Straying

by Molly McCloskey

  I made us lunch, and afterward she sat in her soft chair in the living room with a crossword on her lap, watchful and mostly silent. She seemed different—remote, detached—and I worried that this was not a fleeting mood but the result of damage to her brain. In myself I observed a peculiar unease, a feeling that I’d trespassed on her deepest privacies by witnessing the indignity of her befuddlement, what was surely a milestone in her progress toward death.

  THE DAYS OR weeks between meetings with Cauley were spent in a state of nervous anticipation in which I wished, desperately, to be assured that I was gambling wisely and well. I would fall prey to the fear that our next rendezvous would surely be the moment when the whole thing went flat before our eyes. Then the day would come, the minutes ticking toward his appearance until, finally, there he was. And always there was a sense of—it is hardly too strong a word—horror. Not horror at him, exactly, but horror at my own foolishness: that I had allowed the effects of this thing to become so disproportionate to their cause. I suppose they were unavoidable, those moments of deflated rapture.

  On one of these occasions, we were to meet in a pub on Chatham Street. Dublin still felt like a foreign country to me, exotic and perilous, and with a language and customs all its own. I couldn’t get a clear sense of it, all the leafy squares and the Georgian grandeur, and at the same time something recalcitrant and primal, the side streets still with a tenement-era reek about them. I made my way on foot from Connolly station, crossing the river and stopping at a newsagent’s on Grafton Street. As I came out, a skinny young man strode past me, his eyes doing a sweep of the crowd. He had a filthy blanket clutched at his neck like a cape and such an air of purpose about him that he looked like a dystopian superhero.

  Cauley was in the pub when I arrived. It was almost six p.m., late in August. A grotty light streamed in through the stained glass. I saw him before he saw me. He was reading a magazine, one leg crossed over the other, a pint on the table. Whatever way the sun was hitting him, he looked practically translucent. It spooked me. I had my usual moment of doubt, but stronger this time and different in kind: a sudden stark dread. A shiver passed through me, a tickle at the top of my spine. I could’ve been staring at a stranger.

  For a split second I thought that I was capable of it after all, of letting him go. In fact, I felt like fleeing. I actually considered it. I saw myself going straight back to the station and getting on the next train west.

  Cauley looked up, too quickly, and caught my expression. This was normally the point at which the horror would soften into a feeling of uncertain alarm, and then into shyness; when I would go to him and he would put his arms around me and rub his rough cheek gently against mine, a creaturely gesture I adored, and the doubt would evaporate.

  None of that happened, though. He didn’t rise to reassure me. Instead, I saw alarm in his own eyes and knew that my expression had given me away.

  I walked over to him.

  “What’s wrong?” he said, standing.

  I said something about colliding with a junkie.

  “Oh,” he said, and seemed to relax slightly. “Are you okay?” He put his hand on my arm and went to kiss me, and I turned aside and said, “Can you get me a drink?”

  By the time he came back with my pint, he looked nervous and distant. It seemed that a moment’s wavering from me was all it took for his own misgivings to break the surface, for love’s false floor to be revealed.

  * * *

  IT WAS A terrible evening, the only truly terrible evening we ever had. At dinner, he worked very hard to make conversation, and I sat there, coldly observing him.

  Finally, he got tetchy. “What is with you tonight?” he said.

  And I said something stupid, like, “I’m not always a laugh a minute.”

  “I don’t expect you to be a laugh a minute.”

  “Well, then.”

  “Well, then, what?”

  “Then let me be.”

  “But why won’t you talk to me about it?”

  “About what?”

  And around and around we went, until our plates were cleared and he paid the bill. I watched and thought, It’s killing him, paying the bill, and instead of offering to help, which I always did—an awkward gesture, because of course some of my playing-around money was Eddie’s—I sat there watching him, enjoying his diminishment. A meanness had surfaced in me, and I felt helpless to rein it in. He left an excessive tip, to spite me, I thought, and we exited the restaurant in single file, like some old married couple grown sick of the sight of each other.

  When we got outside, I steered him into the mouth of an alleyway, pushed him up against the wall, and kissed him ardently, a kiss that he returned in kind.

  “Let’s go to my place,” he said, a fistful of my hair in his hand, his lips thick at my ear.

  When we got to the bedsit, it felt all wrong. Everything that had moved me—the humble collection of dress shirts, hung with such care; the accoutrements of creativity and the quiet heroism of artistic struggle they bespoke; the very neatness of the place—now struck me as simply sad. All I could see was cheap cabinetry and curtains that needed cleaning. We tripped toward the bed and had raunchy, untender sex, the kind that would’ve thrilled us had we not been in the grip of resentment. Afterward, I curled into a ball and cried, feeling sloppy and tragic, while he lay there staring at the ceiling, scratching lazily at his chest.

  In the morning, I woke sticky with the heat. The usual sounds were rising from the street. I put on one of Cauley’s shirts and sat up in front of the window and peered out at grubby Rathmines. Dublin is miserable in the rain, but unambiguous sunlight doesn’t flatter it either. It’s a city that is at its best under florid, tumultuous skies, or at sunset on a summer evening, when the light rolls in low from the west and all the filth is hidden in shadow and the river gleams.

  Cauley wasn’t there. He might’ve been in the bathroom down the hall, or he might’ve gone out for the paper—he always woke early. I flopped back down on the bed, a film of sex on my skin, and thought of Eddie. I felt, as insupportable as it sounds, betrayed by him. For knowing what I was doing and not confronting me, for thinking he could just carry on, blow past it or wait it out, for letting me stew here in this awful little trap I had built for myself. A wave of nostalgia rolled over me, a yearning for something wholesome, for him. I thought of a certain autumn afternoon. We were on a weekend break at a restored stately home, and we had rented bikes and ridden on a path that followed a river. It was getting near dinnertime, and we decided to forgo the five-course meal that awaited us, going instead to a pub that served steak and chips. A smell of fried food was leaching from the kitchen. Two men at the next table ate steaks even bigger than ours, holding their knives like pencils and not saying a word to each other but keeping their faces to their plates until I thought they’d lick them clean. I think there was a time in this country when no one spoke, just sat there in a savage silence.

  Eddie and I had to cycle home in the dark—he went in front and warned me if there was a tree root or a bend in the path—and when we finally got back to our hotel we ordered whiskeys and nestled by the fire, two people who knew exactly what they meant to each other and reveled in the knowledge.

  Cauley came in with the papers and a pint of milk. When he looked at me, I saw a trace of affection, and I offered him one of those sheepish smiles that stop just short of apology. I got up and put the kettle on. We didn’t say much. We were both hungover, headachy and spent. When we brushed against each other, we flinched and said, “Sorry,” as though our actual flesh were tender to the touch. We drank Nescafé and cooked rashers on the portable stove, and I nearly forgot that this was where he lived. The room seemed like a stage set to me, provisional and laid on, as though the dishes, the furniture, the tea towels—all of it, down to the box of tissues on the side table—had been arranged for our use and would be stowed again at the conclusion of our run. I had thought, the first time I visited Cauley, that he’d i
mposed order on the place on my account. But later I realized it had nothing to do with me. There was something in it that spoke volumes about Cauley, an air of white-knuckled necessity. It was how I imagined a soldier’s tent might feel, its order a stay against the outside world or the inner maelstrom.

  I felt a strong need to be out of there.

  I said, “I have an idea. Let’s go to Rosses Point.” We were sitting at the table, leafing through the papers and gnawing at some toast, and my anxiety was building. I wanted to leave. But I didn’t want to leave Cauley. I wanted two mutually exclusive things: to flee and to be cocooned, to rid myself of Cauley while pulling him close.

  He looked up from the paper. “What?”

  “We could stay with Kevin.” Kevin who had introduced us, who knew all about us, because Cauley had told him.

  He gave me a frigid little smile and said in a tone he might’ve employed with a child, “That sounds like a really bad idea. Why do you want to do that?”

  “Eddie is in England,” I said. “We’ll go straight to Kevin’s. We won’t go into town at all. I want to get out of Dublin.”

  He eyed me steadily. He was right, it was a bad idea; maybe it was even a test—of him, or of us, or of myself. We sat for a while in silence, staring at the tabletop. He was weighing it all up. He was afraid I was leaving him; I could nearly smell the fear off him. And yet I was insisting he come with me, back into the belly of my life. He could either let me go, there and then, and that might be the end of it, or he could say yes and see where I was leading him.

  “You know I’m nearly skint,” he said.

  “My ticket is for tomorrow. I’ll have to buy another anyway. I can buy yours.”

  “No,” he said.

  After a minute or two I got up and began to gather my things. I wasn’t going to leave just like that, but I needed to occupy myself.

  “Let me see what I can do,” he said. He got up and went to the hall, where the pay phone was, but I didn’t hear him speak.

  “PJ isn’t picking up,” he said, when he came back. PJ was a friend of his, and one of the few things I knew about him was that he had a proper job. I was leaning against the kitchen unit, drinking a cup of water. Cauley took the cup from my hand and set it down and put his arms around me. All the tenderness that had been missing the night before flooded in now. Maybe we saw ourselves coming to an end. Or maybe we thought it was finally getting real. The feel of him was good, and I pressed my hips against his, and he sighed. He let his head fall back and I nipped gently at his exposed neck.

  “Okay,” he said, and kissed my forehead, and went out to the pay phone again. When he came back, he said, “I’ll get some cash, and we’ll go.”

  And that was how I met his mother.

  CAULEY’S PARENTS, LONG separated, were the inverse of that old trope of the Irish marriage, the drama of male misconduct and female martyrdom, often hinging on drink. I never met his father, but I gathered that he was a steely, inward-looking man. Cauley thought there was a woman he spent time with, but back then, especially down the country, anything resembling life after marriage was viewed as shabby or ignoble and wasn’t always talked about.

  Maeve, Cauley’s mother, was some kind of civil servant. She had left Cauley’s father some years ago, and though Cauley had never said that she’d left him for Tom, the man she was now living with, I sensed that was the case. Cauley didn’t like Tom, and I think he didn’t want to admit that this was the man for whom his mother had thrown away the family.

  Tom was from Longford, and he owned a breaker’s yard out near Swords. I imagined him in a pair of greasy coveralls, with enormous oil-blackened hands. Cauley’s mother I pictured heavily made up, jagged and slatternly.

  We had arranged to meet them at a pub in . . . was it Inchicore? Phibsborough? Terenure? I can’t remember. Those places were indistinguishable to me then, blending together in a sea of pebble dash and red brick and illogical traffic flows.

  I can recall that pub’s interior, though, like it was yesterday. It was just after noontime. The August sun was pouring through the open doors like divine light. A smell of stale beer rose from the dark floorboards; cigarette smoke drifted lacily past. The place was empty but for Maeve and Tom at the bar and two older men sitting at a corner table, and all four of them were smoking.

  Cauley and I had taken the bus instead of splurging on a taxi. We’d sat on the very front bench upstairs. I had wanted to sit there for the view—the double-deckers were inordinately thrilling to me—but that day it was all too much. I felt queasy and vertiginous, pitched headlong onto the streets, which vanished in a rolling motion underneath us, as though we were copilots losing altitude at a furious rate. Then again, everything felt vertiginous those days. I had always imagined adultery would feel shadowy and whispered, a world in black and white, all cobblestone and dripping eaves, but what it felt like was being always on the run, everything breathless and fractured and a bit ridiculous.

  Neither Maeve nor Tom bore any resemblance to my imaginings. Tom wore a golf shirt and pressed slacks. There was a slight air of the spiv about him, the snake-oil salesman. He might once have been handsome in a hale, seafaring way, but his face had acquired the reddish-purple hue of high blood pressure and dissipation. He struck me as a man slightly ashamed, whose manner of surviving that had been to adopt an awkward bravado, unconvincing even to himself. As for Maeve, she looked much like every other middle-aged Maeve I had encountered: a sturdy matron in slacks and blouse and, pinned to her heaving bosom, an amoeba-shaped brooch.

  Tom saw us first and called out too loudly, “There they are!” Maeve turned, blew a jet of smoke toward the yellowed ceiling, and looked us over for a moment before saying gently to her son, “Hiya, pet.” She gave me a glassy little smile. “And you’re Alice,” she said, as though assigning parts in a school play. She stubbed out her cigarette and didn’t offer her hand.

  Tom shook my hand, overeager, compensating for Maeve’s coolness. “Sit,” he said, “sit. What are you having?”

  Cauley had told me that we would need to have a drink with them, that he couldn’t just borrow money from his mother and leave. So we took the stools beside them, ordered pints, and proceeded to talk about absolutely nothing. I mean, we talked about the traffic that had made us late getting there, and then about some match—I wasn’t even sure what sport was at issue—and of course we talked about the weather, though by then the summer’s unending sun was a fairly worked-through topic and the collective sense of wonder had been replaced by feelings of fatigue and unreality.

  And then Tom said to Cauley, “How’s the scribbling?” and winked at me. Maeve looked hard at her son—I could tell she took his writing seriously.

  Cauley tipped his head quickly, dismissively, and turned pointedly away from Tom. “You know yourself,” he said.

  “I don’t,” Tom said. He looked at me. “I loved Shaw as a boy.”

  “You’re working hard,” Maeve said to Cauley.

  Tom said to no one in particular, “We who tread the boards are not the only players of parts in this world.”

  Cauley still refused to look at him. “That wasn’t Shaw,” he said, sounding bored.

  I felt sorry for Tom. I think what he wanted was to package up this mixture of admiration and resentment that he felt for what Cauley did—this thing that mattered to Cauley and that it seemed he had a talent for but which made him so little money he had to come begging to his mother—and to deliver it in the form of a cutting aside. But he wasn’t clever enough, or sufficiently clear-headed, to pull it off.

  Maeve was harder to read. I wasn’t sure what kind of face I should be putting on. Contrite? Deferential? Ashamed? Or, on the contrary, unashamed? I intended to love and honor her son. But could I really do it? I had no idea. I had no idea what I was made of.

  She asked me a single question: “Are you in Dublin for long?”

  I fumbled the response. “Heading home today,” I said, then attempted to cor
rect myself. “Heading back . . .” The symmetry was making us all slightly queasy. She caught me watching her a few times. The question I wanted to ask was: What’s it like leaving your husband?

  She was reserved, wry, vaguely disapproving. They were both disapproving. But it wasn’t our affair they objected to so much as it was our happiness, and probably our youth—that we were young enough to believe that whatever we were feeling really mattered, to think that none of this had ever happened to anyone before, not in the way it was happening to us. They resented the flighty, brazen way we were hurling ourselves at life. They resented our ignorance of each other and ourselves. It wasn’t that Maeve and Tom didn’t love each other—I think they did. But there was a current of weariness and cynicism running between them. They were deeply, committedly alcoholic, and in on it together: the grim enterprise of being themselves. It wasn’t only the drink, though, that dishonored them, it was the legal limbo of the undivorced. They had about them a fugitive air, and an uncertainty about how much their transgressions mattered.

  At some point, a signal must’ve passed between Cauley and his mother because she slipped him a wad of notes, and we all glanced quickly around, as though something crooked were taking place. The whole encounter felt like a burlesque of the classic meeting with a lover’s parents, where instead of offering you living proof that love lasts and esteem endures, instead of welcoming you to the land of long-term commitment, they press fifty quid into your hand and tell you to keep your head down.

  After an hour or so, we made our excuses. Cauley kissed his mother on the cheek, and I shook Tom’s hand and half bowed to Maeve, as though she were a cleric—she still seemed disinclined to touch me—and off we flew. I see us running down the street, running as though to catch the last-ever bus, running as though we’d just robbed a bank and our whole mad, vibrant lives were about to begin. We weren’t actually running; of that much I’m certain. It was another hot day and neither of us was the least bit fit. But I remember it that way because that was how it felt—like we had so much life in us we couldn’t contain it. Of course, we were running from ourselves, too. No great powers of deduction were required to recognize that we had just been presented with a version of our future: it was the sort of thing Cauley might’ve called, in one of his theater reviews, a gross oversignification.