Afternoon of a Faun

by Afternoon of a Faun (retail) (epub)

  “They’re fine,” I said, wincing at the sound of him using that terrible phrase “sexual predator” about himself. It was as if he were trying to get used to it ahead of time, and I felt a burst of real sympathy for him. “And you’re not being a bore.”

  “Christ! What the hell are those?”

  He was pointing toward the window. I looked out.

  “Wild turkeys.”

  Two toms and a hen, part of a large flock that often came out of the woods for the spillage from Caitlin’s bird feeders, had wandered onto the meadow beyond our lawn.

  “They look like dinosaurs!”

  As they came close to the lawn, the larger of the toms raised his black tail feathers and fanned them into a tall, bronze-ringed semicircle. The three of us watched as he began moving in short, suave bursts toward the hen.

  “Speaking of sex . . .” I said.

  The hen moved off a few paces, seemingly indifferent, while the smaller tom hung back, observing. After a moment the big tom glided again toward the hen, tilting his enormous fan now this way, now that, while she wandered off again, pecking nonchalantly in the grass. The tom appeared to be readying himself for his next pass. His neck had turned bright blue. Stretching it forward, he made a tender, crooning, putt-putt-putt sound. The hen paused, faltering in her indifference. The smaller tom looked from one to the other, with an air of studious fascination. Then the hen stepped forward a few paces, and very matter-of-factly lay down in the grass. At once the big tom sailed forward, puffing out his chest feathers, fanning his dark tail like some strange satanic peacock, and climbed onto her back, his curved spike of beard waving at his throat as he trod her, the wattled skin above his neck engorged and red, his head gone entirely white, the long appendage of flesh over his bill dangling weirdly, his whole body swollen and immense, as if dilated into some billowing, fantastical and irresistible idea of itself. Scooping the hen’s tail feathers to the side with his own, he lowered himself and began thrusting. After a few seconds he stepped off and walked uncertainly away. The hen stood up and did the same.

  A silence descended on us; some minor awkwardness in it that was perhaps our own voyeurism catching us unawares, or perhaps just the slightly too blatant connection to what we’d just been discussing. I made another joke, quoting from Julia’s article:

  “ ‘It was all over very quickly. . . .’ ”

  Marco laughed good-naturedly. “Now, now . . .”

  Caitlin got up to open another bottle, a thoughtful look on her face.

  “But so what actually did happen that night?” she asked when she came back. “Do you remember it at all?”

  Marco looked at her, taking in the slight change of tone, and then nodded, as if to say he welcomed the question.

  “I’ve been trying to. It was a long time ago, so it’s never going to be crystal clear. It wasn’t the first time we slept together, I know that for sure. We’d done it before, in London, at least once. I know because I remember her telling me she had a boyfriend who she was serious about, and we agreed it was just going to be a one-off. Belfast was maybe a couple of weeks later. We’d had a stressful day shooting with an ex-militia contact who’d brought us to a flat overlooking this back alley where a Catholic girl was going to be punished by some Provos for consorting with a ­British soldier. It was extremely grueling to watch. They stripped her half-naked and tarred and feathered her, and we got the whole thing on camera. Julia and I and the camera crew went back to the hotel and had a few drinks to decompress. At some point the crew went off to eat but she and I stayed in the bar. We were drinking whisky, I remember that, and she was matching me shot for shot. We kissed a bit in the bar and like she says, I invited her up to my room where I’m sure, knowing my twenty-something-year-old self, I was fully intending to get her into bed. I don’t recall her mentioning her boyfriend that time. I’m not saying she didn’t, but what would have been the point, since I already knew about him? But let’s say she did, and let’s say she did express some misgivings about being unfaithful again, even some outright reluctance, there’s still no way I’d have coerced her, and more to the point, there’s no way she’d have let herself be coerced. You knew Julia in those days . . .”

  He looked at me, and I nodded.

  “She was a force, right?”

  “She was.”

  He turned back to Caitlin:

  “I mean, not in the sense of being an extrovert or boisterous—she could seem quite reserved sometimes. But once you got to know her you’d realize she was someone who knew how to handle herself. She wouldn’t have submitted to anything she didn’t want to do, not without putting up a fight. She certainly wouldn’t have spent the entire night with me if I’d made her do anything remotely against her will, but that’s what she did. I remember that part very clearly, because we were both so hung over in the morning we almost missed the taxi to the airport. The cameraman had to drag us out of bed.”

  “Are you still in touch with him?” I asked. “The cameraman?”

  Marco thought for a moment.

  “No. But I could probably track him down . . . That’s a good point.”

  “Not that it would prove anything even if he remembered,” I said.

  “True, but still . . .”

  “And by the way, your word ‘reluctance’ . . . I know you were just using it hypothetically, but it’s a dangerous word, at least in my world. If a student was accused of assault and admitted the girl was reluctant, he’d be toast.”

  “Oh, that’s ridiculous!” Caitlin broke in. “People have sex reluctantly all the time. I certainly have.”

  I looked at her, wondering whether to feel stung, but decided to ignore it. She was more than a little tipsy, as we all were.

  “Well, anyway,” Marco said, “the point is she wasn’t reluctant and I wasn’t coercive. I can’t prove it any more than she can prove the opposite, but that’s the nature of these things. As you say, the onus of belief is on the believer . . .”

  “Why do you think she’s doing this,” Caitlin asked, “if it’s not true?”

  “I assume to make money. She’s broke, I know that. Her career didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to. But whose does?”

  “And that was the last time you slept together, that night?”

  Marco tilted his head. “Actually you know, I’m not sure. We weren’t exactly a couple, so there was never a formal breakup. We just stopped at a certain point. But I have no idea if that was the last time. Maybe it wasn’t!”

  “But either way you went on working together?” I said.

  “Absolutely. For at least another year. That I could prove, I imagine, for whatever it’s worth.”

  “And no bad feelings between you?”

  “None I was aware of.”

  “Have you tried contacting her directly?” Caitlin asked.

  “No!”

  “That would be intimidation,” I said.

  “Seriously?” Caitlin asked. “Just calling her up to ask what’s going on?”

  “It’s a risk.”

  “Wow.” She shook her head. She was, is, somewhat unworldly in her interests, my wife, and as a result constantly being amazed by the world.

  “But does she actually know she’s harming you with this story?”

  “She has to know,” Marco said.

  Caitlin frowned into her wine. “I’m not getting a very clear picture of this person. Could you tell me more about her?”

  Marco gave the same grave nod. I had a sense that, for him, the conversation had something of the quality of a rehearsal: an informal dry run for some sterner version of itself likely to occur somewhere down the line.

  “Well, she was this quiet girl from the midlands. Grew up on a housing estate. No father around, mother worked for the council. Got into Oxford where she was apparently very shy and retiring. Came to London as a freelance journalist and began to realize she had something that made people want her around. Worked in print and radio for a couple of years, b
efore moving into TV.” He turned to me: “Didn’t your mother help get her that TV job?”

  “That’s right, she did.”

  “Anyway, that’s when I met her. She was assigned to me as a researcher. Actually, what she told me was she’d finagled the assignment. I was a desirable commodity then, professionally speaking. We worked very closely together, and we’d often go for a drink at the end of the day. She seemed a bit sphinxlike at first but she turned out to have strong opinions and we had a sparring, mocking relationship that kept me on my toes. She used to call me a closet colonialist because in her opinion my embrace of third world politics was just an update on Kipling—white man’s burden, etcetera, with journalists as the new pukka sahibs. I’d defend myself furiously, but she was right, in a way, and I knew it, which was part of what attracted me to her. I was physically attracted, too, obviously. I mean, she was gorgeous. She looked like a lioness, I used to think. She had this wide, wide face with a sort of distant smile as if she was dreaming about something simultaneously enjoyable and highly dangerous. I’d say for sure we both knew we were going to end up in bed sooner or later . . .”

  The sun was going down behind the woods as Marco talked, lighting the hillsides opposite. I was half-listening, slipping off into my own memories of Julia. I mentioned that she’d been a presence in our house during my teens, but for a period she’d actually been something more in the nature of a fixture. My mother had befriended her—“taken her up,” as they used to say—inviting her to dinner in London or for the weekend in Sussex, connecting her with influential friends, bringing her along to first nights and private views. She was friendly to me, in the amused way of worldly young women with tongue-tied teenage boys. I didn’t see anything lion- or lioness-like about her. Physically, she reminded me of the Flora figure in Botticelli’s Primavera, with that inward look expressive of both bashfulness and sensuality, but there was certainly a fierceness about her—an air of intensely but privately pursued pleasure—that always intrigued me. And beyond this there was a radiance about her that, whatever its real cause, existed for me in my generally befogged condition at that time, as an idea of reprieve. It’s not an exaggeration to say that for me she incarnated the idea of joyous freedom that I believed life consisted of once you came through the long tunnel of adolescence. I had a crush on her, also.

  5

  MARCO HAD PLANNED to spend two nights with us, but the next morning at breakfast he asked me to drive him to the train station right away. He’d decided to fly to London. He’d already bought a ticket from JFK online, and just needed to pick up his passport in Brooklyn.

  He’d had an idea in the night, as a result of our conversation. He wouldn’t tell me what it was as he didn’t want to jinx it, but he promised to give me the full story after he got back.

  He was in a jittery, distracted state as we drove to the station, talking in non sequitur bursts about his Crime-and-Place project, his daughter’s new partner, Hanan’s visa problems, anything but his “ordeal,” though it was obvious he’d been up all night thinking about it. He’d shaved and splashed on some of the cinnamon-scented cologne he sometimes wore, but a sheen of exhaustion clung to him—a sort of manic optimism shot with dread.

  “There’s a quiet car on the train,” I told him. “You should get some sleep.”

  “Not a chance.”

  I didn’t hear from him for a while. The spring turned mild and showery, with waves of blossom rolling through the woods, and birdsong bubbling everywhere like some naturally ­occurring spritz in the air. But it was melancholy, too: our first with no child at home. I worked on a book, fitfully, breaking off regularly to remember, as if from yesterday, how I used to sit at this same desk, watching our children laughing and squabbling as they played on the swing set that stood unused now out on the empty lawn. The paradox of memory—being able to traverse in an instant the chasm of time that had taken all these years, all these thousands of days, to inch across in the first place—never ceased to fascinate me, and if I was lucky, the fascination would supplant the feeling of sadness. Caitlin, less metaphysically disposed, took it harder—or maybe just took it straight. I’d see her in a doorway, staring at some haunted corner, her eyes moist, a look of bewilderment on her face as if she were trying to recall why she had ever opened herself to this inevitable desolation in the first place. I’d put my arm around her, remind her what happy, functional, unfucked-up kids our parenting, and hers especially, had produced; how they’d always be coming back to us, one way or another . . . Obvious platitudes, but they seemed to comfort her, at least temporarily, and she’d cheer up, or pretend to; she’d go off to the hospice where she volunteered, or repot some plants, or take a stroll with her birding binoculars, or work on a proposal for another travel book in the series we’d started before the kids were born and set aside when they were too old to pull out of school. We were tentative with each other; each of us aware of the need to establish a new basis for our marriage, or reestablish the original basis, if such a thing were possible.

  One minor incident occurred, of relevance to this story. The old dairy pasture beyond our lawn was getting overgrown and in danger of reverting to forest. I rented a brush-hog from the hardware store and spent a day of pleasantly mindless labor dragging the squat, all-devouring machine back and forth by tractor across the scrub of brambles and baby pines, leaving satisfying stripes of stubble in my wake. Halfway through the job I saw a turkey hen sitting in some tall weeds. She looked up as I cruised by but she didn’t move, and I realized she must have made her nest there. I steered around her, leaving a small island of brush to keep her hidden. Caitlin was alarmed when I explained the situation. She had a gift for immersing herself in the lives of whatever creatures, human or otherwise, lay closest to hand, and these ungainly birds had joined the ranks of this fondly tended menagerie. She got it into her head that, having drawn the creature here in the first place with our birdseed, we were now responsible for the successful hatching of her eggs. To that end, and with encouragement from an article in one of the many wildlife publications she read, she decided she needed to camp out in the meadow at night for the four-week incubation period, to keep the foxes away.

  I don’t sleep well alone. I did try sleeping in the tent with her, but after a couple of uncomfortable nights I resigned myself to a period of solitary slumber, doing my best not to complain. Anyway it rained fairly often and on those nights, if the rain was hard enough, Caitlin felt it was safe to stay inside. By some miraculous dispensation of the powers that preside over marital harmony, we entered a phase of frequent lovemaking. Our wedding anniversary fell during this time, and we went out to celebrate at our favorite restaurant. It happened to be a dry evening, unseasonably warm, and we had a candlelit dinner on the restaurant’s creek-side terrace. I wasn’t thinking about the turkey as we drove home, and Caitlin said nothing about her. We went to bed, made love and fell asleep in each other’s arms. Early the next morning I heard a cry from the meadow, and ran outside. Caitlin had gone to check on the nest and was standing in front of it, in a state of extreme anguish. The hen was gone, and all her eggs had been broken. It wasn’t Caitlin’s style to blame other people for things that went wrong, and she didn’t say anything directly reproachful to me, but as we stood there looking at the wreckage of the nest with its glistening smashed eggshells spotted with blood, I heard her muttering furiously to herself: “I should’ve just done what I wanted to do! I shouldn’t have given in! I always give in!”

  I turned and went back into the house, upset and confused. Guilty, too, though I had no sense of having forced or even subtly pressured her into sleeping with me. Should I have actively discouraged her, though? Was it my responsibility to think through the situation from her point of view as well as my own? I couldn’t help remembering that comment of hers about people having sex reluctantly, herself included, and of course I couldn’t help thinking about Julia’s accusation against Marco, and wondering if I’d just been accused—albeit w
ithin the entirely private precinct of our home—of the same thing, and if so, how I should react.

  The episode faded fairly quickly and we moved on, but I imagine it affected the way I viewed Marco’s plight, his “ordeal,” as it continued evolving over the next several months. I don’t know whether it made me more sympathetic or less. But it certainly made me more interested.

  6

  HE CALLED ME after his return from London.

  “Victory!” he shouted into the phone.

  Was I momentarily dismayed? I can’t think why I would have been, but memory persists in noting a split second’s shadow falling before the appropriate response rose to my lips.

  “That’s wonderful, Marco!”

  He told me the full story a couple of weeks later when I had a meeting in the city and decided to make a night of it.

  I dropped off my things at his house, and we walked to our usual restaurant under the sycamores, the darkness and quiet of the neighborhood with its ornate old brownstones and occasional modern apartment buildings reminding us both of the London we’d grown up in, though with that wilder atmosphere of even the most genteel New York neighborhoods—the pervasive sense of more reckless lives being lived under more unpredictable conditions. We’d agreed early on in our friendship that this quality was what gave this city its edge over London, and was one of the reasons why we preferred to live here.

  “My treat this time,” Marco said as we entered. “I’m in the mood for a celebration.”

  The place was packed, with a good roar of happy voices ­blasting out through the door. The maitre d’ greeted us warmly and led us to a corner table. Busboys hurried over, eagerly plying us with ice water and crostini as if we’d crossed deserts to get there and were in urgent need of resuscitation. A waitress, new since we’d last visited, asked if we’d like to hear about the evening’s special cocktails.

  “We’d love to hear about them,” Marco said with his quick, raffish friendliness. The two had some jokey back-and-forth about the absurd ingredients of some of the drinks and Marco talked me into getting an artisanal gin decoction with pickle brine and smashed strawberries. He ordered two bottles of wine, to be opened right away, whipping out a pair of reading glasses to examine the menu and tucking them back in an inside pocket the instant he was done.