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Back Afternoon of a Faun Save as PDF
Chapters (23)
  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Part One
  4. 1
  5. 2
  6. 3
  7. 4
  8. 5
  9. 6
  10. 7
  11. Part Two
  12. 1
  13. 2
  14. 3
  15. 4
  16. 5
  17. 6
  18. 7
  19. 8
  20. 9
  21. 10
  22. Acknowledgments
  23. Also by James Lasdun

We finished the bottle and Marco ordered crème brûlées and gorgonzola with Vinsanto and then some grappa. I’d drunk more than I wanted, but I was experiencing a resurgence of that irrational negative reaction I’d felt when he first told me the news, and I thought alcohol might help suppress it. I didn’t understand this lurking animus. He’d been wrongly accused. He’d defended himself—fought back single-handedly against a national newspaper, and won. Why would I begrudge him his feeling of triumph? It wasn’t as if I had any reason to doubt his version of events. And I didn’t doubt it. There just seemed to be some resistance on my part to actual rejoicing. Had I internalized the campus outlook, I wondered, with its endless, tedious refinements of anxiety over power and privilege? I suspected this must be the case: these virtuous attitudes have a way of insinuating themselves even as you resist them, as if the very act of resistance creates the pathways they need to establish themselves in your psyche.

Back at his house he smoked a cigar in his partitioned living room with its mismatched charity shop furniture and odd remnants of ornate wood paneling. (He’d bought the building, a former single-room occupancy with warrens of tiny rooms on every floor, long before gentrification had spread to the neighborhood, and was defiant about not restoring it to its pre-SRO condition, or in any other way tarting it up.)

I made my excuses as soon as I politely could, and staggered upstairs where I had the sparsely furnished top floor to myself. Passing his bedroom on the second floor I noticed several pairs of scuffed leather ankle boots, all stylishly pointed at the toe as if to address an idea of locomotion inseparable from that of impalement, lined up in pairs against the wall, and a sort of cheap amusement passed through me, the hostility of which I preferred not to examine too closely. I was feeling surfeited, bloated—not just with food and drink but teeming, incoherent thoughts. My head started spinning as soon as I got into bed. The ceiling tilted ominously. A vivid sense of the viscous orange sauce on my pasta came back and for a moment I thought I was going to throw up our celebratory dinner. I held it down, just, overcome by the still stronger urge to sleep.

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