Orchid & the Wasp

by Caoilinn Hughes

  Sive pours whiskey into three of the four cups on the coffee table. Art takes his one.

  The left hand kicks into double speed and there are indeed distinctive dynamics. Fortes and pianissimos, if not much else. Then a pause and a stark bridge into the conclusion of the opening section. A longer pause. Then delicate tones, like rain beginning to fall. Tippling from the upper octaves to the lower and the electric piano must not be big enough for the range because notes seem to be missing. The key signature is unreadable, and soon one hand sounds like it’s tripping, just a touch, over the other and that they’re slightly out of sync, but the gentleness of sound convinces you to keep listening. Hear it louden. And you listen because of its authority; because it’s a story, clearly, not just sounds. There will be a moral and morals are worth all sorts of wretchedness. He will take us somewhere if we concentrate.

  Why, then, does it sound made-up? Volatile? If they hadn’t just been listening to the composer’s recording, they might think the player was losing her mind, in the tidiest, most bourgeois manner possible. And who wouldn’t pay to hear how that sounds. Harper makes the motion of turning a page of the sheet music that isn’t there, and Gael sees that her eyes are closed and that she is, in fact, losing it …

  She looks to the keys and catches it again, and it could be the soundtrack from a haunted house or maybe just a normal house where you’re pursued by your own demons so you’d better keep climbing the stairs; you’d better pick up speed and suffer the muscle burn because it’s life or death, or make-believe which is analogous. She plays it too fast, now, faster than is possible, notwithstanding your abilities, and her fingers trip and slap and miss. Her hands slide off the keys and hang by her side like buckets.

  ‘Sorry. Mom only liked the first part.’

  Her head drops forward and Gael rushes to her, as if to catch it. Gael squeezes her and feels the heave and judder of her body, how Guthrie used to convulse in her arms. Except this is a pouring out, not a locking up. Gael presses her mouth to the top of Harper’s head and hopes she doesn’t feel the trickle on her scalp. The balcony door opens and a chill breeze scurries in. Art stands out there in his slippers, his coffee steaming and fogging the glass. A light snow is coming down. Not enough to hold. But there and beautiful, for the time being.

  It feels like seconds, but it must be longer, before Art and Sive are all wrapped up and calling from the hallway.

  ‘Sure you won’t come with?’ Art asks. ‘Nice soft snow out there. Gently falling.’

  Gael feels Harper heave anew at this; her eyes still closed, cheek pressed against Gael’s belly. Gael says no. As the door shuts, she thinks she hears Harper say the words Falling gently, but that could mean anything.

  With her head on Gael’s lap, nude on the futon in the study with the duvet across their legs, Harper said that her mother had talked endlessly. Then she corrected herself:

  ‘Not endlessly. Not non-stop. I assumed it would be. I begged her to cut it out. I said: “Is there no tsunami somewhere we can do a minute’s silence for?” Then she’d get all hurt and I’d feel bad. What a bitch, hindsight.’

  From what Harper said, it seemed as if Kendra had wanted Harper to know as much of her mind as could be exposed in the time she’d had left. Even the innermost stuff; the stuff Harper would rather not have known. But all this talk was one of the reasons Harper hadn’t expected her to linger on the subject of death: certainly not on how she hoped to experience it.

  Years prior, Kendra had attended an introductory seminar on Tibetan Buddhism. She hadn’t been ready for the teachings at the time, she told Harper wisely, but they’d all come racing back to her as death neared and, like all things (including how wilted spinach landed on her plate), she took this as a sign.

  As Kendra explained it, Tibetan Buddhists believe that in both orgasm and death the self is swallowed up in the intensity of the experience. If a person can succumb to this forfeiture of self, they can experience the freely floating mind – the pristine innermost mind, underlying the conceptual one. All people, they believe, are afraid of this loss and unconsciously resist total immersion in the mind, uniquely available during these concentrated experiences. We fear completely losing ourselves.

  Harper spoke:

  ‘ “That’s all fine for sex,” Mom said, “it’s a pity but it’s normal … believe me … but in death?” She held my hand so tight I thought the whole thing was a setup. That she wasn’t really sick! That it was something else! Where’d she get that strength from?’ Harper took Gael’s hand. ‘She squeezed my hand like this and said, “Harper,” she said, “You don’t always like what I believe. But you gotta help me here. To not be fearful in the end, of losing my self. I wanna have the bliss they talk about. People always say they wanna die in the middle of an orgasm. That’d be a good way to go, they say. Well, the Tibetans think it’s possible. Because death and orgasm are the same. Only one lasts longer.” ’

  Gael laughed. And Harper let go of her hand, lifted her head from her lap and turned on the pillow towards her. Her breasts and tummy weighed down sideways and Gael reached out to bear their gorgeous gravity.

  ‘You’re laughing at my dead mom.’ Her face was spliced all over in red patch-ups, instead of gold.

  ‘She’s funny.’

  ‘She was funny.’ Harper breathed in intervals. ‘Truly, she was a hoot.’ The brown around her eyes looked like eye shadow brushed in the wrong place. ‘And that was funny, for sure, but it also meant a lot. Because I could respect it. An I never really respected Mom intellectually. She musta known. I hated that she didn’t read. I hated a lotta things. But I respect that wish she had. And I respect that she wanted me in on it. And it’s hard to be around people you love … but don’t respect. And I took that out on her, for a long time. So I’m the sucker, really. That I missed out on not finding out sooner.’

  Harper closed her eyes, because she was too tired to weep anymore. And Gael was there. And Gael’s pale lips were there, and the shadows beneath her breasts and the stubborn wishbone of her hips. The diamond hollow where her ribs met. The tongue to slip round the avocado of her sybaritic core. And likewise, but different. Likewise, but fuller and brawnier and altogether more forgiving. Those are things that can be lost in and succumbed to and lived on. Later, they can work on the mind. On its presence. For now, the body alone would do. It’s what they had.

  It’s stopped snowing out. Just a very light kiss of it has stuck. Enough to need boots for. Though, she can’t risk waking Harper, in her cucumber eye mask, her sore throat clacking on each outbreath.

  Opening the wardrobe ever so gently to see if the boots are within reach, Gael recalls Wally’s pin. He’d given her quite a scare a few days ago, when it glinted at her like a drunken memory on a too-bright morning. He’d turned up at Guthrie’s doorstep, a taxi engine running at the gate. Gael was busy putting toys away when Guthrie had opened the door to him and the voice blared through the house like a severe weather siren.

  ‘Either the Yellow Pages is outdated as I am, or you’re Mr Foess, the great Irish artist. Which of the two?’

  Gael had run to the door and embraced him. ‘Wally!’ She had to dissolve the notion that strangers might know about Guthrie before he considered it. ‘It’s the guy from the plane!’ she told her brother, who had his son propped on his hip.

  ‘The guy from the plane?’ Wally touched his baseball cap and scanned Gael’s loosely clad body for a sign of what she was made of. What she had shown him. The blackness of his eye disguised its dilation. ‘Well, I never been called that before.’ He chewed on the liverlike flesh of his inner cheek. ‘But this gal can call me just about anything. You know she got me to wear pyjamas? Said she’d do it if I did it – and so I put em on, all cramped up in the airplane cubicle, nearly killed me, then I come back down the aisle and she’s still dressed … says she changed her mind. “Can’t be bothered,” she says … I never been duped like that before. And I’ll never forget it. I been telling everybody!
You got a smart sister. But if she got the smarts, kid, you got the talent.’

  ‘What are you doing in town?’ Gael said, pulling at her collar unconsciously.

  ‘Will you come in?’ Guthrie said.

  ‘No, thank you. My brother’s expecting me. I was just standing in line at the airport and I thought: I wanna meet that kid. I wanna get his autograph. You’re really something.’

  ‘How’s your brother?’ Gael said, desperate to steer things to safer terrain. ‘I didn’t know he was in Ireland.’

  ‘Sure you did. County Wexford. He’s doing fine. He’s okay. He can pay for all his TV channels and that’s about all he cares.’

  ‘If he’s ever in Dublin,’ Guthrie said, ‘tell him he’s welcome here.’ Standing in front of a millionaire, Guthrie saw someone unfortunate. ‘Gael’s helping me to set up a centre for creative therapies. With the money from the paintings. To help people in need. To find healing methods and solace.’ He sounded like a Jehovah’s Witness, Gael thought. ‘If your brother gives it a year or two,’ Guthrie continued, ‘he might be able to call into the centre. We hope to have a place. Some people are more comfortable with that, than coming to someone’s home. What’s your brother’s name?’

  Wally was squinting, which equalled listening. ‘You’re creating a centre where people like you can prosper?’

  Ronan was pulling on Guthrie’s ear aggressively. ‘Yes,’ Guthrie said.

  Wally inhaled noisily through his nose, as if there were only so long he could spend out in the real world before it wearied him. ‘The little fella’s pulling your ear. But you pulled mine.’ He took out his chequebook from the breast pocket of his down jacket, along with a photograph. ‘What’s it called? The centre? I’m writing a cheque here. Who do I gotta make it out to?’

  ‘That’s incredibly kind,’ Guthrie said, almost laughing. ‘But thank you. We have enough.’

  Wally didn’t lift his head. ‘Look. We got this great custom in America called philanthropy. It’s how rich seniors get our egos rubbed. How we put our tax dollars where we wanna put em.’ It’s how holes in the Titanic get patched with gold nameplates, is the repercussion he failed to arrive at. ‘I’ll be dead soon and everyone I ever met will be crawling all over my stock like roaches. Lemme annoy them a bit. That’s my prerogative. It’s about the only card I got left.’

  ‘The Foess Creative Therapy Centre,’ Gael said firmly. One must open one’s mouth for the tax dollars.

  Wally looked up and puckered his lips at her, then squinted at Guthrie, as if to say: That what you’re sticking with? Guthrie’s stunned expression was answer enough. He scribbled on the check and on its stub. Then he tore it off and folded it in half; held it out along with the photograph. ‘Put that in your pocket.’ He meant the cheque. ‘Now here’s a pen. I want an autograph on that back of that picture. The painting’s hung in my anteroom.’

  And here it was. The moment of reckoning.

  Guthrie held the photograph and the pen in one hand. His other arm clasped around Ronan. He stared for some time at the photo. Of his painting. Of the copy Gael had had made of his painting. The copy of the painting he had gifted her. Done on school desks from a different school of thought; an entirely different continent. Gael had never felt sicker than her brother before that moment. He looked at her and she thought all their hearts might stop and Ronan would be quietly pointing at each of their corpses until a neighbour passed by and stopped for a gawk.

  He looked at her and saw the implication; an infraction so fundamental it would not only render everything known strange, but it might impel a person into a state of mind that cannot be overcome. He looked at her and did not read her, for what good would that do? The most unspeakable information stays as such and never transforms into knowledge. This is our contract.

  No, he wanted her to take Ronan. That was the emergency of his look. Take my child. Which she did, mechanically. She held him too hard so he whinged and writhed. Guthrie barely contained his rapture – joy over pride, which is a sin – as he signed the back of the photograph.

  So Harper had been right. That it’s hard to be around people you love, but don’t respect. Guthrie, like Wally … like so many, is a mark. He has been colonized and extorted and he will never come to accept it. Gael wants her love for him to last and if that means putting a glass casing over it and sealing it, she’ll do it; better that it can never grow than risk corroding it completely.

  She doesn’t zip her suitcase shut, so as not to wake anyone. She lifts it in both arms like a child and steals off into the morning. It’s five o’clock and the sky is purely space, now. No weather in the way of that brute fact. Harper had admitted their failure to Gael, just then. How they would spool out. When she’d said that respect is a prerequisite to love. That was an onus Gael didn’t want to bear. Someone else’s definition of respect. Someone else’s conception of love. That is a life sentence to negative liberty.

  ‘Leave now,’ Gael tells herself, marking out the road she has come along with the wheels of her case through the snow. It’s crueller to let it deepen and endure. It’s kinder to leave them in the dark.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to Bill Clegg. For every damn thing. Marvels at the Clegg agency – Simon Toop, Marion Duvert, David Kambhu – for being kind, astute, thoughtful people. For reading this book how it wanted to be read and knowing what it needed. Anna Webber. Lindsay Sagnette and Rose Fox at Hogarth, for your care, humour, energy, and for what you wanted. Juliet Mabey, exemplar of British publishing. Everyone who worked on this book at Oneworld and Crown and Hogarth, including Alyson Coombes, Margot Weale, Rachel Rokicki, Gwyneth Stansfield, Becca Putman, Paul Nash, Thanmai Bui-Van, Caitriona Row, Cormac Kinsella, Louise Dobbin.

  Tin House was the first venue to ever publish my fiction. I had no MFA or recognizable bylines. Dragging myself to the desk for the 441st day in a row, the fact that the writing mattered made every conceivable difference. Rob Spillman, Taylor Lannamann, Lance Cleland, Emma Komlos-Hrobsky, Paul Lucas, and others behind that encouragement: thank you.

  My PhD supervisors, Harry Ricketts and Geoff Miles, who patiently let me learn how to write – one wise word and one recycling bin-load at a time. Thanks to the Queen’s University of Belfast, Victoria University of Wellington and Maastricht University for the invaluable support over the years. To Culture Ireland, Literature Ireland, and the Arts Council. Huge thanks to James Merrill Foundation.

  Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s concept of the orchid and the wasp inspired this book. In the documentary Art and Craft (2014), painter and art forger Mark Landis asks, ‘Where would the church be if St. Peter didn’t lie?’ I shan’t let Jarleth pass this off as his own.

  Friends who read parts of the work along the way, or whose support I exploited: David Fleming, Donnla Hughes, Evin Hughes, Ronan Ryan, Fergus Barrowman, Elizabeth Knox, Kristen McDougall, Nicola Gaston, Taylor Lannamann, Robbie Ellis (for brilliant composer tidbits), Edmund Frettingham, Dean Bakopoulos, Ricki O’Rawe, Sean O’Meallaigh Ian Baxter-Crawford, Beverly Burch, Wade Geary, Elizabeth Behrens, Brian Lynch, Jessica Traynor, Eoghan Walls, Lorna Davie, Willy Bliss, Alicia Hayes, Petria Mc Donnell, Kim Watts, and my big-hearted parents, Ailbhe & Seán, who – thank Higgs – love books.

  Apologies to my dad, who I dedicated my last, unpublishable novel to. Paul Behrens gets this one; not because he deserves it, but because he earned it. For not staging an intervention. For sharing his life.

  A final thanks to the robot vacuum cleaner.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Caoilinn Hughes is an Irish writer whose poetry collection Gathering Evidence won the Irish Times Shine/Strong Award and the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for both the Seamus Heaney Prize and the Pigott Poetry Prize. She is a fellow of the James Merrill Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation, and was awarded a Tin House Writers Workshop Scholarship, a Literature Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland, and The Ireland Funds Monaco Award. Her
work has appeared in Tin House, Granta, POETRY, Best British Poetry, BBC Radio 3, The Rumpus and elsewhere. She divides her time between Ireland and the Netherlands.

  A Oneworld Book

  First published in Great Britain, Ireland & Australia by Oneworld Publications, 2018

  This ebook published 2018

  Copyright © Caoilinn Hughes, 2018

  The moral right of Caoilinn Hughes to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved

  Copyright under Berne Convention

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-78607-365-5 (Hardback)

  ISBN 978-1-78607-366-2 (eBook)

  ISBN 978-1-78607-420-1 (Export Trade Paperback)

  Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

  PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov. Copyright © 1962, Vera Nabokov and Dmitri Nabokov, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.