a mirror or its opposite

excerpts from outline by rachel cusk

'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.'

. . .

'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.'

. . .

'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.

*****

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.