It's Beginning to Hurt

by James Lasdun

  “Maybe.”

  “I’d like a cord if you are.”

  “Okay.”

  He didn’t seem all that interested in talking. I moved away, wondering if I’d offended him by talking business at a social gathering. Schuyler and Faye left the party, but Rick stayed on, drinking steadily. At one point he started asking women to dance, even though it wasn’t that kind of party. One or two of them did, just to humor him.

  The next night, at two in the morning, he started firing off his gun. The same thing happened for the next several nights. I called to ask what was going on. He answered the phone with the words “Hello, you’ve reached the Vanderbeck Hollow Cathouse and Abortion Clinic,” then hung up. A few days later I came home from the train station to find a pile of logs dumped over the lawn. It was true that I’d asked for wood, but normally we would discuss the price and the time of delivery before Rick brought it over, and he would help me stack it. I called him that evening. Without apologizing for dumping the wood, he said he wanted $120 for it.

  “That’s quite a bit more than you usually charge.”

  “That’s the price.”

  I stacked the wood. It seemed less than a full cord, and I said so when I took the check down to Rick the next day. He was outside, talking with Faye by the stone oven he’d built in their front yard. He barely looked at me as I spoke.

  “That was a full cord” was all he said, taking the check. “I measured it.”

  It was only when I spoke to Arshin a few days later, as I passed him on his porch clicking his beads, that I began to understand Rick’s behavior, and it is only since I’ve spoken with a cousin of Rick’s who works at the post office that I’ve begun to piece together the sequence of events in the month that followed.

  Schuyler, their companion at Arshin’s party, was not a friend of Rick’s at all, let alone his “buddy,” but an old acquaintance of Faye’s. The exact nature of their relationship was not made apparent to any of us at this time; all that was known was that he had turned up at Rick’s house, having just come out of jail, where he’d spent eighteen months for selling methamphetamine. Faye ran off with him the day after that party, leaving the four kids behind. She was gone for five nights. Those were the nights Rick fired off his gun. She came back; they had a fight, a reconciliation; then she took off again. The sequence repeated itself a third time, after which Rick told her to stay out of the house for good. She could take the children or leave them, he told her, but she had to go. At this point Faye became violently angry, throwing furniture and dishes at the walls till one of the older kids called the cops. Before they arrived, Rick chamber-locked his gun and set it outside the house. “That was so the cops would see there wasn’t no gun violence in the house,” his cousin told me. Faye had cooled down by the time they showed up. Very calmly she told them that Rick had threatened to kill her and the children and then himself. The police, obliged to take such threats seriously, carted Rick off to the Andersonville Hospital psychiatric wing for a week’s enforced observation. By the time he came out of the hospital, Faye had obtained a protection order, barring him from coming within a mile of the house.

  The next few days are a mystery, obscured by conflicting reports and gaps in the record. What was known for sure was that Rick spent them at the home of a relative, a woman named Esther, whom he referred to as his “second mother,” his first having disappeared when he was small. He was distraught, drinking heavily, but also looking for work, intent on supporting his family even though he wasn’t allowed to see them. The Saturday after Thanksgiving he took a job with a landscaper who’d been hired to do tree work on a property in town. We first heard about the accident when Arshin called on Sunday to ask if we knew whether it was true that Rick had been killed the day before, hanged, up a tree. An hour later he called back to confirm the report. A heavy branch, roped to the ground to make it fall in a particular direction, had been caught by a gust and blown the wrong way, slashing the rope across Rick’s neck and chest, asphyxiating him. He was seventy feet up in the air, and the fire department couldn’t reach him with their cherry picker. They put out a call for a bucket ladder. A local contractor brought one and grappled him down. He was blue. The emergency helicopter on its way from Albany was sent back.

  The funeral service was in town, at the Pinewood Memorial Home. It was already crowded when we arrived: young, old, suits, overalls, biker jackets, everyone in a state of raw grief. We signed the register and made our way inside. Loud, agitated whisperings rose and fell around us, anger glittering along with tears. Already there was a sense of different versions of Rick’s last days forming and hardening, of details being exchanged and collected, variants disputed. The two older children sat on the front bench on one side of the chapel, fearful-looking as they had been when we first saw them, walking alone up the twilit slope of Vanderbeck Hollow. On the other side were Rick’s relatives; his father sitting rigid, hands on his knees, broad back motionless.

  Faye appeared from a side room with the two little girls and slid next to the older two, glancing briefly over her shoulder at the congregation, her face stricken, though whether with grief, guilt, or terror was hard to say. Even among her four children she seemed a solitary, unconnected figure.

  A minister came in and told us to rise. He read from the Bible about walking through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, fearing no evil. We sang a hymn, and people went up to the front to speak. High school anecdotes were recounted; fishing stories, the time Rick was chased out of his front yard by a bear … A tall silver-haired woman stood up. As she began speaking, I realized she was Esther, Rick’s “second mother.” She said she’d had a long conversation with Rick a few days before his death, when he was staying with her. “In hindsight,” she continued, “unbelievably, I see that I have to take this conversation as the expression of Rick’s last wishes.”

  With a firm look around the crowded chapel, she announced that he’d said he still loved Faye. “He told me he still hoped to have another child with her, a son.”

  She paused a moment, then concluded: “Therefore, Faye, I honor you as his widow, and I love you.”

  An unexpected brightening sensation passed through me at these words. I, like everyone else no doubt, had arrived at the funeral believing Rick was up that tree in a state of impaired judgment, if not outright suicidal despair, and that this was a direct result of Faye’s behavior. I still did believe this to be the case, but I was caught off my guard by the implicit plea for compassion in Esther’s speech. In spirit, if not in any specific detail, it chimed with some dim sense I had of something inadequate or incomplete in the story I had been told of Faye’s actions. I had concurred in the general verdict against her, but I must have had some faint scruple of doubt about the matter. At any rate I found myself thinking again of the expression I’d glimpsed on her face at the wedding, gazing off into the late-summer greenness of the hollow, and although I still had no more idea what it signified than I had at the time, I wondered if there was perhaps something more in the nature of a torment underlying her behavior than the purely banal selfishness and manipulation by which I had so far accounted for it.

  The service ended. Whether by design or some unconscious collective assent, our departure from the chapel was conducted more formally than our arrival; a single, slow line formed, passing out by way of the casket. It was open, and there was no avoiding looking in. Ribboned envelopes were pinned to the white satin lining of the lid. “Dear Daddy,” they read, in childish handwriting. I mounted the single step, bracing myself for the encounter. There he lay, eyes closed, beard trimmed, cheeks and lips not so subtly made up, chalky hands together holding a turkey feather. I stared hard, trying to recognize in this assemblage of features my neighbor of seven years. For a moment it seemed to me I could make out a trace of the old mischievous grin that floated over him even when his luck was down, and it struck me—God knows why—as the look of someone who knows that despite everything having gone wrong with his life, at
some other level everything was all right.

  That was November. Knowing what I know now—what we all know now—I go back to that ghost of a grin on Rick’s face and find I must read into it a note of resignation as well as that appearance of contentment; submission to a state of affairs as implacably out of reach of human exertion as the shift of wind that took his life. And by the same token I go back to the look on Faye’s face at their wedding and find in it, beyond the general sadness, the specific expression of a person observing that after all, nothing, not even the charm of one’s own wedding day, is powerful enough to purge the past or stop its taint from spreading into the future. Whether this disposes of the “banal” in her subsequent actions, I am not sure, the situation being, in a sense, the precise essence of banality. Schuyler had been her foster brother from the time he was fifteen and she eleven. Arshin had the story from an acquaintance who used to work for the Andersonville Social Services. Over the course of several years, in a small house in the section of town known as the Depot Flats, he had—what?—“seduced” her? “Taken advantage” of her? “Raped” her? No word seems likely to fit the case, not in any useful way, which is to say any way that might account for the disparate, volatile cluster of wants, needs, aversions, and fears the experience appears to have bequeathed her: the apparent determination to put a distance, or at any rate the obstacle of another man, between herself and Schuyler, her equally apparent undiminished susceptibility to him, her cold manner, her strange power to make a man as warmly tender as Rick fall in love with her nevertheless.

  She stayed in the house all December and January, though I barely glimpsed her. Arshin claimed Schuyler was living with her, sneaking up there at night and leaving first thing in the morning, but we saw no sign of him. In February we went on vacation. When we got back, there was a realtor’s board up outside the house. Faye had left abruptly—for Iowa, we heard later, where she had relatives—and Rick’s father had decided to sell the place. It sold quickly, to a couple from New York who wanted it for a weekend home.

  A few days ago I met Cora Chastine coming down the road on her mare. We stopped to talk, and at some point I remarked how quiet Vanderbeck Hollow had become without Rick roaring up and down it in his truck. Cora looked blank for a moment, and I wondered if she was growing forgetful in her old age. But then, in that serene, melodious voice of hers, she said: “Do you know, I realized the other day, that Rick is the first person whose life I’ve observed in its entirety from birth to death, within my own lifetime? I was living here when he was born, and I’m still living here now that he’s no longer alive. Isn’t that remarkable?”

  I nodded politely. She gave the reins a little flick and glided on.

  I’d been planning to take just my usual late-afternoon walk to the top of the road and back, but something was making me restless; some faint sense of shame, no doubt, at having failed to protest that Rick’s existence might be regarded as something other than merely the index of this genteel horsewoman’s powers of survival, and instead of turning back I continued along the logging trail that leads from the end of the road up through the woods to the ridge.

  It was years since I’d been up there. The trail was muddy and puddled from the late thaw, but the service blossoms were out, ragged stars, and the budding leaves on the maples and oaks made high domes through which the last of the daylight glowed in different shades of green. Reaching the top of the ridge, I followed the path down the far side, past the rusted swing gate with its STATE LAND sign and on down the uninhabited slope that faces north across Spruce Hollow.

  The trees here were different: hemlocks and pines, with some kind of dark-leaved shrub growing between them, its leaf crown held up on thin, bare, twisting gray stems like strange goblets. It took me a moment to recognize this as mountain laurel—deer must have stripped it below shoulder level, causing this eerie appearance—and I was just trying to remember the things Rick had told me about this plant the time we walked up through the woods together when my eye was caught by a straight-edged patch of darkness off in the distance, and I realized, peering through the tangled undergrowth, that I was looking at a man-made structure.

  Leaving the path, I made my way toward it, and saw that it was a hut built out of logs. It stood in a small clearing. The walls were about five feet high, the peeled logs neatly notched into each other at the corners. The roof had been draped with wire-bound bundles of brush. A door made of ax-hewn planks hung in the entrance. I pushed this; it swung open onto a twilit space in which, by whatever swift chain reaction of stimulus and remembrance, I became abruptly aware that I was standing in the cabin that Rick had built himself in order to have, as he had put it, “somewhere to go.”

  The top few inches of the rear wall had been left open under the eaves, giving a thin view of Spruce Clove. On the dirt floor below stood a seat carved out of a pine stump, with a plank shelf fitted at waist height into the wall beside it. An unopened can of Molson stood on this, and next to that what looked like an improvised clay ashtray.

  I sat on the stump, struck by the thought that this would make a good refuge from the world if I too should ever feel the need for “somewhere to go.” And then, as I was sizing up the shelf for possible use as a desk, I saw that what I’d thought was an ashtray was not in fact an ashtray at all. I picked it up; it was a piece of dried clay that had been hollowed by the imprint of an enormous, clawed paw.

  A sudden apprehension traveled through me. Despite a strong impulse to swing around, I stopped myself; I dislike giving way to superstition. Even so, as I sat there gazing up at the granite outcrops of Spruce Clove, streaked in evening gold, I had an almost overpowering sense of being looked at myself; stared at in uncomprehending astonishment by some wild creature standing in the doorway.

  CRANLEY MEADOWS

  “What will I do? Keep looking, I suppose.”

  Lev Rosenberg remained stooped as he spoke to his wife, his eye pressed to the lens of the squat sixteen-inch telescope pointing through the small dome of the observatory.

  It was a chilly, glittering October night. As Lev inched the telescope across the heavens, his wife could see faint showers of magnified starlight spark in the translucent part of his iris. The grounds of the college and the farmland beyond were visible through the open slot in the dome, familiar contours spectral in the bright moonlight. Frost was already glinting on the stiffened milkweed pods at the base of the observatory.

  “Not that a fifty-four-year-old physicist who hasn’t revised relativity is exactly a hot commodity on the market right now. As we seem to be discovering.”

  Bryony, Lev’s wife, said nothing.

  “Don’t we?”

  “I guess.”

  Last summer the college had fired eighteen professors, Lev among them. Only two so far had found jobs elsewhere. A few others had drifted off. Most of the dozen or so who remained owned homes in the area, with mortgages to pay, families to support. In a few months the severance money would run out. Then what? Were they going to have to sell their houses? Take their children out of college?

  As a courtesy, Lev had been permitted to go on using the observatory. He came most nights; it seemed to be good for his morale. Tonight Saturn was rising in Pisces at an unusual angle to Earth, and Lev had brought Bryony with him to show her.

  “You’re not cold, are you?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Don’t want the little fellows catching a chill. Can you catch a chill in the womb?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ah … There he is. There’s Saturn. Come. Come have a look …”

  Lev turned from the lens and smiled at his wife. His yellowish gray eyes were watering with the cold. Silver hairs shone in his black beard, which he had grown since being fired.

  He stood back and made way for his wife at the eyepiece.

  “That’s a sight to put our little problems in perspective.”

  Lev had come to Shalehaven twelve years earlier from the Soviet Union.
At the time of his arrival the college had been prosperous, hospitable to exiles like him. In those days it was prestigious to have a dissident on campus, and the college had shown its appreciation by building a small observatory to Lev’s specifications. It was here that his relationship with Bryony had begun.

  She was his student then, sixteen years his junior, tall—taller than Lev—with a reticent self-possession he had found beguiling. She’d stayed on at the college during the summer vacation of her senior year to write her thesis. As darkness fell on the warm evenings, she would make her way over to the observatory to record the positions of the star cluster she was studying. Lev would be there, writing or reading in his office downstairs. He would offer her a drink—not such a scandalous thing in those days—and they would talk, before going upstairs to look at the star cluster.

  Toward the end of the summer their conversation had begun to take on a more personal tone. Lev told Bryony about his arrest for distributing censored pamphlets, describing the labor camp in Siberia where he’d built railbeds for a bauxite mine till he collapsed with a heart attack, aged thirty-seven. He told her about his years in internal exile in Tomsk, where he’d been caretaker of one of the old merchant buildings. He showed her a photo of the gray wooden building with its carved eaves and confided that he had been happier there than anywhere else in his life. “Until now. But you tell me about your life.” She spoke about her parents, both doctors in Maine; her brother, a naval cadet; the year they had all spent at a reservation clinic in Alaska … “Not much to tell, really,” but in the strangeness of Lev’s new existence, the ordinariness of this calm young woman’s life had had a powerful effect on him. They had first kissed up in the observatory, the smell of freshly carpentered lumber mingling with the faint soap scent of Bryony’s skin and the sweetish tobacco fragrance from Lev’s Tekel cigarettes, the air outside full of silvery spindrift from the milkweed pods that had ripened and begun to split. Even today Lev couldn’t climb the braided metal steps to the dome without recalling the feelings of tumultuous affection those evenings had stirred in him.