It's Beginning to Hurt by James Lasdun

Author:James Lasdun [Lasdun, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429923330
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

She went straight to the kitchenette and poured a vodka martini into one of the cocktail glasses chilling on the shelf of the freezer. Listening to his shoes stomp down the last flight of stairs, she swept the chrysanthemum stems into the disposal unit and stepped over to the window where she watched him come out through the door and walk off down the block.

She sipped her drink, following his progress till he disappeared across Greenwich Street.

“Goddamn Englishman,” she said.

The accent had thrown her, triggering some absurd reflex of guilty nervousness. That and how much younger he was than she’d thought.

The sun sank down behind the rooftop opposite, and the color drained out of the room; only the chrysanthemums still glowing yellow on the coffee table, as if they’d been dipped in some kind of luminous paint.

A mistake, those. The wrong note entirely. She must have realized that unconsciously. She’d picked them up on impulse coming back from the liquor store with the Stoli, then forgotten about them till he was already in the building, so that she had had to unwrap them and trim them and set them in their vase, all in the space it took him to climb the stairs, forgetting even then to throw out the stems, which meant that the entire time he was there she’d had to be thinking about whether he had noticed them and, if so, whether it was reasonable or paranoid to imagine he might infer from them that she was not in fact just going out but had just come in, in which case—

“Oh, who cares?” she said, tipping back the rest of the drink.

She stood, consulting her own restlessness. After a few minutes a smile rose onto her face. Was this what was going to happen? There were ways in which the world forced itself on you and you had no choice but to yield. But there were also ways of using your own weakness as a source of strength. In high school she and her best friend had discovered they could do anything the other dared them to do by telling themselves they would do it on the count of three, with eternal damnation as the penalty for chickening out. One, two, three, and without hesitation the highway at the end of the school road would be run across blindfolded; the cherry-bomb-rigged toy boat sent floating over the pond to explode amid the boys’ fleet of miniature clippers; the mystery substance puffed, sniffed, swallowed … Cumulative observances had strengthened the rite over time until it came to possess an almost magical potency, with no need of the penalty clause to enforce it. She had continued to practice it in college and on into adult life, using it not just for feats of gratuitous recklessness but also for simple practical purposes. One, two, three, and she could dive into the icy lake her husband’s family had owned in Maine. One, two, three, and she could make herself call up her brother at his law office in Atlanta and ask for a loan.

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