It's Beginning to Hurt

by James Lasdun

  Clammy, still smelling bad, with bits of straw and torn leaves sticking to the slime on his suit, he made his way toward the guests. Before he reached them, he caught sight of his father: as ever a little shorter than he remembered him, but his silver hair gleaming with that curious vitality that had the effect of making you briefly question whether you mightn’t have got things the wrong way around, whether silver wasn’t after all the color of youth, while brown, black, and blond were the colors hair turned in old age. Beside him stood Rosemary, slim and erect in her white outfit, her veil pinned back, flowers and seed pearls gleaming in the silk and lace of her dress.

  Moving toward the crowd of guests, Roland had the impression of entering the locus of a single vast living organism. The old man had always had a gift for ceremony, display, for all those occasions requiring a particular complex of forces to be summoned into harmonious form. University chancellors regularly consulted him on their processionals and jubilees, as did the organizers of village fetes. What radiant entity had he brought forth here? As Roland approached, its epidermis seemed to shrink from him, as though fine hairs or antennae had detected something inimical to its own rustling brilliance.

  His father saw him.

  “Ah. There you are,” he said, not unkindly. His manner too was less forbidding in reality than it was in Roland’s imagination. But when he saw the state Roland was in, he stiffened.

  “What in heaven’s name—”

  “I’m sorry—”

  As Roland moved toward him, he stepped back, drawing Rosemary with him. She pulled her arm free, however, and looked at Roland with the same warmth in her eyes as he had seen when he first met her. For a moment it seemed she hadn’t noticed his condition, but when he heard his father say, “Rosemary, be careful, he’s filthy,” and saw her continue on toward him, it occurred to him that she didn’t care. Over his own swamp smell he caught the fragrance of lilies of the valley. She put her long, silk-furled arms about him and drew him close, her white dress surely staining in great oval blotches from his oozing suit. In her embrace he thought again of his dream: his mother’s incontinent body whole, supple in his hands; her naked breasts warm and sweet in his mouth. Appalling! And yet as he stood there, he felt as if he were on the point of being cleansed of the confusions, the glutinous horrors of his day, and instead of letting Rosemary go, he drew her tighter to him, burying his head in her sweet-smelling shoulder, while dimly beyond her he could hear his father tutting and fussing. And a strange elation rose through him, as though the great miasma, which had hung upon his life so long it had come to seem a part of his own nature, might after all be about to lift.

  THE WOMAN AT THE WINDOW

  A young Englishman was walking down a street in the West Village. He had come to New York on an internship at the Manhattan branch of the auction house he worked for in London, and he was on his way to appraise a painting at the home of a private collector.

  He was early for his appointment, and he moved along at a leisurely pace, gazing appreciatively into the boutiques lining the street. He liked New York. Superior versions of all the things he enjoyed most in life—clothes, cocktails, art books, restaurant meals—were available everywhere at half the price they cost in London, and wherever he went people seemed smitten by his unusually pure Englishness: his drawl, his unfailingly polite manner, his pallid good looks.

  He had a girlfriend in London, who worked for a merchant bank. Every morning he spoke to her on the phone, and every night he sent her an e-mail, usually with some anecdote chosen to appeal to her sense of the ridiculous: the beggar he had given a handful of change to, only to be indignantly informed by the man that he didn’t “accept no goddamn pennies”; the clambake he had gone to on the beach in East Hampton wearing shorts and a T-shirt, where it turned out all the other men were wearing linen suits and ties … And this too, the gathering up of these little stories to share with his girlfriend, was a part of his enjoyment of the city.

  He turned onto a quieter street of brick town houses with window boxes and small front gardens enclosed in iron railings. About halfway along he heard a voice shouting from above him: “Sir, sir, excuse me, sir …”

  He looked up. A woman was leaning out of a window on the top floor.

  “Could you help me please? I broke the handle on my door, and I can’t get out of my apartment …”

  He hesitated, unsure how to respond.

  “I feel like such an idiot, but I don’t know what to do … I’m trapped in here!”

  “Er …”

  “Do you think maybe you could open the door from the outside if I buzz you in?”

  She spoke slowly in a high, rather plaintive voice. Her brown hair gleamed in the sun. She wore a pale turtleneck sweater.

  “Well … All right …”

  “Thank you! I’m in Four-A. There’s no elevator. Sorry!”

  The door buzzed, and he stepped into a dim hallway with cracked marble tiles and a row of brass mailboxes. As he climbed the wooden stairs, it occurred to him that he was being set up to be mugged. This was no doubt some old trick, well known to New Yorkers, but still good for a newcomer like himself. The woman had probably spotted him the moment he’d turned down the street—guessed he was English from his herringbone jacket perhaps or the old-fashioned brogues that he had polished that morning—and readied her accomplice, some thug who would be waiting for him behind her door with a knife or a gun … He should go back outside immediately, he told himself, turn around and leave. But something—some perverse pride or gallantry—prevented him. He moved on up the stairs, not afraid, but with a feeling of melancholy resignation.

  The door to 4A was a dull beige color, with an egg-shaped brass knob. He knocked. There was a movement at the peephole, then the woman’s voice, softer now: “Hi …”

  “What shall I do?”

  “I guess try turning the handle.”

  He turned the handle, but it didn’t seem to be connected to anything.

  “I think the spindle may have come out.”

  “Oh. Well, try just pushing.”

  He gave the door a push.

  “Nothing much seems to be happening.”

  “Push harder.”

  He pushed as hard as he could. Still the door didn’t budge.

  “I think maybe you need to take a run at it,” the woman said.

  He paused. The imagined mugging gave way in his mind to a more sinister scenario. He was going to be accused of breaking and entering, or whatever they called it here: caught on some hidden camera perhaps; blackmailed … Thoughts of some embarrassing drama involving the police and his supervisors at work went through him. And yet, with the same fatalistic resignation as before, he stepped back along the landing and ran full tilt at the door, hurling himself against it.

  This time it burst open. He and the woman stood face-to-face. She looked about forty, her features lined but still youthful, a narrow charcoal skirt hanging below her close-fitting sweater. There appeared to be no one else in the apartment, a studio by the look of it, with bare brick walls, shelves full of magazines and plants, and a bed in the far corner half hidden by a screen. After a moment of startled silence the woman spoke. “Wow! You did it.”

  “So it would appear.”

  “That’s wonderful! I don’t know what I would have done. I was just—I was just trying to go out.”

  “Well, I’m glad to have helped.”

  She had been smiling, but now she began to look agitated, her eyes darting about the room as if seeking support from familiar objects. The situation, though evidently not dangerous, seemed to him freshly awkward. It struck him that having forced the door open, he had taken on the aspect of an intruder, even though the woman had asked him to do it. For a moment this made him actually feel like an intruder, stirring something unexpected inside him. And this in turn prompted the thought that he must leave immediately, so as not to appear to be trying to take advantage in some underhand way. He straightened his jacket. The wo
man glanced at him, smiling nervously. “I don’t know how to thank you …”

  “Oh, no need.”

  “Can I offer you a cup of coffee?”

  “No, that’s very kind of you.”

  “A drink?”

  He laughed. “A little early for me.”

  “Oh. Well …”

  “Goodbye then.”

  “Goodbye.”

  He went back down the stairs, smiling to himself. Already as he reached the street, he was composing in his mind the e-mail he would send his girlfriend that night. He would make the whole story into a little mock epic of suspense and misplaced apprehension, with the woman as a damsel in distress and himself as the naive but gallant knight, too chivalrous to ignore her plea for help. He would describe the gloomy hallway, the sense of being led into a trap, the melancholy obligation to proceed nevertheless, the oddness of breaking into a strange woman’s flat … His little moment of male regression he would omit, but he would try to describe the woman herself.

  Although what was there to be said about her after all? A New York woman of a certain well-groomed type: more glamorous-looking than her English counterpart, her face more concertedly made up, her hair more showily coiffured, her manner at once more direct and more remote, giving that odd effect of intimacy and unknowability.

  He pictured her again, facing him in the doorway with her dazed, slightly frantic expression, the afternoon light refracting on the surface of her hair. Her voice came back to him, high and a little mournful: “I was just trying to go out …” Briefly a vague disquiet entered him, as though there had been some complication present in the picture that he had failed to grasp at the time. He tried to pin it down, but it seemed to retreat from him as he pursued it, and by the time he arrived at his destination on Washington Street he had decided he was mistaken. It was as he had thought: the woman herself had been the least interesting aspect of the whole situation.

  She went straight to the kitchenette and poured a vodka martini into one of the cocktail glasses chilling on the shelf of the freezer. Listening to his shoes stomp down the last flight of stairs, she swept the chrysanthemum stems into the disposal unit and stepped over to the window where she watched him come out through the door and walk off down the block.

  She sipped her drink, following his progress till he disappeared across Greenwich Street.

  “Goddamn Englishman,” she said.

  The accent had thrown her, triggering some absurd reflex of guilty nervousness. That and how much younger he was than she’d thought.

  The sun sank down behind the rooftop opposite, and the color drained out of the room; only the chrysanthemums still glowing yellow on the coffee table, as if they’d been dipped in some kind of luminous paint.

  A mistake, those. The wrong note entirely. She must have realized that unconsciously. She’d picked them up on impulse coming back from the liquor store with the Stoli, then forgotten about them till he was already in the building, so that she had had to unwrap them and trim them and set them in their vase, all in the space it took him to climb the stairs, forgetting even then to throw out the stems, which meant that the entire time he was there she’d had to be thinking about whether he had noticed them and, if so, whether it was reasonable or paranoid to imagine he might infer from them that she was not in fact just going out but had just come in, in which case—

  “Oh, who cares?” she said, tipping back the rest of the drink.

  She stood, consulting her own restlessness. After a few minutes a smile rose onto her face. Was this what was going to happen? There were ways in which the world forced itself on you and you had no choice but to yield. But there were also ways of using your own weakness as a source of strength. In high school she and her best friend had discovered they could do anything the other dared them to do by telling themselves they would do it on the count of three, with eternal damnation as the penalty for chickening out. One, two, three, and without hesitation the highway at the end of the school road would be run across blindfolded; the cherry-bomb-rigged toy boat sent floating over the pond to explode amid the boys’ fleet of miniature clippers; the mystery substance puffed, sniffed, swallowed … Cumulative observances had strengthened the rite over time until it came to possess an almost magical potency, with no need of the penalty clause to enforce it. She had continued to practice it in college and on into adult life, using it not just for feats of gratuitous recklessness but also for simple practical purposes. One, two, three, and she could dive into the icy lake her husband’s family had owned in Maine. One, two, three, and she could make herself call up her brother at his law office in Atlanta and ask for a loan. It wasn’t about willpower; it was about submission. That was the glory of it.

  She strode over to the table and picked up the bowl of flowers, carried them into the kitchenette, and shoved them into the garbage. No more innovations. From the kitchenette she went over to the door and wedged the thick brass tongue all but a few millimeters in, using a paper clip the way she had figured out earlier that summer. And then, pushing the door till she heard the little click, she crossed the room to take up her position once again, beside the quartered glass of the casement window.

  The sky was clear, just a small fleet of clouds patrolling the river, pink lit from beneath. Nobody of any interest on the street. She waited, thinking of the first time it had happened. She really had locked herself in, pulled the handle and its mechanism right out of the door and been unable to unfasten the catch. In a panic of claustrophobia she had called down to the first person she had seen passing, a man in a business suit, who turned out to be a shoe retailer on his way to check out a new storefront. It had been his idea, not hers, to take a run at the door after nothing else worked. When it burst open and they had found themselves face-to-face with each other, they had both felt it, the sense of something unexpected surging up, rising right through them. It was just a matter of surrendering to it. He had stood there with a confused look on his face, making no attempt either to leave or to come farther in. She had offered him coffee, then before he had been able to form an answer, had heard herself add, “A drink,” at which he had smiled, very sweetly. She smiled back now, remembering.

  A man appeared, coming east along the block from Greenwich Street. She studied him carefully as he approached. He was tall, lean, with long graying hair. Leather coat, jeans, scuffed cowboy boots. A little wolfish maybe, his chin unshaven by the look of it, but after Mr. Tweed Jacket that was maybe just what was needed … She gripped the handles on the window and slid it up. For a moment a feeling of vertigo passed through her, as if she had opened the window onto a bottomless void. One, two, three, she counted in silence. Then heard her own voice calling: “Sir, sir, excuse me, sir …”

  A BOURGEOIS STORY

  I read the letter with a feeling of unease, then put it in one of the partitioned receptacles on the desk in my study and packed my briefcase for work. From a mahogany periodicals rack I selected a publication to read on the tube, a digest of reports on lawsuits arising from shipping accidents around the globe.

  Karen was in the room we call the breakfast room, feeding our baby daughter, Sophie.

  Spring sunlight, whiteish, with a tint of green from the foliage of the communal garden, came through the window, and there was a sound of birds in the cherry tree in our own private garden. I noticed that the tree was coming into blossom.

  I stepped into the room to say goodbye. Karen smiled at me calmly, continuing to feed Sophie.

  “You never met Dimitri, did you?” I asked her.

  She shook her head.

  “He’s an old friend of mine. He’s sent me a letter.”

  “Oh.” My wife moved the spoon from the jar of puree to the flowerlike mouth of our child, and back again. Lit from the window behind her, the planes of her high-cheekboned face appeared smooth and firm as stone. Her fair hair was already up; brushed back from her wide forehead and fastened in a tightly knotted bun. Her lips, full at the center, but neat a
nd small like the tight coil of hair on her head, were closed, as they always were the moment she had finished speaking, a characteristic that gave an emphatic finality to her utterances.

  “We were at school together,” I said, “then at university, till he dropped out.”

  Karen tilted her face up again: serene, maternal, not especially interested.

  “I haven’t heard from him for years.”

  She said nothing, though she gave me a pleasant look, as if asking me to forgive her indifference. As a matter of fact I had always admired my wife’s attitude to my past, which seemed to be that compared to the great fact of our having married each other, our previous lives were no more than unimportant sketches, first drafts full of clumsy experiment and fruitless detours.

  I kissed her and Sophie goodbye, passing through to the living room that led into the front hall.

  As if she now felt safe from the risk of a prolonged discussion, Karen called out: “That’s nice of your friend to write. What does he say?”

  “Not a lot. He wants to get together sometime.”

  “Will you?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  On the tube I found myself unable to concentrate on the law reports. I hadn’t seen Dimitri for almost fifteen years, but I could still picture him with perfect clarity: dark, shiny eyes; the close-cropped reddish curls; barrel-chested frame, six inches shorter than mine … I’d always had to bend down in his company, and I liked to think of the slight stoop I had now as a record of our friendship, hardened in me like the crook of a plant bent too long toward the same source of light.