My Buried Life

by Doreen Finn

  Somewhere along this lightless abyss, I learned to accept the loss of my words. Now, I can talk about it. Here, in this garish university cafeteria, with its appalling acoustics and mediocre coffee, I can meet with someone and allow the possibility of my poems to be studied. Somewhere, I crossed over into acceptance. The air is clearer there.

  I’m finishing my second coffee when I spot Sally, pink-cheeked and flustered. She plonks her bag and folders down onto the table.

  ‘Sorry, Eva, I’m so sorry. I couldn’t get away.’ She rummages through her bag, retrieves her purse. ‘I couldn’t even text you because I was in a bloody meeting. Hang on.’ She disappears and is back in minutes, a coffee mug slopping its contents onto the tray in her hands. ‘Sorry,’ she says again, tearing a sachet of brown sugar apart and dumping the granules into the mug. ‘First day back and it’s already mad. No such thing any more as easing yourself back in.’

  I wait as Sally drinks half her coffee, breaks her toast into pieces before buttering it. ‘How’s Adam?’

  The question sounds casual, but carefully asked. ‘Fine, I think.’ I’ve barely spoken to him since Christmas. He’s been busy with his family, his visiting nieces, his New Year spent in Sweden. And I’ve actually missed talking to him. Tomorrow school starts, and I’m looking forward to seeing him. Jim Collins has extended my contract until the end of the school year. It’s a good thing.

  Sally looks at me closely. ‘He’s a good guy.’

  I fiddle with a sugar sachet. ‘He is.’

  ‘He likes you.’

  It’s so unexpected that I laugh.

  Sally laughs too. ‘Don’t tell me I’ve surprised you.’

  It’s not that it’s a surprise. I met her to talk about some of my poems, not to whisper about boys. We’re practically 40, and I don’t know Sally well enough to be having this conversation with her. Awkwardness makes me fumble for words.

  Sally grins. She picks up one of her folders. ‘Don’t mind me. I’m just poking my big nose in where it has no business. Adam would kill me if he thought I was sitting here with you, having a cosy chat about him. Forget I said anything.’ She pulls some sheets of paper out. ‘Here we are,’ she says, handing me a few pages stapled together. ‘This is what I’ve been working on. It’s more or less final, and I’d like you on board, with your agreement.’

  I scan the pages. It’s just names of poets, some Irish, some international. With each name, Sally has included five or six possible poems. In the margins are handwritten notes and queries. My name is on the last page. Five of my poems are proposed.

  For a while I was used to seeing small articles about myself in literary publications, and for my last book an extensive piece in The Times. But it’s been so long now that it’s almost as though it never happened, and to see my name, neatly typed in bold alongside all these poets of note, is daunting. Something stirs inside me and I recognise it. Excitement. It is quickly doused by reality. What’s the point in having my work picked over, rehashed, if there’s nothing new to replace it with? It’s fine for the other poets on the list. The dead ones are free of all expectation, and the living just keep on producing work of incredible magnitude and depth. To see my name on the same pages as Billy Collins, Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds and others has lent the moment an unreal quality. These are my gods. Not rock stars in glittery make-up and tight leather, but these poets, their genius stretching far beyond the page.

  ‘What do you think?’ Sally asks.

  I’m not sure what she wants me to say.

  ‘Are you okay?’ She leans forward. A girl collects our trays, and we wait in silence while she wipes the table clean. ‘Look, I know this is probably the last thing you were expecting, and let’s face it, the school syllabus is hardly the place for radical poetry, but it gets your work out there, gets people talking about it again.’ She sits back in her plastic chair, tucks her hair behind her ears.

  I spread my hands on the table. My skin is chapped in places. I must put cream on them. The table beside us fills up with students. Undergraduates, no doubt. They talk loudly, American inflections heavy in their otherwise Irish accents. When I was their age, it was the west-Brit accent that staked out social territory. Now, everyone comes from California. London is old-school. The west coast is in. Sally rolls her eyes.

  ‘Yours?’ I ask her.

  ‘God, no. I’m not lecturing much this year, thankfully.’ She checks her phone, which has beeped three times, then puts it aside. ‘So, what do you think? Are you in?’

  ‘Don’t you have to run this by some people?’ It’s too sudden, and I feel under pressure to do something, say something, and I’m not sure what.

  Sally waves a hand in the air. ‘I already have. We’ve been working on this for six months. It has to be decided on pretty soon.’

  I run my finger down the page. God, it’s been a long time. ‘What about copyright?’

  ‘That can be a problem, but I think we’ll be okay. I contacted your old publishers. The man I spoke to was new, but they still have you on the old files, said there shouldn’t be a copyright problem. Nothing we can’t sort out at least.’

  I put my hands to my face. ‘I’m not sure. I haven’t written in years, and I’ve nothing new to offer.’

  She places her elbows on the table. ‘It doesn’t matter, Eva. It has nothing to do with that. It’s to do with the poems themselves. They’re fantastic, and worthy of inclusion in any anthology.’ She checks her watch. ‘Shit, I have to go in a minute. I’m giving a tutorial to third years. So, are you on for it?’

  ‘Can I think about it?’

  Sally starts to gather up her belongings. She glances again at her phone. ‘You can, but don’t take too long. This has to be in by the end of next week.’ She hoists her bag onto her shoulder, stands, and looks down at me. ‘Think about it and ring me in the next day or two. It’s a good thing, Eva, really. I’d do it.’

  I watch her stop to talk to three people before she finally leaves. My hands are shaking, whether from caffeine or nerves I can’t tell. It hits me that this proposal of Sally’s, this possible inclusion of my poems on the course that I’m currently teaching here gives me a deadline. I can’t teach my own work. I couldn’t. How would I talk about those poems, read them aloud in class, listen to the sighs of boredom, or worse? I will either have to find another job entirely, or move back to the States. At least it will put an end to this lack of clarity that I feel about my life right now. I have an out.

  I pick up the newspaper she left behind and read about the day’s occurrences. Unemployment, cuts in public spending, developers in court, even more scandals in the Church. Nothing much changes in Ireland.

  CHAPTER 21

  Adam’s daughter is coming to visit him for the midterm break. He wants me to spend a day with them while she’s here; he is determined that I will. I’m not as sure.

  ‘The poor kid will need a change of scenery from just having me around her all the time.’ He looks over his shoulder as he manoeuvres into a parking space that opened up just as we arrived. We exit his vegetable-oil car, which always smells faintly of doughnuts. He gets his oil from a doughnut and coffee chain in Rathmines. Once a month, Adam pulls around to the rear of the premises, and used oil is siphoned into the car’s tank. I admire that in him, the determination to do things properly. Adam cares not for the jibes about his car. ‘I’m above that’ is his usual reply. And he is. We are going to the National Gallery. A touring exhibition of Picasso is on for a month, and Adam has two tickets. There is a school rugby match on today, and we finished classes at lunchtime. The teachers are expected to attend the game, support the students, but I slipped out the side door as everyone assembled in the hall. Adam caught up with me minutes later.

  ‘Right.’ Again, that doubt, all those plaguing questions I ask of myself. What should I do? What do I
want? Was it the right decision?

  ‘We can go to the zoo, or whatever. She’s easy to please.’ Adam is casual in his tone, but he’s thrilled at the prospect of an unexpected week with his child. Her mother, a biologist, will be in Moscow for a week’s conference, and Adam has agreed to take Annalie while she’s gone.

  ‘Does it affect her? Not having you around, I mean?’ We walk through the square. It is cold today, and I wrap my scarf around my neck, tug my hat down over my ears. Most of the trees are bare, pared back for winter. They wave their cuttlebone branches in the slight wind. The flowerbeds have been recently turned, but nothing is visible in the brown earth, not a hint of anything to come.

  ‘I don’t think so, not really.’ Adam’s shoes echo on the stony path. We pass the Oscar Wilde sculpture. Tourists in bright jackets take photos beside it, taking it in turns to put their hands on Wilde’s marbled legs, his feet, smiling despite the freezing air. I feel sorry for them, being here at this time of year. Dublin is grey and unwelcoming in midwinter, despite its upgrade in wealthier times to a city on everyone’s wish list. The hotels may be glitzier, the shops plentiful, but in late January a curtain of dampness clings to every surface, lending the city a bedraggled air that no money can dispel.

  Through the shrubbery, pieces of the children’s play area can be glimpsed, flashes of red and yellow, all the bright, primary-coloured equipment. The playground, when we walk through it, is a big disappointment, the swings rusting and chipped, the slide in need of repair, more like the playgrounds beside the public housing on the Lower East Side than one in this beautiful park.

  ‘I’ll bring Annalie here,’ Adam says as we pass. ‘She still loves swings, and long may it last.’ He coughs. His breath is a cloud on the freezing air. ‘Can’t abide the thought of her getting into boys.’ He pulls a packet of tissues from his inside pocket. ‘You ever think of having kids yourself?’ His tone is casual, throwaway, but I know the barely veiled curiosity behind it. This question is the one most asked in offhand terms, but overloaded with meaning and hidden judgement. Women ask it mostly when they don’t know you well enough to ask such a personal question, and men ask it to see if it’s worth pursuing you. There is no right answer. Say yes, and the men run a mile, while the women quietly pity you. Say no, and men will only date you so they can sleep with you, secure in the knowledge that you won’t try and trap them. Everyone else thinks you’re cold.

  Or so I’ve been led to believe.

  Isaac never wanted children. That is what he told me every time the issue arose, and in the past couple of years it arose quite frequently. His wife couldn’t have them, and didn’t wish to adopt. Isaac happily fell in with her. He loved me partly because it was easy to be with someone who saw life in intellectual terms, who didn’t equate happiness and fulfilment with reproduction.

  Except for me it wasn’t quite that easy.

  Everyone goes through a phase of wanting children, even those who avowedly don’t want them. I never dedicated much time either way to thinking about it, until one day when a colleague brought her baby son into the faculty lounge. All my barriers vanished. I had a turn at holding that beautiful tiny boy, and something clicked inside me, some airless tunnel finally let in some light and air, and instead of turning from the emotion, I faced it head on. Out of nowhere, I wondered about having a baby. It wasn’t a sudden, gasping need that grabbed me by the throat and demanded me to breed. It was more subtle than that. I noticed things. Baby things. Like the number of them I now observed on my runs, the nannies pushing big prams around Central Park, the toddlers wobbling on unsteady feet, plump arms windmilling. It was new for me, and at first I was taken in by the novelty of it all. I wondered what it would be like to be called Mother. Mama. That sort of thing. Very gradual.

  ‘Do you?’ Adam stubs out his cigarette.

  I shrug. ‘Not much.’

  When I found out I was pregnant, shock and fear, but mostly shock, exploded in my head. I kept it from Isaac for three weeks, unable to bring myself to say the words over the phone. It was supposed to be something I’d planned, not the result of a long weekend with my married lover, who, it turned out, was the most commitment-phobic man I’d ever been involved with.

  I was in Los Angeles, on a research project for three months. Isaac had visited me at the end of January, and by mid March I knew that something wasn’t quite right.

  I didn’t need a test kit to know. I just knew. And it made me sick. It’s terrible to admit that, I know, but from the safe distance of one year I can look over my shoulder and be honest with myself. I felt sick. All the time. When I wasn’t throwing up, I was a nauseated mess. I could barely focus on my work, was unable to eat, and all I wanted to do was sleep. The tentative imaginings of having a baby faded to nothing in the face of the reality I was in. Who would help me? Where would I live? My shoebox in the East Village was hardly large enough for me. And I didn’t want to sandwich my child between the sounds of bottles smashing late at night and screaming in Spanish. Hijo de puta! Te odio!

  My mother slithered into my thoughts, silent as a ghost. What if I turned into her, mothered the way she did? What if my brother’s madness festered in those microscopic dividing cells inside me?

  I spoke to Isaac every day, but stalled at saying anything to him. We spoke at length about work, about my research. The secondment to LA had been offered to me, an extension of the research I was doing in New York into cultural responses to poetry. The English faculty in UCLA had a small but thriving modern poetry department, and I settled in quickly. Work was busy, with little time for procrastinating. Due to the individual nature of research, I was largely left to my own devices, an arrangement that suited me fine. Daily briefings and casual meetings kept me in touch with my new colleagues. I found the experience refreshing after the intensity of New York. I enjoyed the freedom of being away from the familiar. If I am honest, it was nice to be away from Isaac too, just for a while. Lately, I’d begun wondering if that was all I was ever going to be in, a relationship on the side, the supporting act while the main attraction continued onstage. For the first time since we started seeing each other, I had to ask myself what I wanted, and what I thought I was going to have in the future.

  Except now this had happened.

  I was in LA, busy writing notes on how different groups in American society respond to poetry. Our research was ongoing, with feedback from the sample populations providing the backbone to our work.

  Then Isaac came to visit.

  LA was hot, hot in that late winter way that the west coast has, hot in a way that New York never is except in July. Coming from the unimaginable cold of a New York winter, it was like plunging into a furnace, the air dragon’s breath on my heat-parched skin.

  I’d been drinking. It was a holiday weekend, and the extra day off work sent me scurrying into corners of my head that I preferred to keep sealed shut. Isaac was late, something I’d noticed happening a little too frequently, something that I had chosen to ignore because I didn’t like the thought of what challenging him would bring. It was one thing to question myself about what I was doing, but another thing entirely for him to have doubts too. And he didn’t say he was having doubts, I just knew he was. Call it intuition, call it low self-esteem, but my radar was beeping like crazy and I dulled the sound with a myriad of So Cal cocktails that were never less than marvellous at intoxicating me to the point of oblivion every time.

  I’d been waiting for him for hours. His flight had been due at noon. He had a lunch meeting with someone from USC, some man he shared research with, but had promised me he’d be at my place by four. Afternoon dissolved into evening, the light fading quickly as it did at that time of year in southern California. On the tiny balcony of my borrowed studio apartment, I finished my third margarita, then poured another from the blender. Below me, Sunset Boulevard wound its way to the ocean, a shimmering thread of sluggish traffic
and street lights. The heat made zigzags in the humid evening air, the scent of eucalyptus and gasoline omnipresent in the noisy city evening. The palm trees rattled their fronds like bones. A miniscule lizard scuttled up the wall. The insane excitement of LA palpitated. Tourists screamed from rented stretched limos, kerb-crawled in convertible Porsches, roved the streets in packs, their oversized bodies and extra-large clothes branding them different no matter how hard they tried to fit in. The real Angelenos were far away, tucked in corners of dive bars, eating on patios, being discreet in the Chateau Marmont. I longed to be out there with Isaac, sitting in a cool bar, getting a table in a trendy restaurant, ordering lobster or whatever was in season on the LA dining circuit.

  Finally, Isaac rang the bell and I staggered to the door to buzz him in. Salt congealed on my fingers and cheeks, and I was too drunk to care. I swayed to the huge white bed. A book lay face down beside where I fell, but I didn’t bother turning it over. When alcohol swamps my brain, words swim into each other, turning pages into an inkblot of incoherence.