by Doreen Finn
‘And my paper?’
‘You’ll get it done. I trust you, Doctor.’
And so it was. Our shared love of jazz was the excuse I used for seeing him, for spending evenings in his company in dark clubs all over Manhattan. It was easy to catch the subway to meet him and convince myself that it was just for fun. It was fun, in that giddy, uncontainable way that love always is in the beginning. Isaac didn’t know about my drinking, not yet. There was no need.
Now I’m here and he is in New York. Someone else is doing my job, teaching twentieth-century poetry to undergraduates, guiding my doctoral students through their theses, publishing papers and going to meetings in my place. My apartment has been sublet, and I can’t go back, not yet.
I shove my mother’s letters in a recycling bag. I care not who wrote to her, what they told her. It won’t help me unpick her, uncover her depths. She learned too well to hide herself, to pack herself into the tightest suitcases, bury her truths.
I didn’t choose this house, but it shelters me for now. I’ll work my way through each room, lighting sage in corners, chasing away the ghosts that linger.
But my personal ghosts still waltz to silent music, dusty candelabra lighting their spooky way.
Later, I stand at the kitchen window, John Coltrane’s tenor sax fattening the silence of the early evening. The topaz light slips slowly away, and I finish the bottle of wine I started in order to shake the dust of my mother’s papers off me. Irish days take forever to end, twilight at this time of year stretching on past its bedtime. I’ve stood in this same spot on countless evenings, watching the same scene smoothe itself out before me. There’s comfort in that for me; no matter what happens during the day, it will end.
That’s the thing about home. It tricks you into thinking that nothing has changed. But in the universe of our lives, nothing could be further from the truth.
CHAPTER 10
The window has darkened without my noticing it. The overhead light flickers insistently. A faint buzzing like a trapped bee is the only sound in the empty classroom. I’ve just finished marking the last of the essays, all thirty of them. Two exam questions on solitude in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, with reference to five poems. The church on Rathmines Road bells the hour. Six. My hand cramps from holding my pen.
This is the first time I’ve stayed late since I started, but I don’t want to go home. The emptiness of the house has grown around me, pulled me close. My East Village apartment, where I’ve lived alone for six years, has never seemed as vacant as the three storeys of red-bricked Victorian terrace that my mother threw my way. Staying on in school stretches the day out, lessens the time that I must spend alone at home.
I crave New York. Flashes of what I’m missing out on catch me at moments when I least expect it. Flowers in barrels at the Korean market on the Lower East Side. A ticket to an exhibition at MoMA. Reading a book in the park on a cold spring day. Ramen or sushi in the tiny Japanese place on Seventh, where you have to point at pictures of what you want because no one speaks English. Chinese New Year in Chinatown Park. It’s better for me, right now, to be away from everything there, but it is difficult being here. Dublin is full of Andrew. He lingers like perfume in the house no matter how I arrange or rearrange the furniture. His room is bare, yet my hand is stilled each time I place it on the handle.
‘Are you still here?’ Adam leans against the door. His hands are stuffed in his trouser pockets. The sole of his shoe taps on the wood behind him. His reddish hair is burnt sienna in the faded light.
‘Just finishing now.’ I push papers into the desk, closing the drawer on the red marks I’ve scored across most of them.
‘What’re you working on?’ He gestures towards the desk.
‘Sixth years. Dickinson.’
He groans. ‘Jesus.’
‘The kids or the poet?’
Adam rubs his glasses on his shirt tail. ‘The shit they’ve probably written. I can only imagine, if it’s anything like the shit I’m handed on a daily basis.’ He holds the glasses up to the light then rubs them again. ‘Unless you have a few geniuses in here.’ A phone beeps in his pocket. He takes it out, slides his thumb over the screen, smiles and puts it away.
I stand and reach for my coat. Adam is at my desk in a flash, helping me on with it. It’s unnecessary, but nice. Isaac was that kind of man too, opening doors, helping with coats, carrying bags. A gentleman.
‘Thanks.’ I tug my hair free, shake it. It needs a cut.
‘No problem.’
We walk along the quiet corridor. The dry smell of chalk and dust is gentled by the lingering silence of the post-class school. Our footsteps are hollow in the hush. A large portrait of a founding father catches my attention. Something is off. Adam sees me looking.
‘Have you not noticed it till now?’
I haven’t noticed anything.
‘Look closely.’
The priest’s face is vaguely familiar.
‘It’s Jim Collins. Some smartass Photoshopped his face and stuck it up. It’s been there about three years now, and Jim still hasn’t copped on.’ Adam laughs. ‘I see it every day and it always cracks me up.’ He nods to a plaster bust of a former pope, his skullcap obscured by a Dodgers baseball cap. ‘Same thing, there since last year, not a glance from Jim.’ We laugh at the silly, boyish humour. This kind of fun is absent in university, where it would be regarded as childish from the lofty heights of academia.
Adam holds the main door open for me. ‘Drink? Or something to eat?’
The burger place is one of those upscale joints so popular now in Dublin. The hipster waiter seats us at a long refectory table filled with other early diners. I am reminded of lunchtimes at school when I was a child. We touch elbows with the people on either side of us, but no one seems to mind. The music is loud, something jazzy and mellow. Adam removes his glasses. He fiddles with them while contemplating the menu, which is huge and laminated. Despite the quirky names carefully printed in rows and the exorbitant prices, the dishes are ordinary diner fare.
We order. Adam requests a turkey burger.
‘I don’t eat red meat,’ he says before I ask. Not that I care. New York academia is every bit as neurotic about its eating habits as the celebrified West Coast. I am accustomed to meat-free, wheat-free, lactose-intolerant diets. I order a gourmet burger, whatever that is, and a mineral water. Adam takes a long swallow from an impossibly tall glass of wheat beer.
‘Sure you won’t have something else?’ He nods at my water.
‘Positive.’
He doesn’t push me or berate me for being boring as so many Irish people would, as though drinking were a badge of honour, an activity only for the worthy. Waiters weave their way through the rows of tables, the music changes and becomes more insistent, queues form at the door. A girl with a snake tattooed on her forearm stands at a podium and takes names, writes down mobile numbers, turns large groups away. Traffic builds on the main road. We talk about school, about books we’ve read.
‘So, this PhD, what’s it in?’ Adam raises a hand to the waiter, points at his glass.
I shrug one shoulder. ‘Early modernism.’ It seems so long ago now, all those years of study. Poetry and early modernism. My crutch in times of need.
‘I’m impressed.’
I tip the last of my water into my mouth. ‘Don’t be. It was years ago.’ I signal for a refill.
‘Have you done much university teaching?’
‘That’s all I’ve done.’ I allow the waiter to place a new glass of water in front of me. I could pretend it’s gin and tonic. I could languidly sip it, hold onto it while I converse, not let it out of my sight. But it’s only mineral water, and I can have gin when I get home. If I can find any. If my resolve fails. ‘NYU’, I say, by way of explanation. Pride nudges me, but I bite it back. My
mother hated pride. She made sure I felt little of it, and guilty if some should mistakenly fall my way.
I miss my job. I miss it all, my office, the undergrads, even my doctoral students, with their thesis problems and tedious draft rewrites. I miss my colleagues and the papers I should be writing. What am I doing? Really, where did my courage slip away to? Why didn’t I just stay, face things, let time work its magic?
‘I started one.’ Adam’s phone lights up on the table between us. I expect him to break our conversation and smile at the screen again, but he ignores it. ‘A doctorate, I mean. I did two years and gave it up.’ He sits back. ‘Realised I didn’t give a damn about what I was researching.’
‘Which was?’ I can’t help it. He has caught my curiosity.
‘British maritime history leading up to and during the Great War.’ He announces it, then laughs. ‘It sounds a lot more interesting than it was.’
I grin. He leans back, smiles at me. ‘Oh, you may laugh, but I bet you’re dying to know the intimate details of Mahan’s thesis.’
‘Who?’
‘Don’t be coy.’ Adam shakes his head. ‘You know who Mahan was. You probably keep a photo of him by your bed.’
I sip my water. ‘Tell me more.’
‘I don’t know if I should. You might expire with excitement.’
‘Try me.’
‘Well, there’s the dreadnought model, template for all battleships.’ He raises an eyebrow. ‘Should I go on?’
‘Please do.’
‘Let us not forget the fact that British battlecruisers and torpedo boats led the Germans to develop their own lighter versions.’
Our laughter is loud, and irritates the couple next to us, but I don’t care. This is the most I’ve enjoyed myself in ages, and as I watch Adam spill ever more obscure naval facts, and find myself convulsed, I can see why the boys love him. He doesn’t try to be cool or funny. He just is.
He’s how old, late thirties? More? I admire how easy he is in himself, how effortless his confidence is. His mother loved him. I see how that one simple fact can alter the whole person. I am in awe of people like Adam, who wear their self-assurance like a loose layer, who treat such bounty almost with neglect. The old darkness slides through my brain, and the desire for a drink catches me, as it invariably does, unawares. I don’t know why it surprises me; the need is always there. I just have to keep it tightly sealed in its jar. I’ve been good for a couple of weeks now.
This has been a bad year for my drinking. All that time on the dry, and I slid right down the ladder, all the way to the last rung and beyond. It’s been a bad year all on its own though. The booze just cushioned it.
Adam pays the bill. The queue for seats does not allow us time to linger. ‘Shall we?’ Adam puts his phone in his pocket and shakes his car keys.
I follow him to the door. Our seats are swallowed before we’ve exited. Outside, the line snakes to the corner and beyond. An autumn wind gusts along the main road, sending bits of discarded paper wheeling in the air. It starts to rain with a suddenness that surprises me. The wind catches my hair, whips it around my face. I try to hold it down. Can’t have it getting even more tangled than it is. The air smells of metal. A Hallowe’en firecracker explodes somewhere off the main road.
Adam opens the passenger door of his vegetable-oil car. ‘Hop in,’ he says. I dither. ‘Come on, you’ll get soaked otherwise.’ He pulls the collar of his jacket up. ‘And so will I if you don’t get in.’
I obey him. The rain has soaked us, even after the few minutes it has taken to walk to the car.
Adam puts the radio on. Donald Byrd fills the silence around us. It doesn’t matter that we don’t talk. There is humour in the quiet, an almost intimate quality. Beyond the confines of the car the rain washes down the gutters, gathers in puddles. The car smells of doughnuts, and Adam delivers me to my door.
CHAPTER 11
Sean is buying vegetables the next time I bump into him. Same place. I see him first, turning carrots over, checking tomatoes for marks. His hair looks longer, or maybe it’s just flattened beneath his grey beanie hat. A heavy checked shirt is knotted around his waist, his jeans are skinny and a faded black, and his canvas shoes scream hipster. The look is less contrived on him than it is on the legions of boys slouching around Dublin dressed as he is, as though it’s simply the clothes he put on this morning as opposed to an image he wants to project. Gorgeous. He’s gorgeous. He doesn’t notice me, and I busy myself with a box of limes. The limes are organic, unwaxed, and their scent squanders itself on my hands, a citrus sharpness that brings to mind margaritas, a crust of salt on a glass, a hot New York sun, happy hour in a village bar. There are only three other customers in the shop, and I try to slip out before Sean spots me.
‘Hey! How are you?’ Suddenly, he is beside me. What has happened to the dour repression of Irish males, all that kicking at the ground with scuffed shoes, hands jammed in pockets and no eye contact, the familiar traits that afflicted the bulk of the boys of my youth? All those emotions, boarded up like a derelict house. Sean brims with smiles, pleased to see me in a way that I don’t understand. He didn’t ring me. Funny how that should matter. The paper bag with my number scrawled across it shames me slightly.
The bag of limes crinkles as I shift it to the other hand. ‘Fine, thanks. You?’
He pays for his purchases and drops his wallet in on top of his vegetables. ‘Grand, I’m grand. Busy, but that’s a good thing.’
I duck under his arm as he holds the door open for me. A dog, tied to a post, barks furiously at us. Sean laughs and rubs its head. He jerks his thumb at the café. ‘I’m going in. I’m freezing. You coming?’
A double espresso lasts only a few minutes. I order a second. Sean stirs his mocha. He’s working on an animated short, something he’s hoping will lead to a commission. ‘If it doesn’t happen, I’m off. Australia, probably,’ he adds, though I haven’t asked where. Everyone is off to Australia this time around. There or Canada. When I left, the States was still the place to go, but not any more. There are other destinations, other magnets that pull. It seems that economic prowess opened Irish eyes up to the world, battered down borders and any kind of barricade to personal happiness.
‘Sure,’ I nod. ‘Australia.’
‘Not much time to work in the bar any more. Have you been in?’
I shake my head. I’m trying to keep away from booze. If I’m not around it I’m less likely to drink. It’s so difficult, the huge draw towards substance. The consistency of addiction is its most exhausting feature. Nowhere to hide in its darkened rooms.
I got high last night, smoked the last of the weed I brought back. Miles Davis unthreaded on the stereo behind me and I did something I haven’t attempted in a long, long time: I tried to write. Oh, it was pointless, I knew it at the time, but I was stoned, stoned and lonely, and it’s been such a bad year, and I need to put some perspective on it, need to examine it all, and poetry used to help me do that.
It didn’t work, and after a couple of hours of looking at the sheet of paper, covered in my initials and not much else, I gave up, finished the badly rolled joint and surrendered to the empty embrace of cheap upstate weed. It’s easy to trawl the darkness around with me. Letting it go is one of the biggest challenges. Despair is indeed a glacial god.
Sean tells me about the animation he is working on. It sounds good, some ordinary children, each with a once-off superpower that can only be used for the improvement of the world. His hands move as he speaks, shaping his characters, and again I’m struck by their beauty.
In the middle of it, his phone rings. Without apologising, he grabs it, nods, nods again, and hangs up.
‘Listen, I’ve got to split.’ Sean stands, gathers his bags and pulls his hat on. His blond hair touches his shoulders. ‘We should hang sometime. Give me your number agai
n.’ He smirks. ‘I know I had it before, but don’t ask me where it ended up.’
‘The language of seduction was never better spoken.’
‘Sorry.’ In black marker he scrawls on one of his paper bags.
‘Is this your routine?’
He stops writing. ‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ I recite the home phone number for him. ‘Déjà vu.’
‘Yeah, sorry. I’m hopeless.’
‘It’s Eva.’ I point to where he’s written ‘Aoife’ before the number.
‘Shit, sorry. Jesus. Eva. Yeah.’ He grins again. ‘Sorry about that.’ He doesn’t bother changing it, but I don’t really care.
The dog is still tied up outside. Its barking is frenzied as Sean bestows one final pat to its head. The sound grates. I’ve always tried to live in dog-free buildings, a near impossibility in Manhattan. One dog, an Alsatian, was poisoned on my block last year. Someone, driven demented by the incessant barking and the owner’s dismissive contempt for the many complainers, got to it, fed it poison, and the dog was silenced. The owner was a Dominican drug dealer, flashy in stolen sunglasses and expensive clothing. The animal had worn a diamond collar. I admired the bravery of the poisoner, who risked a bullet for peace and quiet. Everyone said it was a rival dealer who had done it, but I suspected an elderly neighbour, fed up with years of barking and fear.
Sean sees me watching him. He straightens, raises his hand in farewell and walks away. He shifts his groceries to the other arm, adjusts his hat and disappears from view.
I linger, scan the paper and drink a glass of water. The same waitress is there, her English thickly accented, her face full of absent smiles. I have no plans for the evening and no weed left to blunt the edges of empty time. There are things I should do, boxes I need to fill with Andrew’s things, emails from the university I must respond to.
What I’d really like, though, is a drink. A mojito, with the limes I’ve bought, all crushed mint leaves and Caribbean rum, or a margarita, salt and lime juice colliding on my tongue. Summer in a glass.