New Irish Short Stories

by Joseph O'Connor

  *

  By morning it had mostly passed. I rose and went outside in the growing light and beheld my gardens, my land, the house where I had laboured, and it was all changed. I was free of it. I looked at the full vines and now it meant nothing. It was not my problem.

  I had come to the island to hear only the sounds the earth made, the sea and the wind and the animals, to sustain myself in its grace, to eat what it yielded me; I had gone there to shrug off the nagging frightened flesh, its memory and craving, believing thereby my journey was at an end. But I had understood nothing. The journey never ends. I looked at the vines and saw in the swollen berries the problem I had wrapped myself around and which had tied me there, a dream – like that of the woman and the man in their perfection, each striving towards the other, both towards release, and then falling, knowing it is to begin all over again from the start – and now it mattered no more that the grapes would lie where they fell. There was nothing to be saved. There was always too much fruit, and it rotted where it fell. How had I forgotten that?

  The sun rose over the sea, and I went to the pump and washed the sweat off myself. The fever had not entirely passed but it was pleasant, the cold water. Then I dressed in clean clothes and put a few things in my sack. I did this without thinking, naturally, because going to the town was what I wanted, in that moment. I’d had all the solitude a soul could take. I wasn’t going anywhere for any reason. I wasn’t setting out on a journey. I was just going for a walk.

  I picked a bunch of ripe grapes to eat while I walked. I climbed the path along the hillside, eating them, spitting seeds as I went.

  Goose

  Joseph O’Neill

  IN LATE SEPTEMBER, ROBERT DALY flies New York-Milan. He travels alone: his wife Martha, six months’ pregnant with their first child, is holed up at her mother’s place upstate, in Columbia County. Robert is going to the wedding of Mark Walters, a Dartmouth roommate who for years has lived in London and is marrying an English girl with a thrilling name – Electra. Electra’s mother is Italian, hence the Italian wedding. Although he has been to Europe a number of times, Robert has never visited Italy. Italy, New York friends tell him, is the most beautiful country in the world.

  Robert is happy to find himself in the most beautiful country in the world. He needed a pick-me-up. Life at the bank has been downright difficult. His solitude is also a cause of happiness because being alone, these days, is a harmless form of freedom. However, driving out of Malpensa Airport in his tiny, chariot-like rental car, gripping a shift stick for the first time in years, Robert is frustrated. Every time he turns onto a road he believes will lead him south, he winds up heading in the direction of the Alps, snow-capped even at this time of year and altogether astounding in their abrupt and fearsome immensity. Eventually he makes his way onto the autostrada. There, cruising at what he believes to be a fast speed of 120 kilometres per hour, he is repeatedly menaced by light-flashing cars – with mysterious invariability, silver cars – and, finally, by a racing pack of motorcyclists costumed in chequered leather outfits. Robert makes way for the zooming harlequins. His place is in the slow lane, between gigantic trucks that almost frighten him.

  He is bound for Siena, and at Bologna he goes westward. He plans to spend the night in what may well be, in the further assertion of his New York informants, the world’s most beautiful city. The road takes him through a mountain range he cannot name. On the far side of the mountains, at dusk, in a vista of almost ridiculous paintiness, Florence presents itself. Robert takes in the bright low rays, the pretty mist, the shining agglomeration of domes and rooftops, the gloriousness, and thinks, Okay, I get it. The temptation pushes at him to skip Florence, to keep going, but he resists. Down he drives, into the legendary city.

  Once there, he is foiled. He passes a full two hours trapped in powerful but sluggish flows of traffic: twice the Duomo comes into view, and twice he is helplessly borne away in slow motion to a district of muddy apartment buildings to which all roads lead and which must be, a grim Robert surmises, Rome. When at long last he penetrates the city’s historic section, he stops at the first hotel he sees because it comes with a courtyard where he can park and to find parking is to find peace of mind. The receptionist shows him a mini room with a mini TV and a mini bath. No mini bar, however. Robert takes the room, just as he takes the receptionist’s plainly careless recommendation of a restaurant a few blocks away. The wine he orders warily and gloomily: in the past year he has barely tasted anything as a result of a sinus affliction that took him at the age of thirty-eight and, inhalants and nasal sprays notwithstanding, has left him in an all-but-odourless world. The affliction does not touch him most keenly in the matter of food. He can no longer smell his wife. He can no longer detect those scents that, as a husband, are his alone to detect.

  Dinner over, he wanders in a warm night. It is past ten o’clock. He sees only tourists. He winds up following a sign to the Ponte Vecchio – the name definitely rings a bell – where an Italian guitar player is singing Simon and Garfunkel. Robert thinks, You come all this way, you come to the world’s most beautiful city, and you end up with Simon and Garfunkel. Actually, Robert acknowledges that he would rather listen to a terrible version of ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ than visit a museum or a church. He knows what the latter would involve: an hour or more of waiting in line with chattering art-aficionado-mimickers in order to be confronted with a vaguely familiar Michelangelo or Botticelli or what-have-you that’s no better than its postcard reproduction. He leans on the edge of the bridge. Surrounding him are American retirees and irritatingly self-contained German girls with small bears hanging from their backpacks. Robert gazes at the river, the Arno: it is moonlit and atmospheric and so forth. He gets the river.

  At midnight he walks back to the hotel.

  In the morning, he takes a scenic route. Robert clocks the scenery: hills, hill towns, and sloping fields evidently cultivated for millennia. So this is Tuscany. It feels to Robert like one of those counties around Santa Barbara. Then, Siena. His hotel is in the old city, and the old city, as per the wedding instructions, is an intricate medieval arrangement of alleys and squares set on a steep hill. Robert finds parking outside the old city and walks to his hotel. Now what? He tries to eat lunch but cannot: the restaurants are all closed for the afternoon. So for half an hour he strolls. He has nothing to do until the evening, when an eve-of-wedding reception will be held. Back in his hotel room, he phones home – Everything is fine, just fine, reports Martha, hanging up before Robert is quite ready for it. He browses through a hotel leaflet about Siena’s history. Once upon a time, he reads, Siena was a great banking centre. Robert muses on how investment banking might have been structured in what was, he presumes, a pre-corporate age, and who the bondholders might have been, and whether their crises were like the one that’s happening now. Robert assumes so. Then the leaflet reveals that a plague struck Siena and the city lost its power. He flips to the next page but there’s nothing more.

  Plague, loss of power, period. Robert is taken aback by this.

  He decides to shave for the party. This takes care of five minutes. When Robert heads out he steps into an internet café and logs on. His intention is to look at his email. Instead he gets distracted by a headline on the AOL home page.

  5,000-YEAR-OLD SKELETONS LOCKED IN ETERNAL EMBRACE

  By coincidence, the story comes out of Italy. In the north of the country, archaeologists have discovered the remains of a man and woman buried for five thousand to six thousand years. The intactness of the teeth indicates that these were young persons. It is apparently a remarkable find, even for professionals who spend their lives finding things of this kind. A Neolithic double burial is very rare, and what’s more the man and woman are hugging: It’s unmistakable, states the archaeologist, who says she is very moved. There is a photograph. The youngsters’ skeletons lie face to face. Each has its arms wrapped around the other skeleton. Undoubtedly the skeletons appear to be a pair.
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br />   The question in Robert’s mind is whether the couple arranged themselves in this way, or whether their bodies were arranged in this way by others.

  There’s a second question, asked by the article: Is there someone you’d like to spend 5,000 years buried with? There’s a Yes tab and a No tab.

  Robert floats the cursor toward the tabs and clicks the Yes tab. It has not been discussed, but it is logical that Martha and he will lie together, or at least near each other, for the next five thousand years, give or take the few decades of their joint lives.

  The welcome party is being held at a splendid old building down the hill, and Robert walks there, shoes echoing. He wears no socks. His loafers are brand new. The last thing Martha did before driving upstate was drag Robert into a shoe store on Madison Avenue. Now you’re respectable, she said, handing him the shoebox. The purchase was a weight off her mind, Robert saw, a loose end tied. With the baby just three months away, Martha has been spotting loose ends everywhere: the need for a paint job in the baby’s room, the dangerousness of the electricity sockets, the inadequacy of the freezer compartment. Martha is on a tear. In recent weeks she has carried around a checklist and a marker pen that makes a fat, satisfactory stripe when a to-do is done. Robert recently picked up the list and read it with awe. A one-word item earned his closest, most amused, most mystified attention. The word, which had a line drawn through it, was his name.

  Arriving at the reception, Robert wonders who from the old Dartmouth days will have made the trip. The answer, he discovers, is himself. Either Mark has lost interest in the Dartmouth crowd or vice versa or both. The last possibility is the most likely, mutual loss of interest. After all, Mark has been abroad for a long time. Moreover, a year after his first marriage came to an end, Mark quit his London job – as a boutique picker of Russian investments, an undertaking whose huge success truly registered with Robert only when he heard that Mark was in the habit of rollerblading from his Mayfair flat to his St James office – quit his job in order to work in Africa in an opaque help-the-needy capacity. Consequently Mark himself became a little opaque, at least to his American circle. Robert guesses that his status as the only present Dartmouthian may be referable to the $2,000 cheque he once wrote in favour of Mark’s African cause – and in secret, because Martha would have thought it excessive, particularly given the recipient’s reputation as a Mayfair rollerblader.

  Whatever: the Dartmouth crowd has not made it over. Pretty much everyone is from London. Robert recognises that he will need to drink heavily. He has some experience of being the lone American at a gathering of English people.

  A couple of vodkas later, Mark appears with his fiancée – his wife, in the eyes of the law, since they submitted to an Italian civil marriage that afternoon. Mark is happy to see him and in fact hugs Robert, which has never happened before, and introduces him to Electra. Electra falls into the beauty category, with long red hair and legs that move in almost supernaturally small steps and bring to Robert’s mind, for the first and possibly the last time in his life, he thinks, the word elfin. He remembers how, in one of their few transatlantic communications, Mark had mentioned meeting a redhead. I need to move fast, lock this down, Mark said. Well, he’s done it, Robert thinks. He is glad for his friend and glad to accept another vodka.

  *

  You’ve got to give the English this much, Robert thinks: they know how to throw a wedding. The Saturday afternoon is a sunlit one, and as he sits in the chartered bus he knows already that the proceedings will be a marvel of invention and organisation and poetry.

  The venue for the marriage blessing is a manor house on a hilltop ten miles outside Siena. There is a garden with views of five valleys and, for the ceremony, an arbour. Robert is the first to take a seat among the chairs artfully scattered on the lawn. He puts on his sunglasses and stretches out his legs. He is no longer hung over. He feels, for the first time on this trip, relaxed; and his thoughts run with more freedom.

  What he thinks is that he may very possibly be the only person here, Walters family excepted, who attended Mark’s first wedding, to Jane. It was held on a dark afternoon, nine years ago, at a church on the Upper East Side veiled in a black net. Inside, statues of saints and benefactors hovered in little nooks, to grotesque effect. The father of the bride, dying of cancer, was held up by his only daughter as they walked up the aisle. He died the following week, and two years later Jane died, very courageously, of cancer. Jane was small and dark-haired, altogether different from Electra. Robert remembers the homily at Jane and Mark’s wedding, a homily memorable because Mark was pretty much the first of their crowd to get married (Shit, how old was everybody – twenty-eight? twenty-nine?) and because the homily itself was such a downer. It concerned what the minister termed the will to love. The will to love: Robert remembers how he’d felt under assault from this sombre, slippery theme. He’d even taken offence on behalf of the happy couple. Even today, when of course he is able to take a pretty good guess at where that minister was coming from, he’s hoping he won’t hear any admonitions or life lessons, which nobody believes make any difference to anything and which certainly are way too cloudy for a wedding. Give people a break for one fucking day of their lives.

  The seats begin to fill up – how middle-aged everybody looks, Robert thinks, even Electra’s crowd, in their early thirties – and a young Scottish clergyman wears an expectant, official expression. Mark, a handsome straw hat covering his bald head, nervously makes conversation. Robert limits his greetings to a double thumbsup. Then Electra makes her entrance, in white, escorted by her father. The blessing ceremony begins. Robert is not really listening. He is dwelling again on Mark’s first wedding.

  After the marriage, Mark and Jane led everybody to a nearby restaurant. At dinner – dessert was being served – Robert checked his phone and saw that he’d received three missed calls, all from the same unknown number. Sneaking out, Robert returned the calls. It turned out they were from the animal hospital where his cat – Buster, formerly the cat of his sister, whose travels made it impossible for her to keep a pet – was undergoing surgery on a blocked intestine. Buster had a history of such blockages. There’d been a fur ball, then a piece of leather, then another fur ball. He’d needed three operations. There was fur-ball medication, of course, but either he or his sister had neglected to give it to Buster or the medication didn’t do the job. Now there was this new fur ball and this fourth operation.

  Robert, a finger plugged into his free ear, spoke to the veterinarian surgeon. He knew this woman from the day before and didn’t like her. When examining the cat, she’d remarked that Buster had fleas and had been all sniffy about it. Buster himself had jumped off the examining table and taken an interest in the room. Then he was taken away.

  Through New York’s roaring, Robert heard this vet quite animatedly telling him that the operation had gone well, only then mentioning that Buster had reacted badly to the anaesthetic and was – Robert had to extract the words from her – in a coma. It was a case of a brief but serious deprivation of oxygen to the brain. Robert found himself unable to speak. He went inside to Martha – a brand-new girlfriend back then. The two left the wedding immediately and took a short taxi ride to the animal hospital on York Avenue. They were shown into a room. Robert saw a creature stretched out on a table with its eyeballs turned into its head and its mouth stretched open by a tube. Its four legs, strapped to the table, were splayed out in a way that made no sense. The cat looked nothing like Buster. It didn’t even look like a cat. The vet offered some clearly dishonest and meaningless statistics about the thing’s chances of recovery. Also she mentioned the expense of keeping it alive. Martha held Robert’s hand as he listened to all of this. When she understood that Robert still could not speak, she took it upon herself to ask the vet the necessary questions. When the vet again said, The operation was a complete success, Martha said, You know what? We’d appreciate it if you stopped saying that.

  The next morning, nothing h
ad changed. The plug was pulled on Buster. There were various options with regard to the remains. Robert decided on the gratis option, namely the garbage. Buster was garbage at this point. Over the next few days, handwritten condolence cards arrived from vets. Bills, too.

  On the other hand, this was when Martha had revealed herself to be a rock, and that turned out to be a big deal. Suddenly everybody stands for a hymn, and Robert can barely get to his feet.

  Under God, Mark and Electra make their vows. When the service comes to a close, Robert locates the small packet of rice he noticed earlier under his seat. He empties the packet into his hand and tosses the grains on Mark and Electra.

  *

  Dinner is in the manor house. The names on the place cards are anagrams, and Robert Daly takes the seat set aside for LADY T. BORER. He finds himself between a Colombian and an Indian: evidently, this is the foreigners’ table. Robert spends the first part of dinner pretending to take an interest in the Indian man’s bizarrely forceful opinions about the future of the dollar and the euro and the yen. (The Indian man calls Robert Roger. Robert begins to correct him, meaning to point out that his anagram name has no g in it, but abandons the correction. Roger, Robert, whatever.) The second part of dinner is devoted to the Colombian woman. They talk about kidnapping insurance, which it seems is a necessity in Colombia. These conversations are disturbed from time to time with talk of the goose. Apparently there is a goose present at the wedding. The goose lives at the villa and is very socially sophisticated. Everybody at Robert’s table seems to have a story about the goose.

  The speeches start. They are all funny and pointed and confident and moving, and Robert, who has witnessed this national facility time and again, wonders whether making after-dinner remarks is somehow part of the British educational curriculum. Mark’s speech mentions him for having come all the way from New York. None of the speakers mentions Mark’s first wife. It is Electra’s day.