It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (15 page)

“Oh, no need.”

“Can 1 offer you a cup of coffee?”

“No, that’s very kind of you.”

“A drink?”

He laughed. “A little early for me.”

“Oh. Well. ..”

“Goodbye then.”

“Goodbye.”

He went back down the stairs, smiling to himself. Already as he reached the street, he was composing in his mind the e-mail he would send his girlfriend that night. He would make the whole story into a little mock epic of suspense and misplaced apprehension, with the woman as a damsel in distress and himself as the naive but gallant knight, too chivalrous to ignore her plea for help. He would describe the gloomy hallway, the sense of being led into a trap, the melancholy obligation to proceed nevertheless, the oddness of breaking into a strange woman’s flat. . . His little moment of male regression he would omit, but he would try to describe the woman herself.

Although what was there to be said about her after all? A New York woman of a certain well-groomed type: more glamorous-looking than her English counterpart, her face more concertedly made up, her hair more showily coiffured, her manner at once more direct and more remote, giving that odd effect of intimacy and unknowability.

He pictured her again, facing him in the doorway with her dazed, slightly frantic expression, the afternoon light refracting on the surface of her hair. Her voice came back to him, high and a little mournful: “I was just trying to go out. .Briefly a vague disquiet entered him, as though there had been some complication present in the picture that he had failed to grasp at the time. He tried to pin it down, but it seemed to retreat from him as he pursued it, and by the time he arrived at his destination on Washington Street he had decided he was mistaken. It was as he had

thought: the woman herself had been the least interesting aspect of the whole situation.

She went straight to the kitchenette and poured a vodka martini into one of the cocktail glasses chilling on the shelf of the freezer. Listening to his shoes stomp down the last flight of stairs, she swept the chrysanthemum stems into the disposal unit and stepped over to the window where she watched him come out through the door and walk off down the block.

She sipped her drink, following his progress till he disappeared across Greenwich Street.

“Goddamn Englishman,” she said.

The accent had thrown her, triggering some absurd reflex of guilty nervousness. That and how much younger he was than she’d thought.

The sun sank down behind the rooftop opposite, and the color drained out of the room; only the chrysanthemums still glowing yellow on the coffee table, as if they’d been dipped in some kind of luminous paint.

A mistake, those. The wrong note entirely. She must have realized that unconsciously. She’d picked them up on impulse coming back from the liquor store with the Stoli, then forgotten about them till he was already in the building, so that she had had to unwrap them and trim them and set them in their vase, all in the space it took him to climb the stairs, forgetting even then to throw out the stems, which meant that the entire time he was there she’d had to be thinking about whether he had noticed them and, if so, whether it was reasonable or paranoid to imagine he might infer from them that she was not in fact just going out but had just come in, in which case—

“Oh, who cares?” she said, tipping back the rest of the drink.

She stood, consulting her own restlessness. After a few minutes a smile rose onto her face. Was this what was going to happen? There were ways in which the world forced itself on you and you had no choice but to yield. But there were also ways of using your own weakness as a source of strength. In high school she and her best friend had discovered they could do anything the other dared them to do by telling themselves they would do it on the count of three, with eternal damnation as the penalty for chickening out.
One, two, three
, and without hesitation the highway at the end of the school road would be run across blindfolded; the cherry-bomb-rigged toy boat sent floating over the pond to explode amid the boys’ fleet of miniature clippers; the mystery substance puffed, sniffed, swallowed . . . Cumulative observances had strengthened the rite over time until it came to possess an almost magical potency, with no need of the penalty clause to enforce it. She had continued to practice it in college and on into adult life, using it not just for feats of gratuitous recklessness but also for simple practical purposes.
One, two, three,
and she could dive into the icy lake her husband’s family had owned in Maine.
One, two, three,
and she could make herself call up her brother at his law office in Atlanta and ask for a loan. It wasn’t about willpower; it was about submission. That was the glory of it.

She strode over to the table and picked up the bowl of flowers, carried them into the kitchenette, and shoved them into the garbage. No more innovations. From the kitchenette she went over to the door and wedged the thick brass tongue all but a few millimeters in, using a paper clip the way she had figured out earlier that summer. And then, pushing the door till she heard the little click, she crossed the room to take up her position once again, beside the quartered glass of the casement window.

The sky was clear, just a small fleet of clouds patrolling the river, pink lit from beneath. Nobody of any interest on the street. She waited, thinking of the first time it had happened. She really had locked herself in, pulled the handle and its mechanism right out of the door and been unable to unfasten the catch. In a panic of claustrophobia she had called down to the first person she had seen passing, a man in a business suit, who turned out to be a shoe retailer on his way to check out a new storefront. It had been his idea, not hers, to take a run at the door after nothing else worked. When it burst open and they had found themselves face-to-face with each other, they had both felt it, the sense of something unexpected surging up, rising right through them. It was just a matter of surrendering to it. He had stood there with a confused look on his face, making no attempt either to leave or to come farther in. She had offered him coffee, then before he had been able to form an answer, had heard herself add, “A drink,” at which he had smiled, very sweetly. She smiled back now, remembering.

A man appeared, coming east along the block from Greenwich Street. She studied him carefully as he approached. He was tall, lean, with long graying hair. Leather coat, jeans, scuffed cowboy boots. A little wolfish maybe, his chin unshaven by the look of it, but after Mr. Tweed Jacket that was maybe just what was needed . . . She gripped the handles on the window and slid it up. For a moment a feeling of vertigo passed through her, as if she had opened the window onto a bottomless void.
One, two, three
, she counted in silence. Then heard her own voice calling: “Sir, sir, excuse me, sir ...”

I read the letter with a feeling of unease, then put it in one of the partitioned receptacles on the desk in my study and packed my briefcase for work. From a mahogany periodicals rack I selected a publication to read on the tube, a digest of reports on lawsuits arising from shipping accidents around the globe.

Karen was in the room we call the breakfast room, feeding our baby daughter, Sophie.

Spring sunlight, whiteish, with a tint of green from the foliage of the communal garden, came through the window, and there was a sound of birds in the cherry tree in our own private garden. I noticed that the tree was coming into blossom.

I stepped into the room to say goodbye. Karen smiled at me calmly, continuing to feed Sophie.

“You never met Dimitri, did you?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

“He’s an old friend of mine. He’s sent me a letter.”

“Oh.” My wife moved the spoon from the jar of puree to the flowerlike mouth of our child, and back again. Lit from the window behind her, the planes of her high-cheekboned face appeared smooth and firm as stone. Her fair hair was already up; brushed back from her wide forehead and fastened in a tightly knotted bun. Her lips, full at the center, but neat and small like the tight coil of hair on her head, were closed, as they always were the moment she had finished speaking, a characteristic that gave an emphatic finality to her utterances.

“We were at school together,” I said, “then at university, till he dropped out.”

Karen tilted her face up again: serene, maternal, not especially interested.

“I haven’t heard from him for years.”

She said nothing, though she gave me a pleasant look, as if asking me to forgive her indifference. As a matter of fact I had always admired my wife’s attitude to my past, which seemed to be that compared to the great fact of our having married each other, our previous lives were no more than unimportant sketches, first drafts full of clumsy experiment and fruitless detours.

I kissed her and Sophie goodbye, passing through to the living room that led into the front hall.

As if she now felt safe from the risk of a prolonged discussion, Karen called out: “That’s nice of your friend to write. What does he say?”

“Not a lot. He wants to get together sometime.”

“Will you?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

On the tube I found myself unable to concentrate on the law reports. I hadn’t seen Dimitri for almost fifteen years, but I could still picture him with perfect clarity: dark, shiny eyes; the close-cropped reddish curls; barrel-chested frame, six inches shorter than mine ... I’d always had to bend down in his company, and I liked to think of the slight stoop I had now as a record of our friendship, hardened in me like the crook of a plant bent too long toward the same source of light.

At university we’d lived in the same shared house, a Victorian building at the end of a run-down terrace. I hadn’t thought of the place for years, and I remembered it now with a feeling of fondness. The big kitchen had been a hub of student social life, with its peculiar blend of hedonism and puritanical zealotry. Over the sound of reggae from the stereo Dimitri’s voice would rise with its hornetlike buzz, explaining to someone exactly why Bakunin and Marx had despised each other, how guild socialism had developed out of syndicalism, what the differences were between Fourier’s phalanstery and Robert Owen’s New Lanark ... In the kind of riptide of oceanic brotherliness that can flood into the mind of a well-read eighteen-year-old, he had discovered radical politics: Marx and Kropotkin, then Kautsky, Plekhanov, Gramsci, G. D. H. Cole . . . What luster those names had once had! That must have been ’76 or ’77, a time of grandiose political rhetoric and gesture in the whole country. For a time Dimitri had even started referring to British politics as the Great Duel, after Heine’s phrase “The great duel of the destitute with the aristocracy of wealth . . .” Gingerly following his lead, I had dipped my toe in the same waters. As the tube rattled toward Lincolns Inn, I found myself remembering the picket lines I had stood on alongside him, the torchlit marches of the Anti-Nazi League against the National Front, the time I had thrown a flour bomb at a speaker from the Monday Club ... I could still see the thickset face of the man, feigning dignified imperturbability as the paper bag burst open on his pinstriped suit.

By the end of our second year even the limited privilege of being able to study at university had become offensive to Dimitri’s principles. To the dismay of his tutors, he dropped out and went to live in Leeds, where the little revolutionary party he’d joined had its headquarters, taking a job as a laborer with a demolition company.

I visited him there once, a spur-of-the-moment detour on a trip to Edinburgh with a girlfriend. We had phoned from the motorway and followed Dimitri’s directions to a dilapidated housing estate on the outskirts of the city.

Our reception was subdued, to say the least. Dimitri showed little curiosity about my life, and when I asked him about his own, he answered laconically, staring out the window, as if our presence oppressed him and he were trying to draw strength from the sprawl of suburbs and derelict-looking factories spread out below.

That was the last time we had seen each other.

“I knew people like that at university. There was a whole gang of them who joined one of those parties and then just dropped out en masse. I thought they were complete idiots.”

It was night. Karen and I were in the bedroom.

“Don’t look at me. I’m covered in cream.”

I turned away.

“Anyway, I’m surprised you’d want to start up a friendship again with a person who could treat you like that.” Karen brought her lips tidily together.

“We’re meeting for a drink. I wouldn’t necessarily call that starting up the friendship again.”

Karen shrugged and stood up to go into the bathroom. After a while I heard her step quietly down the corridor to Sophie’s room.

I lay still while she was gone, thinking again of Dimitri. What could have prompted him to get in touch after all this time? The letter, which had been forwarded from my parents’ home, said only that he was living back in London and that he would like to see me. There was no allusion in it to the fact that we hadn’t seen each other for over a decade. In this omission I caught the loftiness, the note of slight condescension that had always been present in Dimitri’s exchanges with me. And on the phone, when 1 had rung him up to arrange the meeting, he had sounded almost offhand, as if it were not himself but I who had broken the long silence between us. In his casual way he had suggested meeting in a pub up in Dalston, where he was living now, miles from where I lived or worked. I smiled to myself, remembering how tamely, willingly even, I had acquiesced.