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

And the two of them howled, while I stood in my wedding dress beyond the window in the glade where night was falling and trembled, trembled to the soles of my feet. It was me they were talking about, me they were painting – I was Eve! A terrible darkness flooded my mind, so that for a while I couldn’t see or think or move. And then a thought came, and it was that I had to get back to Tony. I turned and ran back down along the path through the trees, and as I was approaching the house I saw two red lights in the driveway at the front. They glowed for a minute and then began to recede, amid the sound of an engine. I realised that it was our truck, and that Tony was inside it, and was driving away! I ran out to the driveway and stood there calling his name, but the lights disappeared around the bend and I knew that he had left me and gone, and I didn’t know whether he would ever come back again.

Symbolically enough, the fine weather broke the very next day and it started to rain, and I sat and looked out of the window at the falling water without speaking or moving at all. At a certain point I heard the sound of a car at the front of the house and I bolted outside, believing that Tony had come back, but it was only one of the men, who had driven up to tell me that Tony had asked him to lend me a car, since he had gone away in the truck. Gone away! I went and sat and looked out of the window again. How sad the rain was, falling after all these weeks of warmth and sun. I thought about Tony’s irrigation system, and how he had kept everything alive day after day while the rest of us had rejoiced in the fine weather, and I began to weep while it dawned on me anew how responsible and good Tony was and how frivolous and selfish were the rest of us. Sometimes Justine came and sat beside me and looked out of the window too at the rain falling, and I saw that she was nearly as sad as I was that Tony was gone. She asked me if I knew when he would be coming back, and I said that I didn’t. When it got dark I went upstairs and lay on our bed and tried to talk to Tony. There in the darkness I concentrated my whole self on talking to him in my heart and hoping he would hear me, wherever he was.

The next day two more of the men came, to do Tony’s outdoor chores and the various pieces of work that always need to be done on the land. I remained very still and quiet, talking to Tony in my heart, as I had been doing all night. I did not for a minute doubt his loyalty or his reasons for acting as he had done – what I doubted was myself and my ability ever to convince him that I was still the person he had believed me to be. The thing is, Jeffers, that between two people as different as Tony and me there needs to be an act almost of translation, and at times of crisis it’s very easy for something to get lost in that act. How could we be sure we understood one another? How could we know that what we were seeing and responding to was the same thing? The second place was just one example of our attempts to accommodate those distinctions, because both of us realised that in a marriage like ours you couldn’t always be fed from the same source. There was a freedom in that situation but there was also a kind of sorrow that came if you ever suspected it of representing a limitation in your bond to one another.

For me, Tony’s differences were a test of my ability to contain my own will, which was always straining to make everything how I wanted and thought it should be, to make it conform to my idea. If Tony were to conform to my idea, he would no longer be Tony! I don’t know what, in me, represented a similar test to him, and it isn’t my business to know, but I remember when we were building the second place, and had come to start calling it that in a way I knew would never change if we carried on doing it much longer, I said to him that ‘second place’ pretty much summed up how I felt about myself and my life – that it had been a near miss, requiring just as much effort as victory but with that victory always and forever somehow denied me, by a force that I could only describe as the force of pre-eminence. I could never win, and the reason I couldn’t seemed to lie within certain infallible laws of destiny that I was powerless – as the woman I was – to overcome. I ought to have accepted it at the beginning, and spared myself the effort! Tony listened to me, and I could tell he was slightly surprised by what I was saying, and that he was thinking about why he was, and after a long time he said:

‘For me it doesn’t mean that. It means parallel world. Alternative reality.’

Well, Jeffers, I laughed heartily to myself at this perfect example of the paradox that is Tony and me!

When we got married, I remember the minister confidentially asking me whether I would prefer the word obey to be excised from the marriage vows – a lot of women these days did prefer it, he said, with a sort of wink. I replied that