by Doreen Finn
Seamus traces a hairline crack in the table’s surface. It leads nowhere. ‘Would you like to draw something else?’ I ask him. Again, that childish shake of the head, side to side, his fringe swinging. I am exhausted. It’s been possibly ten minutes, and I’m spent. How do people do this? What spurs them on, allows them to keep on asking and offering, coming up with new things to suggest and proffer? Adam’s daughter arrives next week. He has made me promise to spend at least one day with them. Where will I find the resources? I place my hand on Seamus’s. Surprised, he looks up at me. His smile splits his lovely face in two. With his free hand, he pats my cheek.
‘Eva.’ He pronounces it Ava. ‘Eva, more book.’
As we finish the book again, Aelita appears, summoned as though by magic, at the kitchen door. She is shrugging on her raincoat, pulling her ponytail out of the collar. ‘Is all finish. Mrs Maude she is finish too. Next week same, yes?’
I say yes and pass her an envelope with her pay. All cash. No cheques, ever, just hard cash.
She holds Seamus’s coat out. ‘Come now, Seamus.’
With a nod at me, she turns. The door closes behind her.
In the silence that follows, I remain in the kitchen. I can hear Maude’s door open, then close. Back from bridge. Then the muffled sounds of her at home, the dulled noise of the television, the creak of ancient plumbing. I will visit her in a few minutes, bring her something to eat and the day’s paper. Maybe next time Aelita comes I’ll bring Seamus down for a visit. Pretend to myself for ten minutes that he’s mine.
CHAPTER 25
Leafing through a book, I find the photograph. Isaac and me. Summer three years ago. All photos of us were deliberately left behind in New York. Those that I didn’t destroy.
Holding it is a shock. His face, so handsome. Those angular cheekbones, the brown eyes. The linen shirt. His arm encircling my shoulders, holding me close, as though I mattered. As though he loved me.
It is my face, though, that amazes me the most. My face, that laughing, smiling, happy person. My eyes on him, all my attention focused on the man holding me.
A day trip to Coney Island. Crushed on the subway with the tourists, the beachgoers and the Brooklynites, on the hottest day so far of that summer. A child near me cried the whole way, his mother holding him on her ample lap while fanning herself with a magazine. It had been my idea, one that Isaac had scoffed at, but I wanted to go. Seven years in New York and I hadn’t made it as far as the end of the subway line. We had a good day, a very good day. A stroll on the boardwalk, hotdogs, the freedom just to be with him and not have to consider our moves in case we ran into someone. Not that bumping into acquaintances is a common problem in New York City, but Isaac was careful. New York is a city so busy with itself, so self-obsessed, that it doesn’t notice anyone else. There is a relief in that, something that doesn’t exist in Dublin, although there is something nice about seeing a familiar face when I’m out and about here, a sense of belonging to something whole.
I stroke his face in the photo.
The end came quickly, as it turned out. The decision was mine, but I can’t say that Isaac objected.
I’d gone back to Manhattan for a week from LA. I was due to give a paper at a seminar in NYU, and despite the fatigue and nausea that swirled around me at a constant and astonishing pace, I managed to deliver the paper, answer questions, and appear to all concerned as though I were one more busy academic, flying in from one big city to another, a whistle-stop tour, and the end of a fragile hope that I’d foolishly allowed myself to be duped by.
The heating in my apartment building was broken. The Salvadorean super was sick, and for three days I baked in an abundance of calefaction. Added to the nausea, it was too much. I called Isaac.
‘We need to talk.’
‘Sure, sweets.’ It had never irritated me before that he referred to me as sweets when he wasn’t about to do what I wanted, but now I positively raged.
‘I’m pregnant.’ This, delivered before he had taken his coat off or shaken the early spring rain from his hat. This, thrown at him as he dawdled in the doorway of my third-floor apartment in the East Village, where the heating was broken and the Dominican neighbours screamed at each other over the blare of television. Te odio! Cabron! Puta! Te voy a matar!
‘You’re fucking joking.’ The professor of English, swearing. It wasn’t something I was used to hearing. Next question: ‘How long?’
Deflated, I turned from him. ‘Oh, don’t worry. I’m well within the limits.’
‘Thank God.’ He followed me and sat down in the tiny kitchen, at the table barely big enough for two people. The window looked out over the fire escape, a jigsaw of rusty ladders at diagonals up and down the building. I leaned on the sink.
‘Don’t you even want to talk about it?’ I asked.
‘And say what? I don’t want a child. You don’t want one either.’
But had he asked me? The question was too big to discuss in a miniscule kitchen, amid potted plants and shelves buckling under the weight of books. It needed space, light, air to breathe. Room to change minds, if that’s what was required.
‘How would you know what I want? Have you ever even asked me what I want?’ I hadn’t meant to scream at him. This was supposed to be a dignified conversation. ‘Do you think I want this, this tiptoeing around, this constant pretence when everyone, absolutely everyone knows exactly what we’re up to?’
Isaac’s head shot up. Something sparked in those brown eyes. ‘What do you mean?’
It took a lot of effort not to throw something at him. ‘I mean that everyone knows I’m fucking the star professor. Or maybe that he’s fucking me? In every possible way.’
‘Don’t be childish.’
It was meant to be a dialogue between two adults discussing this new fork in their road.
It dawned that I was on that road alone.
Isaac pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Jesus, Eva. We’re not 17.’
‘What does that have to do with anything? You’re 52, for Christ’s sake! 52!’ A rush of despair jangled my nerves. I’d thought that maybe things would be different after his disastrous trip to LA. I’d even stopped drinking.
‘I’m too old for a child.’ And suddenly he looked it, as though something had veiled him up to this point. A sprinkling of grey in the cropped hair. A huddle of wrinkles at his eyes, the slight sag under his chin.
I was alone. I was thousands of miles from home, with no one around me. He’d become my family, and like families always do, he’d let me down.
‘Then you have to leave.’
His fingertips rubbed at a worn patch on the kitchen table. Despite the white walls, the pale floor, the tasteful photographs and my shelves of books, my apartment looked like the shoebox it was. Who was I kidding? I was a 36-year-old washed-up poet, with a job in academia that I enjoyed, but it was still only a job. I was fooling myself if I thought it was any substitute for writing. I earned a good salary, I had tenure, I was a regular on the publication circuit. There was plenty to be positive about, and I was proud of my achievements, but little about my life appealed to me at that instant. And I had no one to share it with, not really.
‘Eva.’ His voice tripped over the syllables. ‘Eva. What should we do?’
My elbows throbbed from leaning on the cold porcelain of the Belfast sink. I turned to face him. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘Not this.’ The words were soft, his voice gentle, measured. If I hadn’t been involved in the conversation, had I been merely eavesdropping, I would have thought myself an intruder on lovers’ whispers.
I picked up an uncorked wine bottle, left over from God knows when, splashed the remaining wine, stale now and vinegary, over him, and threw the bottle at his head. I missed and it smacked off the cupboard behind him and smashed into a thousan
d pieces. ‘I’m sick, I’m pregnant. You’re the one who’s supposed to do something.’
‘What can I do?’
‘Go fuck yourself.’ My hands shook. They itched to slap him as my mother had slapped me, numberless times.
‘But you need help.’
I almost felt sorry for him, his ruined shirt and lack of comprehension of what it was to be me. All that time together and he didn’t know me at all.
‘Get out, Isaac.’ I slumped back into the chair. ‘Just go home to your wife and your childless life and leave me the fuck alone.’
He didn’t go. Instead, he lifted cups from the draining board, filled the kettle, rummaged for teabags in the caddy. While the kettle boiled, he swept up the glass shards. The pieces clinked as he put them in the bin. ‘I’m not going anywhere. You can’t be alone and I’m not leaving.’
My burst of energy seeped away. I slumped in my chair, gazed at the free world outside the tiny kitchen window. The sky was the colour of tin, the beaten metal of a cold spring in New York. The roosters on the roof of the next building protested, their squawking even more irritating than it was at dawn each day. I cursed the person who’d put them there, some Puerto Rican who thought they reminded him of home. I was sick of Manhattan, of the great divide between rich and poor, its litter and noise, the filthy human carousel that I needed to get off.
‘I’m sorry, Eva.’
His apology fell into the abyss. There was, quite simply, nothing left to say.
When Isaac finally departed, I wrapped myself in the huge wool blanket he’d bought for my birthday. Soft, finely woven, outrageously expensive cashmere in the palest blue. Baby blue. Stepping onto the fire escape, I unscrewed the bottle of Jameson I’d bought in the Irish shop in the village and drank it straight from the neck. A police siren shrieked down in the street. Homeless people slammed dumpster lids, scavenging for yesterday’s scraps.
I finished the rest of the whiskey. The cold darkness gathered and swallowed the activities in my neighbours’ homes. The other apartments rang with someone’s laughter, a handful of cracked notes on a trumpet, an old piano playing ragtime.
A child’s mitten lies on the hall floor. Hand-knitted in chunky wool, it has a piece of elastic with an open safety pin at the top. It probably fell off as Aelita hurried her child into his coat. I inhale it, the wool scratching at my nose. Whatever it is I’m searching for it’s not in this piece of childish apparel, with its smell of fabric conditioner and bubble gum. What I search for cannot be found.
Isaac accompanied me to the clinic, a discreetly private oasis of pale carpets and walls, good prints of Impressionist paintings and uncrumpled magazines. He paid in advance with his credit card and left before I saw the doctor, because I insisted. I insisted because it was the only way I could convince myself that I was doing the right thing. We’d barely spoken since the wine throwing. Turns out our love was brittle after all, dismantled by the unwarranted entrance into our lives of unplanned upheaval. The disappointment that he was just like everyone else was grinding. Love conquers little in the end. I stood at the reception desk and watched his tall figure disappear through the automatic doors.
I haven’t seen him since.
Maude’s name appears on the screen of my phone. ‘Eva?’
She invites me down for dinner. It’s nice to be asked. I offer to cook, which she accepts readily. I suspect she just wants company.
A nurse brought me into the examination room. I clutched the positive lab slip in my sweating hand, held onto it while she placed my shaking legs in stirrups, covered me from the waist down with a white paper sheet. The table was cold beneath me.
‘You’re absolutely sure you want to do this?’ she asked, smoothing the sheet, then transferring her stroking fingers to my arm. I wanted to lie there forever, pretend she was my mother. I could have cried just from the kindness of her touch. She was about my age. I felt decades older.
I’d been through it all, the questions, conclusions, the scenarios I’d run ragged through my aching brain. I nodded. ‘I’m sure.’ Isaac hadn’t probed, hadn’t wished to break the thin membrane of relief that he was getting off so lightly. If I said to the nurse that I wanted to come back another day, I knew I wouldn’t return.
She touched my hand, her fingers cool and dry. ‘It’s not as bad as you think.’ Her smile was the most real thing about that room, with its scrubbed white walls and sterilised steel equipment. Her shoes squeaked softly on the tiled floor.
In the kitchen, I begin to make dinner. Nothing too complicated, just some chicken and rice. Maude loves rice. The water boils in the saucepan, and I cover it, the steam hot on my skin.
I wished Isaac had offered to marry me. Abandon his Upper West wife, with her trench coats and expensive shoes, and come and live with me. Even lying on that cold steel table, in the moments before the anaesthetic claimed me, before the doctor scraped my insides clean, I hoped he would come back, do everything I thought was mainstream and predictable, and carry me out of that expensive, hushed necropolis.
The sadness had an iron fist, and it gripped my soul in a vice. Afterwards, when I was empty, lying in recovery, I watched the light change shape on the white ceiling. Afternoon, mid afternoon, evening. I was staying the night. I hadn’t wanted to, but Isaac insisted. The nurse recommended it. Isaac said it was the least he could do.
It was the only thing he could do. A private room in a private clinic would have cost him, the bill a stain on his credit card account. He would quickly expunge it with justified self-assurance, seek solace in his wife’s inheritance, which allowed such extravagances to pass invisibly by.
They used words in the clinic. Procedure. Operation. Excision. Or what I had, dilation and curettage. The removal of that which remains. All spoken in the language of denial. I was as guilty as anyone who worked there. I described what had taken shape inside me as a foetus, an embryo, a zygote. Anything but baby. Never baby.
They filled me with pills, and I slept like a body buried. The cold blue light of my mind extinguished temporarily, the whirling regrets put to rest for a while. I departed the next day, the tablets leaving me with a head that felt stuffed with sponges. Physically, I felt fine. Inside, I was as far removed from the streets of New York City as it was possible to be.
It was one of those April days in Manhattan, when the sun was so bright against the windows that it hurt my brain. The city gargled dust trapped between its buildings. Sirens split the metropolis open, its wounds gaping and bleeding for anyone to see.
On the subway back to my apartment, I observed everyone go by, all of them cheerful and young. The train window resisted my finger as I wrote a word on it. Mother. I quickly wiped through it. No one had seen me. Not a mother any more. I hadn’t allowed myself to think about it, but I already missed what I was not going to be.
Not Mother. Not Mama.
What deluged me, brimmed inside me until I thought I would melt on the subway floor, was too much to be called grief. I kept expecting to cry, but how could tears help? Sorrow as deep as the dark doesn’t allow for tears. It freezes them, sends them scuttling to a fathomless place, never to be found. In the abyss, tears have no function.
I hardly knew who or what I was. I offered up thanks for the lingering remains of the medication. At least my mind only functioned at its most basic level.
I craved obliteration, instant obliteration, but I had no energy to throw myself in front of a car. I desired anything that would release me from the endless breathing and moving and grieving that constituted living.
I understood how my brother had killed himself. The sirens had sung too sweetly to be ignored, preening themselves on their chilly rocks, waving their arms in invitation to those undone. The promise of a land not ruled by despair, that gelid god.
It would be so easy. Just a mouthful of vodka and a fistful of pills.
But I didn’t have the courage to do it.
Spooning rice onto plates. Stirring chicken in a dish. These small tasks keep my mind from straying too far into the darkness. They moor me, vessel of sorrow that I am. It is easy to do this, to put rice on a plate and take it downstairs to where my great-aunt waits, her swollen leg raised on a footstool, the day’s paper on the sofa beside her. These are the things that can keep the night at bay.
I have no choice but to keep afloat.
CHAPTER 26
Andrew’s anniversary is marked by a brief notice in the In Memoriam column of today’s paper. Maude must have put it in; it has never occurred to me that this is what should be done. I suppose she is following what my mother most likely did each year at this time. I have remembered my brother constantly, but most especially on this day of days.
The sky is blocked by ravaged clouds the colour of molten lead, and the wind rattles the windows and doors. Cold air slips through every gap, sending the temperature indoors lower than it has any right to be. It is one of those Irish spring days, a day when it seems as though winter will never leave, as though we are condemned to inhabit for eternity a world of razor-toothed winds and shining sleet. Ice frosts the grass, makes the daffodils bow their heads in sorrow. People scurry by outside, bent into the gusts. This is the second wave of morning people, fewer now, their hurry less urgent than those who thronged the path two hours before. These are the less employed, perhaps, the elderly, the housewives, the students. Their time is more elastic than those who cram onto buses, into cars, pack the bike lanes between the hours of seven and nine.