From the kitchen, Eddie called, ‘The Irish Times would be good.’
The next morning, I phoned Cauley. One week later, we met. I was in Dublin to interview a man who was the head psychologist of an Alzheimer’s unit at a hospital in Stillorgan. I sat there listening to that man, who was dignified and a little wearied, knowing that, behind him, in rooms padded for safety, people were growing ever more frail and demented, and I’d felt a terrible thrill about the likelihood that I would soon be making love. When the interview ended and we’d toured what we could of the unit, and the man was bidding me goodbye, I had the urge to go tearing from the hospital lobby out into the car park, to toss my folder in the air and, as the papers scattered to the wind, flee towards the land of the living.
Cauley and I had agreed to meet at a pub on the Rathmines Road. I’m sure we both knew we’d go to his place, but Cauley was afraid to sound presumptuous by suggesting I meet him there. I was about twenty yards from the pub when I spotted him sauntering up the footpath from the opposite direction, affecting what was meant to look like nonchalance.
When he saw me coming, he smiled and waved, a simple, undisguised happiness in his expression. He walked towards me, parodying the very air of cool he’d been trying just a moment ago to project. I laughed.
‘Hiya!’ he said, and kissed me on the cheek.
‘Hiya.’
‘Hi,’ he said, softer now.
He’d got his hair cut since I’d seen him last. It made him look boyish, and though I was only a few years older than he, I had a moment of misgiving, as though I were defiling him. When I remarked on the haircut he said goofily, ‘Gerry’s finest, three quid.’
We looked at the door of the pub, but neither of us moved to go in. He asked if I was hungry.
‘I ate at the hospital,’ I said.
He made a face. ‘That must’ve been tasty.’
‘A cheese sandwich,’ I said. ‘Nothing adventurous.’
‘I have food at my place. It’s just around the corner. Or we could go out somewhere. Or do you want a drink?’
‘Show me your place,’ I said.
There was none of the usual song and dance. I had no reason to be cagey, or coy. Marriage makes utilitarians of us, and adultery, which pretends to such risk and adventure, requires no courage – because whether I put it plainly to myself or not, I’d known, as I set out that day to meet Cauley, that whatever happened I need not sleep alone that night. If in the aftermath I wanted to flee him, or if he went all funny on me, I would be protected from that grim post-coital loneliness by the very institution I was betraying.
It is often difficult to remember, once a thing has happened, what you had expected of it. But I do remember being surprised. I suppose I had expected a certain awkwardness, or hesitancy, a deference, even. But when we entered Cauley’s room it was as though a switch had been flipped and he was sure, suddenly, of everything. He was hungry, animalistic, shameless; he was everywhere at once. All tongue and teeth and hands, a hard thigh wedging its way between my thighs, a finger gliding in and out like a slow piston along the flat of my tongue while he looked me square in the eye, his own mouth slightly agape. I had fleeting thoughts, as we made our way, stumbling, across the room, as we shucked our clothes and shimmied free of our undergarments, that I had misread him entirely. But they were only fleeting. There are very few people who, if we’ve observed them closely, will actually surprise us when the time comes. Anyway, I don’t think he was sure of anything. It was only desire, with its air of the irrefutable.
The roughness of his jaw chafed my face. That surprised me, too. I had assumed he would be rather soft and hairless, what with that peach-pink skin and his hands, which still had a slight childish pudginess to them. So I didn’t expect to find whorls of mannish hair, rather a lot of it. It had the look of having been flung there, something random and indiscriminate about it, and it caused in me an odd stab of pity.
Something else about Cauley: he was generous. I don’t mean that he was excessively tender or solicitous, or particularly systematic in his ministrations. More that nothing human was foreign to him, which gave me permission to be myself, whoever that might be. So while a part of me revelled in it – biting his lip and shuddering at the probe and squelch of his fingers, all that arch-backed bucking and the throaty sighs, the theatrics of sex that you sometimes wonder if you learned from the movies – there was another part witnessing it with a kind of shock, as though I were seeing myself clearly for the first time.
Afterwards we lay face to face, gazing at each other, stupefied and a little frightened, as though each of us had created the other entire, out of thin air. It was early evening. From the street below came the sounds of rush hour. The traffic had picked up noticeably; you could hear the groan and hiss of buses, the squeal of brakes, an occasional shout or laugh, a car door slamming. But it all seemed very far away, like a memory of such sounds.
I began to look around the room, to take note of his life as he’d arranged it, and I saw that it, too, was not as I’d imagined. I had expected to enter the bedsit and see a mess, vehement and male – heaps of dirty clothes, empty beer bottles, unwashed dishes and tea towels stiff with mopped-up spills. I’d pictured a small television with a smudged screen, and resting atop it a half-full mug of ancient, greying tea; books and pens and spiral notebooks strewn across the floor like toys that needed picking up; a mushroomy smell rising from a laundry basket.
Instead, I saw his few dress shirts and trousers hanging from a metal frame on wheels. Lined up precisely under the bottom rod were three pairs of shoes. There was the bed, which we were lying on, and a dull brown love seat with a wood-laminate coffee table in front of it. There was a bedside table with a well-scratched surface. The kitchen was a sink in the corner with a rusted white immersion tank suspended over it, a small draining board, a waist-high fridge and a portable two-hob gas cooker.
In the corner of the room that did not contain the kitchen or the love seat or the bed was a rectangular fold-up table, the same brown as the lumpy little sofa, which I imagined jiggled slightly as he worked at it. On the table was an Amstrad, a printer, a stack of clean A4 paper, three more stacks that were successive drafts of the screenplay, and a play in progress. There were two unopened bottles of red wine on a ledge behind the table, and another one, two thirds drunk, with the cork pressed neatly into its neck, beside the Amstrad. The one small note of disorder – a coffee cup listing in a cereal bowl from that morning’s breakfast – had the look of something waiting to be remonstrated with and removed.
I wondered how I could’ve been so wrong, not only about how he lived but about the aftermath of our encounter. I had imagined that it would bring me to my senses, remind me that I was a grown-up now, with a cupboard full of wedding china and candlesticks that matched. I had thought that if we did manage to linger, half naked, over a glass of corked wine, it would be brief and awkward, and that when enough time had passed that I could leave without seeming over-hasty or putting too clear a stamp of failure on the thing, I would gather my clothes from their improbable locations around the room, and I would go downstairs and hail a taxi and make my way to the train station, feeling rueful and cinematic. On the train home, passing through the dull midlands that never failed to dispirit me, by which time the whole episode would have begun to feel unreal, I would offer myself some sad congratulations, because whether I’d honestly believed it or not in the run-up – the bit about being brought back to my senses – it had turned out to be true.
But I knew, as I lay there in Cauley’s bed, looking around the room and hearing the soft stutter of his breathing beside me, that it had not turned out to be true. I knew that when he woke there would be no embarrassment between us. Already I was thinking of when I might see him again.
The first time I looked out my third-floor window here I thought of a tsunami. I thought: If a tsunami hits, I will be safe. I saw myself herding people up the stairs to the highest ground, where we would crowd
round the windows and watch as our world was transfigured – the trains flung free of the tracks, cars smashed against the terraced houses, trees sucked from the ground – and then the sea pulling back into itself, as though innocent of the destruction. For decades I have had a recurring nightmare in which a monstrous swell rises up but is arrested in the moment before breaking. Sometimes I am on the shore, watching people float, tinily, atop this wall of water that is on the verge of collapsing catastrophically on to the beach. Other times I am in the water myself when the sea grows terrifyingly tall, and it is not the fear of drowning I become aware of but the vast abyss beneath me.
I was afraid that living in this house would prompt those nightmares, but not once since moving in have I dreamed of the sea in any state.
Instead, I dream of Eddie. The dreams seem to have come out of nowhere. Years went by when, though I might’ve thought of him from time to time, he never breached the barrier between my conscious and my sleeping mind. Now that he has, I find myself curious when I lie down at night, as though there is a life we might yet live out together, realizable only in dreams. The other night, we arranged to be remarried – to each other, I mean. The ceremony was due to begin, I was in the front garden of our house, the guests were already arriving, when I realized – in the way you do in dreams, when you ‘discover’ something you’ve already done – that I had called off the wedding. Eddie knew, but I hadn’t told anyone else. I started to panic about the impending humiliation, the disappointment everyone would feel in me. And then Eddie arrived, looking strong and sure and handsome. He was wearing the suit and tie he’d worn at our actual wedding, and he had already taken care of things: he had told the guests that it was off. He put his arm around me and uttered one of those inane lines that seem perfectly sensible within the dream. ‘It’s okay,’ he said, ‘they want us to go on the blue bus with them.’ I leaned into him and said, ‘I love you, I love you so much.’ And off we strolled, arm in arm, like one of those not-so-young couples you see in ads for retirement plans.
The line dividing sea from sky is blurred today, and the world looks naïve and precarious, as though painted by children. Between my window and the sea there is an expanse of about three hundred feet that is comprised of the sea road, the train-station car park, the tracks and the retaining wall beyond. As the tide moves in and the water level rises with a speed that looks unnatural, an insupportable anxiety is triggered in me. I can see the railings that stand between the tracks and the sea but I cannot see the land beneath – the dun-coloured beach, rippled and unpretty, or the desultory outcropping of rock beyond – and the station and the intermittent trains appear to be floating.
This uneasy fascination with the sea has been with me since childhood. Every summer when I was growing up we visited my grandparents at their vacation place down the Oregon coast at Agate Beach. The house was a three-bedroom clapboard with a wooden porch that they rented out when they weren’t in it – humble in comparison to the fancy vacation homes that were slowly growing up around them. It sat high on a bluff, and to get to the beach we had to descend a pine-shaded, zigzagging path that opened on to a huge expanse of white sand beach which seemed, in its suddenness, like a moment out of a fairy tale, the very embodiment of possibility and wonder. Fog could roll in without warning, though, and often a bright, clear morning would turn misty and damp within minutes, so that a slight anxiety attended even the finest of days, a watchfulness that I often think persists in people who have grown up in fickle climates.
The Pacific at that latitude was cold, but my mother used to plunge in regardless, gliding like a seal, her head held stiffly above the swell, as I knelt digging in the sand beside my grandparents, or waded in knee-deep to watch her, fearing for her life since the day I heard her say to her mother, laughing and shivering as she towelled herself off, ‘That water would stop your heart.’
Around the time that I was entering adolescence my grandparents came less and less often to the beach, until they no longer came at all. The slope was too treacherous for them. When I was sixteen, my grandfather died, and for the final two summers before I went off to college, the same year my grandmother sold the house and moved into a retirement home, it was just women on those visits, my mother and grandmother and me, and sometimes a girlfriend or two I’d brought along. We would sit round the fireplace at night, sororal and easy, but conscious, too, of the men who were not with us.
Years later, when my mother and Stan visited Eddie and me in Ireland after we were married, I took her to the beach at Rosses Point. It was early June, just the two of us. Stan had gone golfing with some men Eddie had introduced him to, and Eddie was working. As we descended the slope from the car park to the long second strand, my mother stopped and put her hand on my arm as though she had seen an apparition.
‘What is it?’ I said.
She took a deep breath and looked up and down the beach, surveying the horizon, then she put a hand to her chest and patted herself consolingly.
‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, and for a moment said nothing more. When she had recovered herself, she told me that she had just experienced a sense of déjà vu so powerful she felt a bit unsteady. Something about the beach, she said, the precise elevation from which we were overlooking it, something about the weather, too, which was changing as we stood there. Just a minute ago, the sun had been out and it looked as though the day was going to get steadily brighter, but low, pewter clouds were now gathering above the water. She had felt transported, she said, right back to her parents’ beach house, to that moment of approaching the top of the trail, before you descended through the trees, when you could see the beach and the sea spread before you.
‘Do you remember that?’ she said.
‘Of course I do.’
We stood looking out over the strand until the thing that had come upon her seemed to pass and I felt her beside me again, in the here and now. As we started down the path, I hooked my arm through hers.
‘Don’t lose me,’ she said. It was an old phrase of mine from childhood.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, and steered us towards the water. ‘Let’s put our toes in.’
At the water’s edge we took off our shoes. A warm wind was blowing. Across the inlet, we could see the shoreline at Lissadell, and to the north the mountain behind our house. I traced an arc through the water with my foot and said, ‘The cold would stop your heart.’
‘It’s not so bad,’ my mother said, and I knew that she didn’t remember. I told her then how I had lived in terror of her heart stopping whenever she was in the ocean, and instead of laughing she looked genuinely distraught. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she said. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. And I didn’t. There are many things like that in childhood, fears that could easily be allayed but which, in the overly literal realm we inhabit as children, make too much sense to question. It wasn’t hard to believe that the icy water that sent needles of pain up my calves might also be sending similar, and deadly, shards into my mother’s heart.
During the last year of her life, when we went to the beach near her condo she wouldn’t go in the water. The Gulf was calm, but she didn’t trust her balance. She said if she fell she would not be able to get up. Once, she let me lead her. I held her arm and we stood in water not even to our knees, and she looked happy, but then a small wave lapped against our shins and she tottered slightly and said, ‘Whoa.’ After that, she demurred whenever I asked her to come in with me, and while I swam in the calm shallows she sat under the beach umbrella, watching me so anxiously I felt I was torturing her.
Once, not long into the affair, Eddie and I were in the car when I heard Cauley’s voice on the radio. I had a moment of dissociation, in which I was not sure if the voice was in my head – I often imagined what Cauley might say to me about this or that – followed by another moment in which I wondered, ridiculously, whether he might say something that would give us away.
We were coming home from Ed
die’s parents’ house. Celia and Gerry had had their first baby three weeks before, Ethan was his name, and they had driven down to Sligo to show him off. We’d walked into the sitting room and Celia was in a big armchair, holding him. Gerry and Eddie’s mother were bent over, eyeing the baby rapturously, and Eddie’s father was to the left, leaning forward in his wheelchair. Everyone was silent, struck dumb by the miracle of Ethan blinking.
‘Ah, come in!’ Celia said when she saw us. ‘The little guy is dying to meet you.’
She handed the baby to Eddie, who took him and rocked him gently, with a naturalness that surprised me. When he turned and offered Ethan to me, I panicked. I felt suddenly frail and shaky, the sort of person you wouldn’t hand a baby to in a million years. But I couldn’t possibly refuse, so I took him, and everyone looked on with their beatific smiles. The impulse to drop the infant was strong – I don’t mean I wanted to, of course, but it was one of those unbidden urges, like veering into oncoming traffic or pitching yourself off a mountain path. Some part of me wanted to drop the baby and just come clean, because it was too much, the way they were all smiling at me, the way they’d entrusted me with this baby of theirs, as though I were someone who could be trusted with anything at all.
‘Isn’t that Kevin’s pal?’ Eddie said, as we turned up the mountain road. The show’s host had just mentioned the names of his guests, Cauley and two others, who were there to discuss the future of the Abbey Theatre. ‘The one you met in Dublin that time?’
I had told Eddie I was meeting Cauley for coffee before going to the hospital to interview the psychologist. The idea had been to carve out a plausible space in my life for Cauley to inhabit, though I could see now it would’ve been smarter to say nothing.
I pretended I hadn’t been listening. ‘Oh,’ I said vaguely, and looked down at the radio. ‘You’re right, it is.’
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