Rachel Cusk - Outline - A Novel

On the flight over she had happened to get talking to the man sitting next to her, she said, and it was really their conversation that had set her mind to work around these themes. He was a diplomat, newly stationed at the embassy in Athens, but his career had caused him to live all around the world and consequently to acquire many of its languages. He had grown up, he said, in South America, and so his native language was Spanish; his wife, however, was French. The family — he, his wife and their three children — spoke the universal currency of English when they were together, but they had been stationed in Canada for several years and so the children spoke an Americanised English while his own had been learned during a long period he spent in London. He was also entirely fluent in German, Italian and Mandarin, had some Swedish from a year spent in Stockholm, a working understanding of Russian, and could get by very well and without much effort in Portuguese.

She was a nervous flyer, she said, so the conversation really started as a distraction. But in fact she had found his whole story, of his life and the different languages it had been conducted in, increasingly fascinating, and had asked him more and more questions, trying to get as much detail from him as she possibly could. She had asked him about his childhood, his parents, his education, about the development of his career, the meeting with his wife and the marriage and family life that ensued, his experiences at different postings around the world; and the longer she listened to his answers, the more she felt that something fundamental was being delineated, something not about him but about her. He was describing, she realised, a distinction that seemed to grow clearer and clearer the more he talked, a distinction he stood on one side of while she, it became increasingly apparent, stood on the other. He was describing, in other words, what she herself was not: in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

She asked if I would mind if she took off her boots: she was beginning to feel hot. She took off the velvet jacket too. She had been constantly cold, she said, in these recent months. She had lost a lot of weight: she supposed that explained it. This man, her neighbour on the plane, had been very small — one could almost have described him as petite. He had made her feel, for the first time in ages, quite big. He was very little and dapper, with child-sized hands and feet, and sitting next to him at such close quarters she had become increasingly aware of her body and how much it had changed. She had never been particularly fat, but after the incident she had certainly shrunk, and now, now she didn’t really know what she was. What she realised was that her neighbour, so neat and compact, had probably always been the way he was right now: sitting beside him this distinction had become apparent to her. In her life as a woman, amorphousness — the changing of shapes — had been a physical reality: her husband had been, in a sense, her mirror, but these days she found herself without that reflection. After the incident she lost more than a quarter of her body weight — she remembered meeting an acquaintance in the street who had looked at her and said, there’s nothing of you any more. For a while people had kept saying things of this kind to her, telling her she was fading away, vanishing, describing her as an imminent absence. For most of the people she knew, people in their forties, this was a time of softening and expanding, of expectations growing blurred, of running a little to seed or to fat after the exhaustion of the chase: she saw them beginning to relax and make themselves comfortable in their lives. But for her, coming back out into the world again, the lines were still sharp, the expectations undimmed: sometimes she felt as if she’d arrived at a party just as everyone else was leaving, leaving to go home together and sleep. She didn’t sleep much, by the way — it was lucky I was going back today, because she could see the apartment was quite small and she’d have woken me up, roaming around at three o’clock in the morning.

But sitting next to her neighbour, as she was saying, she’d felt a sudden urge to know herself again, to know what she was like. She found herself wondering what it would be like to have sex with him, whether being so different they would disgust one another. The more he spoke the more she considered this question, of whether their differences, at this point, could only bring them to a state of mutual disgust. For this difference, this distinction, had formulated itself by now, had moved beyond size and shape and attitude into a single point that she could see quite clearly in her mind: the point was this, that he lived a life ruled by discipline, where hers was governed by emotion.

When she had asked him how he had mastered the many languages he spoke, he had described his method to her, which was to build a city for each one in his mind, to build it so well and so solidly that it would remain standing, no matter what the circumstances of his life or how long he had been absent from it.

‘I imagined all these cities of words,’ she said, ‘and him wandering in them one after the other, a tiny figure amid these big towering structures. I said his image reminded me of writing, except a play was more of a house than a city; and I remembered how strong it had once made me feel, to build that house and then walk away from it, and look behind me to see it still there. At the same time as I remembered this feeling,’ she said, ‘I felt an absolute certainty that I would never write another play, and in fact couldn’t even recall how I’d ever written one in the first place, what steps I’d taken, what materials I’d used. But I knew it would have been as impossible for me to write a play now as to build a house on water, while floating in the sea.

‘My neighbour then said something that surprised me,’ she continued. ‘He confessed that since his arrival in Athens six months ago, he had been absolutely unable to make any headway whatsoever in Greek. He had tried his very best, had even hired a personal language tutor who came to the embassy for two hours each day, but not one word of it would stick. As soon as the tutor had gone, everything my neighbour had learned dissolved: he found himself opening his mouth, in social situations, in meetings, in shops and restaurants, upon a great blankness like a prairie that seemed to extend all the way from his lips to the back of his head. It was the first time in his life that this had ever happened to him, and so he was at a loss as to whether the fault was his or whether blame could be assigned, somehow, to the language itself. She might laugh at that idea, he said, but his confidence in his own experience meant that he could not rule it out entirely.

‘I asked,’ she said, ‘how his wife and children had got on with the language and whether they had encountered similar difficulties. He admitted, then, that his wife and children had remained behind in Canada, where their life, at this point, was established to the degree that it couldn’t have been uprooted. His wife had her work and her friends; the children didn’t want to leave their schools and their social lives. But it was the first time the family had been separated. He was aware that he hadn’t told me this initially, he said; he wasn’t quite sure why he hadn’t. He hadn’t anticipated that it would become relevant.