It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (23 page)

He had recognized the piece, he would tell her as she opened the door. She would pour them each a glass of wine. Already she could feel his enigmatic aura spreading over her, not quite that of an adult, but not that of a child either. Not even quite of this world, it seemed to her. He was like a state of mind from long ago in her own life, miraculously recaptured and held out before her. They would sit on the sofa, talking. At a pause, she would bring up the subject of the bluebells. She’d regretted sending him away that afternoon, she would tell him. And taking his hand in hers, she would ask:

“Am I going to be given a reprieve?”

The gangly figure had emerged from the woods. Out into the darkening evening she sent the simple melodies. After a moment, she saw him look toward her house. Slowly, as if drawn against his own will, he began to move toward her, mesmerized, it appeared, by the phrases her fingers were conjuring from the instrument. She looked down as he came closer, but she could feel his steady approach, as if he were looming upward through her own consciousness. Then, as he came through the garden gate and stood at the opened window, she turned back up to face him, not troubling to feign surprise, merely smiling at him as he peered in at her, the edges of his light, loose clothes translucent against the low sun, his hair lit like a ring of red fire.

“Martin!” she said.

And for a moment she felt a sharp anguish welling up inside her, as if the convergence of wish with reality was, after all, an experience as close to pain as it was to pleasure.

Then, glancing at the clock, she stood up to let him in.

In a jeweler’s boutique in Soho, the young sales assistant was modeling a necklace for a customer who had come in to buy a gift for his fiancee.

“Something out of the ordinary,” he had said, and the assistant had shown him a cabinet with a necklace in it made of lemon- and rose-colored diamonds. The man had admired it but, after learning how much it cost, had laughed.

“Out of my league, I’m afraid.”

“Lef me show you some other things.”

The assistant had led him to another cabinet. “These are more affordable. They’re set with semiprecious stones.”

The man had nodded and peered forward into the lit glass case. “If you have any questions,” the assistant had said, “I’ll be happy to answer them.”

For a while the man had looked in silence at the things inside the case.

“I’ll tell you what,” he had said abruptly, “let’s have another look at that first necklace.”

“The diamond?”

“Yes.”

And so now she had taken the expensive necklace from its case and was modeling it for him while he sat in a chair opposite her, looking at how it lay on the flesh below her throat.

This was a part of her job, but in her seven months at the boutique she still hadn’t grown used to it. It made her self-conscious to sit and be stared at by a man she didn’t know, and it seemed to her that the men themselves were uncomfortable. Either they found it hard to look squarely at her in this moment, or else she would feel them peering too intently, as if they felt it their masculine duty to try to make a conquest of any woman who submitted herself so willingly to their gaze.

But this man was neither furtive nor brash. He was at ease in the artificial intimacy of the situation, intent in his scrutiny, but making no attempt to promote himself.

He was in his thirties, she guessed, dark and heavy-set. Brown hair curled on his head in thick clusters.

He nodded slowly. “All right,” he said in a bemused tone, as though not so much deciding as discovering what he was going to do, “I’ll take it.”

A moment later he was signing his name, Peter Kahn, on the three credit card payments into which he had had to divide the transaction. Then he went out of the store, carrying the flat box with the necklace inside it in his coat pocket.

Over the next couple of years he reappeared in the boutique several more times to buy his wife anniversary and birthday gifts. The assistant, whose name was Clare Keillor, would model the pieces he was interested in, and each time she would experience the same calm under his gaze. It was as though for a moment she had been taken into a realm glazed off from the everyday world, where a form of exchange that was inexpressible in everyday human terms was permitted to occur between strangers.

She had no idea whether Kahn himself experienced anything resembling this, or whether he even remembered her from one visit to the next, but she found herself revolving the memory of the encounters in her imagination after they had passed, and when several months went by without Kahn coming back into the store, she would begin to wonder if she was ever going to experience their peculiar, almost impersonally soothing effects again.

On one occasion his cell phone rang while she was modeling a pair of earrings for him. He excused himself, saying that this was an important call, and she waited while he spoke. From what she heard him say, it became clear that he was in business as an importer of wines and that he was trying to persuade a partner to bid on a consignment of rare French bottles that were coming up for auction. Evidently he was encountering resistance, and his tone became increasingly heated.

“Taste it!” he said. He proceeded to describe the wine in the most extravagant terms, which in turn appeared to prompt even more resistance. “Well then, let’s find customers who do give a damn!” he shouted. Then he snapped shut the phone.

Apologizing for the interruption, he tried to concentrate again on the earrings, but his mind was clearly on the altercation he had just had. The strong feelings it had aroused were still milling behind his eyes, and for a moment as he looked back at Clare, he appeared to forget why he was looking at her at all. He was just staring at her as though knowing there was some important reason why he was doing this, but not clear what it was. Then, as she looked back into his eyes, he seemed to stop struggling to remember and simply accept that this was what he was doing. And now for the first time she did have the impression that he was seeing her as she saw him, that he too was in that lucid atmosphere and was encountering her there with the same feeling of ease as she herself felt. Then the moment passed, and they were each back in the everyday reality of their own lives.

He decided against the earrings and left without looking at anything else.

Two more years passed. Then, on a hot morning in July, Kahn appeared once again in the store.

He stood in the entrance for a moment, adjusting from the boil and glare of the street to the store’s air-conditioned dimness. He looked less youthful, fleshier and redder in the cheeks, but still handsome and with a more developed air of consequence about him.

“I’m looking for a wedding gift,” he said, “for my fiancee. Something a little . .. out of the ordinary.”

Clare looked at him for a moment before answering. He gave no sign of recognizing her, and despite knowing there was no reason why he should, she felt dismayed. A few minutes later, however, as she was modeling some new pieces for him, there was a startled motion in his eyes.

“Still here!”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t recognize you. I apologize.” He gave an embarrassed grin. “What you must think of me, already on to my second wife!”

“Oh, I wasn’t—”

“Well, it happens.” He laughed, recovering his self-possession. “Anyway, we’re very much in love. What can I tell you?”

“That’s good. Congratulations.”

He bought a set of earrings and an expensive emerald bracelet; money was apparently no longer a great concern.

“At least we can say I’m faithful when it comes to where I buy my wives their jewelry!” he said in a parting attempt at jollity Clare gave him a polite salesgirl’s smile. His phrase “We’re very much in love” had grated on her, and as he left the store, she decided it must have been the formula he had used in breaking the news to the wife he had cast off, “We’re very much in love .. .” as though he and his new girlfriend just couldn’t help themselves. Clare pictured the wife—a blur of disembodied pain—and the girlfriend: younger, fresher, prettier. It struck her that Kahn hadn’t recognized her because she too had started to age.

There was that realm, the glassed-in sphere in which these encounters occurred, and then there was the real world, and Clare lived her life in this world also. She married a man named Neil Gehrig, an airline industry analyst, twelve years older than herself.

At a dinner one evening, someone praised the wine, and the host said, “Yes, it’s a Kahn.”

Looking at the bottle, Clare saw his name on the sticker at the neck, “Imported by Peter Kahn,” and an unexpectedly sharp emotion went through her. Three or four years had passed since their last encounter, and she was caught off guard by the force of her own feelings.

“He set up a company to bring over wines from the last small producers in France and Italy,” the host was saying. “We grab everything we can afford off his list.”

“I know him,” Clare heard herself say.

“You do?”

“He used to come into the store.”

“Really? What was he like?”

She shrugged, aware of her husband looking at her across the table, and regretting that she had spoken. “He seemed a nice enough guy . . .”

“Did he talk to you about wine?” the host asked.

The husband broke in. “Why would he talk to her about wine? It’s a jewelry store.”

“He’s obsessed with it,” the host answered. “We get this newsletter he writes. The guy’s on a mission. He wants to save the wine world from globalization.”

“How incredibly original,” the husband said, leaning back in his chair.

“One time he took a call on his cell phone,” Clare went on impetuously. “I heard him describe this wine he wanted to buy as like having the Rose Window at Chartres dissolving on your tongue.” “My God, a poet too!”

Clare smiled at her husband. Neil’s jealousy had surfaced soon after their marriage and now lived with them like a third person whose volatile behavior had to be carefully negotiated. Once, after a dinner like this, he had hit her on the mouth with the back of his hand after accusing her of flirting with another guest.

That November Kahn appeared once again in the boutique. He wore a soft-looking felt hat and an alpaca scarf. His eyes had a melancholy cast. There was a woman with him. The second wife, Clare supposed.

He gave a half-surprised smile of recognition as he saw Clare. Still here? The look seemed to ask.

“We’re, ah, we’re looking for an engagement ring,” he said.

It took a moment for the implication of this to sink in. Doing her best to conceal her surprise, Clare pulled a tray of rings from a cabinet.

The woman removed a pair of kidskin gloves. Her face was smooth and symmetrical. Its features seemed exclusively occupied in compelling the word “beauty” to form itself in the mind of whoever beheld them.

She glanced briefly at the rings. “I don’t think so, darling.”

Kahn turned to Clare with a shrug. “Sorry.”

“Oh, no problem.”

He gave her a smile.

“Shall we see some other things?” he asked the woman.

“I suppose, since we’re here.”

A necklace of rubies and small gold lozenges seemed to interest her.

“Why don’t you try it on?” Kahn said. But instead of handing the necklace to his fiancee, he handed it to Clare. The woman gave a breathy laugh, and Kahn, realizing his blunder, put his hand on hers.

“Sorry. I’m used to coming here alone.”

“Apparently.”

“So you try it on,” Kahn said to her.

Ignoring him, the woman turned to Clare.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Clare.”

“Put,on the necklace, Clare,” she said.

Clare put on the necklace. She was aware of Kahn’s glance upon her, but she was careful to look only at the woman. After giving the necklace a cursory appraisal, the woman turned to regard Kahn. As the three sat watching one another, Clare felt as though her relation to Kahn had developed into something newly strange. Everything seemed suddenly its own opposite: his physical closeness the precise expression of his untraversable distance from her, the free air between them a barrier impenetrable as glass. It seemed to her that no one on this earth was more remote from her than this man, sitting less than two feet from her with this, his third fiancee.

But even as she was feeling this, she allowed herself to glance at him for a moment, and at once, in spite of herself, she felt the old ease, the sensation of effortless compatibility.

She stopped working at the store soon after that. Neil, who earned a good salary, had been making increasingly scornful remarks about the fact that she chose to work at a mindless job when she didn’t need to, and she agreed to quit.

She despised her husband, but the very fact that she had no illusions about this was a source of perverse satisfaction to her; in the irremediable absence of love, it appeared she could make do with someone to hate.

With the new leisure imposed on her, she began cultivating the habits of a pampered mistress. She had their living room furniture reupholstered in raw silk. She bought a pair of Selvaggia shoes for seven hundred dollars. Neil was eager to have a child, and she pretended to want one too, even setting a calendar beside the bed with the optimal nights for conception marked on it. In a morbid ecstasy of self-torture, she allowed him to make love to her on those nights, while privately taking care not to get pregnant.