“Do you ever hear from him?” I asked.
“He’s in London.”
I knew that much. I’d seen it on the Internet. He runs a theater company there. His wife is a set designer.
“He went a bit off the rails, you know.”
I hadn’t known, but it was easy to imagine. Cauley was wired, on a collision course with something—even I could see it, as heedless as I was then, all the energy he didn’t yet know how to harness.
“But he pulled it together. He’s married, he’s got two boys. He came out to the house a few months ago.”
“Really?” It shouldn’t have surprised me that Cauley still visited: he and Kevin had been friends since childhood. But I was startled to think of him here so recently.
Kevin poured what was left of the water into our glasses, then drained his. A bird hopped brightly on the wall. The sun was shining. It was steamy then, after the rain, like we were in the tropics. A hundred meters down the road was the wide sandy beach. I envied him, in a way. A house of his own, the sea on his doorstep. Knowing what his life consisted of and where it was rooted. A life of limits isn’t necessarily easier, but there is something clarifying in it, and beauty makes up for a lot.
It was late afternoon when I left Kevin, heading back to town along the sea road. Crossing the bridge, I could see the hostel where I had lived that first summer. To the left, the low, drab skyline of Stephen Street, and to the right, the docks where Eddie’s showroom and flat had been. Then I was back on the relief road, which had finally been built, carved right through the town’s center, houses bulldozed to make way. High walls of forbidding gray stone had been erected either side of it, so that I felt I was driving past a prison, or out of one.
* * *
THE HOUSE CREAKS and ticks, as though light-footed creatures are living their little lives all around me. I sit down at the kitchen table and make a list for tomorrow. Harry is coming for brunch. He said we’re going to have a reverse housewarming. I asked him what that meant, and he said that it was when, instead of imprinting yourself upon a new place through objects, you think about what the place you’re leaving has given you, the intangible things, and how you’ll bring those with you to the next life. “By which I mean,” he said, “the next place you live.”
I nodded. It sounded interesting. “Is that a ritual?” I asked. “Where do they do this?”
He shrugged, smiling. “I made it up.”
I picture Harry in the kitchen here, conjuring on my behalf. I remember what he said once about how everywhere you leave stays with you. In a satchel on the table in front of me, in a wallet-sized folder that holds nothing else, is a photo of my mother. It is my favorite of the dozens I’ve held on to. She is four years old, and the look of bliss on her face as she stands ankle-deep in the Pacific is more than I know what to do with. Her head is tilted up and her eyes are closed, as though she has heard a whisper from on high. I look at that child and I hold her in the kind of awe in which my mother once held me. I feel my mother less acutely than I did even one week ago. But what I lose in intensity, I seem to gain in diffuseness: I feel her everywhere. I think of her belongings, the few I saved. From where I’m sitting I can see them, in a box on the landing, awaiting transport to the next life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for their ongoing and generous support. Thank you to Brendan Barrington, Lucy Luck, Liese Mayer, Valerie Steiker, Mary Costello, Una Mannion, Adam, Ciarán, and the Searson family of Monkstown.
This novel grew out of a short story, “City of Glass,” which appeared in Town & Country: New Irish Short Stories. Thanks to Kevin Barry, who edited that anthology.
The lines “ ‘What does it mean,’ he asks, ‘when people say, “She’s out of her misery?” Why the present tense? Who’s this she we’re speaking of?’ ” (page 36) are based on lines from Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary: “In the sentence ‘She’s no longer suffering,’ to what, to whom does she refer? What does that present tense mean?”
A Scribner Reading Group Guide
Straying
Molly McCloskey
This reading group guide for Straying includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
Intimate and quietly stunning, Straying is the story of Alice, a young American raised by a single mother who finds herself in the west of Ireland in the late 1980s, where she meets and marries an Irishman. One summer, a chance encounter with a charismatic playwright leads to an affair that upends her life. Years later, having worked in war zones around the world, and following her mother’s death, Alice returns to Ireland and confronts her past. Straying is a searing account of passion and ambivalence and a rich exploration of how we define love and desire, family and home.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. In the very beginning of the book, Alice immediately admits to having an affair. Why does she share this information right away? What kind of relationship is she trying to establish with the reader?
2. On page 26 Alice says, “For as long as I could remember, there’d been a vague disquiet in me, as if I lived in the shadow of some humiliation whose particulars I could not recall.” What does she mean? How does this revelation explain some of Alice’s actions?
3. What do you think about the structure of the novel? Why does the author switch between past and present?
4. On page 37, Alice says that she remembers impressions, images, and people “who were more interesting as symbols than as individuals.” What does she mean? What does this reveal about her?
5. Alice very much admires and respects her mother, particularly her decision to be a single mother when she got pregnant by a man she didn’t love. How does Alice’s relationship with her mother influence her decisions? What impact does Alice’s father have?
6. On page 74, Eddie tells Alice a story about a man who was having an affair. Why do you think Eddie told Alice this story? Do you think he suspected Alice of having an affair, even though she was still faithful at that time? How do you think he expected Alice to react?
7. What do you make of Alice’s job working in war zones around the world? How does it change your opinion of her? What purpose does Alice’s relationship with her colleague Harry serve?
8. Why do you think Alice decided to cheat, and how does she rationalize her decision? Read and discuss from “I’d wanted to gather him in” on page 116 to “I must’ve thought about little else that summer” on page 117 in which Alice reflects on what she wanted from the affair.
9. Why do you think Molly McCloskey wrote the novel in first person? How would it have been different if written in third person?
10. Why do you think Alice must constantly push boundaries, first with her marriage and then with her relationship with Cauley?
11. How would the novel be different if the narrator were a man cheating on his wife, rather than a woman cheating on her husband? How does the novel engage gender roles? How does it challenge our different expectations and judgments of men and women?
12. Why do you think Eddie showed up at Kevin’s to retrieve Alice? If he already knew she was having an affair, why didn’t he broach the subject sooner?
13. Why do you think Alice wanted to return home and revisit this moment in her life?
14. How does your impression of Alice change throughout the novel? Were you able to understand her motives?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Compare other beloved novels involving extramarital affairs—Desperate Characters by Paula Fox, Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright, or Brick Lane by Monica Ali, for example. What was different or similar about this novel? Why do you think people are interested in reading abou
t affairs?
2. Imagine Staying is being made into a movie: whom would you cast for the lead roles?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© LEONE BRANDER
Molly McCloskey is the author of three works of fiction and the memoir Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother. Straying is her first work of fiction to be published in the United States. She has served as writer-in-residence at Trinity College, Dublin; University College Dublin; and George Washington University in Washington, DC. In 2016, she was a judge for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Having lived half of her life in Ireland, she now resides in Washington, DC.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Molly McCloskey
Originally published in 2017 in Great Britain by Penguin Random House UK as When Light Is Like Water
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First Scribner hardcover edition February 2018
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Interior design by Kyle Kabel
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Jacket photographs: Photograph of Woman © Sevgi K/Moment/Getty Images; Background © Dennis Janssen/Moment Open/Getty Images
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017050606
ISBN 978-1-5011-7246-5
ISBN 978-1-5011-7248-9 (ebook)
Straying Page 18