My mother remained single while I was growing up, though she went on the occasional date – perhaps more dates than I was aware of. Her social world consisted mainly of women she played bridge with at a club in Portland and with whom she went to dinner or the movies. From her work at the university, she had developed an interest in philosophy, and sometimes she went to talks on campus and read books that professors in the department had written or contributed to. She was able to immerse herself in some of those books, and she would read out bits to me, wonderstruck; others, I could tell, were too dense or challenging. She would be sitting in her armchair, and a look of self-consciousness would come over her, and she would leaf ahead – to see if it got easier – and then quietly put the book aside and take up something else. My mother was by no means unintelligent, but I have a sense of her as someone caught between worlds, or eras, not drawn to the more obvious and conventional roles available to her but not sure enough of herself to carve out a life of greater challenge or stimulation. She had earned her undergraduate degree in English, and I know that she lived with a diffident desire to be more than a glorified secretary, but being around all those clever men – the department was staffed entirely by men throughout her time there – reinforced her sense of being not clever enough, for though they were all fond of her and relied on her enormously, not one of them encouraged her to expand her horizons, and my mother was someone who needed that sort of permission.
Once, I saw her with a man I didn’t know. I was ten years old. I had come downtown with a friend and her older sister. It was the lunch hour of a summer’s day, a workday for my mother. We were passing a little eatery, looking idly in the window, and there she was; I could see her through the glass, shaking her head and smiling, as a balding, not bad-looking man gestured rather wildly, in a manner clearly meant to amuse her. Before I’d even thought what I was doing, or considered the advantages of spying on her, I had left my friend and her sister on the street and burst in upon them.
In the egoism of early adolescence, I hadn’t seriously considered the idea that my mother might have, or want, or be entitled to, a ‘private life’. It was only on seeing her that day – seeing her face when she caught sight of me over her companion’s shoulder, the brief, slight slackening of her features as her laughter subsided, that strange look in her eyes, as though she was trying to place me, before she recovered her wits and perked up and said, with what sounded like genuine pleasure, ‘Alice! What are you doing here?’ – that it dawned on me that I was not everything in the world to her.
She introduced the man as ‘my friend David’, a professor of English at the university, and he greeted me by way of a courtly nod, followed by a broad smile and an offer to join them. He seemed jovial and hearty and, somehow, not a man I could imagine my mother loving. Anyway, I don’t think there was anything significant between her and David, but that isn’t the point. The point is that I’d awakened to her loneliness, her sense of incompleteness – which was, after all, perfectly natural – and instead of growing empathetic I took it personally. I made a show that evening at home of trying to convey my upset, while trying at the same time to make it look to her that I was, for her sake, covering up how truly upset I was. I’d like to think she saw through this act, and that those years she went without intimacy were the result of not meeting the right man and not of the success of my manipulations.
What I feared, I think, was my mother erring and the result being a reprise of our first abandonment, only this time – somehow – I would lose her, too. I had one certain parent and one missing parent, and I was not about to gamble what I had in hope of doubling my luck. Meanwhile, I wanted my real father. Throughout my childhood, and even more intensely once I’d met him, I felt my father’s absence like an undertow, a pull in the direction of the unknown and the ideal. I imagined that if I transformed into the magic thing – a boy? a girl-child who needed nothing and provided unalloyed delight? – then all the pieces, and the people, would fall into place. Even when I grew old enough to accept that the person I longed for simply did not exist – firstly because my father was incapable of being what I needed him to be, and then because he’d died – the pull did not subside. By then, the longing had detached itself from its object and become something free-floating, something quietly ravenous.
A few nights before the wedding, my mother and Stan and Eddie and I were having dinner at a converted castle south of Sligo. Eddie was talking – about his business and about furniture – and Stan, who had spent most of his working life as a financial planner, was nodding earnestly, saying, ‘You bet’ and ‘You’re on to something there.’ I noticed my mother looking at Eddie in a very particular way, and I knew immediately what she was seeing: completion, stability, containment. I turned to Eddie. I hadn’t really been listening to what he was saying – something about educating people to become more sophisticated consumers – and I put my hand on his thigh under the table. I saw the corner of his mouth twitch. I wanted to run my hands all over him, his shoulders, his broad back, to cup the nape of his neck in my palm. I wanted to consume him. When I glanced back at my mother, I saw that she was looking at me. She gave me a little smile, proud and collusive and relieved. I was safe. Her work here was done.
Eddie and I rented a house in town and commenced being married. It was a small place, and we viewed it as temporary. We had talked about where we might buy a house – whether we could get something near the sea, or maybe in the countryside – but for now I liked being in the town, able to step outside the door and be in the midst of things.
That first year, I didn’t feel terribly different, and I wasn’t sure if that was an indication that marriage was our natural state or if it meant that some part of me didn’t quite believe what we had done. I had the sense that we were still in the prelude of our life together, and I wondered whether this feeling was common to couples who had not yet had children.
Eddie’s mother mellowed towards me after we were married, and a certain deference entered her attitude. By assuming the status of wife, I had become, in her eyes, a woman to be taken seriously. This struck me as silly, and the truth was that I felt diminished by my new status. I hadn’t changed my name, but when a card or letter came addressed to us both it was often the case that I now had neither a first nor a last name. I had simply been collapsed into a Mrs. What disturbed me more than the thing itself, though, was the seductiveness of that collapse. Here it was, a ready-made role that I had only to inhabit, where the expectations were clear and the rewards understood. It was all so simple, or could be if I let it. I felt the lure most keenly on Sundays, when we went to Eddie’s parents’ place for lunch. There was the proper glass for every drink course – the aperitif, the red and white wines, the liqueur, the port – and as I sat there with a crystal tumbler heavy in my hand, I felt the world acquire a density and depth that it had never had before. I realized that all my life I had felt insufficiently anchored. I recall a certain windswept Sunday – we had all retired to the sitting room for a smoke and a cognac after lunch, the fire crackling demurely in its grate – and feeling a sudden surge of impatience to bring children into this mix, to see them (two, maybe three?) sitting on the carpet like little angels, playing with their wooden toys, and thinking that if I could just give myself to this, this sweet tableau I saw before me, I would always know who I was and who I belonged to and what was required of me.
Our social life revolved mostly around Eddie’s friends, the couples he’d introduced me to that first summer, people who wanted nothing from me other than that I enter into the spirit of the evening, keep up with the drinking and occasionally utter something unexpected. They hardly knew me, nor I them, and in their company I found it possible to hide in plain sight.
I kept freelancing for papers in Dublin, but there was only so much news from Sligo that the national media were interested in, and if there was anything really big they sent their own people to cover it. When the regional radio station opened I began to d
o the occasional story for them: the oldest woman in the county celebrates her birthday; a young man punches a punching bag for a world-record forty-two hours; the efforts of the Tidy Towns committee. My assignments were not enough to occupy me fully, and there were evenings when I found myself exaggerating the labours of the day. Eddie didn’t seem to notice, or perhaps thought it normal that I, his wife, should pass hours each week engaged in nothing in particular.
Every so often, I did get to go to Dublin for work, each time boarding the train with a frisson of excitement, and each time feeling more daunted upon arriving. One fine autumn afternoon I sat in the garden of an advertising firm in Ballsbridge with a man named Niall, eating salmon and glass noodles, in a near-paralysis of inadequacy. I was researching a local-boy-made-good piece. Niall hailed from a south Sligo backwater and had gone abroad in the early eighties when the country was economically stagnant and choking on coal smoke. Now he’d come home, all spit and polish, proud to be Irish and with a vague air of plunder about him. Niall embodied an attitude that would become widespread, one that saw the sudden upsurge in the nation’s fortunes as a form of moral restitution. He wore pressed denims and slip-on loafers of the softest leather, and a sky-blue cashmere V-neck that set off the traces of grey at his temples. He was demurely wealthy, smooth as agate, and he was giving me an hour of his time. Around us in the garden young people sat on the edge of their cast-iron seats, jabbering excitedly into one another’s faces, lit by some creative or acquisitive fire. Gone was the gormlessness I had long associated with Irish twenty-somethings, the slouch, the in-turned shoulders, the physique somehow thinnish and doughy at the same time; gone was that air of expecting, at any moment, to be embarrassed. They looked amoral and eternally young. It was like witnessing the advent of a new species.
Am I exaggerating? Possibly. But I’d grown countrified. I, who had once felt so brash and New World, now felt slow-witted and gauche. Returning home on the train that evening, the clouds gathering over Leitrim, as they invariably did, I could feel my insides tightening, a morning-after despair gnawing at me, as though I had lost something dear to me but could not quite recall what it was.
As the economy improved, Eddie’s business steadily expanded. He was well positioned to supply the new housing estates that were beginning to proliferate, and to meet the more rarefied needs of the first wave of nouveau riche. He started to travel more, often just to Dublin but sometimes to England or the continent. In the beginning, I often went with him but, increasingly, I stayed at home. I spent the evenings he was away reading or watching videos or going out with Camille or Jane, sometimes to the little cinema on Wine Street, sometimes for drinks or a meal. One night at closing time Jane and I ran into the guys from the band I’d partied with that first summer and had hardly seen since. Jane was ready to go home, but I agreed to go on with them for a late drink. We went to the hotel on the bridge, a flat-roofed affair from the sixties that must’ve been the height of luxury in its day but now looked dismal and tired. We got a table in the corner of the bar and ordered pints. I bought a pack of Silk Cut, though I rarely smoked then, and we all puffed away like mad, and the boys teased me about being let out for the night.
‘You’re made up now,’ one of them said. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that line, or variations on it, and I always ignored it, but tonight, because I was drunk, I said, ‘If I’d been looking to get made up, this town wouldn’t have been my first stop.’
The sharpness of my tone surprised them. Martin tapped a cigarette on the outside of the box. ‘Ah, now,’ he said.
It was one of those catch-all phrases of placation that drove me insane. ‘Ah now, what?’ I said.
Frank stared at his lap. One of the others winked at me, not in a smarmy way, but conciliatory. Now I felt ashamed. They had thought of me, in the long ago, as one of them. And all they wanted now was for me to agree that I was made up, that we – those of us who cared about things other than money – had got one over on the mercantile class. Only I didn’t feel that way. I was an American from the suburbs, and though Eddie’s family might’ve been more polished in some ways than my own, I could hardly view them as a class enemy.
At one point I looked over towards the bar. The man who owned the hotel was standing there – he knew Eddie from the Chamber of Commerce – and he saw me and nodded. His eyes took in my companions, and he hesitated for a moment, then turned away. When I went up to the bar shortly after to order another round, he materialized beside me and said, ‘What have you done with himself?’
‘Sent him packing,’ I said flatly. I was tired of existing only in relation to Eddie. ‘He’s in France.’
With an oily little smile, he said, ‘If it was me, I’d have taken you along.’
‘Would you?’ I said.
‘I would,’ he said.
‘Well, I didn’t want to go. I had things to do here.’
He glanced in the direction of the boys.
The barman said he’d drop the drinks down, and I gathered up my change and pocketed it.
The owner and I looked at each other, the way you do, and he said, ‘I should buy you a drink later,’ and I said, ‘Should you?’ and laughed brazenly and turned away.
The boys and I stayed at the hotel until they stopped serving, and then we went to one of the grungier late-night discos. I danced until two in the morning, and every second person said to me, ‘Where’s Eddie?’
When Eddie got home the following day I felt unwholesome, as though I had actually cheated on him. He didn’t ask what I’d done the night before. He wanted to tell me about the deal he’d closed to become the rep for a line of French dining suites. He was standing in the kitchen, and I came up and put my arms around his waist and ran them up his chest and down again. He squirmed a little, slipped out of my embrace, and said, ‘What shall we do about dinner?’
Late that night, as Eddie slept beside me, I was awoken by the sound of a man wailing. It was so tortured and insistent I got out of bed and opened the sitting-room window and poked my head out. He was standing at the corner of Castle Street, wearing an anorak that was hanging off one shoulder. There was another man with him – they looked to be in their late twenties or early thirties – and he was tugging at his friend’s jacket, then trying to bear-hug him into submission, like one boxer clinching another. They staggered a little together, and then the howling resumed. Against the wall was a heap of black rubbish bags awaiting collection, and he began to kick at them, while the second man stood there, his hands on his hips and looking down the street, like someone waiting for a dog to do its business. One of the bags burst and its innards spilled on to the footpath. But he kept kicking, and then another one split and caught on the toe of his shoe. I think the indignity of that set him off again, for he became even more tormented. Finally, violently, he shook his foot free, and then he stumbled up Market Street and into the night, his friend trailing defeatedly behind.
I was awed by the man’s anguish, or rather by the force of its expression, and I had trouble getting back to sleep. When I described the scene to Eddie in the morning, he shook his head with bemused, absent-minded interest, the way he did when I told him a dream I’d had. ‘I wonder what happened to him,’ I said, and Eddie said, ‘He was rat-arsed, that’s what.’ Then he kissed my cheek and headed off to work.
I was unsettled in the weeks that followed. I felt itchy, and nearly petulant with boredom. Eddie’s ease irked me. A resentment had surfaced in me after that night out, which had something to do with my life having been decided and defined, with the admission that I had not entirely submitted to that finality, and with the fact that Eddie didn’t see this, or couldn’t see it.
You’re made up now, I heard the boys say.
I thought of the hotel owner, his eyes on me, his proprietorial tone. My being Eddie’s wife somehow gave him the permission to speak to me like that. I felt repulsed by it. I also felt a shiver of desire.
One afternoon, coming home from doing
the shopping, with a bag of groceries in each hand, I was passing by the open door of a pub on Wine Street, one of those dark unsavoury spots I had frequented the summer before I met Eddie. I hadn’t gone into a pub on my own since that summer, but in I went. A guy behind the bar with a long ponytail served me a pint, which I took to a table in the corner. There weren’t many people there, it was mid-week, and after eyeing me with mild curiosity the few who were there went back to their conversations. A copy of the previous day’s Irish Times was lying on the table next to mine and I picked it up. Over the next two hours I spoke to no one but the bartender, who served me two more pints and a glass, without question – a fact that sent a strange thrill through me, as though I were breaking the law.
When people started to trickle in, around five-thirty, I finished my drink and left, swaying slightly on the short walk home.
That night we had a fight. Eddie came home soon after I did. He opened a bottle of wine while I cooked dinner. Almost immediately, he realized I’d been drinking. He asked me who with and I said, ‘No one.’
‘Alone?’ he said, and I said, ‘Well, I was out.’
When I told him where I’d been, he said, ‘Why on earth would you go in there?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘Well, it’s not much of a way to spend an afternoon,’ he said.
‘I enjoyed myself.’
He rolled his eyes.
‘Oh, don’t be dull,’ I said, in a tone I hoped was teasing.
He looked at me, puzzled. ‘Is this the first time you’ve done that?’ he said, meaning sit in the pub all afternoon. His tone was tinged with disapproval.
It was the first time, and yet I felt disproportionately guilty, as though this were a habit I’d kept hidden from him. I also resented his judgement, which sounded disconcertingly parental.
‘What if it wasn’t?’ I said. ‘Would you be ashamed of me?’
When Light Is Like Water Page 5