‘Did you ever hear back from him? Wasn’t he going to set you up with some contacts?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I never heard back from him.’
Eddie gave a little snort. He had a particularly low opinion of people who made a show of saying they’d do this and that for you and then didn’t deliver.
‘I should’ve followed up,’ I said. ‘I didn’t follow up.’
We listened for a minute. Then Eddie said, ‘He sounds full of himself.’
Cauley went on and on. I felt an intimacy with him that was making me queasy. I had to resist the urge to turn the radio off. It was unbearable, Cauley’s voice filling the car as though he were in it, and Eddie trying to talk to me about him, and me thinking: How could he not know, how could he possibly not know?
I reached over to turn the volume down, and my hand was shaking.
We met maybe a dozen times in all, when Eddie was travelling, or if I managed to secure some freelance assignment that took me to Dublin. A few times, I simply lied. I was meeting an old college friend who was passing through, or an editor I hoped to work for. Or I was researching some vague story idea. On every one of those occasions, when I left our home I imagined that when I returned all would be changed. Whatever vague intimations Eddie was feeling would crystallize, and he would grasp the truth. I thought that only in my absence could Eddie see me clearly, and each time I set out for Dublin, eager as I was for Cauley, I had to resist the urge to turn back.
And yet, once I was there, I found it hard to drag myself away. Soon Cauley was having to persuade me to hurry to the train station, for my own good; I was losing track of what was and wasn’t prudent. Once, we argued over whether or not I should accompany him to the Abbey. It was an opening night, and he was reviewing the play. There would be a lot of people there he knew, and apart from the occasional drink in Dublin we didn’t do public outings together. I had told him the day before that I would see him at the flat after the play. I actually relished the idea of hanging around Cauley’s place on my own. I imagined myself stretched out on his bed, awaiting his return, feeling kept and illicit.
But when I got to Dublin that afternoon, we immediately made love, and as we lay there afterwards, playful and sated, feeding forkfuls of left-over Bolognese to each other from a bowl on the bed between us, I decided that I wanted to go to the Abbey after all.
I said, ‘We could easily be friends, you know. It’s not like it’s the fifties.’
Cauley leaned across me to put the bowl on the floor and said, ‘I thought we agreed it wasn’t a good idea.’
‘Someone there you don’t want me to see?’
He propped himself up on one elbow and ran a finger down the length of my chest and belly. ‘I’m not going to dignify that with a response.’
‘That sounds like something my mother would say.’
He smiled. ‘Well, you’ve always spoken well of your mother.’
‘I’m serious,’ I said.
‘I want you to come, it would be lovely. But we decided against it for a good reason.’
I continued to protest. I felt a desire to be reckless, and yet I wasn’t sure I wanted to win the argument. I wanted it both ways – for our secret to be protected, and for us to be seen together. In the end, I convinced him to bring me to the theatre. We readied ourselves in the flat, dressing and primping and sharing an iceless G&T. The normalcy of it thrilled me.
At the theatre, we had a drink in the lobby before the play started, and anyone Cauley knew he introduced me to as a journalist, and he looked at me whenever I spoke with the sort of studied attention we direct at people in whom we are only politely interested. It was only in the theatre, when the lights went down, that he touched me, took my hand and placed it on the inside of his thigh, and whispered in my ear that he wanted to be home and fucking me.
The following day, as though alarmed by what we’d done, we didn’t leave the flat. We ordered a Chinese and lay in bed watching GoodFellas on video, and Cauley told me about the time he went to New York. He was nineteen and had gone to stay with a cousin in Queens, thinking he might never come back. He was going to melt into the crowd and live by his wits and make his way in the theatre. His eyes got that glazed, far-away look I saw in even the most sophisticated, the most jaded, of Irish people when they talked about New York.
‘I loved it,’ he said, ‘I loved New York.’ But then his cousin’s lease was up and the landlord was going to gut the place. Cauley’s cousin moved in with his girlfriend, and Cauley bunked for several weeks with some bricklayers from Clare, tended bar and, over one sweltering summer, whittled his savings down to nothing and met no one at all from the theatre world.
‘I came back with seven quid in my pocket,’ he said, then smiled. ‘But I’d lost weight.’
‘I can’t believe you never told me this,’ I said.
‘I wanted it all to happen fast, and when it didn’t I lost my nerve. It embarrasses me, actually, how quickly I gave up.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘You’ll go back.’
He didn’t answer. He stared at the ceiling like someone whose one good shot was behind him. I nudged him with my knee and he turned to me and kissed me hard, his teeth on my lip, his hand reaching around my lower back to press me to him.
I had a ticket for the evening train. It was nearly five o’clock, the sun coming in full across the bed, the air swampy with heat and the sweat of us, and all I could do was lie there. I felt thick as syrup. I knew that if I didn’t go a cascade of consequences would follow, but just then I was incapable of caring. I was like someone with heat stroke or hypothermia, the life-saving thing in view and unable to rouse myself to reach for it.
Cauley said, for the third time, ‘You have to get up, sweetheart, you’re going to miss your train.’
‘I know,’ I said, and I was grateful to him for keeping us on track, but only momentarily, for in the next instant I thought: Why was he so keen for me to leave? Where was he going? With whom? Sometimes he seemed so sad in his life, waiting there for me like a child. Other times I imagined that the minute I left him he opened the closet door and a party poured out.
Between encounters, we wrote letters to each other. It seems extravagant now, the exchange of letters, as though we had the leisure of aristocrats. I say Cauley wrote me letters, and it sounds like an affectation, like he was showing off. But it was just what people did then. What a commitment it seems now! The gathering of all that gear – the pen, the stationery, the envelope; the copying out of the address and the licking of the stamp; and then the effort of filling all those pages, the laborious scrawling that sends twinges up my wrist even to contemplate. But we had no choice. Phones were a problem. Cauley didn’t have his own, just a pay phone in the hallway outside his bedsit. The age of the mobile had not properly dawned, and none of us had email yet. The first of the two times Cauley phoned the house, a few weeks into the affair, Eddie was right there. It was midday, a time when Eddie was never home. I answered, then constricted with fear at the sound of Cauley’s voice, which seemed to rise an octave and go thin, now heart-rendingly unsure of itself – for he had heard the hesitation in my own voice. I spoke a few stilted non sequiturs that must’ve sounded ridiculous even to Eddie and cut the conversation short, and if there was a moment I felt most strongly the cheap, diminishing effect of adultery, it was that one.
The post arrived in the late morning, when Eddie was gone to work and the breakfast things were put away and the day yawned like some other life I could tumble into. It was the first true summer in six years, the first since the year of my arrival, though the heat and the light seemed in a different key entirely. It should’ve been an idyll – the laburnum coming into its own and the glen bathed in sunshine and Eddie and I languorous as honeymooners, enjoying perhaps our last summer unencumbered by children. Instead it felt infernal, the buzz-saw drone of insects wrongly loud. The light seemed wrong, too – sharp and hard, like light in the desert. By midday, the road to our house
would be blistering in the heat.
Every day, I thought of my first summer with Eddie, the soft, purple-grey skies of midnight and the clarity with which he loved me. I had begun to believe that I had fallen in love with Eddie in part because of the way that he loved me. But if so, was that wrong? I still don’t know. Because in loving him for that I was loving his capaciousness, his ability to accept me as I was, his refusal to be discouraged by my shortcomings or inconsistencies in my character. He was like an example of love, and I envied him his certainty. I thought it might rub off on me. Nothing I had done, or ever might do, seemed to alarm him. And nothing was required of me in the way of change. It was the antidote to the feeling that had nagged at me since childhood, instilled in me by my father’s absence – the feeling that true home was elsewhere, off in the mythical distance, the belief that if things were going to come right, some change was required of me, the nature of which was maddeningly obscure.
Each morning, when Eddie’s car disappeared down the laneway, I felt a shameful relief, and then the anticipation would begin. Around eleven a letter would come, or it wouldn’t come. If there was nothing, I felt safe leaving the house and getting on with my day. If a letter did arrive, I would sit on the front steps, the wave of a mountain breaking behind me and the bay glistening in the distance in front and the garden awash in sunlight – a light that seemed no longer accusatory or even familiar but like an element from another realm entirely. I would hold the envelope unopened for as long as I could bear, my hands trembling with excitement but also with the previous night’s excesses, for Eddie and I had no idea how to hide from ourselves that summer and so fell back on the things we knew: the late nights and the revelry of our beginnings, which in their first instance had had the feel of celebration but which we now relived as bad theatre.
Inside on Eddie’s desk was one of those shiny letter openers, but out of some flimsy notion of honour I never used it, instead hooking my index finger in the little gap at one end of the envelope and running it to the opposite end, producing a ragged furrow that looked like agony itself. I can still see Cauley’s handwriting, schoolboyish and deliberate, which contrasted sharply with the prose, a torrent of ideas and sentiments that seemed to contain all the energy of his person. Each letter was a welter of allusions – to public things, things between the two of us, things meaningful only to himself. It was part of what drew me to him. I wanted to gather him in, to get at whatever was underneath the performance, under all that exclamatory bonhomie. I wanted to see him weep – not over me, but over the past, his parents, life, whatever he’d failed at or feared, the whole sad, fucked-up story. I wanted to see him grow small and helpless and racked with suffering, and then to gather that suffering up and rock it like a baby. What is it with women, our way of looking at men like they are prisoners we’ve been tasked to break?
I suppose it should embarrass me now, to remember the hours that summer that I whiled away just thinking of him, drifting idly about the house, wallowing in love as though it were indeed my whole existence, its interior labours actual demands upon my time. But it doesn’t embarrass me, not as much as other things I did. In fact, I feel astonished, and a tad nostalgic, to recall the frittering away of entire days.
Did I believe we had a future? I honestly can’t remember. I remember the way he made his As, squat and nearly square, but I cannot recall whether I actually thought it might work between us, what I wished for, or thought possible. I lived in the now, as though the affair were a terrible crisis in which the intensity of the present and its demands simply effaced, for some necessary interval, any consideration of the future. But I must’ve thought about it. I must’ve thought about little else that summer.
It is just after ten when we step outside the cinema on Eustace Street. A desultory bit of snow catches us both by surprise.
‘Oh?’ we say, looking up.
‘What’s this?’ Harry says, smiling at me, delighted. It is perhaps my favourite thing about Harry, that quick access to delight. He looks as though he has never seen anything quite so magical as these few aimless flurries drifting down upon Temple Bar on a night in March.
We didn’t go to the cinema together, and it was only halfway through the film that I noticed him, two rows in front of me and over on the far left, alone. He was utterly engrossed, his head tilted back slightly, his face catching the glow of the screen, and in the dark, in the intimacy of the cinema, I felt I was spying him in a private moment. Afterwards, I waited for him in the lobby, and when he saw me he lifted his eyebrows in greeting and gave me a reluctant little smile. There was something sad and subdued about him, and I thought maybe I’d been wrong to wait.
The film was about a couple in their eighties who’d been together for ever. They lived in an apartment in Paris. One day, the woman suffered a stroke. The prognosis was that she could expect more strokes, a rapid deterioration in her mental and physical condition. She made her husband promise he wouldn’t leave her in a hospital to die. As the weeks and months passed, she grew more disabled, more demented. She lay on the bed in her nightdress, and her husband exercised her leg: neuf, dix, onze, douze … The nightdress slipped to reveal the skin of her thigh, mottled and unsightly. In another scene, he watched her being showered by a nurse. Her slack breasts, the folds of her belly. There was no aversion in him, simply the frank gaze of a lifetime. At the film’s end, when his wife was capable of little but lying on the bed and moaning hurts … over and over, he suffocated her with a pillow, in a terrible act of mercy.
Harry and I decide to walk up to the Central Hotel for a drink. I scoot round to the right side of him, the side opposite his walking stick. His bad leg seems not to belong to him, like a slightly awkward bundle he is toting. It turned out I was wrong about it being polio. It was a botched back operation when he was in his early thirties that was meant to deal with some damage to his discs. Afterwards, they told him he’d never walk again.
‘Irish health care in the eighties,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to know.’
He’d spent six months in a wheelchair, then nursed himself – his neurons – back to some kind of working order. He said he’d stand by the fireplace, clutching the mantel with one hand, timing himself with a stopwatch. Ten seconds today, twelve tomorrow, and so on, until he was able to stand with just the walking stick, and then to walk.
‘Does it hurt?’ I asked him recently. ‘Your leg.’
‘And my back.’ He said he gets shooting pains down the right side of his body, sometimes down his arm. His knee is bad. ‘There are places it’s nearly bone on bone.’
We find an empty sofa in the hotel bar and order two glasses of red wine. ‘Well,’ he says brightly, ‘what did you think?’ He has recovered himself. He no longer looks caught out and is ready to discuss the film’s artistic merits.
‘It was a proper love story,’ I say. ‘He did the worst thing, the last thing he could ever have imagined doing, because she’d asked him to. Did you like it?’
‘It was unrelenting. I liked it very much.’
We agree: watching the film was like watching death slowly bearing down on you. There was something beautifully, horribly, true about it.
‘They won’t like it in America,’ Harry says, a bit gleefully. Another thing Harry enjoys: the gormless, adolescent optimism of America. Harry is an old soul, European through and through.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Probably not.’
He looks to his left, he’s caught sight of someone he recognizes. And just like that I remember: Harry, standing in front of the shell of a burnt-out house.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘I remember. The assessment in Kosovo. I remember meeting you.’
Harry turns back to me. ‘Don’t try to flatter me,’ he jokes. ‘It’s too late.’
‘I do,’ I say. ‘I’m serious. I’m sorry it took me so long. I don’t think we really spoke.’
‘We were introduced,’ he says. ‘They had just killed a bunch of dogs in the next village. Do you remembe
r that?’
I have to think for a minute. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘vaguely.’ I had a way, back then, of forgetting things that didn’t make it into my reports. My memory became weirdly utilitarian. My entire relationship to events grew strange, in fact. When I’d first arrived in Kosovo, I had wanted to imbue my reports with feeling – outrage or sorrow – which was exactly what I was not supposed to do. In Sri Lanka, I had written a lot of human-interest stories: people getting new limbs, the displaced being resettled, grass-roots peace activists running community centres. My job was to make donors feel good about what their money had achieved. So although I never lied, I focused on the positive. Every life could have a new beginning. War was not all. Hope springs eternal.
But in Kosovo I was writing for internal consumption. My job was to stand apart from the thicket of propaganda and hysteria, to record barbarity – a murder, a mass grave, a firebombed church, a whole village expelled – with the same detachment I brought to an update on the electricity supply. I took to these communiqués with an ease that surprised me. I understood the authority of dispassion, and felt strangely at home in it.
‘The dogs had rabies,’ I say. ‘Wasn’t that the story?’
‘That was the story,’ Harry says. ‘But killing the dogs was a warning. The village was being cleared.’
‘Awful we should’ve met over a bunch of murdered dogs.’
‘When I think of Kosovo,’ Harry says, ‘I think of dogs. Dogs, everywhere.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I know what you mean.’
The dogs in Priština were all skinny as greyhounds, and they slithered along the dark streets in threes or fours, burying their snouts in the waist-high piles of stinking rubbish, snorting and sneezing, gnawing at God knows what. Those that weren’t wild were kept chained by the neck in the yards of their owners, where they barked and bayed all through the night. When you passed they would leap forward with shocking vigour, before their chains yanked them back to earth. All that animal energy, grown twisted and violent from having for so long been denied any normal outlet.
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