by Rachel Cusk
Tony was calm enough about it, given how much he had done for L and how little he had profited in the history of our dealings with him.
‘Did you trust him?’ I asked, since I believed he never had.
‘Only a wild animal doesn’t trust anybody,’ Tony said.
He didn’t care about the articles, since no one he knew ever read the kinds of papers these things were printed in, but he had observed how much L’s opinions affected me and he worried my life with him at the marsh might now be spoiled.
‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’ he asked me, which in terms of a sacrifice was like him offering to sever his own right arm.
‘Tony,’ I said to him, ‘you are my life – you’re my whole security in living. Where you are, the food I eat tastes better, I sleep better, and the things I see feel real, instead of like pale shadows!’
As for me, I have been disliked all my life, since I was the tiniest child, and have learned to live with it, because the few people I myself have liked have always liked me back – all except for L. His calumny, therefore, had a rare power over me. Hearing the dreadful things he had said about me, it seemed to me there was nothing stable, no actual truth in all the universe, save the immutable one, that nothing exists except what one creates for oneself. To realise this is to bid a last and lonely farewell to dreams.
More wrestling than dancing, Jeffers, as Nietzsche described living!
So I gave up L, gave him up in my heart, and filled in the secret place inside myself that I had kept free for him all along. Someone wrote to ask whether it was true there was a mural painted by L’s hand on my property, and I went to town and bought a big tin of limewash, and Tony and I painted over Adam and Eve and the snake, and I rehung the curtains in the second place and told Justine she could consider it hers, and for her own use, whatever and whenever that might be.
She put her night painting – number seven – in there: as its owner, she now has the peculiar distinction of being the wealthiest person I know! Though I don’t believe she will ever sell it. But I like to think that, however unwittingly, L gave her freedom, the freedom not to look to others for the means of her survival that is still so hard for a woman to come by. She is in love with Arthur, of course, so that game of chance is still hers to play – as, I suppose, it will always be. Might it be true that half of freedom is the willingness to take it when it’s offered? That each of us as individuals must grasp this as a sacred duty, and also as the limit of what we can do for one another? It is hard for me to believe it, because injustice has always seemed so much stronger to me than any human soul. I lost my chance to be free, perhaps, when I became Justine’s mother and decided to love her in the way that I do, because I will always fear for her and for what the unjust world might do to her.
The painting is rather the odd one out of the series, and to my mind the most mysterious and beautiful of all, since unlike the others it has two half-forms in it – amid all the extraordinary textures of darkness – that seem to be composed of light. They seem almost to be beseeching one another, or striving to unify, and in their striving the oneness miraculously occurs. I go in often to look at it, and I never tire of watching that tension between the two shapes resolve itself before my eyes. I like to think, fancifully of course, that this was what L saw, the night he glimpsed Justine and me swimming.
Several months after these events, a letter came for me with a Paris postmark. Inside it was another letter. The second letter was from L. The first letter was from someone called Paulette, who wrote that she had been trying to find an address for me, having recovered an unaddressed letter from the hotel room in which L had died, which she believed was intended for me. She had read the numerous articles about L and had decided that I must be the ‘M’ of the letter. She was sorry it had taken so long for her to get it to me.
I opened it, Jeffers, with hands that didn’t tremble as much as you might expect. I believe I had – and have – come to see through the illusion of personal feeling, as L described it that day on the marsh. So many of the passionate feelings that have ruled me at one time or another have completely faded out of me. Why, then, should I let any feeling claim entitlement to lodge in my heart? I hope I have become, or am becoming, a clear channel. In my own way I think I have come to see something of what L saw at the end, and recorded in the night paintings. The truth lies not in any claim to reality, but in the place where what is real moves beyond our interpretation of it. True art means seeking to capture the unreal. Do you think so, Jeffers?
M
Did you tell me it was a bad idea to come here? If you did then you were right. You were right about quite a few things, if it makes any difference. Some people like to be told that.
Well, the edge is here, and I have fallen over it. I’m in a hotel and it’s cold and dirty. Candy’s daughter was meant to be coming to get me but she hasn’t come for three days now and I don’t know when she will ever come.
I miss your place. Why are things more actual afterward than when they happen? I wish I had stayed, but at the time I wanted to go. I wish we could have lived together sympathetically. Now I can’t see why we couldn’t.
I’m sorry for what I cost you.
This is a bad place.
L
Second Place owes a debt to Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir of the time D. H. Lawrence came to stay with her in Taos, New Mexico. My version – in which the Lawrence figure is a painter, not a writer – is intended as a tribute to her spirit.
ALSO BY RACHEL CUSK
FICTION
Kudos
Transit
Outline
The Bradshaw Variations
Arlington Park
In the Fold
The Lucky Ones
The Country Life
The Temporary
Saving Agnes
NONFICTION
Coventry
Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation
The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy
A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rachel Cusk is the author of the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Paris. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
Also by Rachel Cusk
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2021 by Rachel Cusk
All rights reserved
First edition, 2021
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-374-72079-7
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