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

is my dealings with L that concern me here and that I want to make you see, Jeffers. I don’t want to give the impression that I thought about him more than I did. The thoughts about him – which were really about his work – were cyclical, like a consummation. They consummated my solitary self, and supplied it with a kind of continuity.

All the same, I more or less gave up the idea of L ever coming to where I was and looking at it through his own eyes, which would have taken that consummation to a point of finality and given me – or so I believed – a version of the freedom I had wanted my whole life. He wrote to me a couple of times over the winter, telling me about all the things he was doing in Rio, and once even inviting me to go over there myself! But I had no intention of going to Rio, nor of going anywhere, and the letter annoyed me because it trivialised me and also because its tone forced me to conceal it from Tony. I think what it meant was that he was, somehow, afraid of me, and his treating me as he presumably treated other women was a way of getting himself back on firm ground.

The events of that winter are familiar to everyone, and so I needn’t go over them, except to say that we felt their impact far less than most people did. We had already simplified our existence, but for others that process of simplification was brutal and agonising. The only thing that really irked me was that it was no longer so easy to go anywhere – not that we ever went anywhere in any case! But I felt the loss of that freedom nonetheless. You know, Jeffers, that I have no particular country and am not really a citizen of any place, so there was a feeling of imprisonment that came with knowing I had to stay where I was. Also, it made it harder for people to come to see us, but by that time Justine had been forced to return from Berlin, and had brought Kurt with her, and so we gave them the second place to live in, as had been ordained at the very beginning.

In the spring I received a letter.

M

Well, hasn’t everything gone completely crazy. Maybe not for you. But I’ve gone tits-up, as my English friend likes to put it. All the value wiped off of everything like a layer of scum. I lost my house, and also my place in the country. I never felt like they belonged to me in any case. The other day I heard someone in the street say of this global pandemonium that it will completely alter the character of Brooklyn. Ha ha!

Do you still have a space? I think I can get to you. I know a way. Do I need any money to be there?

L

Because this is partly a story of will, and of the consequences of exerting it, you will notice, Jeffers, that everything I determined to happen happened, but not as I wanted it! This is the difference, I suppose, between an artist and an ordinary person: the artist can create outside himself the perfect replica of his own intentions. The rest of us just create a mess, or something hopelessly wooden, no matter how brilliantly we imagined it. That’s not to say that we don’t all of us have some compartment in which we too are able to achieve ourselves instinctively, to leap without looking, but the bringing of things into permanent existence is an achievement of a different order. The closest most people come to it is in having a child. And nowhere are our mistakes and limitations more plainly written than there!

I sat down with Justine and Kurt and explained to them what had happened, and that they were going to have to move into the main house with us after all – and of course Justine wanted to know why L couldn’t be in the house with us instead. Well, I didn’t entirely know why he couldn’t, just that the thought of it – of me and Tony and L all living at close quarters – made me want to shrivel up, and that the prospect of trying to explain it to Justine was almost as bad. It made me feel old, older than the most ancient monument, which is how children make you feel when you still presume to produce an original feeling of your own now and then. Language entirely fails me at such moments, the parental language that one way or another I’ve neglected to keep up and maintain, so that it’s like a rusty engine that won’t start when you need it. I didn’t want to be anyone’s parent in that minute!

Kurt, unexpectedly, came to my rescue. I hadn’t had much to do with him up to that point, reasoning that it was none of my business who or what he was, though he had a way of making it obvious that he was thinking something very different from what he was saying when he talked to you that I wasn’t sure I liked all that much. It seemed to me that if that was what you were doing, you shouldn’t be so proud of its being obvious. He was quite thin and delicate, and a very elegant dresser, and there was something birdlike in his long fragile neck with the beaky face above it and in his fine plumage. He turned to Justine and cocked his head in that birdlike way and said:

‘But Justine, they can’t have a complete stranger sharing their house.’

It was noble of him, Jeffers, considering that he was more or less a complete stranger himself, and I was pleased to have my point of view encapsulated in that way – it made me feel quite sane after all. And Justine, as good