It's Beginning to Hurt

by James Lasdun

  “Still here!”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t recognize you. I apologize.” He gave an embarrassed grin. “What you must think of me, already on to my second wife!”

  “Oh, I wasn’t—”

  “Well, it happens.” He laughed, recovering his self-possession. “Anyway, we’re very much in love. What can I tell you?”

  “That’s good. Congratulations.”

  He bought a set of earrings and an expensive emerald bracelet; money was apparently no longer a great concern.

  “At least we can say I’m faithful when it comes to where I buy my wives their jewelry!” he said in a parting attempt at jollity. Clare gave him a polite salesgirl’s smile. His phrase “We’re very much in love” had grated on her, and as he left the store, she decided it must have been the formula he had used in breaking the news to the wife he had cast off, “We’re very much in love …” as though he and his new girlfriend just couldn’t help themselves. Clare pictured the wife—a blur of disembodied pain—and the girlfriend: younger, fresher, prettier. It struck her that Kahn hadn’t recognized her because she too had started to age.

  There was that realm, the glassed-in sphere in which these encounters occurred, and then there was the real world, and Clare lived her life in this world also. She married a man named Neil Gehrig, an airline industry analyst, twelve years older than herself.

  At a dinner one evening, someone praised the wine, and the host said, “Yes, it’s a Kahn.”

  Looking at the bottle, Clare saw his name on the sticker at the neck, “Imported by Peter Kahn,” and an unexpectedly sharp emotion went through her. Three or four years had passed since their last encounter, and she was caught off guard by the force of her own feelings.

  “He set up a company to bring over wines from the last small producers in France and Italy,” the host was saying. “We grab everything we can afford off his list.”

  “I know him,” Clare heard herself say.

  “You do?”

  “He used to come into the store.”

  “Really? What was he like?”

  She shrugged, aware of her husband looking at her across the table, and regretting that she had spoken. “He seemed a nice enough guy …”

  “Did he talk to you about wine?” the host asked.

  The husband broke in. “Why would he talk to her about wine? It’s a jewelry store.”

  “He’s obsessed with it,” the host answered. “We get this newsletter he writes. The guy’s on a mission. He wants to save the wine world from globalization.”

  “How incredibly original,” the husband said, leaning back in his chair.

  “One time he took a call on his cell phone,” Clare went on impetuously. “I heard him describe this wine he wanted to buy as like having the Rose Window at Chartres dissolving on your tongue.”

  “My God, a poet too!”

  Clare smiled at her husband. Neil’s jealousy had surfaced soon after their marriage and now lived with them like a third person whose volatile behavior had to be carefully negotiated. Once, after a dinner like this, he had hit her on the mouth with the back of his hand after accusing her of flirting with another guest.

  That November Kahn appeared once again in the boutique. He wore a soft-looking felt hat and an alpaca scarf. His eyes had a melancholy cast. There was a woman with him. The second wife, Clare supposed.

  He gave a half-surprised smile of recognition as he saw Clare. Still here? The look seemed to ask.

  “We’re, ah, we’re looking for an engagement ring,” he said.

  It took a moment for the implication of this to sink in. Doing her best to conceal her surprise, Clare pulled a tray of rings from a cabinet.

  The woman removed a pair of kidskin gloves. Her face was smooth and symmetrical. Its features seemed exclusively occupied in compelling the word “beauty” to form itself in the mind of whoever beheld them.

  She glanced briefly at the rings. “I don’t think so, darling.”

  Kahn turned to Clare with a shrug. “Sorry.”

  “Oh, no problem.”

  He gave her a smile.

  “Shall we see some other things?” he asked the woman.

  “I suppose, since we’re here.”

  A necklace of rubies and small gold lozenges seemed to interest her.

  “Why don’t you try it on?” Kahn said. But instead of handing the necklace to his fiancée, he handed it to Clare. The woman gave a breathy laugh, and Kahn, realizing his blunder, put his hand on hers.

  “Sorry. I’m used to coming here alone.”

  “Apparently.”

  “So you try it on,” Kahn said to her.

  Ignoring him, the woman turned to Clare.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Clare.”

  “Put on the necklace, Clare,” she said.

  Clare put on the necklace. She was aware of Kahn’s glance upon her, but she was careful to look only at the woman. After giving the necklace a cursory appraisal, the woman turned to regard Kahn. As the three sat watching one another, Clare felt as though her relation to Kahn had developed into something newly strange. Everything seemed suddenly its own opposite: his physical closeness the precise expression of his untraversable distance from her, the free air between them a barrier impenetrable as glass. It seemed to her that no one on this earth was more remote from her than this man, sitting less than two feet from her with this, his third fiancée.

  But even as she was feeling this, she allowed herself to glance at him for a moment, and at once, in spite of herself, she felt the old ease, the sensation of effortless compatibility.

  She stopped working at the store soon after that. Neil, who earned a good salary, had been making increasingly scornful remarks about the fact that she chose to work at a mindless job when she didn’t need to, and she agreed to quit.

  She despised her husband, but the very fact that she had no illusions about this was a source of perverse satisfaction to her; in the irremediable absence of love, it appeared she could make do with someone to hate.

  With the new leisure imposed on her, she began cultivating the habits of a pampered mistress. She had their living room furniture reupholstered in raw silk. She bought a pair of Selvaggia shoes for seven hundred dollars. Neil was eager to have a child, and she pretended to want one too, even setting a calendar beside the bed with the optimal nights for conception marked on it. In a morbid ecstasy of self-torture, she allowed him to make love to her on those nights, while privately taking care not to get pregnant.

  Meanwhile she subjected her feelings for Kahn to a deliberate effort of destruction, aiming at them an unceasing barrage of self-mockery. They were nothing more than the symptoms of a sickness, she would tell herself, a fixation straight out of some textbook on mental disorders. The relationship between herself and him in that “other” world was a pathetic, one-sided fiction. As for Kahn himself, he was nothing, a cipher onto which she had projected her own romantic fantasies, themselves as shallow and unoriginal as those of some overwrought schoolgirl. What, from any sane point of view, could she possibly want with such a man? Why would she even dream of being involved in the calamitous opera of his life?

  Numb, bored, detached even from her own desolation, she drifted on.

  One evening she found herself once again at dinner with the friends who had subscribed to Kahn’s catalog. She had forgotten about this connection until her neighbor at the table, a young Frenchman, commented on the wine, and she saw again, with a familiar helpless pang, the familiar name on the bottle.

  As it turned out, her neighbor and his partner, seated across the table, were in the restaurant business and knew Kahn personally. From the look that passed between them, it was apparent that he was a source of amusing gossip in their world.

  Clare glanced at her husband; he was lecturing their host on airline statistics.

  “Tell me about Peter Kahn,” she said quietly to Jean-Luc, her neighbor.

&nbs
p; “Oh! Where to begin!” the young man said with a laugh.

  Mark, his American partner, turned to her. “You know him?”

  “A little.”

  Both men grinned at her, their expressions mischievously alert.

  “You heard about the wedding?” Jean-Luc asked.

  “No.”

  “Oh my God! Tell her, Mark.”

  “He was engaged to this model, Diane Wolfe? She was quite famous a few years ago. It was his third marriage, and he told everyone he’d finally found the right woman and to prove it he was going to have the most spectacular romantic wedding, in Venice. They rented a palazzo on the Grand Canal, invited a hundred and fifty guests, hired a jet to fly them over, arranged for the best chef in the Veneto to make the dinner, and had a yacht waiting on the Lido to take the two of them off into the Adriatic for their honeymoon. Well, guess what?”

  Clare said nothing. Her heart had begun beating violently.

  “He jilted her?” another guest asked.

  “At the altar. At the altar. Our friends Sabine and George were there. They told us the whole story. All the guests in the church. Diane waiting in the back all dressed up in her veils and gown, specially designed, of course, the minutes ticking by, everyone getting steadily more impatient, when this man arrives, a complete stranger, apparently some tourist Peter accosted on the street after his best man refused to do the job, and reads out loud from a piece of paper: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Peter Kahn has asked me to tell you the wedding is canceled. He deeply regrets the pain this will cause …’”

  Clare listened in a daze.

  “What did he do?” she heard herself ask.

  “He got out of Venice pretty damn fast, I can tell you!”

  “What’s he doing now?” The conversation had caught the interest of the rest of the table, and Clare was aware of her husband looking in her direction.

  Jean-Luc answered her: “Apparently he’s become a bit of a recluse. He sold his business, cut off all his friends. The last we heard he’d moved up to the Finger Lakes, looking to buy some winery of his own.”

  “Where in the Finger Lakes?” She made a vague effort not to sound too interested.

  “I don’t know. But we can find out if you like.” The young Frenchman’s eyes darted mirthfully from Clare to her husband. She could sense, without looking, the way Neil’s mouth would be tightening at the corners.

  “Can you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll give you my e-mail address.”

  In the taxi home Neil remained silent. The interrogation began as soon as they had closed the door of their apartment behind them. “Why are you so interested in that Kahn guy?”

  “No reason.”

  “Are you planning to visit him or something, up in the Finger Lakes? Is that why you were so eager to get his exact address?”

  She shrugged, aware of being infuriating but unable to stop herself.

  “I hadn’t thought. I was just curious.”

  “But you don’t rule it out? Visiting this man who you apparently hardly know?”

  “I don’t know, Neil. I haven’t thought about it.”

  Her husband blinked and seemed to reel for a moment. He stood up. She looked away, her eye fixed on a piece of lint on the rug.

  “What went on between you and him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean. He used to come into your store. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What for?”

  “To buy jewelry.”

  “Were you having an affair with him?”

  “No.”

  “Look at me when I’m talking, goddammit!”

  She felt the sudden crack of his hand on her mouth. She looked up at him.

  “All right then,” she said.

  “What?”

  “All right … I was.”

  “What? You were what?”

  “Having an affair with him.”

  Neil’s eyes widened. He looked stunned, in spite of himself. She herself was startled by the unexpected potency of her words. It was as though in saying them she had illuminated some unsuspected truth.

  “When? Before we were married or after?”

  “Before. And after. He’d come in the store after Ishiro went home.” Ishiro was the designer who owned the store. “I’d lock the door, and we’d go up into Ishiro’s office.”

  “And fuck?”

  “Yes. Every day. On the chair, on the table—”

  A blow struck her on the cheek.

  “On the floor—”

  Another hit her stomach. She doubled up, covering her face with her hands. Neil was yelling at her, but his words sounded like a foreign language or the roars of an animal. By the time she heard the front door open and slam shut behind him, she was in that glazed world again, as if she had stepped inside a diamond. In it, as vividly as if the scene were happening right there and then, she saw herself in the calm greenness of a summer afternoon, Kahn’s gaze opening on her like the sun itself as she approached, silver-blue water glittering in the distance behind him. She uncovered her face. The Finger Lakes, she said to herself. And what remained for her to do seemed clear as day.

  LIME PICKLE

  Anna’s father, not yet divorced, took us out for dinner at the Madras Chop House. In those far-off days it was still a novelty for us to eat in a restaurant, and neither of us had ever eaten at a real Indian restaurant at all. Mr. Hamilton, a dedicated bon viveur, had been shocked to hear this. “Isn’t it your birthday coming up?” he had asked Anna. “I shall take you and Matthew to the Madras Chop House.”

  I picked her up from her school in Hammersmith. I was early, often the case in those days. I had left the same school a year earlier, and aside from a morning job in an art shop, I had very little to do with my time.

  I wandered through the school courtyard to the quiet gardens at the back, where I knew Anna would be fencing. There were a dozen or so girls there, practicing their thrusts and parries under the direction of their fencing mistress. Their bendy blunt-tipped foils swished through the crisp spring air and clicked against each other, flashing in the afternoon light. All the girls were dressed in the same fencing outfits, their heads completely covered by their masks, but I recognized Anna immediately. The trim line of her shoulders in the snow-white padded jacket, her boyish hips and slim legs in their tight white breeches like birch saplings in new white bark were unmistakable among the fuller figures of the other girls. As I watched her advance firmly upon her opponent, one hand on her hip, the other in its gauntlet swiveling her foil with fast, graceful, precise movements, I felt the crystalline asperity of her soul sparkle through me like something brilliant and fresh, and I was filled with the still new elation of being in love for the first time.

  The fencing ended. Anna took off her mask, and her long dark hair fell down neatly over the white jacket. Seeing me, she smiled and ran over to kiss me on the lips. Her friends waved at me, laughing. In our few months together we had become quite a fixture, faithful, inseparable, the object of good-natured envy and amusement.

  After she had showered and changed, we went out onto the Broadway and caught the bus to the West End. Traffic lights and the lit windows of office buildings were beginning to shine against the dusk. When I think now of the peculiar tenderness of our lives at that period, I often find myself remembering these evening bus rides across London: the smell of school soap on Anna’s skin, the bristly tartan seats, the conductors lurching down the aisle with their tight black gloves, and out through the windows the city stealthily transforming itself from a thing of bricks and mortar to a little anchored galaxy of electric lights.

  I gave Anna her birthday present on the bus. It was a seashell, a nautilus, in flawless condition, heavy and gleaming, as if it had been carved from solid pearl.

  “What a beautiful thing, Matthew …”

  She held it to her ear, then turned it around admiringly, watching its
silvery whiteness take on a luster of lilac and emerald from the passing lights. In her quiet way she seemed extremely pleased with it.

  “We’ll put it on the stone table,” she said, “the one overlooking the sea.”

  In our imaginations we had constructed a house on a Greek island where we were going to live. To the extent that we were in reality planning to spend that summer in Greece, after Anna had finished school, this was not a complete fantasy. Technically we were still virgins then, and “Greece” had come to stand for the time when we would become lovers in the fullest sense. We would find a quiet island in the Aegean. A small hotel by the beach. There, without our having said it in so many words, we would give ourselves finally to each other. For both of us, this image of simple elements—mountains, starlight, sparkling sea—had seemed auspicious.

  Darkness had fallen by the time we reached the restaurant. Anna’s father arrived just after us, rosy-cheeked from the Garrick, where he conducted most of his business. His portly figure was clad as usual in an elegantly tailored three-piece pinstripe suit, and a silk handkerchief shimmered in his breast pocket.

  To our great surprise, he was not alone.

  “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine,” he said with a faintly embarrassed air, “Lesley McLaughlin.”

  A woman somewhat younger than himself, in a fur coat with a short mauve alpaca dress and high-heeled leather boots, came forward and offered us each a little cold hand to shake.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said with a smile that revealed a row of bright white teeth. Her voice was high and breathy, strangely girlish. Her slightly bouffant hair was partly gathered in a velvet ribbon at the back, falling in a loose, brass-colored sheaf over her padded shoulders.

  Anna looked from her to her father. For the past few years, since she had started at her school in London, she and Mr. Hamilton had been living together during the week in a small flat Mr. Hamilton kept in Bayswater, returning at weekends to the house in Suffolk where Mrs. Hamilton lived with her two younger children. It had never occurred to Anna that this arrangement might reflect anything other than convenience. From the slight apprehensive widening in her hazel eyes, it was clear that the woman’s presence had begun to rouse her from this dream.