He whispers, “Heather, I’m so glad you’re here. It feels so right that you’re here. I don’t even understand why it feels so right.”
I think, that’s what you said to me last year, you idiot. And then, it feels so right because you’re in love with me, stupid. What a fool you were to keep me at arm’s length. I feel a tremendous surge of victory in my chest. I think, maybe you are smarter and cooler than all those other single women. Maybe you are the smartest, coolest person in the world.
Then I decide to take a little ecstasy.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
It’s three days later. A kind of hazy mist is hanging over Dublin. I can’t tell if it’s actually raining. It’s more like the air itself is wet. Although it’s only about three thirty, the light is already beginning to wane in the sky. When I look up, it’s all gray, beginning to fade not yet to black but to something close enough to it that I bring my head down and burrow deeper into my coat.
People passing me on the street seem vague. Not quite like actual humans. It doesn’t bother me, though. I just notice it.
Later
It’s dark in St Stephen’s Green. Just past five. I sit on a bench. Something so odd I’ve seen. All over Dublin this winter, the cherry blossoms are in bloom.
Later
Sitting in Bewley’s, looking out the big plate windows onto Grafton Street. Drinking hot tea.
Eleanor wants me to come home. She says she’s scared for me. She sent me a list of flights for tomorrow morning and said she’ll pay the cost of changing my ticket. My apartment is rented out until mid-January, but she says I should come live with her until then. I’m not wholly opposed to this. Just I can’t really imagine getting myself from here to the airport. That seems beyond me.
I don’t know what has happened. I will record as best I can.
I knocked back the ecstasy with a bottle of beer. And all the rest of the night until it began to grow light out, Kieran and I danced together. He wouldn’t let go of me. He held me around the waist; he ran his hands over my hair and brushed his fingertips across my cheeks. He kissed the top of my head and my eyes. He didn’t look at anything except me for the rest of the night, his eyes wide with what seemed liked love. I wanted to say, Kieran, is this real or is this the ecstasy, but I didn’t want to be a spoilsport. As dawn broke, we sat together on his couch, his arm around my shoulder, our hands intertwined, our heads touching. When people were starting to leave, they came over to the couch to say good-bye, and Kieran didn’t even let go of me then. He just extended his free arm to shake the hands offered him. “Okay, good-bye, thanks for coming. Okay. Bye. Bye.”
He was whispering to me, “Stay the night with me, girl. Please. Sleep in my bed, where you belong. You will, won’t you, sweetheart? Say you will.”
Finally, I was too drowsy and happy to be cool, strong, and independent anymore. So I said, “Yes, Kieran.” And I headed off to bed while he said good-bye to the last of the guests.
He said he’d be right behind me, but I’d hardly call it that. It seemed an eternity I waited for him, naked, in his bed. But finally he came down and I had him in my arms. He was kissing my neck and my throat and murmuring my name, and I just thought, I want to give him everything. I want to kiss him on every inch of his body until there is nowhere left to kiss. I want him to feel safe and protected and nourished. I want to take away the pain of his ex-wife and his mother and his poor, sick daughter. I want to infuse him with love.
I told him what a wonderful man he was. I told him he was brave and strong and that I could see he was suffering and that one day it would pass. I told him how beautiful he was and that he turned me on more than any man had in ten years. I kissed him everywhere.
It’s hard to describe what happens in bed. What words do you even use? Making love? Blech. Sex? So clinical. Fucking? No way. But whatever you want to call it, that’s what happened. I think, I have never really let myself be exposed sexually in front of anyone—only Josh at the very beginning. But here, now, in this moment, I can. I can be as open and ugly as an oyster cracked out of its shell and Kieran will love me and want me. And oh my God, I never knew how blissful it would be out of my shell.
There was late-afternoon sun coming in through the curtain above Kieran’s bed when I fell asleep—on top of him, curled up against his chest, him holding me tight.
And then it was a little bit later. I’m not sure how much later. I was on my stomach and Kieran was behind me and putting himself inside me. I was confused because I’d fallen into a deep sleep. I said, “Kieran, hold on a second,” because I wasn’t quite ready. I said, “Kieran, wait.” And I twisted around to see him, but he wasn’t paying any attention to me. It didn’t feel good. I was sore. “Kieran, hold on.” His face was up to the ceiling, his back arched, and I didn’t even recognize the expression on his face. But before I could even make sense of what was happening or figure out what to do, he was already pulling himself out and letting out a long cry and ejaculating across my back. He fell panting on top of me. I could feel his heart beating through his rib cage, through mine. It felt like he was crushing me. Then he pushed himself off against the small of my back with the flat of his hand.
“Now maybe I can fucking sleep,” he said. And blackness descended on me.
“I come with you so hard—I don’t understand,” I heard him whisper. And then he was asleep. But I wasn’t. I was back out in that dark ocean, drifting in this blackness. It stretched so far, just trying to imagine its boundaries made me dizzy. Even as I flailed my arms and kicked my feet, I was sinking. I thought, something terrible has happened and there’s no going back from it. I felt Kieran’s hand on the small of my back. I heard, now maybe I can fucking sleep.
I thought, there is something waiting for you at the bottom of this ocean and it is not a friendly thing. Kieran flung an arm over my stomach. I turned away, but he moved with me. I thought: What do you want from me? And even though he was there, I was completely alone, like I was the only other person on the planet, surrounded by this vast, black emptiness. I wanted to cry out, but I realized there was no point because there was nothing to be said, no words from Kieran or anyone else that would save me. I thought, that thing is coming. That thing I foretold to Eleanor in the waning light of autumn in New York—some slouching thing, creeping up from the bottom of this ocean to get me.
I clutched the comforter with both hands. I was waiting, praying, for sleep to take me away, but it never came.
In my tangerine room in Avalon House everything fell apart. On Sunday, the day after the party, Kieran and I didn’t even get up until six p.m., when it was already black outside. And then we went to hear this Sudanese group Kieran had gotten us tickets for. But Kieran wouldn’t even look at me. We ran into friends of his and he didn’t introduce me. When we got back to his place, we sat in his kitchen and he started talking about his daughter. I tried to be sympathetic, but he was icily furious in his refusal to take my sympathy. And then he just sat with his head in his hands. I said, “Are you okay, Kieran? Is there anything I can do?” And he said, “I’m dead tired,” and walked out of the room. Then when I crawled into bed beside him, he held on to me so tightly I could barely breathe, his arms wrapped around my stomach, his head buried in my neck. I wanted to weep in confusion until it occurred to me, I’m just a human teddy bear, being used to ward off fears of the dark. And the next morning, he gave me a big kiss on the lips like everything was normal—and then he left the country. Did I even mention that he had to go to Prague three days after my arrival?
I went back to Leah’s, but you must understand, I couldn’t stay there. I packed up all my stuff and headed back out. On my BlackBerry, shading it with my hand from the rain that had begun to pour, I looked up youth hostels. I had no money for a hotel. None for a hostel either, really, but I didn’t know what else to do.
I found a place called Avalon House on Aungier Street, about halfway between Leah’s and Kieran’s. I lugged my stuff back ac
ross town, the wool of my tights and skirt giving off a faint steam as the rain came down on me. The lobby was filled with teenagers all talking at the top of their voices—German, French, Danish. The person at the desk gave me a key that said “409” on it. I climbed the four flights of stairs, banging my suitcase behind on each step, sticky with sweat, dripping with rain. My room was narrow—just a single bed and a sink. The walls were tangerine. The bed was hard—more like a cot than a bed. The sheets were stiff, rough to the touch. At the foot of the bed were two folded towels, scratchy and brittle. Overhead dangled a bare bulb.
I started to cry before I even had my coat off. Soon the entire front of my body all the way down to my waist was wet. Soon snot was running down my face and into the folds of my scarf. My tears turned into howls, and then I shoved my fist into my mouth to keep the howls from becoming screams. I sank to the floor. I put my face down on the bed and clasped my hands in front of me. Please, God, please. Don’t let this be happening.
Then there was a break. Just like that, a break in my mind. I had been in one world, and then I was in another. Everything looked the same—same tangerine walls, same stingy towels at the foot of the bed, same glare from the lightbulb, but I had been whisked away somewhere else entirely. Ben Green ran through my mind. Before he swerved to the left. After. Two different universes traversed in the space of a single second.
Then it was fear. As familiar and old as anything I could remember. How could I have thought there was any escaping it? Pinpricks of heat spreading over my face and across my limbs. Laughter in my ears, mocking me, ridiculing me for being so pathetic, for thinking anything good could ever happen to me, for thinking there ever could have been any destiny other than to end up, alone, in some dismal room like this.
But then I was not alone in the room. Sitting here now, it’s hard to believe what I experienced last night, but it was as real as anything that’s ever happened to me.
I was at the gates of hell. A tunnel descended straight down. I felt like I’d been peeled, and now that I was soft and skinless I was going to be tortured. Down I fell, and I was surrounded by demons—all around me was sweat and tongues and eyes that glowed, toenails scratching across the floor, long fingers with long fingernails reaching out for me. Voices sneered, Did you really think anyone would ever care about you? Did you really think you could escape?
Even though in real life I was kneeling before the bed, my eyes squeezed shut, my hands over my head, in my mind I was falling downward, and there were naked bodies everywhere and something horrible going up between my legs. I was trapped in one of those Vietnam movies I told you about but more real than anything I’d ever had before. Finally I couldn’t help it, and even though I was alone in the brightly lit tangerine room I began to cry out, “Please! Leave me alone! Let me be!”
And then I got up my nerve and opened my eyes and through my crying and with the mucus and tears running down my face, I groped my way to my bag and swallowed five Klonopins. But then I heard German in the hall outside. I froze on my hands and knees. The terror was not just in my mind—it was about to burst forth through my door. The German got louder, closer to my door. I squeezed my eyes shut, buried my head under my hands, and waited to be annihilated once and for all. I prayed. I thought of being a kid and the first time I’d climbed into my mother’s bed after a nightmare and realized her presence couldn’t protect me—lying awake, hot with fear, waiting to be put out like the end of a burning cigarette.
Then the voices outside my door began to recede and finally grow distant and I went limp with relief, torso and arms splayed across the bed. Then the Klonopin must have knocked me out, because the next thing I knew, it was two this afternoon and Eleanor was calling me, and when I picked up my phone she was shouting, “What happened to you? Why didn’t you call? What is going on over there? You have to come home! I am booking you a ticket now!”
But I’m not going home, at least not today. I’m supposed to interview Colm McCullough’s fiddle player, who I met in New York. I refuse to think of myself as mentally ill, a term Eleanor was throwing around quite liberally this afternoon. I suppose I did call her up screaming about demons. But now I feel like I must have been overdramatizing. I don’t tell Eleanor about having gone off my meds. I don’t know if it would reassure her or make things worse. And I’m back on them as of this morning. Believe me, I’m back on them. I also don’t tell her about the ecstasy.
I just tell her I’m fine now. And she tells me no, you’re not, you have to take care of yourself. You need to rest. And I keep thinking, I don’t want to rest.
I don’t know what to tell you, reader. I am as I am.
Later
After our interview, the fiddle player invites me to a poetry reading. A wild-haired man with bright blue eyes reads about the war in his garden between the thistle and the roses. Maybe I’m in a weakened state, but I find it incredibly moving and buy a copy.
After the reading, the fiddle player introduces me to a woman who seems to be in her early fifties with a huge head of graying hair. She’s wearing jeans, Converses, and a black puffy coat with electrical tape on one of the elbows. She has a very confident, wide-legged stance, defiant really, like she could have been in the Clash. Her blue eyes are so pale, it’s like you can see right through them. The fiddle player tells her about my article, and the woman tosses back her incredible mane and says, “You should come visit me. I’ve got a place out in Celbridge. What are you doing for Christmas?”
The fiddle player invites me to go hear some music with him, and before we leave, the lady from the Clash scribbles her number in my notebook.
We go to Vicar Street, which is where I saw the Flaming Lips with Kieran last year. I’m not entirely sure how I’ve made it this far—I have the feeling that my brain is bruised and tender. I find myself struggling to put sentences together. The words aren’t just waiting for me in my mind the way words usually are. I have the feeling that I’m not really there, that some invisible film separates me from everyone else. I’m just flickering through this world other people actually inhabit. At Vicar Street, though, a feeling of such heaviness overcomes me that I think for a minute I must be dead and buried already, except I couldn’t be, because if I were dead and buried already my heart wouldn’t feel as if someone were digging into it with their fingers now.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
I’m supposed to go to London the day after tomorrow and then plan a jaunt to Morocco with Phil for New Year’s. How am I going to do this? The thought makes me feel ill. I can still feel Kieran pushing off against the curve of my lower back. Now maybe I can fucking sleep. Sitting here in this café, I feel infinitesimally small, like I can’t find myself in space or remember how to hold my coffee cup. My heart feels like it’s beating to some strange tempo of its own. It races so fast beads of sweat pop out all over my body. I haven’t had this in a long time. It’s like running into someone I’d forgotten existed.
Eleanor still wants me to go home. But I’m not. I can’t. I don’t want to.
Later
It’s time to go meet Kathryn of the papery white skin. I was supposed to be working on my story for the BBC here at this café, but instead I’ve just been staring at the tabloids. It’s all Katy French. She was like the Paris Hilton of Dublin. Dumb perfume endorsements; short, glittering dresses; snotty glowering at the camera. She was obviously a total nightmare. But I can’t stop thinking, poor girl, poor girl. To be stupid is one thing, to die for your stupidity is another. My brain is not working. I want to be somewhere safe and quiet and warm. But I can’t imagine where that place is.
Later
Kathryn of the papery white skin takes me to an art gallery where she has a show going up. We sit in the back room on folding chairs eating biscuits and tea with the two women who own the gallery, an American in an oversized sweater and an Irishwoman with an upturned nose, a big bosom, and a booming voice like an orator. I have the distinct impression that if she were runnin
g my life, my life would be much better.
The American woman gives me a tour of the gallery. She shows me photographs of a bunch of people fixing up a storefront in SoHo from the early 1970s. She’s explaining how this group was trying to “reclaim” the role of food in American culture by opening an “eatery.” I’m thinking, give me a break, it’s a bunch of hippies in bell-bottoms outside a restaurant. When I find out the American’s mother was part of this group but now lives in Greenwich and is an art collector, rage at this poor girl in her oversized sweater blossoms in my chest. Fucking rich girl, I think. It’s strange, but the anger buoys me up, as if I’d been adrift at sea and finally have something to hold on to. It’s like a shot of energy, so when they ask if I want to go to a party at another art gallery, I say, “Let’s do it, man.”
After the other art gallery, with equally ridiculous art on the walls, we go to a pub called Dice Bar, where we squeeze together into a red leather banquette.
I tell them about my story. The American says, “Who is it for?”
“It’s with the New Yorker,” I say. I don’t say I’m doing it for the New Yorker, because that would be a lie. But I am aware that saying it’s with the New Yorker creates the impression that it’s for the New Yorker. Somehow at this moment, with these three women’s faces turned to mine, I can’t help myself.
I’m immediately filled with shame and dread. But it’s too late. The American’s eyes pop.
“I’m going home for Christmas,” she says. “You should take my apartment while I’m gone and work on your story.”
And then after a few more pints, she says, “Please use my apartment. It would be such an honor. I mean, the New Yorker, my God.”
Reckless Years Page 20