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

to perform it for us one evening at the house after dinner. Kurt then announced that he would like to use the occasion to read from his work in progress. Tony and I bustled around tidying things and arranging chairs and setting out drinks, for I had a sense that L might attend this cultural soirée and I wanted the house to look welcoming, even while his remarks about my playing at being a woman were ringing in my ears. I was beginning to understand that L had a way of making you see yourself without being able to do terribly much about what you saw. While I went on with the preparations I imagined being a different kind of person, someone careless and selfish who was confident that those same qualities would produce a successful evening. How I wished, sometimes, to be that person!

At the appointed hour I saw through the window that my guess had been right, and that two figures were approaching through the glade. Brett came in wearing a startling little dress, a kind of slip or negligee that showed more of her than it covered, and this revelation of flesh instantly created an atmosphere of awkwardness, since it seemed to be part of something private that was happening between her and L. Brett’s face was flushed and her strange letterbox mouth hung blackly open. Her expression had a certain wildness, and I began to feel the blankness and dread that always overcome me in the presence of social tension. There was a wild light in L’s eyes too, and every now and then the two of them would look at one another and laugh.

We sat around and talked for a while. I don’t know what we talked about – I never do, in a situation like that. Tony imperturbably made drinks for people and acted as though nothing was wrong. Brett downed two cocktails one after the other, which seemed to have the curious effect of sobering her up. L accepted one drink, which he placed fastidiously on a side table and didn’t look at again. I glanced frequently over at Justine, who was sitting in a low chair beside the fire with her guitar laid flat across her knees and a meditative expression on her face, even while Brett kept bursting out into shrill laughter next to her. At a certain point she picked up her guitar and began to play softly, and then to hum to herself. L, as usual, had sat as far away from me as he could get, and Kurt was beside him. The two of them were talking, or rather L was talking and Kurt was listening: L had turned his head and was speaking straight into Kurt’s ear, which I suppose he had to do as his voice was so indistinct and there were other noises in the room. Justine’s playing eventually started to have a calming effect, on Brett as well as on Tony and me, and when she began to sing in her sweet voice we fell quiet and listened. Kurt, too, turned his head toward Justine, so that L had to change position to keep talking in his ear. After a while Kurt turned away from her again to listen to L, but he kept glancing back at her with a strange, cold expression in his eyes, and I saw then that his loyalties had somehow become divided, and I sensed L was to blame for it.

The song Justine was playing was a familiar song, and we began to sing along with it, as we often did in that situation. These times were very dear to me, Jeffers, because I always felt deep down that it was me Justine was singing for, and that her song was the song of our wanderings together through time, from her first day of life to the present moment. And in this particular moment I admired her more than ever, since she seemed to have disclosed a new power in bringing righteous order back to our situation. Brett had pulled a coat on over her slip and sang along in a husky, pleasant kind of voice, and Tony struck chords with his strong, low voice, and I matched my singing to Justine’s as best I could. Even Kurt joined in eventually, if only out of habit. The only person who wasn’t singing was L, and I didn’t believe for a minute that this was because he didn’t know how to sing or didn’t know the tune. He wouldn’t sing, and the reason he wouldn’t was because everyone else was singing and it was in his nature not to be coerced. Another person might at least have gone to the trouble to appear charmed or entertained by the scene, but L merely sat there with a weary look on his face, as though he were using this as an opportunity to think about all the other tiresome things he had been made to sit through. Sometimes he would look up and meet my eye, and something of his separation would become my own. The strangest feeling of detachment, almost of disloyalty, would come over me: even there, in the midst of the things I loved best, he had the ability to cast me into doubt and to expose in myself what was otherwise shrouded over. It was as though, in those moments, his terrible objectivity became my own and I saw things the way they really are.

It almost goes without saying, Jeffers, that part of L’s greatness lay in his ability to be right about the things that he saw, and what confounded me was how, at the plane of living, this rightness could be so discordant and cruel. Or rather, what was so liberating and rewarding in looking at a painting by L became acutely uncomfortable when one encountered or lived it in the flesh. It was the feeling that there could be no excuses or explanations, no dissimulating: