by James Lasdun
As he approached the centre of town he found himself thinking of a text he presented every few years at morning assembly: Kierkegaard’s fable of the wild goose. The wild goose wanted to liberate the flock of tame, flightless geese. But it stayed too long among them and discovered one day that it had lost the ability to fly. A wild goose could become a tame goose, the fable ended, but a tame goose could never become wild.
It was the word ‘wild’, he realised, which Bonnie had used about the drumming, that had reminded him of the fable.
Ahead of him, her truck turned off towards the town offices, from which the path led up to the meadow known as ‘Paradise’. He’d been curious about the drumming sessions ever since they’d begun a few summers back. People of his generation spoke of them approvingly on the whole, pleased that their town had been found suitable as a site for such gatherings. He’d offered to take Daniel once, but the boy had said something sarcastic about ‘hippies’ and somehow Richard had never found time to go by himself.
Impulsively he turned off, following Bonnie’s tail lights. He could spend an hour here, he calculated, and pretend he’d come home on the late train. A faint scruple seemed present in his mind, but he brushed it aside. He was sick to death of his little scruples. He pulled in next to Bonnie’s truck in the municipal parking lot.
Her face lit up as he got out of the Saab.
‘Hey! Fantastic!’
‘Well, I’ve always been curious about the drumming …’
She gave a sweet, sly smile, beckoning him with her head. ‘C’mon …’
He followed her to the narrow path that led through woods to the meadow. As soon as they were on the path she lit a joint.
‘Want some?’
The last time he’d smoked pot, several years ago, he’d passed out – the stuff around these days was too strong for him. But he didn’t want to seem ungracious, or square, so he took a hit. It didn’t have much of an effect.
It was dark in the woods but candles in paper bags set out at intervals lit the way. The sound of drumming came through the trees. The narrow trail wound down through clearings with wigwams and tents in them. A figure in a jester’s crown jogged onto the path ahead of them, bells jingling lightly. Fireflies wandered between the dark tree trunks, pulsing off and on. A footbridge led across a stream, after which they came out at the meadow, where a couple of hundred people were gathered around a bonfire, drumming or dancing or lying in the grass. Most looked in their twenties or thirties, but there were young children too, in tie-dye shirts, as well as elderly men with bandannas and straggly grey beards, and also a number of more ordinary-looking types. Richard recognised a realtor from one of the offices in town – a man his own age with a big paunch – furiously beating a bowl-shaped drum with his hands. A group of women in their sixties, standing together with small side drums around their necks, also looked familiar, and he realised they were from the food pantry where he occasionally dropped off donations. One of them smiled at him, glancing at Bonnie, who was already doing a kind of shuffle to the beat of the drums; wrists together, shoulders sloping one way then the other, firelight glinting on the silver feathers in her ears. Woodsmoke filled the warm air, and as they drew nearer to the centre Richard caught scents of sandalwood, patchouli, sweat, and more pot. Up this close, the loud pulse of the drums and the sight of a hundred pairs of arms moving rhythmically together in the darkness, roused a feeling of adventurousness in him. He remembered the sensation from decades ago when he used to go to rock concerts.
They came to a trailer-bed piled with instruments.
‘Grab what you want, folks,’ a bare-chested guy in a round straw hat called out.
Bonnie took a double-ended drum shaped like an hourglass. Richard picked out a single maraca, intending to limit himself to a token shake or two.
‘No frickin’ way!’ Bonnie cried out. ‘You gotta get a drum, Richard!’
She rummaged in the pile, pulling out an enormous cylindrical thing with what looked like the pelts of reindeer hung around the outside.
‘Here.’
Richard took it, bemused by her proprietorial manner. He gave it a tentative pat as they joined the circle. It didn’t make much of a noise. Bonnie was banging away on hers, already picking up the rhythms of the other drummers around them. He slapped the rawhide skin a little harder. It hurt his fingers but still didn’t produce much of a sound.
‘You can hit it a whole lot harder than that,’ Bonnie shouted. ‘It won’t break.’
The drummer next to him, a grizzled old guy in nylon running shorts, nodded sagely.
Embarrassed now, Richard attacked the drum with the heel of his hands.
The same flat thud came from it, barely audible in the thundering around him.
‘Heart and soul, brother,’ the older man said. ‘Heart and soul or she won’t talk.’
‘I don’t appear to be a natural,’ Richard said, annoyed at finding himself in a situation where, absurdly, some question of manhood appeared to be at stake. Closing his fists he hunched over the instrument and thrashed at it as hard as he could. This time, as if fair-mindedly acknowledging his effort, the drum gave a low, booming resonance. He went on, throwing himself into the beat of the drummers around him. Chunga chunga chunk. Chunga chunga chunk. It was surprisingly satisfying; not just for the salvaging of his pride but for the sound itself, a deep boom, but with a bounce to it that made it feel alive and powerful. I must look like a madman, he thought, pounding his fists up and down. But he kept at it, and the self-consciousness gave way to a good feeling of being linked with the other drummers. It was years since he’d played music with other people, and he’d forgotten how enjoyable it was. Bonnie smiled at him. Something warm and tender pulsed in him. It was followed by a censorious impulse telling him he was being an idiot. Which in turn made him pound even more ferociously at the drum. Chunga chunga chunk. Chunga chunga chunk. Some degree of self-obliteration seemed possible here. The thought was strangely alluring.
By the time the rhythms began to loosen their grip on the drummers and the noise died away, he was exhausted but exhilarated. Bonnie came back towards him.
‘Got some colour in your cheeks there!’
‘Well, it was fun.’
They moved away from the drums, walking close together. He felt the back of her hand brush his, then – startlingly – her fingers briefly link and unlink with his. What did that mean? Probably nothing to her, but it sent a surge of desire through him. Gestures of affection had always roused him more sharply than overt sexual come-ons.
She lit another joint, and offered it to him. He was nervous of being seen, but took a drag anyway. There was enough darkness to feel somewhat hidden. He’d smoked half of it before he noticed the effect it was having on him.
‘Whoa!’ he said, reeling suddenly.
Bonnie grinned. ‘Sinsemilla. That other shit was just some home-grown.’
‘It’s strong!’
‘Don’t I know it.’
Someone called Bonnie’s name. Two girls of around twenty, one a redhead, the other chubby and blonde with eyebrow rings, greeted her with shrieks and giggles. She didn’t introduce him and he wandered off. His legs had begun to feel heavy and his head was spinning. He needed to lie down. He found a clear spot near the edge of the meadow and lay on his back in the thick grass, breathing deeply.
The moon had risen, outlining pools of blackness among the clouds. On the horizon, very far off, summer lightning flickered, muffled and thunderless. He closed his eyes but the world immediately began revolving, making him nauseous, and he opened them again. Dreadlocks and patchwork vests drifted on his vision; tattooed shoulders and arms. He remembered a time, long ago, when he’d felt strongly drawn to this world. Its easy-going blend of idealism and hedonism had appealed to him, antiquated as it was even then. As a teenager he used to travel to music festivals with his guitar and sleeping bag, camping out under the stars. For a while after college he’d fantasised about living in a commu
ne: some off-the-grid rural fastness peopled by kindred spirits. There would be pretty girls, a huge vegetable garden, music in the evenings, conversations late into the night.
The fantasy hadn’t altogether been extinguished, but it had been put at arm’s length; removed from the category of primal yearning into one of mere ‘interest’. He ‘took an interest’ in communes and their history; had read up on Oneida and Twin Oaks, World Brotherhood Colonies and Intentional Communities, the high-minded ventures of the Transcendentalists. It ‘interested’ him that the only communes that had lasted more than a decade were ones founded on shared religious beliefs, and as a strict atheist this seemed to him a peculiarly tragic fact. But he hadn’t lived in one. A dim sense of the longer-term requirements of his own nature – the need to be pursuing active good, out in the world – had drawn him to teaching children instead and he’d gone to grad school and become a teacher. It had been the right decision, and he’d never regretted it.
And yet I am dissatisfied, he thought. Francesca came back into his mind, trailing all the turbulent emotions of their history together. Then came Sara’s image, pale and glinting like one of the stars above him. As steadfast too, he felt. But averted from him, somehow, or veiled by some mysterious opacity. He thought of their life together these past years: their conversations at the dinner table, their occasional lovemaking. It was all … friendly. They were sensitive to each other’s interests and needs. But there was a wanness to it all, a docile vagueness. Was this just the natural effect of time on any marriage, or had they always been like this?
He probed back into that earlier period of his life; his training at Bank Street and his first job, at an elementary school in the Bronx. He’d risen to assistant principal there by the time he and Sara had met; the semester before he was hired by Ryden College. Within a few weeks he’d persuaded her to move in with him. It had been years since he’d thought about that time but as he lay there in the grass its very distinct atmosphere came back to him. They’d drawn something sharp and intense out of each other. Something very different from the pallidly amicable selves they presented to each other now. Victor’s phrase, ‘fucking all over the furniture’, came to him, bringing back long-forgotten images of their first months in his apartment on East 6th Street: Sara naked in his arms on the sofa, her lithe limbs gripping him tightly, her breasts flushing pink as she sat astride him, her moans of pleasure as he brought her to orgasm, his own amazed joy at the power of his sensations and feelings. During this time Sara had conveyed something that had a decisive effect on him. It came more through gestures than words; some sense that she’d placed herself in his hands: entrusted herself to him, so to speak, unreservedly. He’d never quite clarified it to himself, but had always known that it was this, above all, that had made him want to marry her.
And yet before I married her I betrayed her.
And he felt as if he were seeing that betrayal clearly for the first time. Not that he hadn’t suffered for it in the past: for a while he had made himself almost ill with guilt. But it seemed to him now that that self-imposed torment had been a way, precisely, of not examining what he’d done; of enabling himself to consider the deed cancelled, expunged.
Whereas it had continued to exist, and in fact had grown only denser and more monumental over time.
It had been there always, he saw, casting its shadow onto every aspect of his and Sara’s life. He had often felt there was something perplexed about Sara; a dreamy, half-unwitting paralysis of bewilderment, as if she were imprisoned in something without knowing it. But he’d never considered that he himself might be responsible for this.
I am though, he thought now. His secret was like one of those accursed objects that keep their victim in thrall until their existence is exposed. In doing what he had done, he had gained an illicit control over her life; spellbound her.
I trapped her, he thought; changed the terms of the life she agreed to share with me, and hid the changes. For the first time he seemed to glimpse the true scale of the harm he had done her.
He sat up. Across the meadow revellers were throwing logs on the bonfire. Sparks whirled into the sky. A drummer banged out a beat and others began to pick it up. Figures started moving back towards the fire. In the shadows he made out Bonnie. She was on her own again, and seemed to be looking for him, peering about her into the darkness. He began to call out to her, but stopped himself, watching her disappear. A pang of wistful affection passed through him. Then bemusement at himself. Then a more fundamental confusion. What did these feelings mean? What were you supposed to do with them?
He lay back down in the grass, still dizzy, his thoughts running on. A documentary he’d seen a few years ago came back to him. It was about a philosopher, a monkish, austere man, not given to frivolous utterance, who’d died aged almost a hundred. Interviewed in his wheelchair at ninety, he was asked if there was anything he regretted in his life. Without smiling and without hesitating he had replied: ‘I wish I’d slept with more women. Nothing else matters.’
He’d recognised himself in the old man; some ingrained cycle or sequence that appeared to be destined to express itself through him repeatedly. Desire, restraint, regret. Desire, restraint, regret … And he was remembering also something his eye doctor had once said, that had acquired a certain talismanic power in his mind. He’d gone in for an examination after waking one morning with a thick drift of silvery spots floating across his vision. After peering into his eye through a tubular lens, the doctor had told him he had a detached vitrius. It wasn’t serious, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. The human body had evolved for a lifespan of thirty-five years, the doctor explained. After that it stopped regenerating itself efficiently.
The exchange had played into a certain bleak intuition at the root of Richard’s psyche. A lurking sense that this and this alone – the physical body – was what ordained the meaning, such as it was, of human life; that all that mattered to the species was creating the optimal circumstances for perpetuating itself. Up to around the age of thirty-five, it appeared, the benefits of staying alive outweighed the costs. But after that, nature had no further use for you. Modern longevity was therefore nothing but a freakish posthumousness. We filled it with all sorts of pursuits – careers, hobbies, culture, news, accumulation of property, social networking; all that ingenious activity – but none of it meant a thing outside the closed circuit of our determination that it should.
Over the years, with a kind of agonised scrupulousness, Richard had allowed this outlook to supplant all his less rational intuitions to the contrary. He liked to claim that in scouring himself clean of all mystical, spiritual or otherwise aggrandising illusion, he was in fact more open to the true glory of existence than people less rigorous with themselves. But the reality was more often the opposite. The attitude that had gradually become his own grimly denuded everything that came into its purview. It was unbearable, really, at times, and he would have been the first to welcome anything, any countervailing vision or argument powerful enough to demolish it. But he was well aware that there was no such thing, and never would be. Not for him.
3
Victor died. It happened on a November afternoon, three years after the summer of Sara’s swan and Richard’s evening in Paradise Meadow.
Richard and Sara drove in to the city for the funeral, which was in Washington Heights. They found a parking space a few blocks from the bridge and walked to the funeral home. A wind blew off the river, full of grit, and the streets looked as drab as the sky.
‘This was where he moved to?’ Sara asked.
‘Somewhere near here.’
‘He can’t have liked it much.’
‘Well, it’s certainly not the Village.’
‘Poor Victor.’
Richard smiled, glad of her uncomplicated sorrow.
She was looking nice, he thought. Her plain grey dress emphasised the trimness of her figure in a way that made him want to put his arm around her waist. The slight
ly ragged, sea-blue chenille cardigan she wore over the dress brought out the lighter blue of her eyes.
‘Will Audrey be here?’ she asked.
‘I wouldn’t count on it.’
‘I mean, he’s the father of her kids …’
‘Well, I guess we’ll see.’
They hadn’t seen Audrey since she’d thrown Victor out over two years ago. Victor had been elusive around the time of the blow-up, barely communicating for several months, and Richard hadn’t in fact heard the story in any detail until Vic was already at the second or third in a series of changing addresses that had culminated in a one-room apartment up here on 177th Street. Even then, Vic had been a bit vague about the circumstances of his expulsion, though clearly a woman had been involved. After they’d been informed of Vic’s death, Sara had left a message with Audrey to say how sorry she was and to call if she wanted to talk, but Audrey hadn’t responded.
The funeral home was in a squat building of grey-painted brick. People were making their way in under the faded maroon awning. Richard recognised a few of them, including Victor’s older brother whom he hadn’t seen since they were all boys. He was the family success, Richard remembered, a chess prodigy who’d gone to Yale and made a career for himself in patent law. He had a smug expression, not helped by a carefully trimmed moustache that looked like a decoration he’d awarded himself.
Polly, the girl Victor had moved in with a year ago, was standing in the vestibule at the entrance to the chapel. She was a dancer, or a dance student, in her twenties and she had the startled look of a commedia clown, with her flopping curls and her big eyes staring wildly out of her white face. Richard had met her once, after Victor and she had started living together, and he’d found her disconcerting. She had a loud, nervous laugh and her conversation consisted of strange non sequiturs. A week ago she’d sent out a mass email to all Victor’s contacts saying: ‘Please come celebrate your departed chum. Bring songs/dances/words!’ Richard had called her and it had taken him several minutes to piece together what was in fact a brutally simple story: that she had come home a few days earlier to find Vic dead on the couch from a heart attack.
