far as to act as though he couldn’t hear me, and afterwards, whenever I brought the subject up and talked about how much trouble they caused, he would listen to me in silence and then say, ‘I like them.’ I suppose that was his way of admitting he might have been wrong. The very first time we had a visitor, a musician who was trying to record and replicate patterns of birdsong and who turned the whole place into a studio full of big black boxes and fantastic dashboards with dials and blinking lights, I went across through the trees to bring some post that had arrived for him, and there he was standing stark naked at the stove, frying some eggs! I would have crept away, except that he saw me through the windows the same way I had seen him, and had to come to the door and take his post, still without a stitch on, because he had obviously decided it was better to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
Or perhaps nothing had happened, Jeffers – perhaps the world is full of people like Tony and this man, who think there’s nothing to be worried about in seeing and being seen, with clothes or without them!
I was allowed after that episode to hang up some curtains, and I was very proud of those beautiful curtains made of a thick pale linen, even though I knew they caused Tony to have a pain in his eyes every time he saw them. The floors were made of wide chestnut planks that the men had planed and sanded themselves and the walls were rough white lime-plaster, and all the cupboards and shelves were made of the same chestnut wood, so that the whole place felt very human and natural, all shapely and textured and sweet-smelling, and not at all clinical and squared off in the way that some new places feel. We made one big room with the stove and the fire and some comfortable chairs, and a long wooden table for eating and working at; and then another smaller room for sleeping, and a bathroom with a nice old cast-iron bath in it that I had found in a junk shop. It was all so fresh and lovely, I was ready to move in there myself. When it was finished, Tony said:
‘Justine will think we made this place for her.’
Well, I can’t say it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder what my daughter would think of the work we’d done, but it certainly hadn’t crossed my mind that she might believe it had been done in her honour! As soon as Tony said it, though, I knew it was true, and I immediately felt guilty, while at the same time determined not to have something stolen from me. These two feelings, always coming in a pair, the better to incapacitate and handcuff me – I have been troubled by them right from the beginning, when Justine arrived on this earth and seemed to want to stand in the same spot that I stood in, only I was there first. I could never reconcile myself to the fact that just as you’ve recovered from your own childhood, and finally crawled out of the pit of it and felt the sun on your face for the first time, you have to give up that place in the sun to a baby you’re determined won’t suffer the way you did, and crawl back down into another pit of self-sacrifice to make sure she doesn’t! At that time Justine had just finished college and gone off to Berlin to work for an organisation there, but she often came back to visit seeming faintly unsettled, with a transitory air of immediate need, like a person in a busy station looking around for somewhere to sit while they wait for their train. No matter how nice a seat I found for her, she always preferred the look of the one I was sitting in. I wondered whether we ought to offer the second place to her straight away and get it ov
er with, but as it happened she fell in love with a man called Kurt and didn’t come back at all that summer, and our new life of having visitors to the marsh began.
I didn’t, obviously, go into all this ancient history in my letter to L, only as much of it as I thought he needed to know. There were a few weeks of silence while life went on as usual, and then all at once he wrote saying he was coming, and coming the very next month! Fortunately we didn’t happen to have any visitors just then, and so Tony and I flew around the second place, repainting the walls and re-waxing the floors and cleaning the windows with newspaper and vinegar until they shone. The first blossoms had just burst out of the cherry trees after the winter and the glade was frothing with the lovely pink and white flowers, and we cut a few branches and arranged them in big earthenware jars and even laid a fire in the grate. My arms ached from cleaning those windows and we fell into bed exhausted in the evenings, having barely been able to cook a meal for ourselves.
Then L wrote again:
M
After all I decided to go somewhere else. Someone I know has an island he says I can use. It’s meant to be sort of a paradise. So I’m going to go and try being Robinson Crusoe for a while. It’s a pity not to be calling in at your marsh. I keep meeting people who know you, and they say you’re okay.
L
Well, we accepted it, Jeffers, though I won’t say I forgot about it – the summer went on to be the hottest and most glorious summer we’d had in years, and we lit bonfires at night and slept outside underneath skies throbbing with stars, and swam in the tidal creeks, and I kept imagining how it would have been if L had been there with us and how he would have looked at it. A writer came to stay in the second place instead of L, and we barely saw him. He spent all day indoors with the curtains closed, even in the hottest weather – I believe he was asleep! But I did often think about L on his island, and about what kind of paradise it was, and even though our own place was more or less paradisiacal that summer I made myself jealous by thinking about it. It was as if some breeze kept wafting toward me, bearing a tormenting scent of freedom – and that same torment suddenly seemed to have bothered and pursued me for too much of my life. I felt I had dismantled everything and run this way and that trying to get at it, the way someone with a bee sting might tear at their clothes and run around making their agony visible to people who don’t know what’s wrong. I kept trying to make Tony talk to me about it – I felt a burning need to speak, to analyse, to get these feelings out of me into the open where I could see them and walk around them. One night, when Tony and I were going to bed, I flew at him in a rage and said all kinds of terrible things, about how lonely and washed up I felt, about how he never gave me any real attention of the kind that makes a woman feel like a woman and just expected me to sort of give birth to myself all the time, like Venus out of a seashell. As if I knew anything about what makes a woman feel like a woman! In the end I flounced off to sleep on the couch downstairs, and I lay there and thought about what I’d said and about how Tony never does anything to hurt or control me, and in the end I ran back upstairs and jumped into bed with him and said:
