Afternoon of a Faun

by Afternoon of a Faun (retail) (epub)

  “There you are. You vanished!”

  I turned from the drinks table. Marco was in the kitchen doorway, standing with a switched-on look in his radiant shirt.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “That’s okay, but I wanted to hear your thoughts.”

  “About . . . ?”

  “About Julia,” he said, as if it should have been obvious.

  “Julia?”

  “You didn’t hear?”

  “No . . .”

  “I thought you must have heard.”

  “What’s happened?”

  He stepped close to me, glancing over his shoulder.

  “She killed herself.”

  “What?”

  “My dad called me yesterday. She jumped in front of a train.”

  “No!”

  He put his finger to his lips.

  “I haven’t told the gals yet. Not sure how they’ll react.”

  “I don’t believe it! I was just . . .”

  “I know. I know. It’s terrible.”

  “I was just with her! She didn’t seem . . . I mean . . .”

  I stepped back, leaning my weight against the table.

  “Beyond terrible,” Marco said quietly, glancing again over his shoulder. “I feel awful. Really . . . shattered.”

  “When was this?”

  “Night before last.”

  He told me what the papers had reported. She’d jumped in front of a train coming out of the tunnel at Russell Square. A feeling of horror lurched through me as he described it; I felt myself cringe as if to ward off a blow.

  “Poor woman,” he said. “But . . .”

  He gave an odd, slow-motion shrug, hunching his shoulders high and holding them there.

  “What?”

  “Well, I just wish we didn’t live in such an extreme black and white universe, where the slightest transgression gets you vilified for all eternity . . . perhaps I wouldn’t have fought her so hard. You know what I mean? Not that I’m going to blame myself for this. I’m just not. But maybe we’d have been able to talk it over, or something . . .”

  I wasn’t sure what he was getting at.

  “I mean, who knows, maybe I did do something I shouldn’t have, back in that hotel. I know we were both totally hammered, so it’s a possibility. A possibility. But it’s not a possibility you can entertain in this particular universe. Not unless you plan to spend the rest of your life as a leper.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Nothing. I’m just acknowledging that I can’t pretend to know precisely what happened forty years ago in some cruddy Belfast hotel where two people, one of whom technically speaking was me, went upstairs with certainly every intention of fucking each other’s brains out . . . I mean, can I?”

  He gave a peculiar smile. It seemed intended to be rueful, but some other emotion was hijacking it, warping it into something weirdly triumphant.

  “You seemed pretty sure a month ago . . .” I said.

  “Well, you have to take a position, don’t you? I was pretty sure. I still am. Seriously. But . . .” He shrugged again. “Anyway, look, I didn’t mean to spring this on you. I assumed you’d heard. I thought that was why you brought the champagne.”

  “No!”

  He stared a moment. As was often the case with him, the workings of his mind were transparently visible on his face as he took in my appalled expression. I could almost see the cogs turning as he realized what he’d said. He nodded apologetically.

  “No, of course not. Sorry—I’m not thinking straight. I’m in shock I guess. You are, too, by the look of it.”

  He put a hand commiseratingly on my arm. I found it difficult to look at him at that moment. To my relief, Eric appeared, wiping his plump fingers on his apron.

  “Marco, they’re about to start the debate.”

  “Ah, okay.” Marco resumed his normal tone. “Let’s get ­everyone in there, if we can. Otherwise we can bring another TV from upstairs. Turn off the music would you? And get that lazybones daughter of mine to top off people’s drinks.”

  “Will do!”

  The boy strode officiously back into the main living room. He appeared to have changed personality as well as gender. There was no trace of the old malcontent in his new role as Marco’s steward. His flourishing air seemed a rebuke to certain murky, residual prejudices lingering in me.

  “We’ll talk more later, okay?” Marco said.

  I nodded.

  He moved away, but then stepped back, gripping my arm again and flashing a conspiratorial grin.

  “Think she’ll stop persecuting me now?”

  “Who?”

  “Julia!”

  His eyes scanned mine, searching for the smile of cynical humor we’d shared so often in the past. I could smell his cologne, and the bourbon on his breath.

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” I said.

  He gave a loud laugh, evidently taking my unamused tone as ironic, and disappeared into the other room.

  I went down the corridor, and lifted my backpack off the coat hook, half-intending to keep going, out through the front door and back to my car. But aside from the fact that I could ill afford a hotel, I detected something artificial in the impulse, theatrical. I could sense already that it wasn’t going to work to cast myself as a figure of blameless rectitude affronted by Marco’s callousness. Whatever flaws I have in my moral makeup, the self-exculpatory urge has never been among them. All the same, I couldn’t face going into the living room just then. I turned back toward the staircase. Alicia was coming the other way, carrying a tray of glasses. I held my pack up, pointing to the landing.

  “Just putting my things upstairs . . .”

  She laughed, as if I’d meant to say something funny again. My daughter, two years younger, had the same habit of compliant laughter, and an urge to warn the girl against her own obligingness briefly seized me. Marco was probably right about me being in shock. I was certainly in a state of confusion.

  Up in the guest room I sat on the bed and tried to comprehend what he’d told me. There was something unassimilable about it. It was at once too large and too remote to take in. Julia’s face appeared in my mind, obstinately alive—staring at me again in the stark light of her living room. Again I had the feeling of having missed something. What, though? It wasn’t as if I’d failed to notice she was unhappy. I didn’t think I’d glossed over any of my own stumbles or gaffes either. And yet I couldn’t connect anything I’d observed to this staggering piece of intelligence. The violence of the act seemed a deliberate challenge, daring one to imagine for oneself a state of rage or despair of an intensity requiring nothing less than the impact of a hurtling train against one’s frail body, to alleviate it. 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) where 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 peere
d 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 realize he was something other than just a buffoon—that he had his own sickened vigor, 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 recognize—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 toward 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. R.I.P. the Republican party.”

  “R.I.P. 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 neutralized, 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 managed 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 de 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, toward justice.

  It was some consolation, I supposed.

  Acknowledgments

  I WOULD LIKE TO THANK JILL BIALOSKY and Robin Robertson for their editorial advice, which has been en
ormously helpful, as always.

  The phrase “epistemological assault” on page 3 comes from a talk given by Katha Pollitt.

  Also by James Lasdun

  FICTION

  Delirium Eclipse

  Three Evenings and Other Stories

  Besieged (SELECTED STORIES)

  The Horned Man

  Seven Lies

  It’s Beginning to Hurt

  The Fall Guy

  POETRY

  A Jump Start

  After Ovid: New Metamorphoses

  (COEDITED WITH MICHAEL HOFMANN)

  Woman Police Officer in Elevator

  Landscape with Chainsaw

  Bluestone: New and Selected Poems

  MEMOIR

  Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked