It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (24 page)

Meanwhile she subjected her feelings for Kahn to a deliberate effort of destruction, aiming at them an unceasing barrage of selfmockery. They were nothing more than the symptoms of a sickness, she would tell herself, a fixation straight out of some textbook on mental disorders. The relationship between herself and him in that “other” world was a pathetic, one-sided fiction. As for Kahn himself, he was nothing, a cipher onto which she had projected her own romantic fantasies, themselves as shallow and unoriginal as those of some overwrought schoolgirl. What, from any sane point of view, could she possibly want with such a man? Why would she even dream of being involved in the calamitous opera of his life?

Numb, bored, detached even from her own desolation, she drifted on.

One evening she found herself once again at dinner with the friends who had subscribed to Kahn’s catalog. She had forgotten about this connection until her neighbor at the table, a young Frenchman, commented on the wine, and she saw again, with a familiar helpless pang, the familiar name on the bottle.

As it turned out, her neighbor and his partner, seated across the table, were in the restaurant business and knew Kahn personally. From the look that passed between them, it was apparent that he was a source of amusing gossip in their world.

Clare glanced at her husband; he was lecturing their host on airline statistics.

“Tell me about Peter Kahn,” she said quietly to Jean-Luc, her neighbor.

“Oh! Where to begin!” the young man said with a laugh.

Mark, his American partner, turned to her. “You know him?”

“A little.”

Both men grinned at her, their expressions mischievously alert.

“You heard about the wedding?” Jean-Luc asked.

“No.”

“Oh my God! Tell her, Mark.”

“He was engaged to this model, Diane Wolfe? She was quite famous a few years ago. It was his third marriage, and he told everyone he’d finally found the right woman and to prove it he was going to have the most spectacular romantic wedding, in Venice. They rented a palazzo on the Grand Canal, invited a hundred and fifty guests, hired a jet to fly them over, arranged for the best chef in the Veneto to make the dinner, and had a yacht waiting on the Lido to take the two of them off into the Adriatic for their honeymoon. Well, guess what?”

Clare said nothing. Her heart had begun beating violently.

“He jilted her?” another guest asked.

“At the altar. At the altar. Our friends Sabine and George were there. They told us the whole story. All the guests in the church. Diane waiting in the back all dressed up in her veils and gown, specially designed, of course, the minutes ticking by, everyone getting steadily more impatient, when this man arrives, a complete stranger, apparently some tourist Peter accosted on the street after his best man refused to do the job, and reads out loud from a piece of paper: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Peter Kahn has asked me to tell you the wedding is canceled. He deeply regrets the pain this will cause . . .’ ”

Clare listened in a daze.

“What did he do?” she heard herself ask.

“He got out of Venice pretty damn fast, I can tell you!”

“What’s he doing now?” The conversation had caught the interest of the rest of the table, and Clare was aware of her husband looking in her direction.

Jean-Luc answered her: “Apparently he’s become a bit of a recluse. He sold his business, cut off all his friends. The last we heard he’d moved up to the Finger Lakes, looking to buy some winery of his own.”

“Where in the Finger Lakes?” She made a vague effort not to sound too interested.

“I don’t know. But we can find out if you like.” The young Frenchman’s eyes darted mirthfully from Clare to her husband. She could sense, without looking, the way Neil’s mouth would be tightening at the corners.

“Can you?”

“Of course.”

“I’ll give you my e-mail address.”

In the taxi home Neil remained silent. The interrogation began as soon as they had closed the door of their apartment behind them. “Why are you so interested in that Kahn guy?”

“No reason.”

“Are you planning to visit him or something, up in the Finger Lakes? Is that why you were so eager to get his exact address?” She shrugged, aware of being infuriating but unable to stop herself.

“I hadn’t thought. I was just curious.”

“But you don’t rule it out? Visiting this man who you apparently hardly know?”

“I don’t know, Neil. I haven’t thought about it.”

Her husband blinked and seemed to reel for a moment. He stood up. She looked away, her eye fixed on a piece of lint on the rug. “What went on between you and him?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean. He used to come into your store. Right?”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“To buy jewelry.”

“Were you having an affair with him?”

“No.”

“Look at me when I’m talking, goddammit!”

She felt the sudden crack of his hand on her mouth. She looked up at him.

“All right then,” she said.

“What?”

“All right... I was.”

“What? You were what?”

“Having an affair with him.”

Neil’s eyes widened. He looked stunned, in spite of himself. She herself was startled by the unexpected potency of her words.

It was as though in saying them she had illuminated some unsuspected truth.

“When? Before we were married or after?”

“Before. And after. He’d come in the store after Ishiro went home.” Ishiro was the designer who owned the store. “I’d lock the door, and we’d go up into Ishiro’s office.”

“And fuck?”

“Yes. Every day. On the chair, on the table—”

A blow struck her on the cheek.

“On the floor—”

Another hit her stomach. She doubled up, covering her face with her hands. Neil was yelling at her, but his words sounded like a foreign language or the roars of an animal. By the time she heard the front door open and slam shut behind him, she was in that glazed world again, as if she had stepped inside a diamond. In it, as vividly as if the scene were happening right there and then, she saw herself in the calm greenness of a summer afternoon, Kahn’s gaze opening on her like the sun itself as she approached, silver-blue water glittering in the distance behind him. She uncovered her face. The Finger Lakes, she said to herself. And what remained for her to do seemed clear as day.

Anna’s father, not yet divorced, took us out for dinner at the Madras Chop House. In those far-off days it was still a novelty for us to eat in a restaurant, and neither of us had ever eaten at a real Indian restaurant at all. Mr. Hamilton, a dedicated bon viveur, had been shocked to hear this. “Isn’t it your birthday coming up?” he had asked Anna. “I shall take you and Matthew to the Madras Chop House.”

I picked her up from her school in Hammersmith. I was early, often the case in those days. I had left the same school a year earlier, and aside from a morning job in an art shop, I had very little to do with my time.

I wandered through the school courtyard to the quiet gardens at the back, where I knew Anna would be fencing. There were a dozen or so girls there, practicing their thrusts and parries under the direction of their fencing mistress. Their bendy blunt-tipped foils swished through the crisp spring air and clicked against each other, flashing in the afternoon light. All the girls were dressed in the same fencing outfits, their heads completely covered by their masks, but I recognized Anna immediately. The trim line of her shoulders in the snow-white padded jacket, her boyish hips and slim legs in their tight white breeches like birch saplings in new white bark were unmistakable among the fuller figures of the other girls. As I watched her advance firmly upon her opponent, one hand on her hip, the other in its gauntlet swiveling her foil with fast, graceful, precise movements, I felt the crystalline asperity of her soul sparkle through me like something brilliant and fresh, and I was filled with the still new elation of being in love for the first time.

The fencing ended. Anna took off her mask, and her long dark hair fell down neatly over the white jacket. Seeing me, she smiled and ran over to kiss me on the lips. Her friends waved at me, laughing. In our few months together we had become quite a fixture, faithful, inseparable, the object of good-natured envy and amusement.

After she had showered and changed, we went out onto the Broadway and caught the bus to the West End. Traffic lights and the lit windows of office buildings were beginning to shine against the dusk. When I think now of the peculiar tenderness of our lives at that period, I often find myself remembering these evening bus rides across London: the smell of school soap 011 Anna’s skin, the bristly tartan seats, the conductors lurching down the aisle with their tight black gloves, and out through the windows the city stealthily transforming itself from a thing of bricks and mortar to a little anchored galaxy of electric lights.

1 gave Anna her birthday present on the bus. It was a seashell, a nautilus, in flawless condition, heavy and gleaming, as if it had been carved from solid pearl.

“What a beautiful thing, Matthew . . .”

She held it to her ear, then turned it around admiringly, watching its silvery whiteness take on a luster of lilac and emerald from the passing lights. In her quiet way she seemed extremely pleased with it.

“We’ll put it on the stone table,” she said, “the one overlooking the sea.”

In our imaginations we had constructed a house on a Greek island where we were going to live. To the extent that we were in reality planning to spend that summer in Greece, after Anna had finished school, this was not a complete fantasy. Technically we were still virgins then, and “Greece” had come to stand for the time when we would become lovers in the fullest sense. We would find a quiet island in the Aegean. A small hotel by the beach. There, without our having said it in so many words, we would give ourselves finally to each other. For both of us, this image of simple elements—mountains, starlight, sparkling sea—had seemed auspicious.

Darkness had fallen by the time we reached the restaurant. Anna’s father arrived just after us, rosy-cheeked from the Garrick, where he conducted most of his business. His portly figure was clad as usual in an elegantly tailored three-piece pinstripe suit, and a silk handkerchief shimmered in his breast pocket.

To our great surprise, he was not alone.

“I’d like you to meet a friend of mine,” he said with a faintly embarrassed air, “Lesley McLaughlin.”

A woman somewhat younger than himself, in a fur coat with a short mauve alpaca dress and high-heeled leather boots, came forward and offered us each a little cold hand to shake.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said with a smile that revealed a row of bright white teeth. Her voice was high and breathy, strangely girlish. Her slightly bouffant hair was partly gathered in a velvet ribbon at the back, falling in a loose, brass-colored sheaf over her padded shoulders.

Anna looked from her to her father. For the past few years, since she had started at her school in London, she and Mr. Hamilton had been living together during the week in a small flat Mr. Hamilton kept in Bayswater, returning at weekends to the house in Suffolk where Mrs. Hamilton lived with her two younger children. It had never occurred to Anna that this arrangement might reflect anything other than convenience. From the slight apprehensive widening in her hazel eyes, it was clear that the woman’s presence had begun to rouse her from this dream.

“Lesley lives, ah, not far away,” was all Mr. Hamilton offered by way of explanation.

“Yes, I have a little flat in Poland Street,” the woman confirmed with an eager smile. “It’s literally just around the corner.” “She’s a songwriter,” Mr. Hamilton said. “And a singer. A marvelous singer.”

“Roland, I wish you wouldn’t say things like that. You know you don’t mean them.”

“Oh, but I do. I mean them most sincerely.”

We were led to a table deep in the dim crimson-lit interior of the restaurant. Waiters in turbans and embroidered silk jackets moved about with large trays full of lidded salvers. Easing into his favorite role of genial host, Mr. Hamilton assumed an expansive air. He put on a pair of half-moon glasses and inspected the list of aperitifs.

“Splendid,” he said. “Let’s have a cocktail, shall we? I believe they make an acceptable cocktail here. What do you say? Martinis? Bloody Marys?”

He was a jovial man, at that time quite a successful agent for actors and singers, with an understated shrewdness about him, observable more as a gleam in his eyes than anything he said or did.

Dispatching a waiter with instructions for our drinks, he produced a tissue-wrapped package from his pocket and handed it to his daughter. “A little something for your birthday, darling.”

Anna opened the package. Inside was a necklace of linked greenish gold ivy leaves. She looked down at it in silence for a moment.

“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” Lesley said. “Isn’t it the loveliest thing you’ve ever seen?”

“It’s very pretty,” Anna replied.

“I told you she’d adore it, didn’t I, Roly?”