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

day I married Tony! Thinking this made me feel suddenly tearful, and I had the awful feeling of an unravelling deep inside me. Did Tony not appreciate me as a woman with a female form? Did I go around in shapeless clothes these days as a kind of renunciation of sexuality and beauty? Clawing in the very back of the cupboard with a sudden and instinctive certainty, I found myself pulling out the very same dress I had got married in, which I had entirely forgotten was there. It was a beautiful, simple, close-fitting dress, and as I held it in my hands I knew it was exactly right, while at the same time I was beset by waves of conflicting emotion, chief among them a nameless kind of sorrow, for the people Tony and I had been then, as if those people no longer existed.

Filled with daring I put the dress on, and was arranging my hair in front of the mirror when Tony walked into the room. Tony is rarely excited or perturbed, and this occasion was no exception. I had wondered whether he might be so moved by the sight of the dress that he wouldn’t notice I hadn’t put it on for him, but he simply lifted his head a little and looked at me for a while and then stated:

‘You’re wearing your dress.’

‘L has finally asked to paint me,’ I said to him, all in a flutter and trying not to let him notice, ‘and he told me to wear something close-fitting, and this was the only thing I could think of!’

I decided it was better not to say anything else, even though part of me was also aching to receive Tony’s compliments and to sit and talk with him about the people we once were, and whether or not those people still existed. Instead, while he was digesting the information I had given him, I slipped past him and sped out through the door and down the stairs. The afternoon had become a little overcast and now, in the early evening, a kind of gloom had fallen over the glade. I wondered whether the bad light might affect my sitting with L and whether he would cancel it, and whether in fact he would be there at all, since now that I came to think of it we hadn’t arranged a specific time. I let myself out of the house and scurried up the path that leads into the trees, and saw that all the lights of the second place were on, making a great glowing shape in the distance. I felt the air on my uncovered shoulders and arms, and the unaccustomed feeling of my hair falling against my bare back, and a feeling of youth and freedom surged through me as I hastened toward the glade and the distant cube of light. At that moment, I heard the clattering sound behind me of a window being opened, and I stopped and turned around and looked up. There was Tony, standing at the open window of our bedroom, looking down on me from a great height. Our eyes met, and he held out a terrible arm at me and he thundered:

‘COME BACK HERE!’

For a second I stood frozen to the spot, looking up into Tony’s eyes. Then I turned and ran off into the trees, skulking and shamefaced as a runaway dog. I went quickly through the glade toward the lighted windows, and since L and Brett had taken down the curtains I was able to see inside in more detail the closer I got. First I saw that the furniture had been pushed aside against the cupboards and shelves, and then I saw two figures, L and Brett, moving so strangely around the room that at first I thought they were dancing. But then, as I drew nearer, I realised they were painting – and what’s more, painting on the walls of the second place!

They were both barely dressed, L with no shirt on and great blotches of paint across his naked chest, and Brett in a camisole and briefs with a scarf tied around her hair. While I watched, L wiped the back of his hand across his nose with a savage gesture and left a long streak of paint over his face too. Brett pointed at it and doubled over with laughter. They had taken the little stepladder from the shed and were using it to reach all the way to the top of the walls, which were half-covered in a growing swirl of lurid colours and shapes. I stopped and stood, rooted to the spot, unable to help seeing what I saw through the glass. I saw the forms of trees and plants and flowers, the trees with great twisting intestinal roots, the flowers fleshy and obscene, with big pink stamens like phalluses; and strange animals, birds and beasts of unearthly shapes and colours; and in the middle of it all two figures, a woman and a man, standing beside a tree bearing violent red fruits like countless open mouths, with a great fat snake wound all around its trunk. It was a Garden of Eden, Jeffers, except a hellish one! I stepped closer to the windows – I could hear harsh music, and above that the sounds of their voices, which seemed to come in bellows and shrieks and gusts of shrill laughter – while the two of them moved around inside as though possessed by demonic energy, splashing and smearing paint over the walls. They were working on the Eve figure, and I heard L say:

‘Let’s give her a moustache, the castrating bitch!’ while Brett shrieked with laughter. ‘Cause of all the trouble,’ he said, blotting the figure’s upper lip with thick black strokes.

‘And let’s give her a nice fat little belly,’ Brett cried, ‘a barren belly like a middle-aged lady’s! She’s skinny all over, but that belly gives her away, the bitch.’

‘A big hairy moustache,’ L