It's Beginning to Hurt

by James Lasdun

  THE NATURAL ORDER

  “So, do you always wear your wedding ring?”

  “I do.”

  “I would never wear one of those things. The way it announces you’re someone else’s property.”

  “Shall we go on here or up to the gorge?”

  “The gorge.”

  Abel took the turn that led off to the high part of the gorge. The landscape was thickly wooded, with the granite-walled gash of a nine-mile gorge cutting through the green slopes of the mountains.

  “And you’ve never actually been unfaithful to Antonia in all the time you’ve been married?”

  “No.”

  “Not even last night, eh?”

  “What?”

  “Just asking.”

  They came to the end of the tarmac road and began bumping over a narrow stone trail that climbed through a scrub of yellow-flowering broom. Strange rock formations—little citadels of thin, tall, wind-eroded towers—appeared on either side of the road. Stewart asked Abel to stop the car so that he could get out and photograph them.

  Alone in the car, Abel watched Stewart jump lightly from rock to rock, camera in one hand, tripod in the other. A dull glare of hostility burned in him. He had known Stewart through mutual friends since the Scotsman’s first arrival in the States several years earlier, but they’d never been close until these past three weeks on the road together, which had forced them into an intimacy that Abel had quickly found disturbing. Specifically, it was Stewart’s ceaseless and exclusive preoccupation with sex that had unnerved him.

  Not that it was entirely a surprise; in a vague way Abel had always known of Stewart’s reputation as a ladies’ man. And although he’d tended not to believe most of the stories he’d heard—girls accosting Stewart on the street, breaking into his apartment, picked up in cafés and bedded without a word spoken between them—he had certainly noticed that women were drawn to Stewart. He was tall and narrow-hipped, with the rare combination of black hair and blue eyes, the hair curling in thick clusters, the eyes mirthful, with a hint of laconic cruelty. His face, always clean-shaven, looked both angular and polished smooth, like some fine artifact constructed purely for the purpose of making a hand want to caress it. He wore brightly colored silk shirts that must have consumed an inordinate share of his income as a not very successful freelance photographer.

  Early in the trip, Abel had realized that the stories were more likely to have been understatements than exaggerations. He had never been in a position to study the habits of a serious womanizer before, and what he’d observed had been a revelation.

  The day after they’d arrived in Athens, a girl in a blue leather jacket had noticed Stewart in the hotel lobby (Abel had observed the brief, involuntary stilling of her glance as she crossed the floor). The next morning Abel saw Stewart handing the leather jacket to the desk clerk.

  “Wee thing split before I woke,” Stewart had told Abel nonchalantly. “Left her jacket behind.”

  A few days later, in Meteora, they had both noticed a young Chinese woman leading a tour group up to one of the monasteries. By nightfall Stewart had found the woman again, discovered she spoke English, and invited her to join him and Abel for an after-dinner drink. Her manner was almost American in its casual ease, though Abel noticed that she held his eyes longer when she turned to him than most American women did. Not flirtatiousness, he sensed, so much as a remote, dispassionate interest, one empire taking the measure of another. Even so, he found himself trying to make her turn toward him as often as he could. He wasn’t aware of competing with Stewart in this regard, but when the girl got up to leave, and Stewart offered to walk her back to her hotel, and she accepted without a word of protest as though this had long ago been settled between them, Abel had felt a distinct pang. He and Stewart were sharing a room that night, and in the small hours Abel was woken by the Scotsman’s return. Stewart was laughing quietly, not drunk but lit up in some way.

  “Smell that,” he’d said, holding out his hand. “Chinese pussy.”

  A mass of sensations had erupted in Abel as the pungent aroma wafted from Stewart’s fingertips: shock, vague anger, and hunger, envy too.

  “She wouldn’t let me go the whole way, though. Can you fucking believe it?” Stewart laughed again. Pacing the room in his vivid shirt and black jeans, he looked coiled and taut, with a wildness about him, an intent, sharp vitality that Abel realized he hadn’t fully acknowledged until now.

  One night they’d met two English girls, backpackers in their early twenties, up from a month of raves and beach parties on the islands. One had shaven blond bristles and a stud in her nose. The other was tall and dreamy-eyed, hennaed ringlets falling to her bare midriff. Within a few minutes Stewart had made his characteristic first move on the tall one, a jocular insult carefully calibrated to raise the temperature between them to the point where they became implicated in what, to all intents and purposes, was a lovers’ quarrel, one that presupposed the tendernesses that invariably followed.

  “I’ve never met an English girl who wasn’t deep down just obsessed with getting married …”

  “That’s so unfair!”

  The other girl glanced at Abel. He noticed a sweetness about her face that hadn’t been immediately apparent under the bristles and stud. Her cheeks looked soft as a child’s, her tawny eyes friendly. He thought of Antonia and the baby back in Connecticut. Where would they be now? Outside probably, lazing on the porch or feeding the chickens. He tried to picture them. The girl impinged on him, producing a little hip flask and taking a swig from it …

  “Greek brandy,” he heard. “Totally lethal.”

  There had been a moment a few months ago when he and Antonia had been in the old barn where her father’s travel book business was housed. Winter sunshine was melting the icicles outside the window, and in the sweet gelid light that filled the high-beamed room, Abel had been filled with unexpected euphoria. Watching his wife laying out pages, their swaddled child sleeping in the cradle beside her, he had been visited by stronger feelings of love than he had ever imagined himself capable of feeling. It was as though the full reality of his marriage—its brimming sufficiency—had for the first time been made radiantly apparent to him. The moment had passed, but the revelation had survived in him untarnished, lit with the gleam of the melting icicles, and filling him with contentment whenever he thought of it.

  “Want a hit?” The girl was offering him her flask.

  “Oh. No thanks.”

  “You’re the quiet American, aren’t you?”

  “Excuse me? Oh … Not really, just the tired American.”

  He stood up, catching what appeared to be a brief flash of annoyance in the girl’s eye as he made his excuses and left.

  Up in his room he thought of her. Was it really possible that she could have been interested in him? He looked in the mirror, felt the familar jolt at the disparity between his persistently youthful idea of his physical appearance and the image that confronted him. His hair lay thinly over his temples; his torso looked shapeless in the useful lightweight beige anorak he had brought along for the cooler evenings. An hors de combat jacket, Stewart had jokingly called it when he first saw Abel sporting it … He smiled wanly at himself. He looked middle-aged.

  Next morning he discovered that both of the girls had spent the night with Stewart.

  Breakfasting with the three of them—him uncomfortable, not wanting to seem either prurient by talking about the night’s outcome or priggish by conspicuously not alluding to it; them calm, sated-looking, globed in their mutual contentedness—he had felt both obscurely mocked and, even more obscurely, ashamed.

  That was a week ago. Since then there had been a woman in a zip-up dress who worked in the tourist bureau in Thessaloniki, a bespectacled assistant in a camera store, the faded-looking proprietress of a small hotel … Not my business what he does, Abel had told himself, but he had begun to feel strangely oppressed. He had never thought of his state of contented monogamy as
something unusual or in need of justification, but the effect of Stewart’s behavior had been to make him feel as though he had consciously adopted some bizarre, almost freakish approach to life. He wondered for the first time whether his faithfulness as a husband had been a matter of deliberate choice or passive acquiescence. Had he deliberately suppressed the appetites of a potential philanderer for the sake of a greater happiness, or had his life taken the shape it had because he didn’t have those appetites in the first place? Or was it just that his love for Antonia was so strong that faithfulness was simply what came naturally?

  It occurred to him that at the very least there were things about the Stewart approach to life that he could adopt without compromising himself. For one thing, he could sharpen up his appearance. Being married didn’t mean you had to relinquish all claim to being regarded as a physical animal, but somehow he had managed just that. His clothes had become shabby, formless, utilitarian. The luster and contour he had once taken care to maintain had given way, he realized, to an apparent desire to blur himself into the background of any given situation. He felt a sudden revulsion for the contents of his suitcase: dust-colored rags of baggy cotton and corduroy; the horrible beige anorak with its webby lining, its pleated elastic waistband, and plastic black toggles. Forget hors de combat; the thing was more like a body bag! But he had worn it almost every evening of their trip … Christ! What had happened to him?

  They were in Kastoria, up near the Albanian border, giving themselves a rest day. It was an old center for the fur trade; furriers still lined the hilly streets, their fronts hung with the glossy pelts of beaver, mink, ocelot, chinchilla … Not exactly what Abel had in mind, but the sight confirmed his sense of the dereliction of his own exterior.

  He got a haircut in a barbershop, letting the barber slick back his sparse locks with fistfuls of greenish gel. He bought three linen shirts in rich colors and a pair of charcoal pants made of a silky material that arranged itself around his legs with the fluid, blandishing lines of drapery on a classical statue. A suede jacket caught his eye in another window. He’d last had a suede jacket in his twenties, when he had gone to live in Europe for a couple of years. Looking at this one, he felt a keen craving to possess it. He went in, tried it on. It was a good fit, expensive but not extortionate. He bought it, paying cash in his eagerness to possess it, the thick wad of bills soft as the suede itself. Shoes: you couldn’t wear these clothes with the all-purpose sneakers he had on, their squished quiltings and bulgings giving them the appearance of giant, misshapen caterpillars. He bought a pair of square-toed black shoes with chrome buckles. Not much use in the mountains, but there were other considerations after all …

  Stewart was out when he got back to the hotel. Abel showered in the shared bathroom between their rooms and dried himself at the mirrored sink. Stewart’s wash things were arranged around the rim of the sink. At the start of the trip, Abel had been struck by the quantity of toiletries that Stewart traveled with, but beyond a reflex twinge of condescending amusement, he hadn’t given the matter any further thought. Now, though, as he looked at the array of conditioner jars, moisturizer tubes, bottles of shampoo, little beribboned vials of essential oils and aftershave lotions, the deodorant stone, the gleaming clippers, trimmers, and scissors, the elegant traveling razor and badger hair shaving brush, he felt again the full reality of Stewart’s quietly fanatical dedication to his appearance, and this time found himself filled with something more like envy than condescension.

  The thought struck him that Stewart, whom he had always vaguely thought of as his inferior, was in some sense—some important sense he had never properly considered—a higher order of being than himself. He flinched from the idea, felt strangely undone by it, almost wanted to utter a groan … But it was true: under the man’s crassness a fine, bright flame seemed to burn in him. One was almost physically aware of it: a steady incandescence of sexual interest in the world, the lively brightness of which was its own irrefutable argument.

  Was there, Abel found himself wondering, any possibility of attaining that quality himself? Had there ever been? More painful to contemplate: Had he ever even truly wanted it? That question seemed to bring with it from the depths some ancient, obscurely held suspicion about himself: that perhaps what he truly wanted was not to be alive at all and that failing that, he had done all he could to make his life approximate as closely as possible the condition of not being alive. Was that the real meaning of that icon of his wife and child, fixed in the gelid wintry light of his in-laws’ barn: the swaddled child silently sleeping; his wife immobile, statuesque … Not presence of joy, but absence of pain: Was that what the domestic contentment he thought he had found amounted to? And if so, where had this strange inclination to be stone come from? Some insidious psychic wound? Or some more culpable failure of spirit? Had he chosen to become this way? Was it possible to change?

  He opened a corked glass vial and sniffed: bay rum. He sprinkled a few drops in his hair and rubbed it in. Back in his room he dressed carefully in his new clothes: crimson linen shirt, the charcoal pants, the chrome-buckled shoes. The evening air was already cool enough to justify the suede jacket. Standing in it, he felt almost as he had a decade earlier, living a bohemian fantasy in Europe, setting out onto the streets of Copenhagen or Madrid for his evening wanderings, joyfully adrift, with a light, clear feeling of infinite promise.

  He went downstairs to the restaurant.

  Stewart was already there, eating mezes with a group of Americans.

  “New haircut,” he observed as Abel joined them. He took in the jacket, fingering the sleeve approvingly. “Well, well. Aren’t we the semi-handsome dude tonight! Here, meet—what’re all you’s names?”

  The Americans introduced themselves. They were hikers, on a tour of the northern mountains. Most of them looked in their fifties and sixties, prosperous couples, their clothes and gear hanging on them with the faint unassimilable stiffness of things bought from outdoor catalogs. But among them was a woman in her thirties, apparently on her own. She wore jeans and an old blue jean jacket. She had a droll, solicitous air, smiling attentively at her companions’ remarks, but at the same time, Abel sensed, a bit depressed by them. Her name was Rose.

  Stewart had established himself next to her at the table. He was talking to the whole group, regaling them with his and Abel’s adventures on the road, but it was obvious whom the performance was intended for. He was playing out a routine Abel had seen before, his eloquent barbarian routine, which consisted of dusting off his accent and assuming the persona of a laconically blunt Scot.

  “Anyway, the shitehead’s clearly under the impression we’ve no got the balls to stand up to a big Balkan laddie like him, so my friend here, who I can assure you is normally the most docile of gentlemen, picks up the desk phone and starts dialing the tourist police. Well, the cunt goes all huffy …”

  Glancing past his neighbor at the younger woman, Abel was surprised to see that she was looking at him. She smiled. Her eyes, under thick gold lashes, were the same faded blue jean color as her jacket. She appeared to be paying no attention to Stewart’s story.

  “You’re writing a book?” she asked quietly.

  “Oh … If you can call it a book. A guidebook.”

  “That’s a book.”

  “Well …”

  “Not War and Peace, right?”

  He nodded; startled to find a stranger even remotely on his wavelength.

  “I used to work in book publishing.” She went on. “I quit to go live in the desert with one of my authors.”

  She laughed, apparently at her own folly. They leaned back in their chairs, defecting from the circle of Stewart’s listeners. Before long, barely conscious of arranging it, Abel found himself at a separate table with her, with their own food and their own red metal jug of retsina gleaming between them. They were deep in conversation.

  “ … We were getting slower and slower. Some mornings I could barely make it into the hammock. I’d
just stand there looking at it, like I’d turned into a cactus or something. A bird could’ve built a nest on my shoulder. You live in Connecticut, you said?”

  “Yes. But so what happened?”

  “Oh, I don’t know … Apparently I’m somewhere in the north of Greece on a hiking trip with some very nice folks twice my age, but I’m not exactly sure how I got here or why I came.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  At one point Stewart appeared at their table, holding a drink. His own table had broken up. Abel and Rose smiled at him, continuing their conversation. He pinched a fold of Abel’s new shirt. “Suits him, don’t you think, the crimson?”

  “Yes, it does,” Rose said.

  “Bit John Travolta–ish, though. But maybe you’re planning to show us some of your disco moves, Abel, later on?”

  “Maybe.”

  Glancing from Abel to Rose, Stewart yawned suddenly and drifted off.

  The two were silent a moment. Rose looked at him, the sun-faded blue of her eyes distantly welcoming. He felt the light pressure of her fingers on his hand.

  “Is that a wedding ring?”

  “Yeah.”

  She looked at him again; something quizzical now, tentatively wary in her expression. He held her gaze, steadily. It was like wandering down some long, warm trail, somewhere with dry, sweet-smelling, blue-domed air. He had been here before, or somewhere like it, though not in a long time. The warm, amused expression returned to her eyes. She projected a sense of being utterly alone in the world. Between the black of her pupils and the blue of her irises were yellowish flares, like the flaring rays of an eclipsed sun in the midday sky. The more he looked at her, the more unusual and likable and attractive she seemed. More attractive, he noted, than the women who were drawn to him usually were.

  They finished their retsina. The restaurant began closing up. It seemed to Abel that he could see with absolute clarity what lay ahead. When they were ready, they would walk out onto the vinetrellised path that led from the hotel to the ruined fort overlooking the town. Up at the top they would go on talking for a while; then they would lie in silence listening to the night. Their hands would touch, take hold of each other … Later they would find themselves back in one of their rooms making love. And the next day they would go their separate ways, each heavy with the rich freight of a new human being inside them.