A Small Indiscretion

by Jan Ellison

  I sat on the bed beside him. There was kissing. His hand began to move under my sweater, over my back, and the kissing took on a life of its own. Or, rather, the kissing seemed to envelop the whole of life, the whole of what was necessary in order to live. Everything outside of it—a hand, for example, thinner, smaller, reaching down between my legs—was a distraction insignificant enough to ignore.

  It was not your father’s hand. It was the redheaded boy’s hand.

  How had it materialized between my legs? How had that boy come to be in the berth, and on the bed?

  I don’t know.

  Maybe, as your father claimed later, I was slow to react. Maybe it took me a moment to differentiate the one hand from the other. To take in the substantial differences in size and temperature. Because, indeed, your father’s hand was very rough and very cool and reasonably large, and the redheaded boy’s hand was small and hot and smooth.

  Perhaps it took me a moment to do the mental arithmetic. One plus one, plus one, equals three. One too many.

  Then the redheaded boy coughed.

  Your father stood up abruptly, knocking his head on a light fixture sticking out from the wall.

  “Fuck,” he said, holding his hand to the back of his head. Then he took in the fullness of the situation, namely, the redheaded boy sitting on the opposite side of me with a hand between my legs, and a confused look passed over his face.

  “What the fuck is this?” he said, not to the boy, but to me.

  I found I could not reply.

  Your father picked up his pack where he must have stowed it when he boarded the ferry, slung it over his back and turned and pushed through the door.

  I shook myself free. I stood up and lurched toward him. But it was too late. He was gone. I turned back toward the Irish boy, furious with him now. He stood and tried to embrace me. I pushed him away.

  “This is not happening,” I said to him. “You need to leave now.”

  I shoved the door open. He went through it. I never saw that redheaded boy—whatever his name was—again.

  THE MANY BEERS. The liquor from the flask. The exhaustion. The rocking of the sea. All of it caught up with me at once, and I spent the night on the bathroom floor, heaving into the miniature toilet. I finally slept, and when I woke it was nearly noon, and we were landing in Rosslare. I could not find Jonathan anywhere. I covered every inch of the ship, every level, inside and out. Passengers were disembarking and I was alone and of course I could not remember Jonathan’s last name. Where was the paper napkin on which he’d written it? I checked my pockets, but there was only Patrick’s note. I watched passengers walk down the plank toward the dock. When there were no more passengers leaving, I hurried back inside and searched the bar for the napkin. I dug through the trash, brushing bits of food and garbage off my hands onto my jeans. There it was, near the bottom. Just as I unfolded the napkin, his whole name came into my head—Jonathan Gunnlaugsson—as if I’d never forgotten it at all. Only then did I realize it was not going to help me much, not in the short term, anyway. It was not as if I could type his name into a search engine and find a cellphone number, since there were no such things as search engines or cellphones then. Where, exactly, had he said he was going to spend Christmas? Somewhere in Ireland. That was all I had to go on, and it was not enough.

  A terrible loneliness took hold of me, not only because I could not find Jonathan, but because it was Christmas. I didn’t decide anything, really. I just did one thing, and when that was done, I did another. I took a DART train toward Dublin. The DART line carried on to Howth. I stepped off the little green train. I asked the woman working at the window about Hill House, where Patrick’s family lived, and she told me it was on the first road to the left off the main street. I had not eaten anything, and I was not feeling at all well. Directly beneath the station, I found the Bloody Stream. I put my nose to the glass and peered in at the chairs upside down on the tables, and the long dark bar across the back, and the fireplace in the corner with no fire. I turned toward the village, but it was deserted. I checked one hotel, then another, but there was nothing open, and not a soul in the street.

  I walked back to the station, then past it, toward the harbor. Thin white clouds were stretched across the sky. Hundreds of boats floated dormant in the marina, their empty masts like a vertical game of pickup sticks. The scene filled me with nostalgia. Not for a life I had led but for all the lives I wished had been mine. A childhood on Little Cranberry Island, in Maine. A life here with Patrick, sailing one of those boats. A life raising dogs on a farm in the Midwest, summers spent in a cottage in a cedar forest on the shores of a great lake, August on a houseboat.

  I walked around the yacht-club grounds, which were slick and wet from rain. I sat on a bench. The moon had already risen. A crow called, shattering the silence and rising, dark and startling, into the sky. I felt the threat of evening in the changing light over the sea. A bleak little rain started up, growing heavier the longer I sat, crying now. Where were all the people I loved? I could feel them, flung about, the distance between us a crushing weight that I myself had put there.

  I stared at the village beyond. There were houses built into the cliff. One of those was Hill House, where Patrick lived. I conjured an image of it—a roaring fire, the turkey cooking, Patrick holding court among his sisters with a drink in his hand. It disheartened me, this vision. It exhausted me. All the effort that would be required to ingratiate myself into it. But the sky was already bruising with the day’s end, and I was without shelter. I had made a grave error, a series of grave errors, and these errors had set me down here on Christmas Day, alone, at dusk.

  I fished an umbrella out of my pack and made my way up the hill. It was getting dark now, and the rain was drenching my feet and my calves beneath my umbrella. My legs began to feel very tired and my shoulders were sore from the weight of my pack. The road was narrow and steep. There were more houses built into the side of the cliff than were visible from the harbor. They were squeezed together, not nearly as grand as they’d seemed from below. Finally I saw it on the left, a blue mailbox with the words HILL HOUSE painted on it, and a stone house with a steep shingled roof and small windows facing the street.

  I touched my hand to my head. My hair was dirty. My shirt smelled. My jeans were wet. I had no makeup on. But it was too late to turn back.

  I knocked on the door. An old man opened it. I thought he was old, anyway, though he was probably no more than fifty-five. He had a wide forehead and deep wrinkles around his mouth and nose. A fringe of graying hair went all the way around his otherwise bare scalp. He wore an apron. At first, I thought he might be a butler of some kind. That is the extent to which I had Patrick’s origins built up in my mind. I thought they would have “help” and a grand dining room for the dinner parties for which Patrick’s mother had been so famous. In fact, the house beyond seemed modest, almost cramped, and it emitted a faint, dusky smell, along with the sounds and smells of home. Meat cooking. A piano being played. Voices. The clinking of glasses and pans. All at once I understood how far outside all of that I was, and how ridiculous I had been to have expected to step into it. I was wrong to have come.

  Also, and more important, I felt a small gush of wetness in my underpants.

  The man opened the door wider.

  “John Ardghal, here,” he said, extending his hand and shaking mine. “Now, then, ah, who might you be on this dark and stormy night?”

  He was not a butler. He was Patrick’s father, not what I’d expected, not a lost soul but a kindly one, very much present and alive. It was that kindness that made me lose my nerve. It was the curious, expectant smile taking over his broad, generous face that saved me from another grave error. Because if I’d said who I was, if I’d asked after Patrick, even though he was not there, because he was still stuck in Paris, I would have been invited in. I would have been given a drink and dinner and a bed. This gentle man would not have thrown a friend of Patrick’s into the weather at
Christmas, especially not a young woman alone—and if that had happened, I would not have walked back to the village and boarded a train back to Dublin. It was those two small interventions—the well-meaning face, the gush of blood in my underwear—that sent me into a future with your father.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said to Patrick’s father. “I must have the wrong house.”

  I FOUND A bathroom in the Howth station and changed my underwear and shoved in a tampon. I caught the last train back to Dublin. I stepped from the station and entered the first hotel I saw, a rundown bed-and-breakfast with peeling paint on its front door. I rang the bell on the desk. A small woman emerged. She informed me that I was just in time; Christmas dinner was being served in the dining room. And there was one room available with a single bed. The room was in the attic—it was not very nice, but perhaps it would do?

  I said it would do just fine. I left my pack with the woman and walked into the dining room. Alone at a corner table—in a white shirt, with his hair combed back off what was indeed a handsome face, its beard shaved away for the occasion of Christmas dinner—was your father.

  Twenty-eight

  WE SPENT THE NIGHT TOGETHER in your father’s room. The bed was tilted, and when we woke up we were squeezed together on one side. There were two nightstands with yellow faded doilies and a chair with worn-out upholstery and a smell like wet laundry. It was a shabby room, a shabby hotel. But the shabbiness did not bother your father. He told me, that morning, that he liked to choose function over form, usefulness over aesthetics.

  “Is that why you chose me?” I asked him. “Because I’m useful?”

  He kissed me. “In your case I made an exception and went for beauty.”

  Later, I picked his towel up off the bed and hung it over the shower rod. I folded his sweater and set it on the chair. He allowed me to do these things, even though I had not allowed him to do what he’d wanted the night before. I had fended him off, barely, not because I didn’t want him, but because I was mostly sober and felt it might be prudent. He was old-fashioned in some sense; he would respect a girl who saved something for later. Also, there had been the matter of the blood.

  He had asked me at dinner, point-blank, what had happened with the redheaded boy on the ferry, and I had told him everything I remembered, and assured him I hadn’t let the boy touch me after he left. He seemed satisfied with my reassurances, and in my mind we’d put the matter behind us for good.

  He said he was starving as soon as we woke up that first morning, and he insisted we eat in the dining room right away. Already the patterns were being set down that would over time lay grooves of wear on the floors and walls of our house and our hearts. Already the table that was to become our life was being laid. Already it was food first, love later.

  After breakfast in the dining room, we returned to his room and got back in bed. I had taken the tampon out first thing that morning, surprised there had been so little blood, and pleased that there was no reason to continue to fend your father off. He put a condom on. We made love. I folded myself into the blanket of his body, and it was like folding myself into my future. I came, and he came, and we collapsed into each other, still kissing, and he held me in a way that made me feel everything was finally all right.

  When he pulled out and looked down, the condom wasn’t there.

  “Oh, fuck,” he said. “Fuck. I’m so sorry. I should have checked. I should have pulled out.”

  I found the condom inside me, and inside the condom, nothing at all. Whatever had been released had been released directly into me.

  “Fuck,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s all right.”

  I wasn’t just saying that. I believed there was no need to worry. I believed my period had come and gone in a day. I didn’t keep track of that sort of thing very carefully, then. I didn’t know about spotting in the middle of a cycle. And I didn’t know sex could make you bleed, even when it was not your first time.

  WE VENTURED OUT of our room at some point. I told the woman at the front desk I would no longer be needing my room. I told Jonathan I’d pay for half of his, but he laughed at me.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “I have money.”

  “Then why don’t you buy a new pair of shoes?”

  “Oh, I will. I just haven’t gotten around to it. And besides, I like these shoes.”

  We walked around Dublin. The rain was gone and the sky was clear and cold. I wondered about Malcolm. I wondered whether I would still have a job if I returned to London. It had all come to seem rather dim and distant—Malcolm, Louise, my desk at the office. It suddenly seemed far removed from this new life with Jonathan in Dublin.

  Patrick, on the other hand, still felt acutely present. I was falling in love with your father, but my feelings for Patrick had not been left behind. All of it was rushing together, making a psychedelic mess of my heart.

  We visited a cathedral. Jonathan dropped a few coins in the prayer bucket and lit a candle and knelt down on the cushion and folded his hands and told me faith was the center of his life.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “What do you mean what do I mean?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think someone like you would be religious.”

  “Well, I’m devout.”

  “Really?” I said. Here was a flaw, a flaw that might release me back into my irresponsible life. I felt a glimmer of relief, or hope, followed by a ringing of alarm.

  Then he laughed. “Not really. I’m a recovering Catholic, like all the good Catholics of our generation.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So am I.”

  “Would it have been a deal-breaker, if I had been some kind of religious fanatic?”

  “Yes.”

  “You almost sound disappointed that I’m not.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to fall for you. Maybe I want to keep being badly behaved.”

  “I’m not stopping you.”

  “You said you wouldn’t love me if I wasn’t good.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Well, then, see?”

  Over lunch he read to me from the guidebook. What did we want to see next? Dublin Castle? Trinity College? The famous prison? The factory where Guinness was born? He had a way of making the day, every day, feel festive and promising.

  For three days after that we toured the city. On the fourth day, Jonathan consulted the guidebook again and decided we should take the DART train to “the charming seaside village of Howth.”

  I did not object.

  We got off the train and decided to start with the castle. It turned out to be in the middle of a golf resort, but the structure itself was sufficiently dark and deteriorating to make it worth the trip. The sky was a stifled gray, and the wind was coming in fits and starts, stirring the branches of the massive oaks. Blackbirds circled over the stone battlements, and Jonathan read to me from the guidebook. The castle had been built in the fifteenth century and was still owned by the St. Lawrence family. There was a legend of a girl named Grace O’Malley, who showed up at the castle at dinnertime to find that the gates were closed, so she abducted the son of the castle’s owners and extracted a promise that the gates would stand open forever after, and an extra place be laid at the table. And so the extra place was always laid.

  “It’s always a girl abducting the poor young boys,” Jonathan said.

  “I promise not to abduct you,” I said.

  “You’ve already abducted me.”

  We walked back to the village holding hands. I liked Jonathan’s cool, dry hand in mine, and the solidness of his body next to me, and his lovely eyes and ready laugh. But that does not mean I was not on the lookout for Patrick. I had not mentioned Patrick again to Jonathan. I had not told him Patrick lived in Howth.

  We wandered around the village. It had once been a small fishing outpost, but now it was a thriving Dublin suburb set down between ocean and wild hillside. There was a steady
stream of cars driving up and down the main road. I dragged Jonathan in and out of shops. I lingered longer than I needed to. I couldn’t help myself.

  “Enough shopping,” he finally said. “It’s time for food.”

  There were taverns and pubs and inns all up and down the main street. Whose idea was it to return to the train station and eat at the Bloody Stream? Mine.

  We ate clams, then oysters, because Jonathan insisted I expand my seafood repertoire, and there was no better place to do that than in a seaside village. I watched for Patrick. I thought of Malcolm. I studied Jonathan’s face and compared him to the two other men who had captured some piece of my heart. He was nothing like Patrick, in appearance or demeanor. He was not like Malcolm, either; he had none of the deference or hesitation, but they shared a cheerfulness, and the sturdiness of thick-boned men.

  There was a fire in the stone fireplace in the corner and a band setting up to play. I wanted to stay and listen to the band. I was not quite ready to give up yet. But Jonathan wanted to go back to Dublin and “experience my bodily parts.” Those were the exact words he used, the ones he always used. It became a joke, over the years, a catchphrase that could pull us into the bedroom together.

  Jonathan paid the check. We finally stood up to leave.

  Then the door pushed open, and Patrick entered the pub. A girl followed him. She stood in the doorway, framed by the pearly light of early evening. It was the girl from Montmartre—Mary McShane.

  They didn’t see us. They sat at the bar. I pulled Jonathan by the hand and sat him down again at our table.

  “That’s Patrick,” I hissed.

  “Patrick?”

  “The one who was sleeping with my boss’s wife. The one who came with us to Paris.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Would you like to say hello?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know.”