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

left! When Tony’s been working on the land I rouse myself to cook for him, and go out to pick herbs from the garden and to look in the shed for potatoes. At that time of year – the spring – the potatoes we store in the shed start to sprout, even though we keep them in complete darkness. They throw out these white fleshy arms because they know it’s spring, and sometimes I’ll look at one and realise a potato knows more than most people do.

The morning after that night in Paris, when I got up and walked beside the river, my body barely felt the ground: the green glittering water, and the worn slanted stone walls of palest beige, and the early sun shining on them and on me as I moved through them, made such a buoyant element that I became weightless. I wonder whether that is what it feels like to be loved – by which I mean the important love, the one you receive before you know strictly speaking that you exist. My safety in that moment felt limitless. What was it, I wonder, that I saw to make me feel that way, when in reality I was anything but safe? When in fact I had glimpsed the germ of a possibility that was soon to grow and rage like a cancer through my life, consuming years, consuming substance; when a few hours later I would be sitting face-to-face with the devil himself?

I must have wandered along for quite some time, because when I came back up to the street the shops were open and there were people and cars moving around in the sun. I was hungry, and so I started to pay attention to the shopfronts, looking for somewhere I could buy something to eat. I’m not good in that situation, Jeffers: I find it difficult to answer my own needs. The sight of other people getting what they want, jostling and demanding things, makes me decide I would rather go without. I hold back, embarrassed by need – my own and other people’s. This sounds like a ridiculous quality, and I’ve always known I would be the first to be trampled underfoot in a crisis, though I’ve noticed that children are also like this and find the needs of their particular body embarrassing. When I say this to Tony, that I would be the first to go under because I wouldn’t fight for my share, he laughs and says he doesn’t think so. So much for self-knowledge, Jeffers!

Whatever the truth is, there weren’t many people about that morning in Paris, and the streets where I was walking, which were somewhere near the Rue du Bac, were entirely devoid of things to eat in the first place. Instead the shops were full of exotic fabrics and antiques and colonial-era curios costing several weeks of an ordinary person’s wages, and of a particular fragrance which was the fragrance, I suppose, of money, and I looked in the windows as I passed, as though I were considering making a purchase of a large carved-wood African head at that early hour of the morning. The streets were perfect chasms of light and shade and I made sure to stay in the sun, walking without any other purpose or direction. Presently, ahead of me, I saw a sign that had been set out on the pavement, and on that sign was an image. The image, Jeffers, was of a painting by L, and it was part of an advertisement for an exhibition of his work at a gallery nearby. Even from a distance I recognised something about it, though I still can’t say quite what it was, because though I had vaguely heard of L, I had no real idea when or how I had heard of him, nor of who he was or what he painted. Nonetheless he spoke to me: he addressed me there on that Paris street, and I followed the signs one after another until I arrived at the gallery and walked straight in through the open door.

You will want to know, Jeffers, which of his paintings they’d chosen for the advertisement and why it affected me in that way. There is no particular reason, on the surface, why L’s work should summon a woman like me, or perhaps any woman – but least of all, surely, a young mother on the brink of rebellion whose impossible yearnings, moreover, are crystallised in reverse by the aura of absolute freedom his paintings emanate, a freedom elementally and unrepentingly male down to the last brushstroke. It’s a question that begs an answer, and yet there is no clear and satisfying answer, except to say that this aura of male freedom belongs likewise to most representations of the world and of our human experience within it, and that as women we grow accustomed to translating it into something we ourselves can recognise. We get our dictionaries and we puzzle it out, and avoid some of the parts we can’t make sense of or understand, and some others we know we’re not entitled to, and voilà!, we participate. It’s a case of borrowed finery, and sometimes of downright impersonation; and having never felt all that womanly in the first place, I believe the habit of impersonation has gone deeper in me than most, to the extent that some aspects of me do seem in fact to be male. The fact is that I received the clear message from the very beginning that everything would have been better – would have been right, would have been how it ought to be – had I been a boy. Yet I never found any use for that male part, as L went on to show me later, in the time I will tell you about.

The painting, by the way, was a self-portrait, one of L’s arresting portraits where he shows himself at about the distance you might keep between yourself