When Light Is Like Water

by Molly McCloskey

  Just before six, I put on my blouse and skirt and set off for the brief walk to Conway’s. I was in good spirits, I felt clean in my skin, and hopeful, though of nothing in particular. I saw myself as though from above, walking jauntily up O’Connell Street in the lingering sun of early evening, and felt fond and a little nostalgic, as though the night ahead were an experience I was already looking back on.

  When I walked through the door of the pub, I saw a man sitting at the end of the bar, chatting to Dom’s wife. He followed me with his eyes as I moved behind the counter and began unloading the glass washer. When Dom’s wife wandered off he ordered a pint of Guinness, and I served him a thin-headed thing he didn’t complain about. I guessed he was in his early thirties, though his hair was already thinning. He had heavy eyelids, which left him looking both sleepy and aroused, and a nose that made me picture his profile on a coin. He was a big man, and he had the look that big men often do – unguarded, somehow made vulnerable by their very heft, like certain slow-moving animals, so that you do not know whether to regard them with pity and tenderness or, on the contrary, to exercise extreme vigilance in their presence. He thumbed through a paper, and when I passed his way again he looked up and held my gaze, and I felt embarrassed by the lowliness of my work. In his crisp, striped, button-down shirt, he appeared to be a man of means. I could see he was like none of the friends I’d made in town.

  ‘So what brings you here?’ he asked.

  ‘Vacation,’ I said.

  ‘Some vacation, eh?’ He looked around.

  I smiled. ‘What do you do?’ It was a very American question, and I immediately regretted it.

  He took a big swallow of his pint. It left a line of foam on his lip and he ran the tip of his tongue expertly over it and sat up a little straighter. ‘Furniture. I import it and export it.’

  I didn’t know what to say. I knew nothing about furniture, and even less about importing and exporting. Over his left shoulder, the sun was coming in through the tall windows that faced on to O’Connell Street. It was the summer of a general election and I could see a streetscape quilted with candidates’ posters, a confusion of faces buckling on the lamp posts. I wished I knew enough to remark on it all, something pithy and elliptical, the sort of thing Jane might say. But it was an event I couldn’t gauge the seriousness of – all the tattered bunting and the megaphones blaring from the roofs of cars gave it the feel of an election in a banana republic or a student council campaign.

  ‘What I meant,’ he said, realizing that he’d reduced me to silence, ‘was how did you end up here.’ He tipped his head to indicate Conway’s.

  ‘Oh, here,’ I said, and I told him about Bill and Lil. He listened closely, shaking his head every so often in enjoyment. I smiled again, and tried to look adventurous without giving the impression that I’d do whatever any passer-by suggested.

  ‘So you’re around for the summer?’

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to say that I’d be leaving at summer’s end. Nor did I want him to think I was indentured to Conway’s indefinitely. I looked down and noticed an after-image of ketchup on my cuff, and said, to my own great surprise, ‘I’m thinking of going into journalism.’ Was I? Why not? Judging by those campaign cavalcades, the public sphere was slight and unserious, nothing I couldn’t get a handle on.

  ‘Really?’ He sounded unfazed. That was Eddie, I would learn. I could say almost anything – even things I surprised myself with – and he’d hardly bat an eye, and I never did figure out if he really believed in me, or if he just didn’t take my notions too seriously.

  ‘I worked at a paper at home.’

  ‘You were a journalist?’

  ‘Trying.’

  He gave me a soft little smile, and said, with the gentlest hint of world-weariness, ‘Sure, what more can you do?’

  We made a date for the following Sunday.

  On the weekends or my evenings off, Eddie would pick me up and we would zoom through the countryside, his Triumph gripping the road, the hedges pressing in with their full summer growth. We went for oysters in Oughterard, and smoked salmon in Westport. He took me to a castle in Kerry and another in Donegal, and to big country houses and tiny little pubs, where in dark nooks we canoodled over milky pints. He took me to an island of beehive huts, to the Shannon, to a bistro the far side of a border checkpoint where helicopters hovered overhead. He took me to an abattoir, and I saw the blood running down the gutters and met a man in spattered coveralls who was charmed by my interest in slaughter.

  Sometimes we just drove and drove, to a waterfall or a piece of land he hankered after or a high-up boreen with a particularly fine view. Everywhere cottages crumbled. I had the foreigner’s eye – acquisitive, ignorant, romantic – and I would say as we passed, ‘What about that one? Do you think that could be fixed up?’ and sometimes he would laugh, and sometimes he would weigh the possibilities, and sometimes he would tell me a story about who owned the land and the intractable knot the deeds were in. And I would be astounded that such places should be let go to ruin as though they were nothing, that you could buy a plot with a sea view for less than you’d spend on a car.

  I recall a single midnight downpour, parked in Eddie’s car above the beach at Rosses Point, the world through the windscreen a rich black smear, as though painted in oils. Otherwise, it was the sort of summer in which every day dawned clear and blue and the seas glittered in the sunlight. The sort of summer whose extreme rarity every person I knew attempted to impress on me, so that a certain unreality attached itself to those months. People flocked to the beaches, looking hazardously pale. The first time Eddie and I went to the beach together I could hardly look at him. I had, by that point, seen him without clothes. We’d had our first, somewhat awkward, sex in the flat where he lived above his showroom and office. But it was still the case that I had seen him naked only in shadowy interiors, and I was surprised that day when he stripped down to his trunks – his costume, as he called it – and I saw that he was as pale as all the rest. We were on the wide second strand at Rosses Point. For a moment I averted my eyes, as though out of courtesy, and took in the scene. Dogs romped in the shallow surf and children squealed and families munched on sandwiches they’d packed. The beach lacked, like no beach I had ever visited, any tinge whatsoever of the erotic, and I detected a kind of happiness that was simpler and truer than the vehement bonhomie of night-time.

  One evening in mid-August we met friends of Eddie’s for dinner in Mullaghmore, on the coast, about twenty minutes north of town. When we arrived at the restaurant the others were already seated, two couples at a picnic table outside, scanning the menus, talking without looking up. An apricot tint hung over the harbour, where tiny fishing boats bobbed, and I marvelled at the fact that anyone would take such toys out into the open sea.

  Eddie introduced me. They were all professionals, the wives, too – a doctor, a dentist, a solicitor and an architect – and all around Eddie’s age. We sat and ordered drinks and there followed the obligatory exclamations of wonder regarding the weather, and then a discussion resumed that had begun before we got there, which concerned the attempted reform of a byzantine European agricultural policy that had resulted in mountains of excess butter and lakes of milk. I tried to look interested, without looking so interested that someone might ask me what I made of it all, but no one asked and no one offered to explain anything, and I was sure I detected a pleasure in the discussion that was independent of its rather dull particulars. There is nothing like the presence of an outsider to heighten one’s enjoyment of being an insider.

  By the time the food arrived – plates of mussels and black sole, boulangère potatoes, broccoli and carrots – the talk had turned to America. One of the men asked what part I was from. I said Oregon, and one of the women said, ‘I was at a conference in Seattle once, it rained for four solid days,’ and the others laughed and someone said to me, ‘You’re at home here, so.’

  ‘So tell us about Oregon.’

&nb
sp; ‘Tell us about America.’

  ‘Explain America to us!’

  Everyone laughed again. I could tell they wanted me to reveal to them some side of America they hadn’t seen before, but I also knew that I was expected to demonstrate a weary cynicism about the place, to mock its excesses and presumptions, and the expectation gave rise to a defensiveness in me. One of the things I loved about Eddie was that he was never cheaply superior or condescending. He liked that I came from the New World. He’d never wanted to live there, but he was a businessman and he regarded my country as fast and sharp and entrepreneurial. When he spoke of America it was with amused, half-baffled admiration – the way you might speak of someone who had no shame but who sometimes, in spite of himself, got it right.

  I said something about what a big place America was, and how many different Americas existed, and how difficult it was to say anything conclusive about America, or even about Americans – who were, after all, people from all over the world – and they murmured their agreement but seemed disappointed by the sincerity of my reply, its lack of wit or indirection. After that, they didn’t press for my opinions, nor did they ask about my plans, which came as a relief. I had no plans beyond the summer, and still felt, as I did with Jane at the hostel, distressingly short of opinions. What they did want from me was to be assured that I was enjoying myself in their country, as though I were a friend’s child they’d been tasked with amusing for the day. I said, ‘Yes, of course I am,’ and one of the men said, ‘What’s not to like?’ And they all chuckled in a way that suggested there were many things not to like and I would discover them if I stuck around. I laughed along, as though I knew just what they meant. But it was one of those moments when all the conviviality and all the laughter seemed only a cover for what lay beneath: a teeming, tricky, intricately coded world.

  An earnest-looking young woman came to collect our plates, and when she departed, carrying the stack in her arms like a pile of laundry, the doctor leaned back against the still-warm wall of the pub, surveyed the scene with a proprietorial eye, and said with exaggerated satisfaction: ‘We’ll never have to go to the continent again.’

  The continent. Irish people were always zipping off to the continent, to the South of France or Sicily or Portimão, people who seemed comfortable but not terribly well-to-do, and I was puzzled, even vaguely affronted, by the seeming extravagance of it. But I was careful not to say anything straightforward or wide-eyed – ‘How often do you go to the continent?’ – or ever to appear surprised by anything. I had seen that what gave rise to the greatest derision was the tendency of Americans to be both credulous and easily impressed. Mostly I let Eddie talk for us and relaxed into the atmosphere of enveloping disregard, both unnerved and relieved by my relative invisibility and my looming obsolescence.

  Just a few days before, Eddie had told me, quite casually, that he had always hated Conway’s pub and had come in that evening only because a friend had said there was a Yank behind the bar and he should have a look. We were in town, walking up Harmony Hill, and I stopped. What I had assumed was a serendipitous encounter had in fact been a sizing-up.

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Like a tip on a horse.’

  He looked askance at me and shook his head. He actually looked hurt. ‘Not at all,’ he said.

  I felt disoriented, beset by a suspicion that would from time to time revisit me: that there was more to why things happened here than I was capable of comprehending.

  ‘So am I your date for the summer?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ he said, and traced a finger round my lips, ‘it depends on what you want to be.’

  I tried to leave him, at the end of that summer. He tried to let me. We were testing ourselves. In September, I went to Greece. I said I might also go to Italy, maybe even France, and that in a few weeks I would come back to Ireland for my things and then I would go home. I had no prospects here, after all. Nor did I have the right to stay indefinitely: even impoverished little nations that haemorrhaged their citizens had immigration controls. Eddie said that he would write. He never felt comfortable writing anything, and the letter he wrote to me while I was in Greece was the only one he wrote during our years together. It came to the American Express office in Athens, where I picked it up, along with two letters from my mother. I read it on the train to Piraeus, over and over, and it may be the thing I recall most vividly about that whole trip. It wasn’t that Eddie said anything profound or terribly revealing, it was just the tone of it, the fine simplicity of the style and of the sentiments. The presumption – was I imagining it? – that, after I returned to Ireland, I would not leave. Neither of us had wanted to take responsibility for moving the thing beyond a holiday romance, but here was Eddie, writing so easily about the everyday, as though our story were ongoing rather than ending, and what I wanted more than anything was to dissolve into him, into that presumption. Maybe it should have worried me, that desire for dissolution, but I was not sure how grown-up love was supposed to feel and so I took this desire for its true mark.

  I took my unhappiness as an indication, too. In Greece, I was lonely and lethargic. But I was trying to prove something, to myself and to Eddie: that I had not disappeared into him, that I had a life to be getting on with, that I, too, could go to the continent. I had come all this way, after all; surely I should visit Europe proper, the cradle of its civilization. And it was amazing, the Parthenon floating above the smog-choked, traffic-clogged city, like memory made solid, like thunder itself resting up there on the hill.

  On the island of Crete I stayed in the guest room of a woman who was somewhere between fifty and seventy. She was thick-set, draped in black, warted and whiskered like someone in a fairy tale. She had hardly a word of English, and I, of course, had no Greek. But she treated me with excessive solicitude, as though something terribly unfortunate had befallen me, which, in her eyes, it had: I was alone. (Her own children were in Athens and London; her husband was dead; she lived alone now herself, but she had married, spawned, mourned.) She brought me lunches of hard white cheese and thick-sliced bread, and the sweetest tomatoes. Sometimes there were whole fish on the plate, no larger than my index finger, which she’d arranged in a fan shape. There was always a pool of olive oil. Every meal tasted of the sea and of sun. I felt myself coming to rest in her care. She seemed to know something I didn’t; she could read my moods. I had a book in which I actually ticked off the days until I could go back to Eddie, until I could allow him to look after me, and somehow she seemed to know what I wanted, and to want it for me, and I took this wish of hers as a benediction.

  I went back to him.

  In my absence, the season had turned. The mountains were a charcoal green, rucked in a collar of low clouds, and the fields were marshy and rush-spiked. Those ruins that on long summer evenings, softened by moss-fur and the tumble of wisteria, had had the look of walled gardens, in the gloom were as bereft as tombstones. Weather pressed in off the Atlantic, and you felt buffeted and alive, as though at sea. When the cloud cover broke, the rain-drenched blues and greens glistened silver, and the world was as bright as a mirror and it hurt to look.

  I rented a little house in town for forty pounds a week. The floors sloped slightly, and the ceilings were low and also sloped. The sitting room and bedroom were covered in a thin, bristly carpet that was hardly softer than an outdoor mat. To get light I had to ply a wall-mounted grey box with fifty-pence pieces, a situation that struck me as larky and amusing, as did so many other things that winter: the three-bar heater that I carried like a handbag from room to room; the gas Superser which, on those rare occasions when I hit its pair of buttons just right and managed to ignite the thing, could heat the small bedroom to the temperature of hell; the way the walls felt as moist as a cave’s. No amount or form of heat would dry that house, and my nose dripped like a dog’s in the dusky sitting room. But we can live easily with many things, and minor inconveniences can seem infinitely interesting, if we are young or there is novelty or if we are
in love.

  Eddie lived by the docks, in the flat above his showroom. He’d been working with furniture since his early twenties, when he’d apprenticed himself to a cabinet-maker in the UK. When he came home he started his own small cabinetry shop, which had grown into the import–export business. He had a couple of high-end craftsmen whose work he sold abroad – Eddie had an aesthete’s love of fine things (tailored suits, Italian shoes, good wine, handcrafted furniture) that seemed at odds with his otherwise no-nonsense approach to life – but in the late eighties his mainstay was importing middle-of-the-road stuff for bungalow-dwellers.

  The flat wasn’t much, a space he’d converted himself, but at night I loved to look out the window and see the lights across the water from the housing estate and, further out, the lights from Rosses Point. In a heavy mist, or with the rain coming down like cold grit and the black water slapping against the quay, I imagined us lovers on the run in some desolate Baltic port.

  We hadn’t talked much during the summer about our past romances. Eddie could be gregarious, but he was tight-lipped about the big things, like money and love, and I had made the mistake of thinking that because he hadn’t said a lot about his past it meant there wasn’t a lot to say. It was also true that I didn’t want to know, not too much anyway. I’d felt safe with Eddie from early on, partly because he was tight-lipped; it made me feel he could hold things – the difficult, messy things – and contain them for the two of us. He didn’t probe too deeply about my past, which puzzled me in the beginning, because it didn’t feel like disregard. With Eddie, I felt both loved and left alone, my privacies intact, and though the formulation struck me then as miraculous, I later wondered if he hadn’t granted me freedoms I was too young and unwise to handle.