Straying

by Molly McCloskey

  As we tumbled into our seats on the bus, he said, with that laconic jocularity that was his dominant register, “Well, there’s us in thirty years!” And we laughed with relief, as though the voicing of it had rendered it impossible. I pressed my head into the crook of his shoulder and ran the tip of my tongue slowly up the side of his neck, which was damp with the heat. He stopped laughing and slid a hand between my legs. I put my arms around him and we held each other, our eyes closed, waiting for the future to recede.

  By the time we drew apart, the shadows of his mother and Tom were gone and we were only ourselves again. I kissed him hungrily, and then, though there were two women about ten rows back, I raised myself up and straddled him and we ground slowly into each other. Our encounter with dissipation had only left us feeling lustier and more alive, and for a few moments we could not conceive of it—either of growing old or of seeing our spiritedness, our exuberance, reduced to the sad habit of spending long, bright Saturdays getting wearily blotto.

  We got off the bus at the station and from there boarded the train west, the heat waning sweetly and the air turning pure and fresh, confirming our exit from the sordid city. The world was one big, pathetic fallacy to us, and we had never felt so favored as we did at the outset of that last journey, the sky blue and enormous, the countryside opening like a promised land to receive us.

  KEVIN’S HOUSE WAS a humble little place on a quiet lane in Lower Rosses, overlooking a beach of pure white powder, one of many unsuspecting properties around there that would soon be worth a fortune. The Point was only on the brink of development that summer. The yacht club had long existed, but there were certainly no yachts there. There were not yet McMansions, there was no spa or leisure center, no kite-boarding school. It still had the ramshackle feel of an old seaside village.

  When we pulled up in the taxi, Kevin opened the front door and ushered us in with downcast eyes and an almost reverential air, as though we were on the run from baleful enemies and he was honored to offer us safe haven. Before he closed the door, he stared intently out at the taxi, which was idling on the roadside. I could see he was enjoying the part Cauley had asked him to play.

  Kevin worked on the building sites. He was a bachelor and a hoarder, and he drank too much. Cauley had told me that when they were in their teens, Kevin had, over the course of one summer, progressed from social to often solitary drinking. A couple of years later, a woman he’d hoped to marry left him over it. Kevin had tried and failed twice to get sober. Since then his life had closed in around him. His eyes were glassy and a bit elsewhere. The house was in disarray. In the spare bedroom, where Cauley and I would stay, as well as piles of discarded clothes, several empty stout bottles, and some faded paperbacks lying every which way, as though they’d been flung aside in disgust, there were three large triangles of broken glass, from a window or a picture frame, which Kevin had taken care to prop against a wardrobe. He saw me looking at them and said he’d been meaning to remove them.

  “I’m cooking chops in an hour,” he said. “There’s plenty.”

  I thanked him, and Cauley said, “Cheers, man.”

  Kevin backed out with what was nearly a bow, and Cauley and I sat beside each other on the bed.

  “Do you think he minds?” I asked.

  “Why should he mind?” Cauley said, and I remembered that men were different.

  Across the room, opposite the bed, was a picture window. We could see in the distance the long mountain that loomed behind my own house. It looked like a reprimand. I got up and closed the curtains, which were actually lace, pushed Cauley back on the bed, and lay down beside him. We didn’t speak. It felt as though we were both waiting for something to happen. We were here. Now what?

  * * *

  KEVIN SERVED LAMB chops and mashed potatoes, and we ate outside and afterward sprawled in the front yard, drinking cans of Heineken, our dinner plates scattered like Frisbees on the grass. The air had cooled, and we smoked lazily and stared up at the sky. I reached over and ran my finger along the curve of Cauley’s jaw. He let his head loll to the side, and we gazed at each other until I couldn’t take it anymore and turned away.

  Just after eight, we rose, drowsily, and Cauley suggested walking to the beach for sunset. Kevin said he’d do the washing up, but we made him come with us. We were trying to feel it wasn’t wrong, what we were doing, that we were just three friends knocking about, and we wanted it to look that way.

  We headed down the lane, and then along a path, till we got to the third beach just as the sun was sinking. We could see Lissadell across the inlet to the north and, to the west, the bay opening out into the Atlantic. There were whitecaps in the distance. I put on a pair of red-lensed sunglasses I had found on the floor in our bedroom. They made the few clouds on the horizon—which, to the naked eye, looked gray and tufty, like what you’d see along the skirting boards of an unswept room—glow like hot coals or swirling lava, what I imagined the end of everything might look like.

  When we got back to the house, a grainy twilight hung in the sitting room. Cauley got cans from the fridge, and the three of us sat talking till late, Cauley and I curled up on the sofa. We had never been in a house together. We had never displayed ourselves so openly as a couple. We felt drained and content, as though this happiness were an actual accomplishment of ours. We were self-satisfied and insular, radiating benevolence but interested, really, only in ourselves. My marriage, Eddie, the home we shared—those things barely impinged. Honestly, it was as though I thought I could forget my life, collapse it like a piece of furniture and stow it for the season.

  In the morning, Cauley and I woke to the chirping of birds. We could feel a light breeze through the open window, and the freshness made the room look all the more sordid. For whatever reason, we had not seen fit to move the triangles of broken glass to a safer spot, and we were lucky that in our nocturnal stumblings to the bathroom we hadn’t gored ourselves. Cauley christened the room the City of Glass, and naming it seemed to domesticate the danger.

  We made coffee and stayed in bed till noon. We talked about everything but the situation we were in. We talked about the summers he’d spent in Sligo as a child, and about his mother and my father and all the ways people fuck up their children, even when they’re not bad people. We talked about whether we drank too much, and then about the script he was writing—a black comedy about an Irish thug in Marbella who ends up raising a young girl, which sounded to me like a remake of Paper Moon. We talked about books, too—or he did, for Cauley was far better read than I—about Philip K. Dick and Borges and other writers I knew nothing about, and we talked about love. He quoted something from the letters of Katherine Mansfield, about how she thought that romantic love was the act of faith that had replaced God, and that what we wanted from the beloved was to be known as we once believed God knew us.

  He looked at me to see if I agreed or if this was what I expected from him.

  “You’ve read the letters of Katherine Mansfield?” I asked.

  “More or less,” he said.

  When we heard Kevin moving about, we dressed and went to join him. We found him standing in the middle of the kitchen, scratching his head and looking around like he’d never seen the place before. The tap was turned on full. Cauley shut it off. There was an open can on the table, which I thought was from the night before until Kevin picked it up and took a long swallow from it.

  Cauley backhanded him gently in the gut and said, “I’ll make us some breakfast.”

  * * *

  AFTER BREAKFAST WE sat around in the shade on the small back patio, reading bits to each other out of a week-old Irish Times. Finally, Kevin said he was going to walk over the field to the pub that faced the harbor on the other side of the Point, and we said we would go along. We set out buoyantly enough, but the sun was intense, and our initial brisk gait soon degenerated to a trudge. The air wavered in the heat. I was a few steps behind and could see the sweat rolling off the two of them, their pale skin s
o unsuited to the sun I imagined it erupting into blisters right before my eyes. For whatever reason, I thought of Cauley in New York, nineteen years old, the story he’d told me about his one stab at the city. I was thinking how out of character it seemed that he’d given up, but maybe that was what was driving him now; maybe he’d spend the rest of his life making up for it. I was thinking how easily things can go otherwise, how he could be living a life in New York now instead of schlepping across a field with the bay just beyond the rise and me behind him.

  Upon arriving at the pub, we collapsed dramatically at a picnic table in the gravel yard. It was a Sunday, and in the fine weather the place was packed. Of course, we saw people we knew. But we seemed to think we were invisible—invisible as lovers, at least, because we had Kevin as a foil, and because no one looked askance at us, and no one asked where Eddie was. I still didn’t get it, how much was observed but unspoken, and how little relation whatever did get said bore to what was known or surmised. And so we made merry, digging our own graves and smiling all the while.

  It wasn’t late, maybe eight o’clock, when we got a lift back to Kevin’s. I went into the bedroom and lay down on the tangled sheets. Cauley and Kevin were sitting out front on plastic chairs, and I listened to the hum of their voices and felt consoled. I thought, I could do this forever: lie here, listening to him, nothing required of me and nothing wanting. I felt a complete absence of ambition, I mean even the ambition to go to him. I thought, He is mine, and was astonished by my luck.

  That was what I was thinking about—my luck—when the phone rang.

  It took a moment for me to recognize what I was hearing—it seemed like ages since I’d heard a phone ring—but when I realized what the sound was, I was sure it must be Eddie calling. I had phoned our house that afternoon, before we’d gone to the pub, and left him a message, knowing he wouldn’t be back till the evening. I’d told him where I was. I’d said that a bunch of us had come here for a party, a bonfire on the beach, and that I would be home tomorrow. I had left him Kevin’s number; it would’ve seemed odd not to.

  Now I scurried to the entryway and stared at the phone. Kevin ambled in from outside, and when he saw me, he hesitated. “Right,” he said, and went back out the door. The answering machine clicked on, and Eddie’s voice came through, as crisp and level as a pilot’s. He said that he was back and that he could pick me up and that I should let him know when I got in.

  When the message ended, I went into the kitchen and fished a can of Heineken out of the fetid chaos of Kevin’s refrigerator and sat there in the semi-dark, my heart racing from the shock of Eddie’s voice. I imagined phoning him and saying, Yes, do, come for me, and slipping out the kitchen door and back to him, now, quietly, before it was too late. And in the next moment all I wanted was to hide, to never leave this house or go back to that one. I thought maybe it could be as simple as drawing a line under one life and beginning another.

  I heard Cauley and Kevin coming into the sitting room from outside. Cauley called my name, then wandered into the kitchen and said, “What are you doing in the dark?” He stood behind me and rubbed my shoulders, and a wilting sensation came over me, but when I didn’t answer, he stopped. He leaned closer and whispered, “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” I said. I put my hand over his and didn’t look up.

  “Nothing?”

  “Eddie phoned.”

  His grip on my shoulders slackened.

  “Just leave me for a bit,” I said.

  Kevin came in then, and Cauley straightened and mumbled something to him. Kevin said something back and opened the fridge and got them each a can. Then they left the room, quietly and with an almost professional discretion, as though my marriage were a medical condition I was better off attending to in private.

  * * *

  UNTIL THE MOMENT I heard his car in the drive, it hadn’t occurred to me that Eddie would come to Kevin’s. I was still sitting in the kitchen, and Kevin and Cauley were in the front room. I got up to go outside—I didn’t want Eddie coming into the house—and the two of them watched me cross the room as though they were seeing a ghost. I met Eddie in the drive, and we stood looking at each other. He tipped his head toward the car and said, with no particular inflection, “Come home. Looks like the party is over.”

  When I didn’t say anything, Eddie walked to the edge of the drive and peered up the lane just for something to do. It was a gorgeous evening—balmy air, deep-pink skies, a few puffy clouds to the west. I followed him and sat on the wall that enclosed Kevin’s yard. Eddie turned back but didn’t sit. He stood there with his hands on his hips.

  “Come home,” he said again.

  I hesitated and, to my own surprise, said, “What will you do if I don’t?”

  I don’t know what I meant by that, exactly. I wasn’t issuing a challenge, and I don’t think I meant ever. Perhaps I wanted him to say: Take all the time you need. Or to assure me that there would be no consequences.

  He sighed and looked down at his feet. I could feel Cauley in the house behind us. “I don’t know what I’ll do,” he said.

  A car rolled past, slowly, and we both stared after it.

  “I need to gather my things.”

  “Okay,” he said, and turned toward the car.

  “I want you to go ahead. I’ll be there shortly. I’ll call a taxi.”

  He turned back to me, irritated. “That’s silly.”

  Was it? I didn’t know anymore what we were pretending and what was simply going unsaid.

  “I’ll wait,” he said again.

  And again I said no. “I’ll be home. I promise.”

  His expression changed then, to something like disgust.

  * * *

  KEVIN’S HOUSE WAS nearly dark inside. Cauley followed me into the bedroom. The sound of the car grew fainter, then disappeared.

  Cauley tried to turn on a lamp, but the bulb popped. He cursed and switched on the ceiling light, which must’ve been about ten watts. “What happened?”

  I lied to him. Or maybe I didn’t. Because already I wasn’t sure I could do what I’d promised Eddie I would. I slipped my arms around his waist, and he returned the embrace, though tentatively.

  “I’m not sure what happened,” I said. “I don’t know what he knows.”

  I said that we’d argued about my going home, and then he’d driven off. Cauley waited for me to say more. Poor Cauley. He must’ve felt the weight of it, Eddie’s arrival, and his departure, and the fact that I was still here. He pulled me closer and stroked my hair very gently, and although it seems cheap to claim it, I think we felt, in that moment, ennobled. For all the lies and the guilt and the selfishness, we believed this was a situation we were equal to. That we wouldn’t leave each other in the lurch. We stood embracing in the gloom, afraid to speak, awed by what we’d done.

  * * *

  JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, I called a taxi from Kevin’s phone. Cauley was asleep. When I came back into the room, I had to turn on the ceiling light to find my things.

  Cauley woke and sat up in the bed and squinted at me, confused. “What are you doing?” he said. “Are you leaving?”

  I was picking my belongings up off the floor—a hairbrush and underwear, a T-shirt, a skirt, two books. How had I scattered so much in such a short time? In the near-dark I almost walked into the glass propped against the wardrobe. “Jesus.”

  “Be careful,” Cauley said. He got out of bed and went to the window and lifted the curtain daintily. He thought Eddie had come back. Seeing nothing, he turned around and shook his head, still half asleep. “What the fuck?”

  I stopped what I was doing and stood in the middle of the room, in the middle of the mess, and tried to keep from losing it entirely.

  “Can we talk tomorrow?” I said. “Can you call me tomorrow?”

  He had moved to the bedroom doorway, where he was leaning in the shadows, his arms crossed over his chest, as though to block my path. I wondered if he was capable of that. �
��Why did we come here?” he asked.

  “Why did we come here?”

  “Yeah. Why did we come here?”

  I looked at the floor. I knew what he was accusing me of—of having delivered us to Eddie. Of creating the conditions whereby Eddie could carry me off like a trophy. But that was crediting me with more forethought and strategizing than I was capable of. If I can say one thing in my favor with regard to those days, it’s that I had no idea, from one hour to the next, what I was doing.

  I said nothing. Anything I said would be the wrong thing, and it wasn’t like I knew the answer. I zipped my bag shut. In the bedroom doorway I stopped and rubbed my cheek slowly over Cauley’s, which was rough with the need of a shave. One of us moaned, softly, and I’m afraid that it was me.

  WHEN I WAS a girl I had a big cutaway dollhouse. I used to squat on my haunches in front of it, arranging and rearranging the furniture, thrilling to the sweep of my perspective. Each room in it was like a museum exhibition, the American home circa 1900—bare floorboards, the furniture spartan but pretty. Mostly, I felt like the benevolent custodian of my domain, but every so often, on a whim, I would reach in with my giant’s hand and cast all of it out upon the carpet—beds and dressers and chairs tumbling from the upstairs rooms as though the earth had shook—so that I could start again.

  I felt that urge these last months, or something like it, peering into Eddie’s house as though from on high, clicking from image to image, from room to room. I wanted to reach in and rearrange it all, so that when Eddie and his wife came through the door and looked around, they would be suddenly unsure of themselves. I didn’t want to haunt them, exactly, or to take my husband back. It was more a desire for a rent in the fabric of reality.