It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (14 page)

As he did, he thought again of the farmer’s behavior. It occurred to him that the man might have been a jealous husband wondering whether he had surprised his wife in the middle of a clandestine meeting with her lover. Dressed as he was, he perhaps had presented a certain archetypal, if also ludicrous, image that a jealous temperament might have found irresistibly suspicious. Then too, Roland surmised as he picked his way along the planks, perhaps he did have the face of an adulterer. A man’s more significant deeds might perhaps have a way of imprinting themselves on his anatomy, if in a manner visible only to the unconscious eye of other people. Had his marital infidelities left their signature on his flesh? Had the farmer dimly perceived it? Was he at some level even correct in his appraisal of the situation, that Roland did have designs on his wife? In a detached, clinical manner, Roland brought the woman back into his mind, imagined being in bed with her, was reassuringly unaroused, smiled to himself at the absurdity of it all, then suddenly remembered where he had seen the tractor before. It was what he had opened his eyes to on the nursery floor where he and the children’s Dutch nanny had first had sex. Unlike the one here at the farm, it was a toy, pedal powered, but for an instant it had seemed vast and strangely menacing, perhaps because his three-year-old son was riding it.

By this point Roland had come to the gap in the wall at the end of the planks and seen that the wall itself enclosed a pool full of viscous greenish liquid that smelled like the contents of an open septic tank. There was no means of getting to the grass beyond it, and he turned to walk back. It was at this moment that the memory of the tractor had suddenly come to him, bringing with it a great wave of anxiety that seemed to contain in it the whole calamity of his marriage—the apparently inconsolable hurt he had inflicted on his wife, the silentness that had fallen on their young child, the bitter dismantling of the home—all of it surging through him with a force that for a moment overwhelmed him. He missed his footing on the plank. Groping at air to regain his balance, he fell backward into the stinking pool.

A moment of absolute surrender followed. It was oddly luxurious, and he was aware of extending it for as long as he could. A1 though the day was cool, the liquid was warm, and in this state of surrender, what he felt seeping through his jacket and trousers wasn’t wholly unpleasant. He looked at the old farm buildings around him, the crops beyond, the sky overhead; for a while he felt almost blissful. It was only as he hoisted himself out of the pool, rising from it like a swamp animal dripping slime, that he began to feel the true foulness of his condition. There was no pain, not even any great physical discomfort. But the sensation of a vile uncleanness both soaking into him and emanating out from him was horrible. He trudged back through the mud (what need now for the planked walkway?) toward the gate blocked by the squatting tractor. There before him, he saw what he had managed to conceal from himself before: just to the side of the main gate was another little one, which he could have passed through without any risk to his attire.

Tearing up clumps of dock
(Rumex crispus),
he did what he could to wipe himself clean. He lined the seat of the Citroen with a protective layer of stalks and leaves before sitting down on it. In this manner, reeking, oozing greenish muck, he resumed his journey.

He was more than an hour late by the time he reached his father’s village. Coming to the church, he saw that the wedding service was already over, and he drove on to the house.

This was a large building of brick and cobblestones. A rounded glass conservatory, filled no doubt with his father’s specimens, protruded gracefully from the ample front. A brass band was playing in a marquee with fluttering pennants at the back of the wide lawn, where a couple of hundred guests were being served champagne. Under the shaggy arms of a cedar, long trestle tables had been set up, garlanded with flowers.

Large family gatherings had always unnerved Roland. From an early age he had associated them with all the more troubling aspects of his mother’s personality: the outrageous remarks— cruel, snobbish, or simply bizarre—that any group above a certain critical mass seemed guaranteed to elicit from her and then later the drunken outbursts of weeping, cursing, even violence that his father’s response of dignified silence served only to fan to ever more destructive heights.

He thought of the strange way his mother’s image had been transfigured in his own consciousness. Alive, she had been a perpetual source of pain and humiliation—hatred even. Dying, she had aroused a kind of morbid solicitousness in him, strong enough that he had taken two months off from his job to look after her as she moved from her flat to the assisted living facility, then to the hospital and from there to the crematorium. Dead, she had undergone a final change in his imagination, turning into something frail, blossomlike, but enduring, for which he bore unexpected tenderness and love. He heard her voice, sad and low, as if she were present again beside him. “It isn’t me,” she would say after each new attempt to make something of her life had been abandoned. The volunteer work, the college administration job, the gift shop . . . “It just isn’t me ...” A familiar dim helplessness washed through him. At moments he could glimpse something almost intentional behind his own calamities, an obscure, insidious solidarity . . . Abruptly, the dream he had woken from that morning in his hotel came back to him; the woman in it had been his mother. A sharp pang of dismay went through him. A wet dream about my own mother, he thought, almost wearily. What next?

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.

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 woman glanced at him, smiling nervously. “I don’t know how to thank you . ..”