Rachel Cusk - Outline - A Novel

Elena came back and sat down again. Her appearance, this evening, was particularly Lorelei-like. She seemed to be composed entirely of curves and waves.

‘My friend will meet us shortly,’ she said, ‘in a place not far from here.’

Ryan lifted an eyebrow.

‘You two off somewhere?’

‘We’re meeting Melete,’ Elena said. ‘You are familiar with the name? She is one of the pre-eminent lesbian poets of Greece.’

Ryan said that actually he was peaked; he might have to leave us to it. He’d had a late night, as he’d said. And then he’d come back to the apartment at three in the morning to find great winged scarab-like creatures flying all around the place and had had to bash them all to death with his shoe. Someone — it wasn’t him — had left a light on and a window open. All the same, it had struck him how little he cared about cheerfully massacring the bastards: when he was younger, he would have been too frightened. You become brave just by being a parent, he said. Or maybe it’s just you become disinhibited. He’d felt this last night, socialising with people in their twenties. He’d forgotten how physically shy they were.

The quick hot dusk was falling, and soon the narrow street had filled up with darkness. The man in the hiking boots and his wife had gone. Ryan’s phone rang and he picked it up, showing us the photograph of a grinning, toothless child that was pulsing on the screen. Must be bedtime, he said; I’ll be seeing you folks. He stood and with a wave of his hand walked away down the hill, talking. Elena paid the bill with her credit card from the office — she was an editor at a publishing house and so strictly speaking, she said, we could consider our meeting to be work — and we walked up towards the light and noise of the main street. She trod beside me with quick, light steps in her high-heeled sandals; her dress was a shift of a knitted material the same dark gold colour as her long waving hair. All the men we passed looked at her, one after the other. We crossed Kolonaki Square, which was empty now except for one or two dark figures lying huddled on the benches. A woman sat on one of the low concrete walls, her legs strangely spattered with dried mud, eating crackers from a packet. A little boy stood near her at the kiosk, looking at the chocolate bars. We walked up an alleyway and came out in a crowded little square filled with the noise of people packed into the restaurant terraces all around its four sides, their faces in the darkness garish with electric light. The heat and the noise and electric light in the darkness produced an atmosphere of unvarying excitement, like a wave continually breaking, and though the restaurants looked indistinguishable from one another, Elena passed several before stopping very decidedly at one. This was the place, she said; Melete had said we should get a table and wait for her here. She wove her way through the tables and spoke to a waiter, who stood there implacable as a policeman and began shaking his head while she talked.

‘He says they are full,’ she said, crestfallen, her arms dropping to her sides.

Her disappointment was so intense that she didn’t move, but stayed standing among the tables and staring at them as though willing them to yield to her. The waiter, observing this performance, appeared to change his mind: there was, he decided, room, if we were happy to sit — Elena translated — over in that corner. He showed us to the table, which Elena scrutinised as though she might not take it after all. It is a bit too close to the wall, she said to me. Do you think we will be all right here? I said I didn’t mind sitting next to the wall: she could sit in the place further out if she preferred.

‘Why do you wear these dark clothes?’ she said to me, once we had sat down. ‘I don’t understand it. I wear light things when it is hot. Also you look a little sunburned,’ she added. ‘Between your shoulders, just there, the skin is burned.’

I told her I had spent the afternoon on a boat, with someone I didn’t know well enough to ask to put sun cream on my back. She asked who this person was. Was it a man?

Yes, I said, a man I had met on the airplane and had got talking to. Elena’s eyes widened with surprise.

‘I would not have thought it likely’, she said, ‘that you would go off on a boat with a complete stranger. What is he like? Do you like him?’

I closed my eyes and tried to summon up my feelings for my neighbour. When I opened them again Elena was still looking at me, waiting. I said that I had become so unused to thinking about things in terms of whether I liked them or whether I didn’t that I couldn’t answer her question. My neighbour was merely a perfectly good example of something about which I could only feel absolute ambivalence.

‘But you still let him take you out on his boat,’ she said.

It was hot, I said. And the terms on which we had left the harbour were strictly — or so I thought — the terms of friendship. I described his attempt to kiss me, when we were anchored far out to sea. I said that he was old, and that though it would be cruel to call him ugly, I had found his physical advances as repellent as they were surprising. It had never occurred to me that he would do such a thing; or more accurately, before she pointed out that I would have to be an imbecile not to have seen it as a possibility, I thought he wouldn’t dare do such a thing. I had thought the differences between us were obvious, but to him they weren’t.

She hoped, Elena said, that I had made that fact clear to him. I said that, on the contrary, I had come up with all manner of excuses to spare his feelings. She was silent for a while.

‘If,’ she said presently, ‘you had told him the truth, if you had said to him, look, you are old and short and fat, and though I like you the only reason I am really here is to get a ride on your boat —’ she began to laugh, fanning her face with the menu ‘— if you had said those things to him, you understand, you would have heard some truths in return. If you had been frank you would have elicited frankness.’

She herself, she said, had visited the very depths of disillusionment in the male character by being honest in precisely this way: men who had claimed one minute to be dying of love for her were openly insulting her the next, and it was only, in a sense, when she had reached this place of mutual frankness that she could work out who she herself was and what she actually wanted. What she couldn’t stand, she said, was pretence of any kind, especially the pretence of desire, wherein someone feigned the need to possess her wholly when in fact what he wanted was to use her temporarily. She herself, she said, was quite willing to use others too, but she only recognised it once they had admitted this intention in themselves.

Unseen by Elena, a slender woman with a fox-like face was approaching our table. I took this to be Melete. She came stealthily behind Elena’s chair and rested her hand on her shoulder.

‘Yassas,’ she said sombrely.

She wore a mannish black waistcoat and trousers, and her short straight hair fell in two glossy black wings on either side of her narrow, shy, pointed face.

Elena twisted around in her seat to greet her.

‘You as well!’ she exclaimed. ‘These dark clothes, both of you — why do you always wear dark things?’

Melete took her time replying to this. She sat down in the vacant chair, sat back and crossed her legs, withdrew a packet of cigarettes from her waistcoat pocket and lit one.

‘Elena,’ she said, ‘it is not polite to talk about how people look. It is our own business what we wear.’ She reached across the table and shook my hand. ‘It’s noisy here tonight,’ she said, looking around. ‘I’ve just taken part in a poetry reading where the audience numbered six people. The contrast is quite noticeable.’