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

as I knew, he hadn’t by that point made any work about the marsh – but he did say that his portrait phase had just about run its course. The trouble was, he said, there weren’t enough people around, other than working people who were too busy to sit for him. He didn’t know why he hadn’t realised that at the start. He had painted Tony, and Justine, and Kurt, and so he’d just about run through the repertoire, unless he could go into town and kidnap some more subjects.

‘I wondered about painting people who aren’t here any more,’ he said. ‘The thought of it makes me sick. But if I could get over the sickness…’

I reminded him that there was one human subject here that he hadn’t yet attempted – me! He had said before that he couldn’t see me, and he had never explained why he couldn’t, and I was well aware that he avoided physical proximity to me at every opportunity. In romantic stories, avoidance of one person by another is often used as a device in the plot of love, the implication being that certain natures betray what they desire by appearing to disdain it. What hopeful and tragic fantasies the authors of those plots shamelessly play on! I didn’t delude myself that L was suppressing an attraction to me, but I did think it was curious that I represented such an obstacle to him. Almost, I wondered whether the removal of that obstacle might help him move forward, which is why I had no particular shame about suggesting he put me in a frame, the way he’d done to Tony. Kurt’s mention, that day in the garden, of L’s wish to destroy me had reinforced that impression. Why shouldn’t he just come out and say why he thought I ought to be destroyed?

He didn’t reply straight away to my remark, but stood for a while with his arms folded tight and his face turned into the wind and into the hard, flat light, as though he found the discomfort consoling. Painting people, he said eventually, was an act of both scrutiny and idolatry in which – for him, at least – the coldness of separation had to be maintained at all costs. For this reason he had always been especially disturbed by artists who painted their children. When people fall in love, he said, they experience this coldness as the greatest frisson of all, the fascination of a subject that can still be seen as distinct from oneself. The more familiar the loved one becomes, the less that frisson can be obtained. Worship, in other words, comes before knowledge, and in life this represents the complete initial loss or abandonment of objectivity, followed by a good long dose of reality while the truth is revealed. A portrait is more like an act of promiscuity, he said, in which coldness and desire coexist to the end, and it requires a certain hard-heartedness, which was why he had thought it was the right direction for him to take at this moment. Whatever promiscuity he had indulged in in his younger years, he had been fooling himself, because the hardening of his heart with age was of a different magnitude. The quality that attracted him now was unavailability, the deep moral unavailability of certain people, so that to have them was in effect to steal them and violate – or at least experience – their untouchability. Disgust came easily to him these days, he was filled to the brim with it, so it didn’t take much to make him overflow, and he wondered sometimes whether this was the presentation at long last of the bill for his childhood, when he had held his disgust inside himself year after year. Whatever the reason, he said, that quality of untouchability was the antidote to it, to the sickness that overcame him whenever he caught the stench of human familiarity.

While he spoke, a feeling had been growing inside me, of the most abject rejection and abandonment, because what I understood him to be saying underneath all his explanations was that my used-up female body was disgusting to him, and that this was the reason he kept me at a distance, even to the point of being unable to sit next to me!

‘It may come as a surprise to you to hear it, but I’m also trying to find a way of dissolving,’ I said to him indignantly, while tears surged in my eyes. ‘That’s why I wanted you to come here. You’re not the only one who feels that way. You can’t just blot me out, because it makes you feel sick to see me – I’m just as untouchable as anyone else! I don’t exist to be seen by you,’ I said, ‘so don’t delude yourself on that point, because I’m the one that’s trying to free myself from how you see me. You’d feel better if you could see what I actually am, but you can’t. Your sight is a kind of murder, and I won’t be murdered any more.’

And I put my face in my hands and wept!

Well, what I learned that morning was that however wicked and terrible an artist permits himself to become on the human scale, somewhere inside him there is a part that remains capable of pity – or rather, when that part is gone, so is his art. The truest test of a person is the test of compassion. Is that true, Jeffers? In any event, L was very kind to me that morning, and he even put his arms around me and let me weep on his chest while he stroked my hair, and he said:

‘There, there, honey. Don’t cry,’ in a soft, kind voice which made me cry even harder.

The feeling of physical closeness to him was quite disturbing to me, as it had come to seem somehow forbidden that we should ever touch, even by accident. I didn’t quite like