My Buried Life

by Doreen Finn

  My brother would have laughed at me, at my secret internet forays into the world of second-hand books, fortified by a few glasses of whiskey. I prefer Irish, but I’m not fussy. After the first few glasses I can hardly tell them apart. Malt, rye, bourbon ... they all blend into one pleasing analgesic blur.

  I can’t write any more. I can do academia, but I am afraid to try poetry. I love academic writing, and relish the challenges of finding new slants on someone else’s material. The library is my friend, all those dusty corners filled with abandoned papers that other people wrote about other people’s work on other people, all of it essential to keeping the blood flowing through the department, justifying our expenditure. Not all of it is pointless, though. During my time in NYU, I discovered that I have an ability to influence others to think a little bit differently, something that gives me more than a little satisfaction. Despite my inherent reservation, I can stand up at conferences and deliver papers without ever losing my nerve.

  But poetry?

  The thing that got me through the blackest period of my life?

  The one constant I believed would be my mainstay?

  That disappeared a long time ago, and it’s not coming back. I’ve done my mourning, let its coat-tails trail out of sight. It threatened to be my undoing, but I won out in the end. I’ve necked bottles of booze, been so high I could have floated, but nothing nudged the block out of place. Writer’s block. How well it was named. Mine sat on my shoulders, cold, hard, immoveable. A block of Michelangelo’s finest marble, all white and implacable, crushing me. I don’t dwell on it any more. I used to, used to let days roll by without leaving the first shoebox I rented. I witnessed drug deals on the street, saw two shootings, countless carjacks, all from my desk by the window where I sat, willing the words to come.

  And when they didn’t, I forced myself to leave it behind. I had to, or I would have turned to salt at that desk. After that, academic writing was easy. While pursuing my PhD here in Dublin my undergraduate students had irritated me, partly because of their simplicity, but also because I saw them as little more than a barrier to my poetry. Teaching was part of my doctoral studies, but I did it with little grace. I was impatient then, too eager to get to whatever place I’d planned out for myself, too busy writing poetry to be worried about explaining Chaucer or Dickinson to kids who doodled hearts and names on their folders and kept checking their watches to see when they’d finally be free. I watched my students live their lives around me, applying lip gloss, fretting over match results, worrying over essays and deadlines. From a great distance I observed them, endured the tutorials and the banality, their lack of ability to see beyond the words on any page. I let them slip away, ran red markers over their essays and then gave them grades they didn’t deserve because I simply didn’t want to fight. I know it’s not the ideal way to liberate minds at third level, but I was young, messed up, moving on. Shelving booze for most of my doctorate didn’t add to my good humour, but it got me through. I’d never have made it while drinking.

  I buy three novels and two essay collections. A book for Maude is a last-minute addition, something colourful and breezy. She’s nearly 90. She’s earned the right to easy reading. I haven’t yet.

  Outside, the afternoon is still bright and warm. The teachers are somewhere nearby, tucked away in a dark pub, dissecting their students, their classes. Adam is among them. Adam. The last thing I need. The absolute last thing I need is another affair – sorry, Isaac, relationship – with a colleague.

  Isaac is a professor of English at New York University, where I work. We’d first met when I arrived in New York to interview for a junior teaching assistant position in a community college, where he was the external interviewer for the day. It was a favour from my thesis supervisor in Dublin, pity-edged, and in my desperation to go somewhere, anywhere, I took it. Junior teaching assistant on the Introduction to Poetry course. It saved my life. Flailing around in my mid-twenties I was a wreck, still wounded by my brother’s suicide, ignored by my mother, heading in the same direction as my uncle. I’d started drinking again once my thesis was handed in, and had thrown myself into alcohol with a fervour previously unknown even to me. Two months into it, dwelling under that dome of booze, enveloped, womb-like, in its tentacled clutches, a phone call came through. Junior teaching assistant. Community college. My university sensitivities bristled, as my thesis supervisor had known they would. Take it, Eva, she urged. At least go and see them.

  I saw the possibilities this position held for me, the tunnel I could escape through. It was a clean break with home. No association with Andrew, no way my mother could trail her loathing in front of me.

  ‘You’re Irish, correct?’ His diction clipped, almost English. His eyes, coloured like moths, met mine, then resumed their perusal of my résumé.

  ‘Yes.’

  He didn’t offer his family line. No Murphys or O’Briens there to be held up to the light, examined, no common thread of ancestry to be uncovered. ‘I’m not sure this is the post for you.’

  ‘It is.’

  A pause, during which he tapped his pen against his tooth. Then a look, just the barest hint of raised eyebrow. ‘It’s only part-time.’ The pen tapped on my application. ‘You strike me as someone who wants something more.’ He spread his hands on the desk. ‘It’s community college ...’.

  ‘I’m aware of that. It’s fine.’ I’d just had years of study, of undergraduates’ essays, of battling for funding. I’d have taken anything. I simply wanted to stay in New York.

  Isaac was older. Mid forties. I was raw, clutching my PhD to me, half afraid it would be taken away. I was a fraud, a stealer of degrees. It had been too easy. I’d heeded the warnings about the years that would accumulate as I struggled with my dissertation, but I finished in less time than anticipated. My supervisor advised me to keep the thesis from taking over my life, but that was what I wanted, craved. A permanent distraction. Something that would loom larger than my dead brother, that would fill the spaces inside me that I poured drinks into whenever I could. I lived for those all-nighters, the weekends locked in the library, the deadlines, the chapters. I researched enough for two courses, yet still I finished a year earlier than planned. I barely breathed during term time, and it suited me perfectly. I bypassed drinking in favour of my research, let the poets I wrote about take Andrew’s place in my priorities.

  ‘Well, we need someone, and you’re ready to start, so let’s give it a shot.’ His first smile threw me. My nerves steadied.

  His real job, I was to learn, was chair of English at NYU. When I worked with him there, everything changed.

  Affairs with work colleagues are too damn tricky, and someone always loses.

  My new books in a paper bag, I take the long way home, avoiding the pub. I think of the bottle of wine in the kitchen, the red lozenge it will create in the bottom of my glass. It waits for me.

  CHAPTER 9

  The house draws me in. I am a fly, caught in its sticky threads. Being there without my mother is still strange. September has dissolved into October, and autumn is mellow now, resisting the pull of colder weather. The trees have turned, and conker shells scatter themselves along the footpaths. Now when I run I crunch leaves underfoot, let them disperse in the slipstream of my pounding feet. Still the hot spell throbs, funnelling colour into the city, lighting it.

  My mother’s things need to be sorted, and I can’t bear the thought of it. Maude offers every day, and I should just let her. My idea of sorting involves inviting someone from the nearest charity shop over, presenting them with black bags and letting them take the lot. Her personal effects, correspondence and whatever else she squirreled away I will just burn. Her letters are in folders, marked with dates. I thumb them. Her organisation floors me. They’re filed in order of date with the envelope stapled to the top. I push through them. Who has time for this sort of thing? Why wasn
’t she mothering me instead of stapling envelopes to letters? Where was the care of her daughter, the attention to detail there? It was always the same, the cold eye cast in the other direction of anything I might have been doing. Even my drinking. Especially my drinking. Secretive as I was, she had to have suspected something. Easier to ignore it. Something I have asked myself frequently in my life, the question that will never be answered: what did she blame me for? What, if anything, did I do? It seems self-pitying now, but I ask without seeking answers. My mother had her reasons, whatever they were, stretching years back into my childhood. She never liked me. Drinking eased the gap she left in my life, but it never really filled it. My mother’s meanness to me as a child petered out eventually, ran its course like a river through desert lands, grew tired and faded away. Being ignored is merely a substitute, a fatigued person’s bullying.

  The old cardboard files give way to newer ring-bound ones for her more recent missives. One folder is marked ‘Lexington Ave.’, the letters printed in her neat hand. Inside is a thick sheaf of pages dating back thirty years, more, all in order, each one dated by my mother. The first half of them are typed, the deliberate lettering of an old office typewriter, like the one Maude gifted me when I was still a kid. There is nothing on these pages beyond my mother’s name, our address, the date, an office reference code. A staple in the top left corner of each sheet is empty, but a tiny shred of paper caught on the metal in several of them hints at something about which I know nothing. My mother was never in New York. She knew no one in the States. Did an emigrant relative send her letters? Money? After leafing through the pages I am as in the dark as I was when I opened the cardboard folder. I put it to one side. My head is too stuffed today to take on anything new that needs working out. My mother’s mysteries are just as unsolvable now as they were when she was alive.

  It is surprising to uncover my own correspondence to her, neatly stowed. My hand stills, hovers over my writing, spiky anger bursting through the hurried scrawl. I don’t read what is there. I know the details. Weather, food, work. The parks I walked in, museums I visited. Nothing personal, no plea for an answer. But she must have known, must have felt my need for a reply.

  Her address book is pristine. Old addresses are neatly crossed out, new ones carefully added in. I flick to E, but there is nothing where my name should be. Same with P.

  She didn’t keep my address in her book.

  This is not a new address book. There are names in it of people who died a long time ago. I remember this book from before I went away. I had three addresses in New York, but my mother seems not to have recorded any of them.

  A bang against the windowpane shakes the hush of the bedroom. A bird lies on the grass below. I can’t tell if it’s still alive from up here. This is the best bedroom in the house, two windows overlooking the main road, and all the light a room could need. I lean my shoulder against the wall. The paintwork is cool against the thin cotton of my shirt. I look down. My bare feet are pale against the dark wood. My mother’s effects lie scattered across the polished floor. The room was immaculate until I began the sorting. Even in death, not a thing out of place. Rigid control of environment was my mother’s calling card.

  When Andrew was in hospital she wrote to him every day. I was never privy to the content of those epistles, but my mother spent time each morning composing letters to her son. She wrote on pads of Basildon Bond, always blue or white, watermarked. These she covered in her neat, slanted script. I knew that no error lay in those ordered lines, not a missing apostrophe or misspelled word. In my eleven years in New York I received one letter a year from her, all of them the same: a short appraisal of the weather, two or three sentences about the garden, a reference to bridge games and a line about Maude. The format never changed. My birthday slipped by each year, unacknowledged; one more day in a year of days for her.

  Isaac asked me about my mother at the beginning. A tiny village jazz club, a candle in a red jar between us, cigarette burns on the tabletop. I waved away the question, let it run off me like oil. Jazz tore up the air around us, gobbled up the spaces between our sentences, didn’t allow for proper conversation. It suited me, kept things at bay. Mineral water fizzed in a glass on the damaged tabletop. I’d stopped drinking again. My meetings kept me sane, even if they didn’t completely stop the craving. It was something I learned to live with, that persistent nagging behind everything I did, the unquenchable thirst. Work helped in the way distractions do, keeping it all at bay.

  I dismissed the question. What about your mother? I dismissed it, yet still I craved Isaac’s curiosity, needed him to draw me out, to let me speak about it all. Sure, by that stage he was my superior at work. Sure, I knew he was married, but none of that mattered to me. Not then, not at the beginning. I just wanted him to talk to me, to ask me questions no one had asked before, things I wouldn’t have tolerated from anyone else. In the darkness of that underground club, with music zinging in our ears and the smell of weed thick on the dark air, I wanted him to stroke my bare arms, to pull me in, to talk to me. His eyes were green-grey, like moths, and they travelled over me.

  My mother never loved me. That’s what I wanted to say. I know that now, sitting here with her folders of letters on my lap, her stupid, pointless collection of correspondence. She loved my brother and she never loved me. I always thought there was something wrong with me, some part of me that was missing, because if everything worked properly my mother wouldn’t have looked at me the way she did, telling me without ever having to say it that I was a nuisance, a waste of her time and money, one more piece of clutter in her house. And I suppose I wanted Isaac to know that about me, wanted him to look at me and see something different, not to notice my mother’s loathing.

  But I said nothing, because how do you put into words something that is held so deeply, a nugget of belief that hardens into a diamond with time and pressure from holding it so tightly? What about your mother? And I said nothing because I didn’t want to be tainted by it, by her indifference to me. Not on that night, in that club, with those eyes like moths on mine.

  I told him I loved him right from the beginning. It felt that way. After three years in the community college, I took over from a junior lecturer in poetry in the graduate school at NYU, who took a sabbatical followed by a nervous breakdown. Isaac, NYU’s star professor of English, was on a career break when I was appointed. It was another three years before he reappeared, fresh from a stint in Paris, another in Sydney, and a third in London. Amazingly, I remembered him, remembered his name and his face, six years older now, but as arresting as it had been that cold spring day he interviewed me. He cornered me at a faculty reception to mark a new publication a week after his return. It was a big deal. A donor was in attendance, a New York millionaire with his sights set on seeing his name over a door somewhere in the building. Promises of money gather huge excitement in the world of the university, where funding always runs short of the mark. We are like survivors of war, scrambling over each other to get the spoils.

  There was little in the way of introduction. ‘So, Doctor Perry, I hear great things.’ He held his wine glass as though it were a pint of beer, his elbow sticking out at an angle. A plate of sausages cooled on the table beside him. He pronged three with a toothpick. On the wall over his shoulder hung framed photographs of events like this one, stretching back decades. The room remained the same, the passage of time marked only by changing hairstyles. Across the room a glass was dropped. Someone laughed nervously. The donor’s voice, loud, self-assured, rose above the clamour. I mentioned the abstract I’d finished the previous day, the paper on Eliot I was preparing. Isaac listened, really listened. The noise of the room swelled around us, but I had his attention. He refilled his glass from a bottle someone had abandoned. As he poured, I checked my watch.

  ‘Leaving us already?’

  ‘Soon.’ I’d started going to meetings, and being around alcohol made me
nervous. Each time a bottle popped, or ice clinked in a glass, the dark thing in me roused itself and stretched inside me. He was attractive, Professor Kraal. And married. I’d been privy to far too much departmental chatter, the rolling commentary on others’ lives. Chinese whispers informed me of his wife, an heiress, and the Central Park West apartment they shared. The same whispers spoke of his solo sojourn abroad, of another woman, terribly distinguished in her field, who left her post in Barcelona for him, and of how it ended badly somewhere between Sydney and King’s College.

  ‘I’m impressed with what I hear. Eliot, Yeats, Cummings. This is exciting stuff.’

  Like most academics, I am guarded about work in progress. So much possibility of it going wrong. But this man, the star professor, a brilliant light in the world of early twentieth-century literature knew my realm of interest. His passion for it surpasses mine. Isaac simply lives it, and there we differ. For me, it’s still a job that I can leave behind. He can’t.

  He leaned closer to me, Chardonnay on his breath. He paused, his mouth almost touching my ear. ‘Do you like jazz?’ His hair, cropped against the possibility of receding, shadowed his skull. His skin, that skin, smooth, honey-coloured, unwrinkled. There was no paunch, no sagging jowls. He hadn’t lapsed into that state of bewilderment that claims so many men in their fifth decade. He had more of the successful novelist about him than the chair of English at a good university. His beige linen suit sat lightly on his frame.

  ‘I do, Professor.’

  He downed the rest of his wine in one go. ‘Then come on. We’ll be late.’