by Rachel Cusk
When L said these things, Jeffers, I felt a thrill of vindication – I knew he would understand it! It was a grey, windy morning, and the marsh looked at its least mysterious in that ordinary, glaring light. It appeared somehow technical, and it was that same technical matter-of-factness that gladdened my heart, because it reassured me that L and I were looking at the same thing. I have seen it at such pitches of the sublime – in certain moods and lights and weathers – that it has wrung every emotion out of me, but in its plainest colours, as it was that morning, its reality is indubitable. As far as I knew, he hadn’t by that point made any work about the marsh – but he did say that his portrait phase had just about run its course. The trouble was, he said, there weren’t enough people around, other than working people who were too busy to sit for him. He didn’t know why he hadn’t realised that at the start. He had painted Tony, and Justine, and Kurt, and so he’d just about run through the repertoire, unless he could go into town and kidnap some more subjects.
‘I wondered about painting people who aren’t here any more,’ he said. ‘The thought of it makes me sick. But if I could get over the sickness…’
I reminded him that there was one human subject here that he hadn’t yet attempted – me! He had said before that he couldn’t see me, and he had never explained why he couldn’t, and I was well aware that he avoided physical proximity to me at every opportunity. In romantic stories, avoidance of one person by another is often used as a device in the plot of love, the implication being that certain natures betray what they desire by appearing to disdain it. What hopeful and tragic fantasies the authors of those plots shamelessly play on! I didn’t delude myself that L was suppressing an attraction to me, but I did think it was curious that I represented such an obstacle to him. Almost, I wondered whether the removal of that obstacle might help him move forward, which is why I had no particular shame about suggesting he put me in a frame, the way he’d done to Tony. Kurt’s mention, that day in the garden, of L’s wish to destroy me had reinforced that impression. Why shouldn’t he just come out and say why he thought I ought to be destroyed?
He didn’t reply straight away to my remark, but stood for a while with his arms folded tight and his face turned into the wind and into the hard, flat light, as though he found the discomfort consoling. Painting people, he said eventually, was an act of both scrutiny and idolatry in which – for him, at least – the coldness of separation had to be maintained at all costs. For this reason he had always been especially disturbed by artists who painted their children. When people fall in love, he said, they experience this coldness as the greatest frisson of all, the fascination of a subject that can still be seen as distinct from oneself. The more familiar the loved one becomes, the less that frisson can be obtained. Worship, in other words, comes before knowledge, and in life this represents the complete initial loss or abandonment of objectivity, followed by a good long dose of reality while the truth is revealed. A portrait is more like an act of promiscuity, he said, in which coldness and desire coexist to the end, and it requires a certain hard-heartedness, which was why he had thought it was the right direction for him to take at this moment. Whatever promiscuity he had indulged in in his younger years, he had been fooling himself, because the hardening of his heart with age was of a different magnitude. The quality that attracted him now was unavailability, the deep moral unavailability of certain people, so that to have them was in effect to steal them and violate – or at least experience – their untouchability. Disgust came easily to him these days, he was filled to the brim with it, so it didn’t take much to make him overflow, and he wondered sometimes whether this was the presentation at long last of the bill for his childhood, when he had held his disgust inside himself year after year. Whatever the reason, he said, that quality of untouchability was the antidote to it, to the sickness that overcame him whenever he caught the stench of human familiarity.
While he spoke, a feeling had been growing inside me, of the most abject rejection and abandonment, because what I understood him to be saying underneath all his explanations was that my used-up female body was disgusting to him, and that this was the reason he kept me at a distance, even to the point of being unable to sit next to me!
‘It may come as a surprise to you to hear it, but I’m also trying to find a way of dissolving,’ I said to him indignantly, while tears surged in my eyes. ‘That’s why I wanted you to come here. You’re not the only one who feels that way. You can’t just blot me out, because it makes you feel sick to see me – I’m just as untouchable as anyone else! I don’t exist to be seen by you,’ I said, ‘so don’t delude yourself on that point, because I’m the one that’s trying to free myself from how you see me. You’d feel better if you could see what I actually am, but you can’t. Your sight is a kind of murder, and I won’t be murdered any more.’
And I put my face in my hands and wept!
Well, what I learned that morning was that however wicked and terrible an artist permits himself to become on the human scale, somewhere inside him there is a part that remains capable of pity – or rather, when that part is gone, so is his art. The truest test of a person is the test of compassion. Is that true, Jeffers? In any event, L was very kind to me that morning, and he even put his arms around me and let me weep on his chest while he stroked my hair, and he said:
‘There, there, honey. Don’t cry,’ in a soft, kind voice which made me cry even harder.
The feeling of physical closeness to him was quite disturbing to me, as it had come to seem somehow forbidden that we should ever touch, even by accident. I didn’t quite like being touched by him. It made the question of disgust, which I had tried to stamp down, rise up again, except that this time it felt as though it was I who was disgusted by him. Perhaps it’s the case that L had – and who knows, maybe all men have – only one way of touching a woman, in which their automatic selves are set into involuntary motion. I didn’t want that automatic, shop-soiled touching. I disentangled myself from him as soon as I could, and sat down on the grass and put my head on my knees and wept some more. After a while L sat down beside me, and in the silence the soothing sights and sounds of the marsh, the waving grasses flecked with butterflies, the distant soughing of the sea, the trailing ribbons of birdsong and the calls of the geese and gulls, could come into focus.
‘It’s good to sit and watch this gentle world,’ L said. ‘We tire ourselves out so.’
Sitting there I began to tell him about the time all those years before when I had walked through a Paris morning in the sun and come upon rooms full of his paintings, and about how it had made me feel, to experience the sort of kinship those images had aroused in me, as though I had suddenly discovered my true origins. They had made me feel that I was not alone in what, until then, I had held as secret to myself. The admission of that secret there in his work, I said, had led to a change in my life’s orientation, because suddenly the secret felt stronger than the things that had kept it hidden. But this change of course had been much more effortful and violent than I could have foreseen, and it had looked at times as though I had entered on the path to disaster, and what I couldn’t understand was how the simple revelation of personal truth could lead to so much suffering and cruelty, when surely it was morally inoffensive to seek to live in a condition of truth.
I had learned since then, I said, that I was naive to expect that other people would merely allow me to change when those changes directly interfered with their own interests, and the revelation that my whole life, which appeared to have been built on love and freedom of choice, was in fact a facade that concealed the most craven selfishness was deeply shocking to me. There is no limit, I said, to what certain people will do to you if you offend them or take away what they want, and the fact that at one time you liked or chose to be among those people is one of the central mysteries and tragedies of life. Yet it is only a reflection, I said, of the very conditions and substances out of which your humanity is made – it is the attempt
by selfishness and dishonesty to reproduce themselves in you and to continue to flourish in the world. You might as well go mad, I said, as try to resist that attempt.
‘Did you go mad?’ L asked.
‘I didn’t go mad,’ I said. ‘Though I suppose I still might, one day.’
I told him about how automatically I had believed – or rather, had assumed – that Justine’s father was a nice, or at least a decent man. How easy it is, Jeffers, to believe that of the men who conform to our idea of normality! I don’t think a woman is ever taken on trust in that way, unless it’s through the notion of her subservience. Yet within less than a month of my return from Paris and my announcement that I wanted to change the way things were, I had lost my home, my money, my friends, and even then I didn’t foresee the greater losses that were ahead of me. Justine was four years old at that time, and capable of expressing an opinion, and one day when she was at his house – as it now was – her father called me to say that she didn’t want me to collect her, as had been arranged. He even put her on the phone, so I could hear her say it myself. It was a year, Jeffers, before I got her back, and during that year I would often go and hide like a wraith at the gates of her school in the hope of catching a glimpse of her, until one day he happened to see me when he was coming out hand in hand with her, and he pointed at me and said to her:
‘There’s that terrible woman – run, Justine, run!’
And the two of them ran away down the street! That was when I tried to make myself die, but I couldn’t die – mothers can’t, really, unless it happens by accident. I discovered afterwards that he had been terribly neglectful of her all through this period, and often left her alone for hours on end, as though he had retained this part of me specifically so that he could demonstrate his cruelty and indifference toward it. This was my sorrow, Jeffers, and I gave it to L sitting there on the marsh, through fits of weeping. What I wanted L to understand was that this will of mine that he so objected to had survived numerous attempts to break it, and at this point could be credited with my own survival and that of my child. It had likewise brought disaster and dispossession on me – but better dispossession than to live where hatred walks around disguised as love! To lose my will would be to lose my hold on life – to go mad – and I was in no doubt that it could break one day of its own accord, I said to L, but it was my suspicion that a woman’s madness represents the final refuge of the male secret, the place where he would destroy her rather than be revealed, and I had no intention now of being destroyed in that way – I would sooner destroy myself, I said, if Justine was capable of understanding my reasons for doing it. What I wanted instead was for L to meet me on the basis of that recognition I had felt that day in Paris – I wanted to be recognised by him, because grateful as I was for Tony and Justine and for my existence at the marsh, my individuality had tormented me my whole life with its demand to be recognised.
‘All right,’ he said quietly, after a long silence. ‘Come across later and let me look at you. Wear something that fits,’ he added.
Well, Jeffers, I grabbed my bag of sea leaves and I leaped to my feet and I ran back up to the house in a state of pure joy – I felt all at once so light and unburdened, I thought I might just fly up to the sun! Everything seemed transformed, the day, the landscape, the meaning of my presence in it, as if it had been turned inside out. I was like a person who walks for the first time without pain, after a long, long illness. I ran up the lawn and along the flower beds and as I came around the corner to the house I bumped into Tony.
‘Isn’t it a wonderful day?’ I said to him. ‘Isn’t everything just wonderful?’
He gave me a lengthy and very beady look.
‘Looks like you need to go and lie down for a while,’ he said.
‘But Tony, don’t be ridiculous – I’m full of energy!’ I cried. ‘I feel like I could build a house or chop down a whole forest or – ’
I couldn’t keep still any longer and I ran into the house and through the kitchen, where Justine and Kurt were standing quietly at the counter, shelling the mountain of peas that had just come in from the garden.
‘Isn’t it beautiful outside?’ I said. ‘I feel so alive today!’
They both lifted their faces and stared dumbly at me and I left my bag of leaves on the counter and ran on, up the stairs and into my room, and I closed the door behind me and dropped down on the bed. Why didn’t anyone want me to be happy? Why were they all so disapproving, the minute I showed any excitement and high spirits? My mood began to deflate a little with these thoughts. I sat there on the bed and went back over my conversation with L, and thought again about the feeling his attention had given me, which was a golden feeling of health. Oh, why was living so painful, and why were we given these moments of health, if only to realise how burdened with pain we were the rest of the time? Why was it so difficult to live day after day with people and still remember that you were distinct from them and that this was your one mortal life?
After all I found that Tony was right, and that I did need to lie down quietly, and I lay there and breathed and savoured the marvellous feeling of lightness, as though some great malevolent lump had been removed from inside me. In the end, it wasn’t anyone else’s business that the lump had been there, nor that it was gone – the whole point was that I had to learn to live more in myself. Everybody else, it seemed to me, lived perfectly happily in themselves. Only I drifted around like a vagrant spirit, cast out of the home of myself to be buffeted by every word and mood and whim of other people! Sensitivity all at once seemed to me like the most terrible curse, Jeffers, foraging for truth in a million pointless details, when in fact there was only one truth, and it lay beyond the power of description. There was only this lack or lightness that words fled away from, and I lay on the bed and felt it, and tried not to think too much about what it was and how one could describe it.
But we live in time – we can’t help it! Eventually I had to get up and go downstairs, and there were all the usual chores to do and all the enacting of oneself that living with other people requires, and one way or another it was late afternoon before I was able to contemplate going across to the second place for my assignation with L. All through those hours and those chores I was aware that a great change had taken place in me, and I kept hoping someone else would notice it. The thought of L looking at me had made me look at myself, and because I could see myself I expected the others to see me too! But they acted as usual, even Tony, and when I slipped away upstairs to get changed it all seemed so normal that I remained convinced that what I was doing was normal as well.
I opened my cupboard of clothes and felt a sudden qualm at the prospect of trying to find what I wanted, so sure was I that what I wanted wasn’t there. As I have already said, Jeffers, I had at some point given up on the attempt to learn the language of clothes, and if someone had given me a uniform I would gladly have worn it every day, but instead I had devised a sort of uniform of my own, in that everything I possessed was more or less the same. But none of it answered to L’s description, which was to wear something that fitted, and as I rummaged hopelessly in the cupboard I remembered that before I came to the marsh my clothes had been more fitted, and that perhaps the last day on which I had worn something fitted was the day I married Tony! Thinking this made me feel suddenly tearful, and I had the awful feeling of an unravelling deep inside me. Did Tony not appreciate me as a woman with a female form? Did I go around in shapeless clothes these days as a kind of renunciation of sexuality and beauty? Clawing in the very back of the cupboard with a sudden and instinctive certainty, I found myself pulling out the very same dress I had got married in, which I had entirely forgotten was there. It was a beautiful, simple, close-fitting dress, and as I held it in my hands I knew it was exactly right, while at the same time I was beset by waves of conflicting emotion, chief among them a nameless kind of sorrow, for the people Tony and I had been then, as if those people no longer existed.
Filled with da
ring I put the dress on, and was arranging my hair in front of the mirror when Tony walked into the room. Tony is rarely excited or perturbed, and this occasion was no exception. I had wondered whether he might be so moved by the sight of the dress that he wouldn’t notice I hadn’t put it on for him, but he simply lifted his head a little and looked at me for a while and then stated:
‘You’re wearing your dress.’
‘L has finally asked to paint me,’ I said to him, all in a flutter and trying not to let him notice, ‘and he told me to wear something close-fitting, and this was the only thing I could think of!’
I decided it was better not to say anything else, even though part of me was also aching to receive Tony’s compliments and to sit and talk with him about the people we once were, and whether or not those people still existed. Instead, while he was digesting the information I had given him, I slipped past him and sped out through the door and down the stairs. The afternoon had become a little overcast and now, in the early evening, a kind of gloom had fallen over the glade. I wondered whether the bad light might affect my sitting with L and whether he would cancel it, and whether in fact he would be there at all, since now that I came to think of it we hadn’t arranged a specific time. I let myself out of the house and scurried up the path that leads into the trees, and saw that all the lights of the second place were on, making a great glowing shape in the distance. I felt the air on my uncovered shoulders and arms, and the unaccustomed feeling of my hair falling against my bare back, and a feeling of youth and freedom surged through me as I hastened toward the glade and the distant cube of light. At that moment, I heard the clattering sound behind me of a window being opened, and I stopped and turned around and looked up. There was Tony, standing at the open window of our bedroom, looking down on me from a great height. Our eyes met, and he held out a terrible arm at me and he thundered:
