by James Lasdun
A few hours later, a sound tugged her out of deep sleep. She was lying on the newspapers. Struggling awake, she remembered tiptoeing in earlier, seeing the swan asleep on its bedding. Her intention, so far as she’d had one, had just been to sit there a while, but she must have nodded off. A trace of something euphoric in her dreams – a sense of wheeling through bright air – was drawing her back into the pleasant oblivion she’d been roused from, when there were louder noises suddenly all around her; violent hissing, the sound of a blow, a cry of pain, and she was wide awake, looking at Richard as he reeled back from the swan, hands up at his mouth, while the swan itself stood stretched up on its legs, hissing and beating its wide, vast wings, overshadowing him like some great archangel.
‘Richard!’
‘What the hell is going on? Why are you sleeping in here?’
He had his hand to his mouth and there was blood running down his chin.
‘Are you all right?’
‘No! Your goddamned bird attacked me!’
‘Let me look.’
He took his hand from his mouth. Both lips were bleeding.
The swan had stopped beating its wings but was still agitated. Sara spoke to it softly until its rigidly outstretched neck began relaxing slowly backward. She turned back to Richard.
‘We’d better get you cleaned up.’
In the bathroom she dabbed the blood from Richard’s mouth with tissues. His lips were swelling extravagantly.
‘Do you want me to take you to the doctor?’
‘No. Thanks.’
‘You should ice it though.’
He nodded. ‘Sorry to yell at you.’
‘That’s okay.’
‘Beaten up by a bird!’ He attempted a smile. ‘I guess I should have knocked first. Why were you in there?’
‘I don’t know. I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I thought it might help to move. I guess it worked.’
Richard nodded.
‘You’re home early,’ she said.
Dabbing at his lips, he told her he’d woken early at his hotel and caught the five-twenty train home instead of the six-twenty, which had given him time to come back to the house before morning assembly.
‘I’d have called,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t want to wake you.’
Sara caught his eye. He looked away, glancing at his reflection in the mirror.
‘Jesus! I look like some eighteenth-century libertine!’
‘I’ll make some coffee,’ she said. She went into the kitchen, absorbing the fact that he had lied to her about the hotel and the train. He’d never, to her knowledge, lied to her before.
**********
There was the domestic idea of virtue – kindness, selflessness, fidelity – and then there was nature’s own idea in which all that mattered was vitality; the feeling of life flowing through you.
For long stretches, years at a time, the two ideas could coincide harmoniously, each enhancing the other. But they weren’t the same thing, and their interests sometimes diverged; sometimes even became directly opposed. When that happened, as Richard had observed as a younger man, you entered a condition of crisis from which there was no easy exit.
He had entered it again now. Even as the train had carried him physically away from Francesca after that evening at the club, his old feelings for her had begun stirring again inside him. And within a few days they had regained all their original strength. They were like those seeds archaeologists find in tombs and then germinate; ancient strains of poppy and delphinium breaking back into posthumous life.
He’d started drifting into imaginary encounters with Francesca in which their old intimacy was effortlessly re-established. At school, where his job required an appearance of unwavering attentiveness at all times, it was necessary to resist the inward tug of these reveries. But it was increasingly difficult to do so. The thought of her touched some source of incendiary joy in him. It felt wrong, unnatural, to shut it off. It didn’t help that the school’s philosophy was all about self-expression, freeing the creative spirit from the chains of conformity and convention. Every classroom wall, every poster and notice, every conversation with his eager young faculty, seemed either to urge him forward or taunt him for his restraint. Be Yourself! Dare to Dream! One morning, perched on one of the child-size chairs at the back of the second-grade home room where he was observing a new teacher’s class, he saw himself suddenly as a child, or rather had an image of himself frozen in some child-size state of arrest as he sat there, squeezed suffocatingly into the diminutive chair. He stood up abruptly and left the room, the puzzled young teacher staring after him. Striding back to his office, he opened his cell phone, and dialled Francesca’s number. She picked up.
‘It’s me, Richard,’ he told her quietly. ‘I have to be down in New York again in a couple of weeks. I was wondering if you’d like to have lunch?’
After only the slightest hesitation, she replied: ‘That’d be nice, Richard. That’d be really nice.’
He told Sara he had to go for a check-up with a specialist he’d seen earlier in the year about a torn ligament in his shoulder. The ligament had in fact healed, and he’d long ago cancelled the follow-up appointment. He hadn’t mentioned that to Sara, and she had no reason to question him.
Francesca had suggested a restaurant in Fort Greene, where she was giving a voice class that afternoon. The place was long and narrow, with salvaged furniture painted in bright oils. Richard felt odd at first, making polite conversation with her. She was quieter than she’d been the other night; subdued almost. But when he asked what had brought her back to the States she told a spirited story about sitting in a pub in Cork surrounded by a flock of girls all bobbing identical blonde ponytails as they chirruped away at each other. ‘They’re lovely people and I remain devoted to them but that’s when I knew I had to get out,’ she said, laughing. He didn’t really understand the story but after she’d told it, all their old ease with each other seemed to return. She asked about Sara, and Richard spoke affectionately about her and Daniel, making no effort to present himself as a man in an unhappy marriage. At the same time, as he listened to her describe an unsatisfactory-sounding on-off relationship of her own with a musician back in Ireland, he made no attempt to resist the pleasant sensation of being licensed to gaze deeply into her eyes, and of being welcomed into their depths.
It was a nice day, and from what he’d understood there would be time to walk around together for a while before Francesca’s voice class. But she had to dash back to her apartment to let in an electrician, she told him, and said goodbye a couple of blocks from the restaurant.
‘So good seeing you, Richard. Take care of yourself now.’
‘You too, Francesca.’
On the train back upstate he asked himself repeatedly what he thought he was doing. What do I want? It was a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Later that evening, as he sat playing chess with his son, he asked himself again: What do I want? Was it just a matter of lust? ‘Getting laid,’ as Victor put it. Was that all this was about?
No. Lust, in his experience, wasn’t so all-consuming. He remembered one of Daniel’s babysitters; a careworn-looking yet oddly alluring Polish woman in her thirties, grey-eyed and ashen, with something at once supple and soft about her figure, who’d washed up in Aurelia for some reason. He had found her acutely attractive, and whether she found him attractive in turn or was just amusing herself, she’d taken every opportunity to flash sexual signals at him, touching and brushing against him whenever they passed by in the house, smiling at him almost mockingly. Once, when he’d come into the living room, she’d bent down in her dress on some pretext with her ass up in the air right where he was standing, holding the pose as if willing or daring him to touch her. He had been tempted, but he’d walked away instead. Almost immediately, the feeling of sharp arousal had given way to relief at having resisted doing something extremely stupid.
That was lust. He’d ignored it and it had gone away
. This was something different. His feelings about Francesca didn’t seem reducible to a desire to go to bed with her. In fact when he thought of her now, it wasn’t in sexual terms at all. It seemed to him that what he felt was something that didn’t quite refer to the actual world at all, but to some separate realm of existence, with its own laws, its own dimensions of time and space, in which this rich nameless intimacy between him and Francesca was not only possible but was already actually occurring.
‘Are you okay, Dad?’
Daniel was gazing up from the chessboard.
‘Huh?’
‘You keep frowning.’
‘Sorry.’
Sara looked over from the sofa.
‘Are you in pain?’
It took him a second to understand why she was asking.
‘Well, a little. The doctor gave me quite a workout.’
‘Why don’t you lie down? I’ll get the heating pad.’
‘No, no. I’ll be fine.’
He looked into his wife’s eyes. It was obvious she didn’t suspect anything.
A week later, he phoned Francesca again. It was too soon, he knew, but that was partly his reason for doing it. It seemed to him that he needed to show some forcefulness. After all, it was Francesca who had stuck her neck out last time around, flying across the Atlantic to see him, only to be rebuffed. Now it was his turn to take the initiative. He thought again of what she’d said outside the club when he asked if they were going to stay in touch this time. Well now, that’s your call I’d say, wouldn’t you? Her words had seemed carefully chosen.
She didn’t pick up, but he left a message and called again the next morning.
‘Hello, Richard.’
‘Listen, Francesca, I have to come down again in a couple of days and I really would like to see you, and to be honest this may be the last chance for quite a while.’
‘Okay …’
‘How about a drink somewhere, or dinner?’
‘Sure.’
They arranged to meet in Chelsea, near another voice student of hers.
She arrived twenty minutes late, unapologetic. She sat opposite him in the dimly lit wooden booth. Her eyes were conspicuously devoid of their usual mirthful warmth.
‘What’s this about, Richard?’
He flinched a little, unprepared for her bluntness.
‘It was nice seeing you at the gig,’ she continued, ‘and I was glad we made the time to catch up the other day, though I have to tell you I was thinking it was a bit previous of you even then, to call when you did. And now here we are again. What’s up?’
A waitress came, but Francesca waved her away. ‘Nothing for me.’
‘You’re not staying?’ Richard asked.
‘No.’
He lowered his head.
‘Well, I’m sorry.’
‘Go home, Richard.’
‘I was hoping to spend the evening with you,’ he said. ‘Actually, I think I was hoping to spend the night with you. Since we’re being frank.’
She gave a half-smile.
‘Is that right?’
‘I told Sara I had to go to a conference for educators followed by a dinner and I’d be staying at a hotel.’
‘Oh, Richard.’
‘Lunacy, right?’
‘Well. That’s not a word that springs to mind when I think of you …’
She looped the straps of her bag over her shoulder.
He grabbed her hand.
‘Francesca. Listen. I made a mistake that time you flew in to see me. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I’ve regretted it ever since you left. Every single day since then I’ve thought about how stupid I was, how cowardly, how blind to my own feelings, not to mention yours. Every day for twelve years. I have to tell you this …’ He broke off, dumbstruck by his own words.
She extricated her hand. They stared at each other through the red-lit darkness. She looked away, and then turned back to him.
‘I loved you,’ she said coolly. ‘You rejected my love. You’d do it again, believe me. Anyway –’ something seemed to flare in her – ‘I’m glad you did do it because it wouldn’t have taken me long to figure out how wrong I was about you. Only, knowing me I’d have stuck it out out of sheer guilt and niceness. So thank you for sparing me that.’
‘God, Francesca—’
She stood up. ‘Well, it’s true. Now go home, little man, while you’re still able. Your wife is waiting for you. And your son.’
She left.
He finished his drink and got the check, not knowing what he wanted to do. His hotel, a Comfort Inn in Queens, was paid for, but it seemed pointless to drag himself out there.
He walked to Penn Station, arriving sticky from the July humidity. There was a train leaving in half an hour and he exchanged his ticket at the office. A black mood settled into him as he stared out the window across the Hudson. The folly of his own behaviour was starkly apparent to him. It seemed to him even that an awareness of this had coexisted in parallel with the behaviour itself, all along. What had he been thinking? What did I really expect to happen? he asked himself. What did I even want? He seemed further than ever from an answer.
It wasn’t yet eleven by the time he arrived in Aurelia. Sara would still be awake, he realised. She would ask him about his non-existent conference. The idea of having to lie his way through a prolonged conversation about it filled him with disgust. He pulled into the parking lot of the Chinese restaurant. He wasn’t particularly hungry but if he could kill an hour there she’d probably be asleep by the time he got home. She’d wake up enough to ask why he hadn’t stayed in the city, but he could tell her the reception had ended early, without the risk of having to invent anything else.
The restaurant was dim and quiet; almost empty. He ordered a beer and some lo mein. The food was slow in coming and he was ready for a second beer by the time it arrived. He was just finishing his food when the door swung open and a woman he recognised came in, carrying a canvas bag. It was Bonnie Fletcher, the mother of a girl at his school. She went straight to the bar without seeing him, propping her bag on the polished surface and greeting the elderly Chinese proprietor with an effusive: ‘Hey there!’
From the largely one-sided exchange that followed, it seemed she was selling some kind of water-filtration system. The area had a sulphur problem in its wells. Richard watched from his table as she went through her sales routine. It didn’t surprise him all that much to see her working this late in the evening. She was a single mother, not well off but determined to give her daughter a private education, and she often took menial jobs at the school to offset the fees. He’d seen her many times mopping corridors or stacking chairs in the auditorium; her slim figure always half-dancing to whatever music she was listening to on her iPod.
At the end of her pitch the Chinese guy shook his head, giving back the little contraption she’d handed him.
‘We don’t need.’
‘Not a problem!’
She turned from the bar.
‘Richard!’
‘Hello, Bonnie.’ He signalled for the check.
Bonnie came over to his table, eyes flashing in that switched-on way of hers.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Oh, I was in New York,’ he said vaguely. ‘I didn’t get a chance to eat before my train.’ He gestured at her bag. ‘I had no idea you were in the filtration business.’
‘Hey, whatever it takes! You know me.’
‘Right.’
She hovered at the table.
‘How’s Caya?’ he asked.
‘She’s fantastic. Staying with her dad tonight. My one night off and I spend it hustling! But I’m done now.’
‘Well, that’s good.’
‘Yeah, I’m heading up to the drumming. Have you been?’
‘No. I never have.’
‘You should come. It’s wild!’
He smiled, handing the proprietor his credit card. ‘It’s a little past my bedtime.’
‘Hey, I’ll keep you awake!’
She’d always been flirtatious with him. Mostly it just seemed her way. But occasionally he’d felt something more purposeful. Earlier that year, in a meeting she’d requested in order to ask for a deferment on her daughter’s fees, she’d seen him wince from the torn ligament in his shoulder and had reached over, gripping the tendons at the side of his neck and probing them gently with her strong fingers. It had felt so good he hadn’t pulled away immediately, and she’d taken quick advantage of the lapse to invite him over to her house for a full sacro-cranial massage, at which she claimed to be an expert.
‘I’m very good,’ she’d said in a low voice: jokily, but he’d felt she was intending to plant a serious idea.
‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ he’d said, standing up. She was extremely attractive, he’d had to admit to himself at that point, with her shining black eyes and fine, sharp cheekbones. He’d dealt with the problem this posed by being always vaguely in a hurry whenever he ran into her.
‘I should get home,’ he said.
They walked out of the restaurant together. Bonnie got into her pickup truck.
‘I’ll be there if you change your mind!’
She drove off and he pulled out after her onto the town road. The interlude had distracted him, but it wasn’t long before he was brooding on Francesca’s words again. Little man … He remembered the vision he’d had of himself in the child’s chair the other day, among the boxes of crayons and wooden blocks. Francesca had outgrown him: that had become painfully clear. He felt weighed down; oppressed by his own stalled sameness.
