It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories

It’s Beginning to Hurt

James Lasdun

Picador

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

James Lasdun was born in London and now lives in upstate New York. He has published two previous collections of stories, three books of poetry, and two novels, including
The Horned Man,
which was a
New York Times
Notable Book. His story “The Siege” was the basis for the Bernardo Bertolucci film
Besieged.

Fiction: 
Delirium Eclipse and Other Stories Three Evenings: Stories Besieged: Selected Stories The Homed Man: A Novel Seven Lies: A Novel

Poetry: 
A Jump Start Landscape with Chainsaw Woman Police Officer in Elevator

As Editor
After Ovid: New Metamorphoses
(with Michael Hofmann)

Praise for
It’s Beginning to Hurt

“If you listen, you can almost hear it ticking: the time bomb of anxiety, or delayed gratification, or fear, or deflected love, in any one of the artfully told stories in James Lasdun’s latest collection,
It’s Beginning to Hurt. . . .
Intimate, sometimes wryly comforting tales of tenderness and rue.”

—
O, The Oprah Magazine

“Probably the closest in recent years this country has come to a genuinely great practitioner of the short story.”    —
The Guardian
(UK)

“Lasdun has a Nabokovian eye. Few exponents of the short form offer such tempting, disturbing pleasures. ... A superlative collection, exhibiting all of Lasdun’s familiar talents and a few new ones [mixed] into the bargain.”

—
Financial Times
(UK)

“Lasdun limns the deep cracks in the soul even as his tales are enlivened by his gift for insight and ear for language. His stories are a fury of elements: skilled dramatic monologues; sketches of fraught emotional states; postmortems of choked lives and numbed hopes; and the literary equivalent of stares at the ruin left by a violent storm.”    —
The Miami Herald

“Sleek . . . There is something reminiscent of William Trevor in Lasdun’s matter-of-fact rendering of the way people are haunted by the choices they make. The cool, dispassionate prose belies an underlying desperation present in Lasdun’s characters to do the right thing.” —
Time Out New York

“Lasdun may be the most heralded writer you’ve never heard of. . . . There is something classically enjoyable about Lasdun’s stories.”

—Time Out Chicago

“[Lasdun’s] characters have a complexity and a confusion that override the unfolding plot. And the narratives seem opened up to the entire history of fiction. . . . Touching and revelatory .. . Devastating.”

—
The Times literary Supplement
(UK)

“ Meticulously crafted... an act of delicate precision and focus ... it’s clear that Lasdun is a craftsman with keen radar for moments and gestures that resonate and reflect our humanity with understated clarity. Disguised as a collection of conventional short stories, this book will catch you off guard and lead you down pathways unforeseen.”    —
The Rumpus

“Lasdun’s ability to unsettle his readers, to usher them within a few sentences into a state of high anxiety, is peerless. Poe, Kleist, and Spark, step aside! Lasdun makes the wind whistle through your heart. He’s the scariest writer since Jonathan Edwards.”    —
The New Criterion

“Stellar collection combines a sharp eye for detail, subtle character development, and virtuosic command of narrative voice.... Merits comparison with the understated artistry of William Trevor or Graham Swift.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“The best stories that anchor this collection are some of the strongest you’re likely to read this year.”    —
The Second Pass

“James Lasdun’s stories often begin simply with a name and a place, but they are anything but parochial. Within a dozen pages, they create a world of objects and feelings that are rich, recognizable, and yet elusive... . The best achievement of this fine collection is how the stories end. The last sentences show characters listening nervously to the radio news or feeling as if they are waiting for a diagnosis. . . . These complicated and all-too-human moments extend beyond the stories into the blankness of the pages that follow. Few writers have the gift to make that happen.”

—
The Sunday Times
(London)

“This accomplished poet, novelist, and story writer’s collection packs a devastating punch. . . . Jewels of resignation and transformative personal disaster, these stories are written so simply and cleanly that the formidable craft looks effortless.”    —
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“As he proved with
Seven Lies,
Lasdun is an elegant and incisive student of the human mind—an author who can register exactly when, for a character, ‘it’s beginning to hurt.’ . . . VERDICT: Affecting, yes; sentimental, no. Hard-edged truths about our predicament poke through this work.”

—
Library Journal
(starred review)

It’s Beginning to Hurt

IT’S BEGINNING TO HURT. Copyright © 2009 by James Lasdun.

Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under license from Pan Books Limited.

These stories first appeared, in various forms, in the following publications:
A Public Space
(“The Old Man”),
Granta
(“Caterpillars”),
New Writing
(“Peter Kahn’s Third Wife”),
Open City
(“The Natural Order”),
Ploughshares
(“Cleanness”),
Prospect
(“The Woman at the Window,” “A Bourgeois Story”),
Southword
(“The Half Sister”),
The Paris Review
(“An Anxious Man,” “Oh, Death”),
Times Literary Supplement
(“Cranley Meadows,” “Annals of the Honorary Secretary”), and
The Yale Review
(“Lime Pickle”). The story “It’s Beginning to Hurt” was commissioned by Diana Reich for the Small Wonder Short Story Festival.

For Pia

An Anxious Man 3

The Natural Order 24

The Incalculable Life Gesture 50

The Half Sister 64

The Old Man 76

Annals of the Honorary Secretary 89 Cleanness 103

The Woman at the Window 113 

A Bourgeois Story 121 

Oh, Death 137 

Cranley Meadows 153

 Totty 164

Peter Kahn’s Third Wife 185 

Lime Pickle 197

 It’s Beginning to Hurt 209 

Caterpillars 212

It’s Beginning to Hurt

Joseph Nagel slumped forward, head in hands.

“My God,” he groaned.

Elise snapped off the car radio.

“Calm down, Joseph.”

“That’s four straight days since we got here.”

“Joseph, please.”

“What do you think we’re down now? Sixty? Eighty thousand?” “It’ll come back.”

“We should have sold everything after the first twenty. That would have been an acceptable loss. Given that we were too stupid to sell when we were actually ahead—”

Joseph felt the petulant note in his voice, told himself to shut up, and plunged on. “I did say we should get out, didn’t I? Frankly it was irresponsible committing all that money”—shut up, shut up—“not to mention the unseemliness of buying in when you did—” oh God ...

His wife spoke icily “I didn’t hear you complain when we were ahead.”

“All right, but that’s not the point. The point is . . .”

“What?”

Her face had tightened angrily on itself, all line and bone.

“The point is . . But he had lost his train of thought and sat blinking, walled in a thick grief that seemed for a moment unaccounted for by money or anything else he could put his finger on.

Elise got out of the car.

“Let’s go for a swim, shall we, Darcy?”

She opened the rear door for their daughter and led her away.

Glumly, Joseph watched them walk hand in hand down through the scrub oaks and pines to the sandy edge of the kettle pond.

He gathered the two bags from their shopping expedition into his lap but remained in the car, heavily immobile.

Money . .. For the first time in their lives they had some capital. It had come from the sale of an apartment Elise had inherited, and it had aroused volatile forces in their household. Though not a vast amount—under a quarter of a million dollars after estate taxes—it was large enough, if considered a stake rather than a nest egg, to form the basis for a dream of real riches, and Joseph had found himself unexpectedly susceptible to this dream. The money he made as a dealer in antique prints and furniture was enough, combined with Elise’s income from occasional Web design jobs, to keep them in modest comfort—two cars, an old brick house in Aurelia with lilac bushes and a grape arbor, the yearly trip up here to the Cape—but there wasn’t much left over for Darcy’s college fund, let alone their own retirement. In the past such matters hadn’t troubled him greatly, but with the advent of Elise’s inheritance he had felt suddenly awoken into new and urgent responsibilities. At their age they shouldn’t be worrying about how to pay for medical coverage every year, should they? Or debating whether they could afford the dental and eye care package too? And wasn’t it about time they built a studio so that Elise could concentrate on her painting?

The more he considered these things, the more necessary, as opposed to merely desirable, they had seemed, until he began to think that to go on much longer without them would be to accept failure, a marginal existence that would doubtless grow more pinched as time went by and end in squalor.

After probate had cleared and Elise had sold the apartment, they had gone to a man on Wall Street, a money manager who didn’t as a rule handle accounts of less than a million dollars but who, as a special favor to the mutual acquaintance who had recommended him, had agreed to consider allowing the Nagels to invest their capital in one of his funds.

Morton Dowell, the man’s name was. Gazing out at the pond glittering through the pines, Joseph recalled him vividly: a tanned, smiling, sapphire-eyed man in a striped shirt with white collar and cuffs and a pair of elasticized silver sleeve links circling his arms.

A young assistant, balding and grave, had shown them into Dowell’s cherry-paneled bower overlooking Governors Island. There, sunk in dimpled leather armchairs, Joseph and Elise had listened to Dowell muse in an English-accented drawl on his “extraordinary run of good luck” these past twenty years, inclining his head in modest disavowal when the assistant murmured that he could think of a better word for it than “luck,” while casually evoking image after image of the transformations he had wrought upon his clients’ lives and hinting casually at the special intimacies within the higher circles of finance that had enabled him to accomplish these transformations.

“I think it’s just so much fun to help people attain the things they want from life,” he had said, “be it a yacht or a house on St. Bart’s or a Steinway for their musical child . . .”