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

back to the bosom of his ideal family; and my guilt-reaction sat across from this impulse and the two of them stared at one another gloomily.

‘It’s all that man’s fault,’ he surprised me by saying, when I discovered him sitting perched on a rock by the stream that runs through the orchard, like an oversized garden gnome. I asked him if he meant L, and he nodded miserably. ‘He gave me all kinds of strange advice.’

‘What did he tell you?’ I said.

‘He told me to stop being such a – such a milquetoast,’ Kurt said. ‘That was the word he used. I didn’t know what it meant but I looked it up. He told me if I wanted to improve things with Justine I needed to find a mistress, and that the best mistress of all was work. It was because I admitted to him that I thought Justine didn’t love me any more,’ he said. ‘That’s how it started. He said I should try writing, because it was cheap and you didn’t need any particular talent.’

‘What else did he say?’

‘He said that I should never let Justine know what I was thinking. He said that if Justine was nice to me then I could be nice back. But if she wasn’t nice, I should break her. He said I had to break her will, and that the way to do it was to always do the opposite of what she expected or wanted me to do. He’s a terrible man.’ Kurt was looking at me in wide-eyed terror. ‘He says he intends to destroy you.’

‘Destroy me?’

‘That’s what he says. But I won’t let him destroy you!’

Well, I didn’t know where to begin with this outburst, except that I did recognise the part about breaking people’s wills. The thing was, Jeffers, part of me wanted to be destroyed, even as I feared that a whole reality would collapse along with it, the reality shared by other people and things – the whole web of deeds and associations that contained both past and future and was clogged with all the evidence of the great dirty passage of time, yet always failed somehow to capture the living moment. What I wanted to get rid of was the part of me that had always been there, and I believe that this was the essence of the feeling I shared with L, as he himself had explained it in our first conversation. There was a greater reality, I believed, beyond or behind or beneath the reality I knew, and it seemed to me that a lifelong pain would be ended if only I could break through to it. It didn’t seem to me any longer that this was something you could think your way into – the psychoanalyst had carried that idea away with him, when he ran off down the street. It needed violence, the actual destruction of the ailing part, just as the body sometimes needs surgery to cure it. It seemed to me that this was the form freedom took out of necessity, the final form, when every other attempt to attain it had failed. I didn’t know what this violence was or how it could be inflicted, only that something in L’s threat seemed to promise it.

I asked Kurt whether he thought he would like to go home for a while, and if so whether he would like me to help him arrange it.

‘I can’t leave you,’ Kurt said. ‘It would be too dangerous.’

I assured him that I would be perfectly fine, and that if necessary I had Tony to protect me, but he was adamant that he had to remain in order to avert the possibility of my destruction. Later that day Justine came to me full of indignation, asking why I was trying to send Kurt home behind her back. I tried to defend myself, and one way or another the little structure of love we had been building together was knocked down and would have to be built all over again.

After I met Tony for the first time, he wrote to me nearly every day for a month or more, until circumstances allowed me to come and meet him again, since at that time I was living some distance away. I was very surprised by his letters, which were extremely well written and poetic, and also by the regularity with which they came. It was as if he were beating a drum, steadily and without cease, that I heard across all the miles that separated us until I recognised that it was summoning me. Tony’s letters gave me the first experience I had ever had of satisfaction – of my most secret hopes and desires, and my sense of life’s possibility, being met. They were always prompter and more numerous and longer and more beautiful than I expected, and they never disappointed me. Whatever I imagined getting from Tony, it wasn’t this sparkling river of words that flowed through me and irrigated me and began to bring me slowly back to life. It has allowed me ever after to live with his silence, because I know that the river is there, and that only I am permitted to have this knowledge.

During those strange weeks with L, I thought often back to Tony’s letters and to the time when our love began. Though it was only a matter of months, that time was so large and luminous that it dwarfed entire decades of my life, like a great edifice in the middle of a city that can be seen from miles away. In a sense its abundance took it outside of time altogether, and by that I mean that it’s still there: I can visit it and live in it for hours, and part of the reason I can is that it is built on a foundation of language. I’m making another building here, Jeffers, out of the time I spent with L, but I’m not sure