As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  Half an hour later Stephen’s hair lay on the floor, and he looked with surprise at the mirror to discover that the centre of his pate was almost entirely bald. When he raised his head he saw the curved limit of himself like a passing moon and was aghast.

  “I’m bald,” he said.

  Sonny Sugrue didn’t catch him. He was sweeping the hair into the corner.

  “I look like a clown.”

  Although he paused, Sonny missed the words as they passed him in the air, merely nodding the slow, wise nod of a man who had handled the heads of ten thousand, seen the vanity of youth, the diminishing of beauty, and the horror of age as the customer turned to the truth of the mirror. We are always a shock to ourselves.

  “Five pounds, please,” he roared across the small shop.

  It was a moment before Stephen moved; he was transfixed by the changed image of himself in the glass, and then gladly realized that as he was unrecognizable to himself, he could walk the streets of the town with no fear of the woman knowing him. When he reached the doorway he felt the warm day cool on the top of his head and stooped out beneath the jamb as if bearing eggs on his crown. A small bubble of joy inflated in his stomach.

  He went across to Nelly Grant. When she saw the white dome of his forehead coming, her heart lifted and she told him at once that he looked much better, and remarked to herself the dark health of his eyebrows. “You’ll see,” she said aloud before he reached her. “Walk in the sun this week now, and eat plums. You’ll see.” She paused in that moment before friendship, then added, “I’m having a mug of tea, would you like some?”

  She sat him in the small side room to the shop and poured a tea that was not Indian. It was green in colour and tasted like the wildflower and grass teas of children playing house in the summertime. She had concocted it herself while he was in Sugrue’s and now watched him drink. He has the embarrassment of those who feel deeply that they should not be alive at all, she thought, those who have survived where others who were better, more gifted or beautiful or true, have perished into death.

  Stephen’s face collapsed in a scowl at the dregs of the teacup.

  “You don’t have to finish it,” she said. “But it will do you good. You’ll see.”

  Nelly Grant filled a bag of plums and gave them to him. She took his money and then watched him walk out the door, telling him she would have fresh supplies in by Friday.

  And so Stephen began the week of his wait for Gabriella Castoldi in the town of Kenmare, where the sun shone like midsummer and the farmers drove their tractors in shirtsleeves. Blue skies hung like canopies above the green mountains. The white flecks of the winter sheep ran and kicked air like lambs as the pulse of a midwinter spring beat beneath the earth. Yellow blossoms reappeared on the gorse bushes that week. The crown of Stephen’s head burned pink, and for it Nelly Grant gave him oil that smelled like coconuts and induced the tropical dreams of warm seas and white sand that woke him with both eyes weeping saltily on his pillow. The town was lifted with the weather, as if a holiday had been declared without tourists. Nelly sold salads on the first of December, and fed Stephen Griffin the restorative fibrous lunch of raw carrots diced in muesli. Out of politeness he gagged mouthfuls of what seemed like horse food and listened to her telling him how his complexion had improved. He had begun to show a little of his life force, she told him. She had already detected that Gabriella Castoldi was the woman he was waiting for, but she did not yet know the extent of their relationship and imagined that at least they had met. Each sun-bright bedazzled day, while the flies buzzed back into Kenmare and the wild rhododendrons reglossed their leaves in the mountains, Nelly Grant plotted the return of Stephen Griffin to health; and he submitted. He was a textbook case, she thought, not that the characteristics of his symptoms bespoke a single remedy, but rather that the multiplicity of his ailments prompted Nelly Grant to consider giving him everything in the textbook. She gave him zinc for his skin and made comfrey tea, and then diced watercress in the salad sandwiches she made for him for his walks. For the anaemic condition which she feared was almost endemic to his character she gave him garlic and sunflower seeds, Brazil nuts and almonds, and offered him a soup of soya beans when he returned red-cheeked and pink-crowned from clambering all day in the lower slopes of the mountains. For the poorness of his respiration, a complaint common in uncertain lovers, she made a carrageen blancmange from the moss which was still growing in winter along the temperate shoreline of Parknasilla.

  Four days was too short a time to change the habits of over thirty years, but Nelly was reaffirmed in her philosophy when she saw the clear improvements in the patient. Love, she knew, was simply the energy that bound us to the earth; and for it the energy of the earth needed to be administered. For love you need carrots, and Stephen Griffin collected four in a brown paper bag every morning before walking his lovesickness out into the green air of the mountains.

  And so, that warm and close week of waiting. It was a week that Stephen had taken out of his life, as though he had torn the next page from a book and thrown the rest away, following the sentences down the page with no idea of what in the airy infinity behind it came next. Endlessly as he moved out into the mountains and walked the lower hillsides he read down the page to the end—how he had heard a woman playing in a concert, how it had moved him, how he could not stop thinking of her and had come now to Kenmare to see her again; it read as simply as an infant’s text. But in the moment he reached the bottom of that page the limitless possibilities beyond it made him ill with a sense of freefall and the notion that he was being absurd and should drive on back to Clare.

  But still, at the moment when he might sensibly have left, he stayed on, his resolve fuelled at crisis moments and his balance restored by the hundred plums and the tropical summertime that had softened the air between the mountains of Kerry like a pair of hands tossing a light pastry. He stayed on, waiting. Mary White brought him boiled eggs in the mornings, and when he discovered her small tape recorder she joined him sometimes in the evenings when he listened to Vivaldi in the garden-looking sitting room, where the saffron crocuses were already blooming. He listened to the music with his hands on his knees and his head back on the armchair, his eyes closed. He wore a white shirt with the collar open that gleamed in the low light. By the Thursday evening sleep had deserted him, and long after Mary White was lying in the familiar dream of her husband in the garden with the straw hat on his head and their camellia in blossom; Stephen was lying wide-eyed on top of the covers, where the moon spilled like mercury, aware only that his life had reached a precipice, and holding in his hands the yellow page that announced the Friday-evening concert in the hotel, with Gabriella Castoldi on violin and Paul Sheils on piano.

  11

  When Stephen Griffin walked in the doorway of The Falls Hotel on Friday evening, his breath scented with parsley and his head clear from the chewing of lemon balm, Maurice Harty was not on the door. And neither was anyone else. The front hallway was deserted and only a young girl clicked the keys of a computer at the reception desk. At first he thought he was early. He had been waiting all week for this moment and now imagined that his watch had moved ahead of Time in rhythm with his mind and that perhaps it was not yet eight o'clock. He walked over to where a wood fire was burning low and mimed the warming of his warm hands to hold off for an instant his gathering sense of foolishness. Then he went to the receptionist and asked what time it was. When she told him it was eight o'clock, he nodded as if in exact agreement with her. He was like a lost traveller, having voyaged on long uncertain seas towards a land he presumed was there, but now, checking the coordinates, was vanished. Nothing was happening. He was there, clean-shaven and freshly scented, his eyes already glossily enlivened with the week of herbs and his head high, just above the sinking feeling of despair. But in a moment he might drown.

  “I was wondering,” he said to the girl, his voice so low in his throat that the words were marshmallowy lumps of nothing, “if ther
e was …” He raised a large one with a small cough. “A concert here.” It was as though he had declared the New World begins here and the men rushed to the side to see only the boundless watery horizon.

  “Oh yes,” the girl sighed, “there is. That's why I'm not gone to the bingo. Don't say you haven't heard? It's with your Man Who Releases the Balls, you know, on the lotto, on Ty he's here tonight, down in the hall. For the football team. They're raising for a pitch.” And as if he could not already tell, she added, “It'll be brilliant.”

  Stephen was trying to contain the shaking that had started in his legs.

  “There is a concert, then.”

  “Yes, in the O'Connell Room. Five pounds. I'd say it's just starting.”

  He paid her the money with the butterflies of his hands and swallowed the air-apples that gagged him as he walked along the carpeted hallway to where the New World was and O'CONNELL ROOM was written in gold leaf above an oak door.

  It squeaked when he opened it. No music was playing yet, he was in time, and it was only when he had turned to close the door that he felt the emptiness of the room at his back.

  There were twenty-seven rows of chairs, fifteen chairs wide, and only seventeen people who had not gone to watch the Man Who Releases the Balls.

  He walked into the middle of the room and sat down. Then Peter Sheils and Gabriella Castoldi entered, took their places, and began to play.

  12

  She wore a green velvet dress.

  They played a Boccherini minuet. There was a light above her and he watched where it glanced upon the angle of her neck. She pressed the held notes and squeezed them for tenderness, her lips closed and her green eyes watching the invisible ghosts of feelings that she freed into the air. Her right foot appeared beneath the dress, and he watched it through the fullness of Brahms's Hungarian Dance no. 17. She played Kreisler, Elgar, Schubert, and Brahms. While she played, nothing else mattered in the world.

  When the concert had finished, Stephen stood and applauded loudly, and was still standing there when the rest of the small audience had filed past and Peter Sheils had closed the piano and walked away.

  Gabriella stepped down from the small stage.

  “Thank you, thank you for coming,” she said to him. She might have been about to walk past him, but she stopped, and Stephen moved a foot closer.

  He stooped down. She smelled like autumn below him. He wanted to eat her voice, and for a terrible gaping moment said nothing, waiting for her to speak again. A driplet ran downward on his crown until he turned his head slantedly to the right.

  “We appreciated your listening,” she said.

  Appreciated. It was like an Italian word when she said it, and he tasted it like a delicacy. He wanted to listen to her talk as he had listened to her play, but the fear of his pause growing overlong made him speak.

  “You are … you … I think you are …”

  She looked at him. She looked in his eyes and she touched his arm.

  “You are very kind,” she said. “I think I saw you before.”

  “Yes. In Ennis,” he said. “And Galway” He wanted so to look at her face that he did not.

  “The Interpreti Veneziani. Oh”—she stopped—“you are the man who nearly died.” She smiled when she said it, but even then, he thought, there was sadness in her. Her hair smelled like autumn rain, and he stooped down deeper within it. “Only then you had more hair.” Her face was lit with small laughter, and Stephen reached his hand to his bare crown as if covering the revelation of some inner secret. “You must love music,” she said.

  I have not listened to music for fifteen years, he wanted to say. I have been dead and woken up. I am shaking here in every particle of my spirit because of you. Please stay. Please stay here talking to me, he wanted to say, but the idiot in control of his body merely nodded at her, breathing parsley-breath on the single word: “Yes.”

  She stood there. She stood there in the green velvet dress, and he imagined he could sense the Adriatic and the sunlight in the skin of her shoulders. She was as different as Venice, and when she spoke again, giving him words like fruit in her rounded and softly bruised English, he had to try hard not to reach out and touch her.

  “We play tomorrows,” she said. “There will be maybe more people.”

  “I don't care.” The idiot was making his words into flurried, pauseless gasps now. “I mean I don't … if nobody comes I will be … You might prefer to play with more people … but I could pay more for … not that it's the money, you … But I …”

  And there the words ran out and he was tongue-tied and trussed with a glittering crown of sweat falling from his forehead.

  “No.” She touched his arm once more, as if she were a balm. “It doesn't matter. I like to play,” she said, moving a step back from him, this strange, anguished man with the stiffly bent wire of his emotions piercing his insides. “Bye-bye.”

  She was already walking towards the door with her violin when the idiot freed him and Stephen could whisper after her, “I will be here,” closing his eyes and lifting his heart to repeat it louder, “I will be here,” and causing Gabriella Castoldi to stop at the doorway and look back at him one last time before she said bye-bye again and was gone.

  13

  She did not even know his name. And yet when Stephen rose from the bed he had not slept in the following morning and opened the window on the continuing blue-bright and balmy summer of the first day of December, he felt the force of goodness moving in the world. He sensed the sweet energy of regeneration and bloom, the tenderness of light, the majesty of birdsong, and all the rapturous gladness and wonder that were the familiar quick-pulsed delights of those who since time immemorial have fallen in love. He was the Hollywood version of himself, the more handsome, white-shirted, and well-proportioned man singing while he shaved and finding that the perfect clean lines of his blemishless skin revealed no cuts and only the immaculate smoothness of his own face. Everything was charged, loaded with a richness of sensation: the water he splashed on himself, the scent of the witch hazel and aloe vera in the lotion, the peppermint in the toothpaste. Music should have been playing. And was when he arrived in the small dining room, where Mary White was bringing him his breakfast.

  It was a micro-season of happiness, a blissed-out moment of abandoned candlelight, and Stephen Griffin could sit at the table in the brief pleasure of knowing: This is joy, this is the richness of things, the brimming sense of the impossible becoming real, when the Hollywood version of himself might have danced about the table and taken Mary White in his arms, spinning her in loops of gaiety, fox-trotting and cha-cha-chaing out through the French doors and into the garden that even then exploded with fireworklike blossoms of orange and gold. There was tenderness in the sunlight and, in the gentleness of the air of that house that morning, a kind of clemency, as if the past had been swept softly with a horsehair brush and the lines of grief, disappointment, and failure were blurred now into the faded and waterpainted corners of the paper.

  She had spoken to him.

  Gabriella Castoldi had spoken to him, and for whatever came afterwards, whatever lay in the crisscrossed double-knotted stitching of the plot, and despite the reflex habitual expectation he had of everything in his life ending like a useless, lost thread that fitted nowhere in the fabric, Stephen Griffin was that morning briefly illumined with faith and calm in his heart, though he balanced precariously on the fast and silver needle of love.

  He did not think of the way ahead. The morning gifted him with a blind optimism that was partly the confusion of his body following the sleepless moon-night, and he did not consider anything beyond that evening and seeing Gabriella play again. No thought of the following week lodged in his mind; Mrs. Waters and the school were not there, nor the enquiries she had already made about his father's health and the growing impatience and suspicion that were mounting in her mind, causing her to hear the morning news on the radio with the stiff cold porridge of dread in her mouth,
certain that her history teacher would at any moment be covered in a bright red scandal and discovered in bed with another man. Neither this, nor any of the dull cautionary counsel of ordinary life that scorns and mocks romance, tells you you cannot leave your job and get in the car and go to Kerry to hear a woman play a violin, that you cannot walk out of your life like that on a whim, on a feeling, no, none of this did Stephen Griffin consider.

  When he walked into Kenmare that morning, Nelly Grant sensed him coming. The town was in the sleepy aftermath of the party for the Man Who Releases the Balls and no custom had yet arrived for the Saturday traders at the top of the triangle. Stephen's stride was slaphappy and easy, and when he entered the shop he radiated the manic intensity that is shared by the hopelessly lost and the recently found. Nelly had known sometime in the night that his spirit was well, for the stillness of the moonlight foretold it, she believed, holding to the fairy credo that the energy of her principal clients was always reflected in the skies that they drew like children's paintings above them. It was an unproven but certain fact, she reckoned, that people make their own weather, that you could hold a grey cloud motionless in the air above you simply by the predisposition of your character towards the negative ions of depression. Look, she would say, at Connemara, and tell me it's not true.

  When Stephen was three feet in front of her, he smelled like lilies, and this despite the aromatic display of oranges and lemons that filled the counter and the burning oil of rosewood in the dish beside the register. It was the scent of Gabriella Castoldi. And when Nelly caught it, opening her eyes wide as she drew it in, she knew the depth of feeling into which Stephen had alien and remarked silently to herself how she must sometime write down the wisdom of that mystery: how we come to smell of those we love and can carry them like the smallest ghosts in the infinity of our pores.