Rachel Cusk - Outline - A Novel

She picked up the wine list from the table and began to study it, the cigarette smoking in her fingers, her fine nose twitching slightly, her glossy hair falling forward over her cheeks.

One of the six, she added, glancing up, was a man who came to nearly every public appearance she gave, and would sit in the front row making faces at her. This had been happening for several years now. She would look up from her lectern, not just in Athens but in other cities that are quite far away, and there he would be right in front of her, sticking his tongue out and making rude signs.

‘But do you know him?’ Elena said, astonished. ‘Have you ever spoken to him?’

‘I taught him,’ Melete said. ‘He was an undergraduate student of mine, a long time ago, when I lectured at the university.’

‘And what did you do to him? Why does he torment you in this way?’

‘I have to assume’, Melete said, puffing gravely on her cigarette, ‘that he doesn’t have a reason. I did nothing to him: I barely even remember teaching him. He passed through one of my classes, where there were more than fifty students. I didn’t notice him. I’ve tried, obviously, to remember some particular incident but there isn’t one. You could spend your whole life’, she said, ‘trying to trace events back to your own mistakes. People in legend thought that their misfortunes could be traced back to their failure to offer libations to certain gods. But there is another explanation,’ she said, ‘which is simply that he is mad.’

‘Have you ever tried to talk to him?’ Elena said.

Melete slowly shook her head.

‘As I said, I barely remember him, though I don’t forget people easily. So you could say that this attack has come from the place I least expected. In fact it would almost be true to say that this student was the very last person I had ever considered to pose a threat to me.’

At times, Melete continued, it had almost seemed to her that this fact was what had created his behaviour. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created an attack on itself, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis.

‘I prefer to call it madness,’ she said, ‘whether his or my own, and so instead I have tried to become fond of him. I look up and there he always is, waggling his fingers and sticking out his tongue. He is in fact entirely dependable, more faithful to me than any lover I’ve ever had. I try to love him back.’

She closed the wine list and put up her finger to summon the waiter. Elena said something to her in Greek and a brief dispute ensued, which the waiter joined halfway through and in which he appeared conclusively to take Melete’s side, taking the order from her with much brusque nodding of his head despite Elena’s continued petitions.

‘Elena knows nothing about wine,’ Melete said, to me.

Elena seemed to take no offence at this remark. She returned to the subject of Melete’s persecutor.

‘What you have described,’ she said, ‘is complete subjection. The idea that you should love your enemies is patently ridiculous. It is entirely a religious proposition. To say that you love what you hate and what hates you is the same as admitting you have been defeated, that you accept your oppression and are just trying to make yourself feel better about it. And saying you love him is the same as saying you don’t want to know what he really thinks of you. If you talked to him,’ she said, ‘you would find out.’

I watched the people at the other tables and at the tables on the adjoining terraces, all packed so tightly that the whole square seemed to be aflame with conversation. Here and there beggars moved among the talking people, who often took some time to realise they were there, and then either gave them something or brushed them away. Several times I saw this repeated, the wraith-like figure standing unnoticed behind the chair of the person obliviously eating, talking, absorbed in life. A tiny, desiccated, hooded woman was moving among the tables close to us, and presently she approached ours, murmuring, the little claw of her hand outstretched. I watched Melete place some coins in her palm and say a few words to her, gently stroking her fingers.

‘What he thinks is of no importance,’ she continued. ‘If I found out more about what he thinks, I might start to confuse him with myself. And I don’t compose myself from other people’s ideas, any more than I compose a verse from someone else’s poem.’

‘But to him this is a game, a fantasy,’ Elena said. ‘Men like to play this game. And they actually fear your honesty, because then the game is spoiled. By not being honest with a man you allow him to continue his game, to live in his fantasy.’

As if to prove her point, my phone sounded on the table. It was a text from my neighbour: I miss you, it said.

It was only when you got beyond people’s fantasies, Elena continued, about themselves and one another, that you accessed a level of reality where things assumed their true value and were what they seemed to be. Some of those truths, admittedly enough, were ugly, but others were not. The worst thing, it seemed to her, was to be dealing with one version of a person when quite another version existed out of sight. If a man had a nasty side to his character, she wanted to get to it immediately and confront it. She didn’t want it roaming unseen in the hinterland of the relationship: she wanted to provoke it, to draw it forth, lest it strike her when her back was turned.

Melete laughed. ‘According to that logic,’ she said, ‘there can be no relationship at all. There can only be people stalking one another.’

The waiter brought the wine, a small unlabelled bottle the colour of ink, and Melete began to pour it out.

‘It’s true,’ Elena said, ‘that my own need for provocation is something other people seem to find very difficult to understand. Yet to me it has always made perfect sense. But I do admit that it has brought nearly all of my relationships to an end, because it is inevitable that that end is also — as you say, by the same logic — something I will feel driven to provoke. If the relationship is going to end, in other words, I want to know it and confront it as soon as possible. Sometimes,’ she said, ‘this process is so quick that the relationship is over almost as soon as it has begun. Very often I have felt that my relationships have had no story, and the reason is because I have jumped ahead of myself, the way I used to turn the pages of a book to find out what happens in the final chapter. I want to know everything straight away. I want to know the content without living through the time span.’

The person she was involved with now, she said — a man named Konstantin — had given her for the first time in her life a cause to fear these tendencies in herself, for the reason that — unlike, if she was to be honest, any other man of her experience — she judged him to be her equal. He was intelligent, handsome, amusing, an intellectual: she liked being beside him, liked the reflection of herself he gave her. And he was a man in possession of his own morality and attitudes, so that she felt — for the first time, as she had said — a kind of invisible boundary around him, a line it was clear, though no one ever said as much, she ought not to cross. That line, that boundary, was something she had never encountered so palpably in any other man, men whose defences were usually cobbled together out of fantasies and deceptions that no one — themselves least of all — would blame her for wanting to break through. And so not only did she feel a sense of prohibition around Konstantin, a sense that he would regard her raiding him for his truth much as he would have regarded her breaking into his house and stealing his things, she had actually become frightened of the very thing she loved him for, his equality with herself.