It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (4 page)

Veronica was at the house with the two girls when he arrived back. She was talking to Elise on the deck outside the kitchen. Seeing Joseph, she waved, laughing.

“We were playing in a treehouse in the woods,” she called out. “Hal drove into town to buy pastries.”

“Ah!”

“We always lock the door. Hal likes to keep a lot of cash around.”

“1 see. I see.”

“We headed back as soon as we heard you guys yelling . . .”

She grinned at Joseph as he stepped onto the deck. She was wearing a white T-shirt and gold sneakers, her bare legs golden against the gray rain. A mischievous look appeared on her face:

“What were you thinking?”

He had had a moment of relief on seeing his daughter, but now he felt embarrassed.

“Nothing. . . We were just, you know, wondering where you were.”

She touched his arm. “We freaked you out, huh?”

“No, no . . .”

He turned away, as though from an uncomfortably bright glare. Mumbling an excuse, he went on into the kitchen. Already his panic on the beach seemed absurd, shameful almost. What a state to get into! He turned on the radio.
Marketplace Morning Report
was about to come on. He lifted a watermelon from the fridge, set it on the counter, and cut himself a thick slice. He ate it nervously while he listened.

“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 cafes 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.