Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

I have never met another human being who is so little burdened by shame as Tony and so little inclined to make others feel ashamed of themselves. He doesn’t comment and he doesn’t criticise and this puts him in an ocean of silence compared to most people.

When people marry young, Jeffers, everything grows out of the shared root of their youth and it becomes impossible to tell which part is you and which the other person. So if you attempt to sever yourselves from one another it becomes a severance all the way from the roots to the furthest ends of the branches, a gory mess of a process that seems to leave you half of what you were before. But when you make a marriage later it is more like the meeting of two distinctly formed things, a kind of bumping into one another, the way whole landmasses bumped into one another and fused over geological time, leaving great dramatic seams of mountain ranges as the evidence of their fusing. It is less of an organic process and more of a spatial event, an external manifestation.

You see, Jeffers, Tony refuses to see anything as a game, and by being that way he reveals how much other people play games and how their whole conception of life derives from the subjectivity of the game-playing state.

I wonder what it feels like, to adopt a child and then prefer it to one’s own.