Rachel Cusk - Outline - A Novel

‘I stood there while my sister talked, about her car and what might have set off the alarm, and felt this compelling pain of loneliness; in admitting which, I knew, I was also admitting the blackest vision of life. I knew, in other words, that something terrible would happen, was happening right then, and when we returned inside and found Mimi on the counter with her face thrust deep into the birthday cake, her jaws churning, I was not the slightest bit surprised. She looked up as we came in, frozen in the act, the chocolate curls still hanging around her muzzle; and then she seemed to make a decision, for instead of jumping off the counter and running away to hide, she looked me defiantly in the eye and bending over it again, thrust her face wolfishly into the cake once more to finish it off.

‘I crossed the kitchen and grabbed her by her collar. In front of my sister, I yanked her off the counter and sent her scrambling to the floor, and I proceeded to beat her while she yelped and struggled. The two of us fought, me panting and seeking to punch her as hard as I could, she writhing and yelping, until finally she succeeded in pulling her head free of the collar. She ran out of the kitchen, her claws scrabbling and sliding on the tiled floor, and into the hall, where the front door still stood open, and then out into the street, where she tore off up the pavement and disappeared.’

Penelope paused and placed her fingers first gently and then probingly to her temples.

‘All afternoon,’ she continued presently, ‘the telephone rang. Mimi, as I have said, was a very distinctive and beautiful dog, and she was well known to people in the area, as well as to my acquaintances elsewhere in Athens. And so people were calling me to tell me they had seen her running away. She was seen everywhere, running in the park and the shopping centre, past the dry cleaner and the dentist’s, past the hairdresser, past the bank, past the children’s school: she ran everywhere I had ever been forced to take her, past the houses of friends and the piano teacher’s house, the swimming pool and the library, the playground and the tennis courts, and everywhere she ran people looked up and saw her and picked up the telephone to tell me that they had seen her. Many of them had tried to catch her; some had given chase, and the window cleaner had driven after her for a while in his van, but no one had been able to catch her. Eventually she got to the train station, where my brother-in-law happened to be getting off a train: he phoned to say that he had seen her and tried to corner her, with the help of the other passengers and the station guards, and she had eluded their grasp. One of the guards had been slightly injured, colliding with a luggage trolley when he lunged to grab her tail; but in the end they had all watched her run off down the tracks, to where nobody knows.’

Penelope let out a great heaving breath and fell silent, her chest visibly moving up and down, her expression stricken. ‘That is the story I wrote,’ she said finally, ‘at the kitchen table last night, after the visit of Stavros and the puppy.’

Theo said it sounded like the problem was that she had chosen the wrong dog in the first place. He himself had a pug, he said, and he had never experienced any difficulties.

At this, Marielle readied herself to speak. The effect was of a peacock bestirring its stiff feathers as it prepared to move the great fan of its tail. She had come dressed in cerise today, high-throated, with her yellow hair gathered up in a comb and a sort of mantilla of black lace around her shoulders.

‘Once I too bought my son a dog,’ she said in a shocked and quavering voice, ‘when he was a little child. He loved it madly, and while it was still a puppy it was run down before his eyes by a car in the street. He picked up its body and carried it back into the apartment, crying more wildly than I have ever known a person to cry. His character was completely ruined by that experience,’ she said. ‘He is now a cold and calculating man, concerned only with what he can get out of life. I myself put my trust in cats,’ she said, ‘who at least can settle the question of their own survival, and while they might lack the capacity for power and influence, and might be said to subsist on jealousies and a degree of selfishness, also possess uncanny instincts and a marked excellence in matters of taste.

‘My husband left me our cats,’ she continued, ‘in exchange for certain pre-Columbian artefacts he was extremely reluctant to lose sight of, but he claimed that a part of himself was left behind with them, to the extent that he almost feared being out in the world without the sense of guidance the cats provided. And it is true,’ she continued, ‘that his choices since then have been less blessed: he bought an etching by Klimt that afterwards was shown to be a fake, and has invested heavily in Dadaism, when anyone could have told him that public interest in that era was irreparably in decline. I, meanwhile, have been unable to avoid the most generous fondlings from the gods, even finding in the flea market a small bracelet in the form of a snake that I bought for fifty cents, and that my husband’s friend Arturo caught sight of on my arm when we happened to meet one day on the street. He took it away to his institute to analyse it, and when he returned it, told me it had come from the tomb itself at Mycenae and was quite priceless, a piece of information I am certain he will have passed on to my husband in the course of their nightly conversations at the Brettos Bar.

‘But cats, as I say, are jealous and discriminating creatures, and since my lover came to share my apartment they have been very slow to yield, despite his constant attentions to them, which as soon as his back is turned they instantly forget. He is unfortunately an untidy man, a philosopher, who leaves his books and papers everywhere, and while my apartment is not fragile in its beauty, it needs to be dressed a certain way to look its best. Everything is painted yellow, the colour of happiness and the sun but also, so my lover claims, the colour of madness, so that very often he needs to go out to the roof, where he stands and concentrates on the cerebral blue of the sky. While he is gone I feel the happiness returning; I start to put away his books, some of which are so heavy I can barely lift them with both hands. I have conceded, after a struggle, two shelves to him in my bookcase, and he kindly chose the ones at the bottom though I know he would have preferred the top. But the top shelves are high, and the works of Jürgen Habermas, of which my lover has a large collection, are as heavy as the stones they used to build the pyramids. Men went to their deaths, I tell my lover, in building these structures whose bases were so large and whose final point so small and distant; but Habermas is his field, he says, and at this stage of his life he will be offered no other to roam in. Is he a man or a pony? While he stands gazing on the roof this is the question I ask myself, almost nostalgic for my husband’s appalling nature, which made me run so fast I always slept well at night. Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I retreat to my women friends, all of us weeping and weaving together, but then my lover will open the piano and play a tarantella, or bake a kid all afternoon in wine and cloves, and seduced by those sounds and smells I am back, lifting the rocks of Habermas and placing them on the shelves. But then one day I stopped, recognising that I couldn’t hold it off any longer and that disorder had to reign; I painted the walls in eau de nil, took my own books off the shelves and left them lying there, allowed the roses to wither and die in their jars. He was delirious and said this had been an important step. We went out to celebrate, and returned to find the cats amok in the fallen library amidst a snowstorm of pages, their sharp teeth ravaging the spines even as we watched, with the Chablis still in our veins. My novels and leather-tooled volumes were untouched: only Habermas had been attacked, his photograph torn from every frontispiece, great claw-marks scorched across The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. And so,’ she said in conclusion, ‘my lover has learned to put his books away; and no longer does he bake or open the piano, and for this mixed blessing that is the shrinkage of his persona I have the cats — if not perhaps also my husband — to thank.’