Second Place by Rachel Cusk (ebook smartphone .txt) 📕

But my aim here is to give you a picture of L: my thoughts about perception and reality are useful only insofar as they advanced my clumsy understanding of who and what L was, and of how his mind worked. My suspicion was that the artist’s soul – or the part of his soul in which he is an artist – has to be entirely amoral and free of personal bias. And given that life as it goes on works to reinforce our personal bias more and more in order to allow us to accept the limitations of our fate, the artist must stay especially alert so as to avoid those temptations and hear the call of truth when it comes. That call, I believe, is the easiest thing in the world to miss – or rather, to ignore. And the temptation to ignore it comes not just once but a thousand times, all the way until the end. Most people prefer to take care of themselves before they take care of the truth, and then wonder where their talent has disappeared off to. This doesn’t have all that much to do with happiness, Jeffers, though it must be said that the artists I have known who have come closest to fulfilling their vision have also been the most miserable. And L was one such: his unhappiness stood around him like a thick fog. Yet I couldn’t help but suspect that it was bound up with other things, with his age and fading manhood and the change in his circumstances: he wished, in other words, that he had taken more care of himself, not less!

He began to talk, sitting there on the stool, about a time he had spent in his younger years in California, just after the first dramatic peak of his early success. He had bought a place on the beach, so close to the water that the breaking waves would surge white and foaming almost into the house itself. The mesmerising sound and action of the ocean cast a kind of spell or enchantment, in which he had lived the same day over and over until he was no longer aware of their passing. The sun beat down and was frothed back up into a sort of mist by the pounding waves, to make an encircling wall of phosphorescence that was like a bowl of light. To live in a bowl of light, outside the mechanism of time – this, he recognised, was freedom. He was with a woman called Candy, and the edible-sounding sweetness of that name defined her – everything about her was pure delicious sugar. For a whole long summer the two of them lived on the sand and rolled in the luminous water, barely dressing, turning so brown it was as if something inside them had become eternal, like two clay figures baked in a kiln. He could spend all day just watching her, the way she stood or lay or moved, and he didn’t draw her even once, because she seemed to have plucked that thorn from his heart and brought him to a condition of stunned intimacy. She was already the most accurate possible representation of herself, and he submitted to her like a baby submits to its mother, and the sweetness he got in return was a kind of narcotic that made him know for the first time what it was to be oblivious.

‘She moved to Paris,’ he said, pinioning me to my chair with his eyes, ‘and she married some nobleman there, and I hadn’t seen her or heard from her in decades. But last week she suddenly wrote to me. She got my details from my gallerist and she wrote to tell me about her life. She and her husband live in some out-of-the-way place in the country, and their daughter lives in the family house in Paris. The daughter is the same age Candy was that time when we lived on the beach, and it had made her think about those months again, because her daughter reminds her so much of herself at the same age. She had thought about trying to see me, she said, but in the end she decided not to. Too much time has passed, and it would be too sad. But if I found myself in Paris, she said, she was certain her daughter would love to meet me and show me around. I’ve been wondering,’ L said, ‘about how to get there, and about what it would be like to meet this girl. The mother reborn in the daughter – it’s so wonderfully tempting, so preposterous! Could it possibly be true?’

He was smiling, a great chillingly luminous smile, and his eyes were blazing – he looked suddenly uncanny and alive, dangerously so. I had found his story painful and horrible, and I half hoped he had told it with the intention of being cruel, because otherwise I would have to conclude he was a madman! To rush off to Paris, an ageing man down on his luck, with the expectation of meeting a re-creation of his former lover and being gloriously restored to potency and youth – it would have been laughable, Jeffers, had it not also been so disturbing.

‘I don’t know about getting to Paris,’ I said, rather stiffly. ‘I don’t know if it’s possible. You’d have to find out.’

How I hated having that stiffness forced on me! Did he understand that by parading his freedom and the fulfilment of his desires in front of me, he was making me less free and less fulfilled than I had been before I walked in the door? He looked startled when I spoke, as though he hadn’t expected me to raise such a practical objection.

‘It’s all so silly,’ he said softly, half to himself. ‘You get tired of reality, and then you discover it’s already gotten tired of you. We should try to stay real,’ he