by James Lasdun
With an unpleasant inward jolt, as if something had been knocked loose inside me, I found myself remembering that in the notes for my abandoned literary project, I’d considered a possible suicide attempt for Julia. Not a serious one; in fact, a decidedly frivolous one, involving a dozen aspirins and a cunning plan concocted by her to make sure she was rescued. The idea had been to place it directly after the episode (drawn from life) in which she was jilted by her American fiancé, as a means of enhancing the quality of melodramatic self-absorption I’d allotted to her character. It disturbed me to recall it. Even without the brutal facts of this latest development to set it off, it seemed a strange thing to have invented. I wasn’t so superstitious as to regard it as some kind of illicit magical tampering in her fate (it wasn’t what had happened, after all), but precisely in its differences from the reality it otherwise so closely resembled, it seemed to confront me with some profound failure to comprehend her true character. I stood up, acutely restless; took out my phone to tell Caitlin the news, changed my mind, sat back down on the bed, and sprang up again, feeling suddenly cornered, and hurried back down the stairs.
A few of the guests were grouped around a small screen that had been set up in the front room, but most were packed into the main room with the big TV. I peered in through the arch. Marco beckoned me over, making a space next to him behind the old thrift-store sofa. Hanan was on the other side, squeezed up close with her hands linked over his shoulder in an uncharacteristically demonstrative pose. The debate was in full swing. There was a lot of raucous commentary from the guests, some of whom appeared to be live-tweeting the event, but the volume was up high and it was easy enough to hear what the candidates were saying. Distraction – my objective at that moment – seemed possible. One of the moderators was pushing the Republican on the things he’d said on the leaked tapes, and he was repeating the phrase ‘locker-room talk’ like a spell, as if it might ward off the general revulsion he’d aroused if he said it enough times. The guests were laughing, some imitating the schoolyard intonations of his voice, others mocking the lacquered fiasco of his hair. His crude attempt at turning the tables with an attack on his opponent’s use of a private email server prompted loud booing. He looked at the camera, and from the scowl on his face – lower lip protruding, jaw clenched tight – it almost seemed he was hearing us.
‘Look! He’s making his Churchill face. The British bulldog!’
‘Too bad he has such a wussy mouth!’
‘Is it me or is there something obscene about it? Like it’s a little anus that grew in the wrong place …?’
‘Wait, what’s he saying? Quiet, everyone …’
The man, towering over his opponent with the expression of an outraged mullah, was informing her that if he won the election he was going to get a special prosecutor ‘to look into your situation’. The room exploded into angry jeers that all but drowned out the whoops of his supporters in the studio audience. I stared, fascinated in spite of myself. I’d been slow to take any serious interest in this weird, ivory-gold colossus who’d been destroying his rivals one by one throughout the summer. He’d been a fixture of New York, an established sideshow, since long before I arrived there in the late eighties, but only very recently had I begun to realise he was something other than just a buffoon; that he had his own sickened vigour, his own charisma even. Perhaps because he too had recently joined the ranks of powerful men accused of assault, his very distinct physicality had begun to acquire, for me, a heightened aura. He brought to mind those slabs of pallid humanoid flesh in Francis Bacon’s paintings, enthroned on toilets in arid rooms with a molten dog for company; his lust for gold, detailed ad nauseam in the press, lending the image a tinge of jaundiced porcelain. Everything about him seemed at once gleaming and effluvial, like some Freudian idol we’d set up in order to load it with the qualities we most abhorred about ourselves before driving it out into the wilderness.
‘He’s going down!’ someone shouted. ‘He is so going down!’
He’d just threatened to jail his opponent and had retreated to his lectern like a bull withdrawing into his safe space, his querencia, looking at once menacing and cosmically aggrieved, as if nothing short of dominion over the entire universe could compensate for the wrongs done to him. That too, that titanically aggrieved air, was something I’d been slow to recognise; slower still to grasp its magical power over others, especially those with real cause for grievance.
‘What a chump!’ a woman on the sofa below me said.
‘Dump his rump,’ another person said.
People laughed, and soon everyone was coming up with rhymes: sump, slump, hump, pump his stump. There was a festive atmosphere, with a definite blood-sport cruelty about it, complicated by the fact that the quarry seemed only too eager to present himself as an actual monster. I drifted inward again. A phrase of Julia’s came back to me: He wasn’t thinking of me … I hadn’t attached much importance to it at the time. It had seemed a bit trite, if anything; an easy formula she’d settled on to explain her change of heart up in Marco’s room all those years ago. It wasn’t that it had become any more profound, but it seemed to come at me suddenly from a different angle; one that put my own actions in a new light. He wasn’t thinking of me … For a moment I saw myself standing before her with a peculiar ruthlessness as I pursued my inquisitorial mission; facing her like some single-minded speculator surveying a landscape purely for its extractive possibilities … Had I, too, not been thinking of her; not thinking of her? Absurd! I thought immediately. There was no comparison between my conversation with Julia in her flat and her encounter with Marco in that hotel bedroom. Here was a character flaw I most certainly did possess: a tendency towards morbid self-recrimination. I pushed the image out of my mind.
‘He’s stalking her! He’s stalking her …’
The Republican had appeared in the frame directly behind his opponent as she answered a question, his red tie stretching down the edge of the screen as he loomed into her space in what appeared to be a deliberate, and deliberately flagrant, attempt at intimidation. Again the room filled with cries of jubilant outrage. It really was like a bullfight, only with the Minotaur himself in the ring.
‘Beautiful! That’s it. Presidential candidate stalks his opponent on live TV. We’re done. RIP, the Republican Party.’
‘RIP. The whole white fucking billionaire patriarchy!’
‘It’s already going viral!’
I glanced at Marco. Was he experiencing any symptoms of identification with the beleaguered candidate? He didn’t appear to be. But then, why should he? He was in the clear, I reminded myself. His accuser had been neutralised, silenced, undone. Hanan hung on his shoulder. I wondered if the news about Julia would affect this new-born tenderness of hers when she heard it. Probably not, I thought. She’d apparently made up her mind to believe in Marco’s innocence. The onus of belief … I thought again, blackly. It was as if I’d invented some spell of my own, for reducing reality to a question of where one’s best interests lay.
‘You okay?’
Marco’s voice sounded in my ear. I must have been grimacing. I nodded.
‘Don’t torment yourself,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t think there’s anything anyone could have done. I mean, if you couldn’t figure out what was going on in her head … You’re the writer, after all!’
‘Clearly I missed the story,’ I muttered.
‘Well, it happens. Anyway, not your fault.’ He glanced surreptitiously at Hanan – her eyes were fixed on the screen – and turned back to me. ‘She’d always been wobbly. Did I tell you she did a spell in the bin when she was at Oxford? Ten days in the Radcliffe under round-the-clock surveillance. We found that out even before we found out about the Hanna Reitsch stuff. So …’
I said nothing. I didn’t trust myself to speak without betraying an emotion I couldn’t explain or justify.
‘This is what matters now,’ Marco said, gesturing at the TV. ‘Right?’
I manag
ed an accommodating grunt. I seem to have a large capacity for accommodation.
‘We’re going to win. Trust me. We’re going to win big.’
‘I know,’ I said.
That at least was something we still had in common. I was as confident as he was in the Democratic candidate’s imminent victory. She’d just reminded the audience of Tocqueville’s old maxim, ‘America is great because she is good’, and it seemed to me still just about valid. Her opponent had faltered visibly in the interim. He was no longer swaggering so much as blustering; flailing even. Swaying on his thick legs, he gave the impression of some elephantine statue lassoed in ropes and about to come crashing down. The nightmarish possibility of his presidency was slipping, mercifully, into the realm of bullets dodged, disasters averted. Some day no doubt novelists would write dystopian alternate histories in which he won, but it was becoming clear, if one had any doubts, that in the real world rationality and basic decency were going to prevail, as they usually did, and that the arc of actual history was going to continue bending, in its imperfect way, towards justice.
It was some consolation, I supposed.
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Copyright © James Lasdun 2019
Jacket: swan © Simon Anstey/Millennium Images; wild turkey © istock/Getty ImagesAuthor photograph © Pia Davis 2016
James Lasdun has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
The phrase ‘epistemological assault’ here comes from a talk given by Katha Pollitt at the New York Institute for the Humanities
First published by Jonathan Cape in 2019
Feathered Glory was published in the Paris Review (Spring 2015)
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library