I picked up the phone one day before Christmas and I heard the person on the other end of the line say:
‘Oh hello, I am looking for Gina Moynihan.’
‘That’s me!’
‘Hi Gina, this is Aileen – you know, Seán Vallely’s wife?’
And I thought, She has found us out.
I remember every word of the conversation that followed; every bare syllable and polite inflection. I played it in my head for days afterwards, note perfect. I could sing it, like a song.
‘Oh, hi,’ I said. A little too fast. With a slight choke on the ‘Oh’. It might, if you were listening very closely, have sounded more like, ‘Go hi’. Aileen, however, did not miss a beat.
‘I got your number from Fiona, I hope you don’t mind. I wanted to invite you over, after Christmas. We have our New Year’s Day brunch, I don’t know if Fiona ever mentioned it, we just do a sort of brunch, and Seán does that consommé thing with vodka, for people who need a cure. What do you call them?’
It was the most words I had heard out of her in one go. It took me a second to realise she had stopped.
‘Bull Shots?’ My voice sounded strange. As well it might.
‘That’s the one. It’s from eleven thirty, though people wander in any time.’
She wasn’t giving me a chance to refuse, or indeed to accept. She said, ‘Seán would love to see you, and Donal of course.’
Donal?
‘Lovely,’ I said.
Maybe she meant Conor.
‘You know where we are – the one on the corner as you take the left up to Fiona’s.’
‘Yes, I think so,’ I said.
‘The rough grey wall?’
‘Rough’ that was nice. She did not say, ‘the old granite wall’, she was much too tactful for that.
Nor did she mention – why should she? – the night I had parked opposite that wall and looked up at her house for two hours, until, one by one, the lights went out. I don’t know why I did this. Fiona and Shay were in Mount Juliet for the weekend, so there was no risk of them passing by and recognising the car: that was certainly a factor. I wanted to be close to him, I suppose. I wanted to see the cube of light in which he sat. I also wanted to discover if they still slept, Aileen and Seán, in the same room. I let the car window down. The night air was completely still. Front window bright: front window dark. A baffled light from the back of the house, blocked by corners and half-open doors. Off. A different light turned on. A head rising and dipping, in silhouette, on what must be the landing – that middle window above the door. They have a house like a child’s drawing of a house; sweet and square.
No one puts the cat out.
By 1 a.m. I am no further on.
I am cold though, and so drained by the excitement of that head bobbing on the landing that I can hardly prise my fingers off the steering wheel to start the damn car.
But of course Aileen did not mention this on the phone. She didn’t say, ‘If you like the house so much you might as well knock at the door.’ She just said, very tactfully, ‘The rough grey wall,’ and I said, ‘Aha.’
I have a fluffy ended biro on my desk; a gift from my niece when she was five or six. It pokes out of my pen holder; a ballerina in a froth of blue feathers, and I stroke my face with her when I am on the phone sometimes, while the feathers twitch and waft about in the breeze of my breath. Or I look at her face, which is always smiling.
‘I think I know it,’ I said. ‘New Year’s Day?’
‘You will come. Brilliant,’ said Aileen. ‘I hope so anyway. Bye!’
‘Bye,’ I said, but she was already gone.
Aileen as socialite, ticking the calls off her list. She did not give me a chance to turn her down. Clever Aileen, no pressure, just a bit of fun. Competent Aileen. Aileen whose little fat sits in sad, middle-aged pouches about her boy’s body, who is too busy, God knows, to bother about such things, and what is there to be done, anyway, when you’re on the damn Crosstrainer three times a week. Busy with the house and with the garden. Busy with the shopping. And the cleaning. Busy with the child. Does she have a job? I think so, though I never asked, and it is certainly too late now, to pause while teasing the lobe of my lover’s ear to whisper, ‘So what does your wife do all day?’ into its red concavities.
She doesn’t know, I decide. If she knew, or even suspected, she would get Conor’s name right.
Or maybe she does know, and got it wrong for fun.
We had met, by the time of his wife’s weird social impulse, two more times. There was no doubt the first time, no hesitation. We agreed, smiling, to a Northside lunch and, as I made my way up O’Connell Street, I got a text from his phone that read:
‘The Gresham 328.’
That was all. No, ‘I need to see you,’ no, ‘I will wait for you there.’
There was nothing before the second assignation either; ten long days later in a hotel out by the airport. No rude talk, no photo enclosed of something untoward.
Just: ‘Clarion 29’.
And from me: ‘OK’.
We discussed, on each occasion, the decor; the pictures on the walls and the colour of the carpet: a hearty, natural brown in the Gresham and a strangely non-existent green in the airport hotel, where all the guests were on their way through. Seán had booked and paid each time – at a guess in cash. It was like we were born to it. No emails, no paper trail, just two, instantly deleted texts.
And inside this scaffolding we had erected of jaunty, fake arrangements and silence, after the bare number on my phone’s display, and the walk past reception where no one bothers to call my name, when the door has been found and knocked upon, the thoughtful champagne uncorked and, eyes averted, with a terrible small smile on both our lips, the carpet discussed, we had – I don’t know if ‘sex’ is the word for it, although it was also, quite definitely, sex – we did, or had, just what we wanted, and when that wasn’t enough, we pushed it farther, and had some more.
We didn’t talk much.
Silence made it that bit filthier, of course. And people do not speak, in a dream. Or if they speak, it is not in a real way. I think about how quiet it was in those two rooms as we made our way through the deliberate and surprising actions that brought us skin to skin. It was daylight. You could hear the Friday afternoon traffic and, at two o’clock, the clock chimes from the GPO. There wasn’t much kissing. Maybe this is why it all seemed so clear – too clear – why so few words were said.
But also, perhaps, because there was too much to say, and all of it wrong.
Or maybe I am being romantic, here. I mean, who knows what Seán was thinking, at that stage. He did say – I think I remember him saying – ‘Sssh.’
And, actually, that first time in the Gresham was a bit hurried and mishandled. Seán afterwards a little agitated, almost brusque. But the second time. The second assignation. Was perfect.
What was he like in bed? He was like himself. Seán is the same in bed as he is the rest of the time. The connection is easy to see, when you have made it once, but before you do, it is one of the great mysteries: What is he like?
This.
And this.
I watched him dress, in the airport hotel, and I stayed on after he left for his flight. I said I wanted a shower, but I did not take a shower. I got up and sat on the chair and looked at our after-image, his towel abandoned on the floor, the final print, on the wrinkled sheets, of the movements we had made. Then I pulled on my clothes and went out to the bar, where I sat in the secret hum of his scent and drank one single whiskey and watched, all about me, a mayhem of dragged suitcases and flights diverted and sad farewells.
‘We drove up from Donegal, the day,’ a woman said to me, with tears in her eyes, and a pint of lager in front of her. ‘She’s off in the morning,’ indicating a woman of great age and girth on the banquette beside her, with hair done up, like my country grandmother’s, in a thin, grey wrapover braid.
The old woman, whose clothes and teeth we
re all American, nodded to me mournfully, while across the bar, three big slabs of young-fellas checked me out, then turned their attention to the big-screen TV.
The bedroom, when I walked back to it, was truly empty. Even our ghosts were gone. Or perhaps there was something left – I tried to leave the door open but glanced back at the last moment and pulled it shut behind me instead.
I handed the key in at reception: four space-age consoles on stalks, each manned by an Eastern European with a crisp manner in a black suit. I chose the shortest queue and a blonde receptionist, with ‘Sveva’ on her name tag. I had plenty of time to read it – whatever the problem with the couple ahead of me was, by the time I got to her, we were old friends. She checked her console screen and said, ‘Yes, that’s all been taken care of,’ and gave me a smile, bright with indifference, and I thought – I wanted to ask her, suddenly – Where will it end?
Three days later, with her wonderful sense of timing, Aileen rang, like a woman arriving in a panic as the ship pulls away from the quay. She was too late. We had already embarked – isn’t that the word that people use? – on our affair.
Back in the office, the flirtation had died. I loved the blank look I gave him beside the coffee machine, the indifferent, ‘See you tomorrow,’ as I pulled my coat off its hook. This was the power our secret gave us. As far as the gossip was concerned, the trail had gone cold.
This must be the rule; that people are madly obvious before they get it together and pathetically obvious when it all stops – but when it is all happening, when the deal is done and they’re at it like knives, then they are as quiet as a government minister with an account in the Cayman Islands, and twice as good at helping old ladies across the street.
‘Hi Seán, sorry about the Poles. I’m still after them to get the numbers for you. They say Thursday. Is that all right?’
‘It’ll have to do.’
‘I’ll keep pushing,’ I say, desire like a kick of blood, that hits low down, then spreads all through me, delicious and alight. It is contained, held by the secret, my skin is the exact shape of it, because I am the secret, I am the money, and this makes me feel I could do anything.
Anything.
Except tell anyone, of course. Which means I can do nothing, in actual fact, in real life. Except be still and know.
‘Thursday,’ you say. ‘What’s that in Polish?’
‘Czwartek.’
‘Oooh. Nice.’
But the deal was not done after the first meeting in the Gresham Hotel. Nothing was certain, afterwards. If anything, he seemed disappointed – with himself, with me, with the inevitability of it all.
‘Give it five minutes,’ he said, when I tried to leave with him.
He placed his finger against my lips, rough and human, and then he was gone, leaving me to the blank walls and the digital display of the hotel clock, which refused to change. Five minutes. I stood by the window and saw him emerge on to the street below, bareheaded, hunched under the November drizzle.
That was it.
No arrangements, no hint of an arrangement.
Which might explain my little lapse outside his gate a week later, sitting in my car until after midnight, hanging on to the steering wheel. Because a week waiting for him to call is a very long time. You could go mad in a week.
You could go mad in an afternoon.
Our hands met, once. In bed. I remembered the shock. Our hands touched when we were otherwise naked and busy, and it was actually embarrassing – such was the charge of reality they held. I apologised, the way you might to a stranger you brush against in the street.
For a week, after the Gresham Hotel, I pulled his love towards me, sitting utterly still and thinking of nothing but the next split second, and then the next, when he would materialise, smiling, in front of me, or my phone would jump at his call.
But it did not jump. No matter how many split seconds I imagined, in how many long days, it just refused.
I did meet him sometimes, of course: I passed his desk, he passed mine. We discussed, on one occasion, the hidden calories in your average café latte. And then he moved on.
At home, I was cross with Conor all the time. How could he be with me all evening, eat Indian takeaway, watch ‘The Sopranos’, and not realise the turmoil I was in? If love was a kind of knowledge then he could not love me, because he hadn’t the faintest clue. It was a strange feeling. Some fundamental force had been removed from our love; like telling the world there was no such thing as gravity, after all. He did not know me. He did not know his own bed.
I turned from him at night or, maybe just once, suffered his attentions – for the misery of it, and the solace. I got up at 4 a.m., to eat cereal straight from the box, with spoonfuls of peanut butter on the side. I woke in the early morning and dressed and redressed; high heels, higher. Then I climbed down off the heels and put on my flats, and buttoned my blouse back up, and went to work. And, on Sunday night, eight days after I left that room in the Gresham Hotel, I found myself outside Seán’s gate in the darkness, hanging on to the steering wheel, making deals, casting spells.
On Monday, I bought him something.
The local vegetable shop is a little yuppie shed, open to the elements. In December it has boxes of Christmas satsumas, green figs, pomegranates woven about by white mesh in figures of eight. I chose a little bag of lychees, cold and bumpy to the touch. I ate one on the way back to the office, standing in a doorway and sheltering from the rain. I had never tasted them fresh, before. The skin was like bark; so thick you could hear it tear. Under it was the dark white of the fruit; smooth as a boiled egg and more slippy, and in the middle of this grey, scented flesh was a deep red pip, surrounded by its own pink stain.
We had been talking about China. Seán had said I should learn some Mandarin. He said he was in Shanghai – had I ever been to Shanghai? It was like the fucking wild west out there – and he nearly bought a Teach Yourself DVD for his daughter in the airport, though she was past that stage where they sort of sing their way into speech, that perfect stage, when you understand how Chinese got invented in the first place. He said you got on those roads, those eight-lane highways, completely empty, and you understood something about the future – that you could do it. Certainly, it was scary. But the future was also normal.
But no, I had never been to Shanghai. I put the little bag, still spotted with rain, on his desk. Is this what I wanted to say? – what is under the skin, stays under the skin. That I was willing to keep things small.
‘Where would you book,’ he said to me later, ‘if you needed an airport hotel?’
‘The Clarion?’ I said.
And three days after I shut the door of that second hotel room behind me, and caught a minibus up to the airport terminal, and got in the taxi queue, and went home unwashed and beyond caring, I answered the phone and found myself talking to his wife, being invited by his wife; who wanted, presumably, a good look at me, now that it was all too late.
It made me more sad, than anything. I put down the phone, and waved my little feather ballerina about, in an admonishing way.
Now see what you have done.
Kiss Me, Honey, Honey, Kiss Me
MEANWHILE, THERE WAS the office party to get through. At 9 p.m., I am standing in the hallway of l’Gueuleton in Fade Street, saying goodbye to Fiachra who is trying to get out the door and go home to his pregnant wife. When he succeeds, Seán, who was assisting, finds the wall with his back and tips his head against the brickwork – once, twice – saying, ‘Fuck. Fuck.’ I say, ‘Where can we go?’ and he says, ‘We can’t go, we just can’t,’ but we are both quite drunk and end up dragging each other into the Drury Street car park for another endless kiss in some concrete corner that smells of petrol and the rain, with the sound of people wandering through the far levels and the squawk of found cars answering the remote.
And this, too, is another epic kiss, a wall-slider if there ever was one, I feel like I am clambering out of my own head, th
at the whole usual mess of myself has been put on the run by it. By the end, we are barely touching and everything is so clear and tender I find myself able to say:
‘When will I see you?’ and he says, ‘I don’t know. I’ll try. I don’t know.’
I walk through the Christmas city lights, not a taxi in sight and the town going crazy all around me, and I think how kissing is such an extravagance of nature. Like birdsong; heartfelt and lovely beyond any possible usefulness.
And then home: the bite of the key in the cold lock, the smell of the still air in the hallway, and the glow, upstairs, of Conor’s laptop. I go up there – drunk, surprised each time my foot meets a step. My husband is sitting in the armchair, his face blue in the light of the screen, and nothing moves except the sweep and play of his finger on the mouse-pad and his thumb as it clicks.
‘Have a good night?’
I had, of course, no intention of going to Aileen’s damn party. But it was a long Christmas in Youghal, pulling crackers, making small-talk, tippling through each day into a state of hard sobriety that kept you awake at night, angry as a stone. Conor’s family never drank in his father’s pub, though sometimes one or other of them would shrug his jacket on and jump in a minicab to take a turn behind the bar. They lived out the Cork road, with a stream in the garden, and they kept themselves separate from the ordinary drunks of the town with cases of French wine, which they got from their importer in Mullingar.
Conor’s mother wore cream trousers to match her ash-blonde hair, and fine gold jewellery on a permanent, light tan. His father was a big, physical man who liked to get a decent handful when he said hello; who thought a handful of daughter-in-law was, at his age, only fair. His wife might rebuke him, she might rap out a ‘Thank you, Francis!’ and everyone would laugh – I am not imagining this – at my discomfort, and the wonderful, horny badness of their old man.
They were a good couple, for all that. They had fun. The place was always busy with cousins and friends and various ‘associates’ who dropped in clutching bottles of Heidsieck or Rémy Martin and laughing about ‘coals to Newcastle’ as they were invited into the front room. It reminded me of my own father, the mock seriousness, ‘Oh take no notice of that fella!’, with its under-swell of self-importance and things unsaid; the way they were all in the know.
Forgotten Waltz, The Page 6