It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (5 page)

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 inlaws’ 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 Bose.

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, sweetsmelling, 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 vine-trellised 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.

He had always thought that if he were unfaithful to Antonia, it would be under conditions of frenzied intoxication. But what he felt now was something calmer, more like the acceptance of some impersonal decree. It was simply something that was going to happen, a reality that had established itself.

“So how come you didn’t fuck her?”

“For Christ’s sake, Stewart.”

“I mean you fancied her, right?”

“She was attractive, yeah.”

“She fancied you too.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me.”

It was two days later, and Abel was in a black mood. He looked at Stewart a moment in the mirror but said nothing.

They were on their way to Zagoria, the last leg of their trip. The hills with their knots of dusty-looking olive trees grew taller and greener, the air a little cooler. The rented car slowed to a crawl as the straight road began its switchback ascent into the gorge country of Epirus.

Already his actions of that evening had begun to seem obscure to Abel. He doubted even the accuracy of what still seemed relatively clear in recollection. One moment he had been in the full momentum of a trajectory about to sweep him and Rose out into the warm night; the next, he was lying alone on his bed with the sensation of having just committed some violently unnatural act. Had he said good night or just turned on his heel and disappeared? He had a bad feeling it might have been the latter, though the former seemed hardly less appalling to him. Out through the window of his room he had seen the scattered whiteness of the moon on the leaves of the vine trellis that led up from the hotel. Grapes hung in shadowy clusters. At that moment, had he not disappeared, he and Rose would have been walking slowly right there, perhaps reaching up to pluck one of the ripe bunches . . . He had almost felt that they were out there, that his being alone on his bed was a minor anomaly of nature, like the alleged ghostly presence of a particle in one place at the same time as it is being definitively observed in another. The version of himself out there with Rose had a far denser reality about it than this one did. But here he was . . . What he felt, more than the embarrassment at his own behavior, more even than the aborted desire ricocheting around inside him, was a feeling of loss. Life offered up so few human beings you could contemplate any intimacy with that to turn your back on one seemed an insane and profligate waste. He summoned the winter-lit image of his wife and child in the barn at home in Connecticut. For once nothing stirred in him. The image seemed flat, as though it had spent all its powers bringing him back from the brink of some abyss and was now just a lifeless reproduction of itself.

“When did she . ..” Abel heard himself begin to ask, though he had resolved not to. “When did she tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“That she . . . found me attractive.”

Stewart gave a lopsided smile.

“Oh, after you left her.”

“I thought you’d gone to bed.” Drop it, Abel admonished himself. -

“I saw her down on the terrace, sitting there all by herself. She looked like she could use some company.”

“So you went down?”

“Yeah, I went down.”

Stewart eyed him in the mirror: a semblance of laconic friendliness, but under it something remote, self-possessed, almost haughtily indifferent. He offered no further comment, and Abel tried to refrain from further questions.

“Did you fuck her?” he blurted.

Stewart was silent a moment. Then quietly, almost gently: “What can I tell you? She wanted getting laid.”

“I see.”

“Does it bother you?”

“No! You can fuck whoever you want. Why would I care?”.

“I get the feeling you do care.”

“Well, you’re wrong. I don’t.”

In the evening they arrived at a village above the gorge. Picturesque enough for their purposes but desolate. There had been atrocities there in the civil war: a massacre, then reprisals. The place was subsiding—willingly, it almost seemed—back into the mountain rubble it had risen from. Black-shawled old women stared from the doorways of the few houses that hadn’t been boarded up. Scrawny poultry roosted on the stone path leading to the hotel where Abel and Stewart checked in, the only guests.

The next morning it was raining. Abel stayed in his room, working up the cheery platitudes required by his father-in-law’s “Wild Europe” series: “From the slit-windowed fortress of a hotel, its stone tiles ragged-edged as the scales of a venerable old carp, you wind down steep cobbled alleys (watch out for guinea fowl!) to the lovely basilica of St. Nikos Dukas, a gem of Byzantine architecture .. .” As a younger man he’d had ideas of becoming a playwright, and although he’d long ago made his peace with the failure of that enterprise, shifting the basis of his happiness from the withheld trophies of the outer world to the freely given bounties of his domestic life, he took a perverse satisfaction in perpetrating these verbal banalities. Revenge by cliche . . .

But after a couple of hours he found himself yawning. He felt simultaneously restless and torpid. He wanted to be elsewhere, without knowing where. Home? It didn’t seem so. The thought of home felt thin and theoretical. He would be back there in three days, and then, he supposed, it would all be real enough. But for now the whole notion of it—wife, child, in-laws, the peaceful routine of their days in the old farmstead—had gone dormant in him. He was bored too, without knowing what he wanted to do. Big airy columns of rain floated down against the mountains and on into the distant gray depths of the gorge. He found himself thinking of Rose. He saw again the look of warm, candid welcome in her blue eyes. A helpless yearning came into him. Apparently she really had been offering herself to him. He had wanted her and yet had refused her. The correct thing for a happily married man to do. But it seemed to him, now, that in observing the human protocol, he had violated some wider law of nature. Why else the obscure, dank sensation of shame clinging to him?

He saw that the encounter was going to take its place among the events that made up his fundamental sense of what he was. A depressing thought, given the distinct mediocrity of spirit it seemed to manifest. . . He got up. Maybe a walk in the rain would do him good.

There in the drawer lay his trusty anorak, self-effacingly pouched into one of its own pockets. He put it on, the beige nylon as forgiving and shapeless on him as a dust sheet on an old chair, something insidiously reassuring about its familiar embrace.

As he came down the stairs, he heard laughter, female, ringing loudly over the unadorned stony surfaces of the hotel. Stewart was at a table in the lobby, opposite two women.

An incredulous jolt, a kind of pang, went through Abel. He had heard no car pull up, no bustle of arrival. . . Where on earth had the man conjured these creatures from?

“Come and join us,” Stewart called, waving him over.

“Well, I was just going for a walk.”

“Ach, we’ll go later. Melina here says it’s going to clear up in an hour. Right, Melina?” He grinned superciliously at one of the women. “Melina’s a psychic prophet. She’s been reading the coffee grounds. She can also read your mind, so don’t be having any dirty thoughts.”

The high, full laughter rang out again. Abel saw glasses of ouzo on the table, along with cups of Greek coffee. He wasn’t in the mood for a party. But short of maintaining an attitude of extreme churlishness, he was clearly going to have to join them sooner or later.

He went reluctantly over to the table. Stewart introduced them. Melina was fair-haired and large—not fat, but swollen-looking somehow, as though by a superfluous creaminess in her silvery-pale flesh. Her soft white arms were dimpled at the elbow, and there were dimples either side of her pale lips. Her eyes were a deep green color. Abel watched them travel over him briefly, taking in his sparse hair, his lined face, the toggled and zippered shroud of his beige anorak. She turned away. At one of her wrists was a frill of pink silk. Her plump hands and tapering, jointless-looking fingers had the smooth solidity of limbs cast in wax. Rings of opal and tiger’s-eye glimmered on them, and with some fascination Abel noted a curious, two-fingered diamond-encrusted ring joining together the third and fourth fingers of her right hand.