She had seen, she went on, some of his work in Paris: there had been a retrospective there. She had happened to be passing and saw one of the posters outside. The image they’d used had caused her immediately to enter the gallery and purchase a ticket for the exhibition. It was early in the morning – the gallery had only just opened – and no one else was there. She had walked alone around the five or six large rooms of paintings. When she came out, she had undergone a complete personal revolution.
She fell silent again. She sipped her tea with an air of equanimity, as though in the confident belief that I would not be able to resist asking her to continue and tell me precisely what had caused the personal revolution to occur. I could hear the neighbours moving about downstairs beneath our feet. There were occasional thumps that sounded like doors being opened and shut, and the rise and fall of voices.
I asked her what she had been doing in Paris and she said that she had gone there for a few days to teach a course. She was a professional photographer, and she was often asked to teach on short courses. She did it for the money, but also because these trips away from home sometimes proved to be staging posts, even if she didn’t see it at the time. They gave her a distance on her own life: it became something she could see, instead of being immersed in it as she usually was, though she didn’t particularly enjoy the teaching itself. The students were generally so demanding and self-obsessed that afterwards she felt completely drained. At the beginning she would feel she was giving them something, something good, something that might change their lives – the drained feeling felt at first like a virtuous kind of exhaustion. But as she was successively emptied over the four or five days of the course, something else would start to happen. She would begin to view them – the students – with greater objectivity; their need for her started to look like something less discriminating, more parasitical. She felt duped by them into believing herself to be generous, tireless, inspiring, when in fact she was just a self-sacrificing victim. It was this feeling that often brought her to a position of clarity about her own life. She would start to give them less and herself more: by draining her, they created in her a new capacity for selfishness. As the course drew to a close she would often have started to care for herself differently, more tenderly, as if she were a child; she would begin to feel the first stirrings of self-love. It was while in this state that she had walked past the gallery and seen the reproduction of Marsden Hartley’s painting on the poster.
There had been a man, she added, teaching with her on the course; an older man – she had a susceptibility for them – who was a well-known photojournalist and whose work she admired. There had been something between them from the start, an electricity, though he was married and lived in America. She had just broken up with her partner of two years, someone who knew her with sufficient thoroughness that his demolition of her character in their final arguments could not fail to undermine her opinion of herself; she clung to the photojournalist’s attention as if it were a life raft. He was a man of intelligence – or at least a reputation for it – and power: his notice of her acted as a counterweight to her ex-boyfriend’s contempt. On the last night they had walked together around Paris until three o’clock in the morning. She had barely slept: such was her arousal and excitement that she had got up early and walked some more, all through the deserted city in the dawn, walked and walked until the poster had caused her to stop.
I asked her what she took photographs of.
Food, she said.
The phone rang in the next-door room and I told her to excuse me while I went to answer it. It was my older son and I asked him where he was. Dad’s, he said, sounding surprised. What’s happening there? he said. I said I was in the middle of teaching a student. Oh, he said. There was a silence. I could hear a rustling sound and the sound of him breathing into the receiver. When are we coming back? he said. I said I wasn’t sure: the builder thought it might be possible in a couple of weeks. There’s nobody here, he said. It feels weird. I’m sorry, I said. Why can’t we just be normal? he said. Why does everything have to be so weird? I said I didn’t know why. I was doing my best, I said. That’s what adults always say, he said. I asked him how his day at school had been. Okay, he said. I heard Jane clear her throat in the next-door room. I said I was sorry but I had to go. Okay, he said.
When I went back to the sitting room I was struck by the sight of Jane’s jewel-coloured clothing amid the white landscape of dust sheets. She had remained very still, her knees together and her head erect, her pale fingers evenly splayed around the teacup. I found myself wondering who exactly she was: there was a sense of drama about her that seemed to invite only two responses – either to become absorbed or to walk away. Yet the prospect of absorption seemed somehow arduous: I recalled her remarks about the draining nature of students and thought how often people betrayed themselves by what they noticed in others. I asked her how old she was.
Thirty-nine, she said, with a defiant little lifting of her head on her long neck.
I asked her what it was about this painter – Marsden Hartley – that so interested her.
She looked me in the eyes. Hers were surprisingly small: they were lashless and unfeminine – the only unfeminine thing about her appearance – and the colour of silt.
He’s me, she said.
I asked her what she meant.
I’m him, she said, then added, slightly impatiently: we’re the same. I know it sounds a bit strange, she went on, but there’s actually no reason why people can’t be repeated.
I said that if she was talking about identification, she was right – it was common enough to see oneself in others, particularly if those others existed at one remove from us, as for instance characters in a book do.
She gave a single, frustrated shake of her head.