The Portable Virgin

by Anne Enright

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Anne Enright

  Dedication

  Title Page

  (She Owns) Every Thing

  Indifference

  Juggling Oranges

  Revenge

  Liking

  The House of the Architect’s Love Story

  Luck be a Lady

  The Portable Virgin

  Science and Nature

  Men and Angels

  Fruit Bait

  Historical Letters

  Eckhardt’s Dream

  Fatgirl Terrestrial

  What are Cicadas?

  The Brat

  Mr Snip Snip Snip

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The characters in this fierce and witty first collection of stories stand at an oblique angle to society. Full of desire, but out of kilter, their response to a dislocation reality is mutinous, wild, unforgettable.

  About the Author

  Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published two collections of stories, collected as Yesterday’s Weather, one book of non-fiction Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood and four novels, most recently The Gathering, which was Irish Novel of the Year, won the Irish Fiction Award and the 2007 Man Booker Prize.

  Also by Anne Enright

  Fiction

  The Wig My Father Wore

  What Are You Like?

  The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

  Taking Pictures

  The Gathering

  The Forgotten Waltz

  Non-Fiction

  Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood

  Anthology

  The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story (editor)

  SPECIAL THANKS TO MARTINA, ALEX AND D.B.K.

  ANNE ENRIGHT

  The Portable Virgin

  (She Owns) Every Thing

  CATHY WAS OFTEN wrong, she found it more interesting. She was wrong about the taste of bananas. She was wrong about the future of the bob. She was wrong about where her life ended up. She loved corners, surprises, changes of light.

  Of all the fates that could have been hers (spinster, murderer, savant, saint), she chose to work behind a handbag counter in Dublin and take her holidays in the sun.

  For ten years she lived with the gloves and beside the umbrellas, their colours shy and neatly furled. The handbag counter travelled through navy and brown to a classic black. Yellows, reds, and white were to one side and all varieties of plastic were left out on stands, for the customer to steal.

  Cathy couldn’t tell you what the handbag counter was like. It was hers. It smelt like a leather dream. It was never quite right. Despite the close and intimate spaces of the gloves and the empty generosity of the bags themselves, the discreet mess that was the handbag counter was just beyond her control.

  She sold clutch bags for people to hang on to; folded slivers of animal skin that wouldn’t hold a box of cigarettes, or money unless it was paper, or a bunch of keys. ‘Just a credit card and a condom,’ said one young woman to another and Cathy felt the ache of times changing.

  She sold the handbag proper, sleek and stiff and surprisingly roomy – the favourite bag, the thorough-bred, with a hard clasp, or a fold-over flap and the smell of her best perfume. She sold sacks to young women, in canvas or in suede, baggy enough to hold a life, a change of underwear, a novel, a deodorant spray.

  The women’s faces as they made their choice were full of lines going nowhere, tense with the problems of leather, price, vulgarity, colour. Cathy matched blue eyes with a blue trim, a modest mouth with smooth, plum suede. She sold patent to the click of high heels, urged women who had forgotten into neat, swish reticules. Quietly, one customer after another was guided to the inevitable and surprising choice of a bag that was not ‘them’ but one step beyond who they thought they might be.

  Cathy knew what handbags were for. She herself carried everything (which wasn’t much) in one pocket, or the other.

  She divided her women into two categories: those who could and those who could not.

  She had little affection for those who could, they had no need of her, and they were often mistaken. Their secret was not one of class, although that seemed to help, but one of belief, and like all questions of belief, it involved certain mysteries. How, for example, does one believe in navy?

  There were also the women who could not. A woman for example, who could NOT wear blue. A woman who could wear a print, but NOT beside her face. A woman who could wear beads but NOT earrings. A woman who had a secret life of shoes too exotic for her, or one who could neither pass a perfume counter nor buy a perfume, unless it was for someone else. A woman who comes home with royal jelly every time she tries to buy a blouse.

  A woman who cries in the lingerie department.

  A woman who laughs while trying on hats.

  A woman who buys two coats of a different colour.

  The problem became vicious when they brought their daughters shopping. Cathy could smell these couples from Kitchenware.

  Cathy married late and it was hard work. She had to find a man. Once she had found one, she discovered that the city was full of them. She had to talk and laugh and be fond. She had to choose. Did she like big burly men with soft brown eyes? Did she like that blond man with the eyes of pathological blue? What did she think of her own face, its notches and dents?

  She went the easy road with a kind teacher from Fairview and a registry office do. She stole him from a coltish young woman with awkward eyes. Cathy would have sold her a tapestry Gladstone bag, one that was ‘wrong’ but ‘worked’ all the same.

  Sex was a pleasant surprise. It was such a singular activity, it seemed to scatter and gather her at the same time.

  Cathy fell in love one day with a loose, rangy woman, who came to her counter and to her smile and seemed to pick her up with the same ease as she did an Argentinian calf-skin shoulder bag in tobacco brown, with woven leather inset panels, pig-skin lining and snap clasp. It was quite a surprise.

  The woman, whose eyes were a tired shade of blue, asked Cathy’s opinion, and Cathy heard herself say ‘DIVE RIGHT IN HONEY, THE WATER’S JUST FINE!’ – a phrase she must have picked up from the television set. The woman did not flinch. She said ‘Have you got it in black?’

  Brown was the colour of the bag. Cathy was disappointed by this betrayal. The weave would just disappear in black, the staining was everything. Cathy said, ‘It’s worth it in brown, even if it means new shoes. It really is a beautiful bag.’ The woman, however, neither bought the brown nor argued for black. She rubbed the leather with the base of her thumb as she laid the bag down. She looked at Cathy. She despaired. She turned her wide, sporting shoulders, her dry, bleached hair, and her nose with the bump in it, gave a small sigh, and walked out of the shop.

  Cathy spent the rest of the day thinking, not of her hands, with their large knuckles, but of her breasts, that were widely spaced and looked two ways, one towards the umbrellas, the other at the scarves. She also wondered whether the woman had a necklace of lines hanging from her hips, whether she had ever been touched by a woman, what she might say, what Cathy might say back. Whether her foldings and infoldings were the same as her own or as different as daffodil from narcissus. It was a very lyrical afternoon.

  Cathy began to slip. She made mistakes. She sold the wrong bags to the wrong women and her patter died. She waited for another woman to pick up the tobacco-brown bag to see what might happen. She sold indiscriminately. She looked at every woman who came her way and she just didn’t know anymore.

  She could, of course change her job.
She might, for example, work as a hospital maid, in the cardiac ward, which was full of certainties.

  Women did not get heart attacks. They would come at visiting time and talk too much or not at all. She could work out who loved simply or in silence. She could spot those who might as well hate. She would look at their bags without judgement, as they placed them on the coverlets, or opened them for tissues. They might even let a tear drip inside.

  Cathy emptied out her building-society account and walked up to the hat department with a plastic bag filled with cash. She said, ‘Ramona, I want to buy every hat you have.’ She did the same at Shoes, although she stipulated size five-and-a-half. She didn’t make a fuss when refused. She stuffed the till of her own counter full of notes, called a taxi and hung herself with bags, around her neck and down her arms. All kinds of people looked at her. Then she went to bed for a week, feeling slightly ashamed.

  She kept the one fatal bag, the brown calf-skin with a snap clasp. She abused it. She even used it to carry things. She started to sleep around.

  Indifference

  THE YOUNG MAN in the corner was covered in flour. His coat was white, his shoes were white and there was a white paper hat askew on his head. Around his mouth and nose was the red weal of sweating skin where he had worn a mask to keep out the dust. The rest of him was perfectly edible and would turn to dough if he stepped outside in the rain.

  They were assessing her as she sat in the corner with a glass of Guinness and an old newspaper that someone had left behind.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked the white man.

  ‘I wouldn’t go near her with a bag of dicks,’ said his companion, who was left-handed – or at least that was the hand that was holding his pint. He had the thin Saturday-matinée face of a villain; of the man who might kidnap the young girl and end up in a duel with Errol Flynn. She saw him swinging out of velvet drapes, up-ending tables and jumping from the chandelier, brandishing, not a sword, but a hessian bag from which come soft gurgles and thin protesting squeaks.

  Errol Flynn wounds him badly and is leaning over his throat ready for the final, ungentlemanly slash when the bag of dicks escapes, rolls down a flight of steps, shuffles over to the beautiful young girl and starts to whine. She unties the knot and sets them free.

  ‘What a peculiar language you speak,’ she said mentally, with a half-smile and a nod, as if her own were normal. ‘Normal’ usually implied American. I am Canadian, she used to say, it may be a very boring country, but who needs history when we have so much weather?

  Irish people had no weather at all apart from vague shifts from damp to wet, and they talked history like it was happening down the road. They also sang quite a bit and were depressingly ethnic. They thought her bland.

  Of course I am bland, she thought. You too would be bland if you grew up with one gas pump in front of the house and nothing else except a view that stretched over half the world. Landscape made me bland, bears poking in the garbage can stunted my individuality, as did plagues of horseflies, permafrost, wild-fire, and the sun setting like a bomb. So much sky makes ones bewildered – which is the only proper way to be.

  She rented a flat in Rathmines where the only black people in the country seemed to reside and the shops stayed open all night. The house was suitably ‘old’ but the partition walls bothered her, as did the fact that the door from her bedroom into the hall had been taken off its hinges. The open block of the doorframe frightened her as she fell asleep, not because of what might come through it, but because she might drift off the bed and slide through the gap to Godknowswhere. (In the shower she sang ‘How are things in Glockamorra?’ and ‘Come back, Paddy Reilly, to Ballyjamesduff’.)

  The white man was beside her asking to look at her paper and he sat down to read.

  ‘Go on, ask her does she want to come,’ said the matinée man across the deserted bar.

  ‘Ask her yourself.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ said the matinée man picking up their two pints and making the move to her table.

  ‘God that’s a great pair of shoes you got on,’ he said looking at her quilted moon-boots. ‘You didn’t get them here.’

  ‘Canada,’ she said.

  ‘She can talk!’ said the villain. ‘I told you she could talk.’

  ‘You can’t bring him anywhere,’ said the white man, and she decided that she would sleep with him. Why not? It had been a long time since Toronto.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked, and was surprised at the silence that fell.

  ‘I’m skiving off,’ said the white man. ‘I’m on the hop. Mitching. I’ll get the sack.’ She still didn’t seem to understand. ‘Look at me,’ he opened up his palms like a saint to show her the thin rolls of paste in the creases. ‘I work over there. In the bakery.’

  ‘I guessed that,’ she said. ‘I could smell the fresh bread.’

  *

  She wrote this story in a letter to her flatmate in Toronto. It is a story about A Bit of Rough. It includes furious sex in red-brick alleyways. It has poignant moments to do with class distinction and different breeds of selfishness. Unfortunately the man in question is not wearing leather, nor is he smelling like Marlon Brando. He is too thin. His accent is all wrong. He is covered, not with oil and sweat, but with sweat and flour.

  The furious sex took him by surprise. She looked at a man sliding down the wall on to his hunkers with his hands over his face. He had lost his paper hat. There was flour down her front congealing in the rain. ‘I’ve never done that before,’ he said.

  ‘Well, neither have I.’

  ‘I’ve never done any of that before.’

  ‘Oh boy.’

  ‘And I’ve got the sack.’ So she brought him home.

  ‘Erections. What a laugh. My ancient Aunt Moragh bounced out of her coffin on the way to the cemetery. I will never forget it. You could almost hear the squawk. It was my cousin Shawn driving the pick-up when the suspension went. Now he was a bit simple – or at least that is, he never talked so you couldn’t tell. But he took her dying so hard that he was swinging the wheel with one hand and crying into the other and he drove regardless, with his ass dragging in the dirt. I swear I saw Moragh rise to her feet like she was on hinges, like she was a loose plank in the floor coming up to hit you in the face. And she yelled out “Shawn! You come back here!” I was only six, but I wouldn’t deny it, no matter how much they said I was a liar.’

  There was a thin white man in her bed, and when he got up to go to the toilet he disappeared through the doorframe like the line of light from a closing door. They were no longer drunk. He stayed, because he didn’t know what else to do. He was fragile, like a man let out of prison, who bumps into a stranger on the street and feels a lifetime’s friendship. He stared, and she felt all the stories she had inside her looking for him like home.

  ‘So Todd tells me about this woman that he is in love with. I mean that’s OK, but why do men have to take all their clothes off before they can tell you about the woman they love? So there we were, sitting in the U of T canteen and I’m saying “Todd, please, it’s OK, I’ll survive, please put your clothes back on.”’

  ‘All the same, I could have spent the rest of my life with him, having bad sex. Honestly. He made love like I was a walrus, something huge and strange. Spent half an hour kind of paddling his hand on my left buttock which must be the least interesting, the most mistaken part of my body. Then sort of dodged in, like I was an alley on the way to school. I didn’t know whether he had come, or a picture had slipped on the wall … True love.’

  He stayed the next day and she didn’t go into school. She opened a bottle of good wine to educate him and they forgot to eat. They lifted the sash of the bedroom window and were surprised by the taste of the air. He was so thin it hurt her and his laugh was huge.

  ‘We came across this swimming pool, in the woods, in the middle of nowhere. It was empty, with blue tiles and weeds growing out through the cracks. There was a metal ladder just
going nowhere in the corner. So we climbed down and it was like being underwater somehow. Like we swam through the air. Then this crazy guy, he stood on the edge and he said he was going to dive in. My God was I freaked. I could just see his head splitting on the tiles. I screamed until I fell over. Men always think I’m neurotic and I suppose it’s true.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  He was grateful for it, whatever it was. Compared to her body, her mind was easy to understand. There were wine stains on the sheets which he wrapped around him like Caesar. He sang, and paced the room, and looked at his naked feet, which weren’t ugly anymore. The razor in her bathroom confused him and he asked about other men. So she made love to him at the sink and he looked at his face in the mirror, as if it was blind.

  He wasn’t so amazed by sex as by people, who did this all the time and never told. Never did anything but laugh in the wrong way. ‘They do this night and day,’ he said, ‘and it doesn’t show. Walking down the street and you think they’d look different. You think they’d recognise and smile at each other, like “I know and you know”. It’s like the secret everyone was in on, except me.’

  The light deepened. ‘What is it like for a woman?’ he asked.

  ‘How should I know?’ she said. ‘What is it like for a man? Sometimes, after a while, it’s like your whole body is crying, like your liver even, is sad. It’s more sweet than sore. In here. And here.’

  ‘Where?’

  Her touch saturated him to the bone and he had to pull away from her, in case something untold might happen. Which it did.

  The next day he rang up the matinée man whose astonishment was audible from the other side of the room. He asked for clothes from his flat and looked at her and laughed as the questions kept pouring out of the phone.

  The matinée man’s name was Jim and he entered her place with an intense air of apology. Kevin poked his head around the jamb of the open doorframe and asked for his clothes. ‘You bollocks.’ They all went out for a drink.