The fall, of course, was always the hardest, and from September to mid-October, I was restive. My mother had died at the very end of summer, and the only man I’d ever loved had vanished at the beginning of fall. Perhaps fall to winter wouldn’t have been so difficult, but passing over from the heat of summer to the cool comfort of fall brought with it the illusion that not all hope was lost. There were still leaves on the trees, still the sun shone down and warmed the earth. Winter had not yet arrived. But I sensed it in the air long before anyone else would have felt the cold bite.
Did I think of Martin? I must have, but I was not aware of it in the way a person might be if words or images went through their mind. Bits of conversation, or flashes of time spent together. My memory of him was more like a ring I’d worn for many years that I no longer felt on my finger, its tiny weight comprehended in my experience of myself. Sometimes I looked down (as it were) and saw it, and was surprised by it: Is that still there? And so it was, it was always there.
And the other person I had lost, Molly — I thought of her from time to time as well. But in the fall of 1999, I actually heard from her. I was thirty-four then, and had long stopped dreaming of ever seeing my oldest friend again, or understanding what had happened between us. She was in Ireland. She’d found Martin’s artworks in a gallery there. She would wait for me if I would come. What she was doing in Ireland, she didn’t say and I didn’t ask. I just got on a plane and flew over. I’d been dating someone, a man named Daniel, but I couldn’t explain what I was doing, and so I just went. But I left a note. I knew at least to do that.
The plane approached the west coast of Ireland, and an older woman beside me leaned over my tray table and peered out through the window. The well-worn green graining every contour of the island, the shadows of clouds slipping over and down the hills. The woman’s ear was beside my mouth, like a lover’s.
“Has it been a long time?”
She hadn’t spoken a word to me the entire flight; now she nodded. She turned her face away a little, so I couldn’t see her eyes.
“Maybe nothing’s changed,” I said.
It was fall in Ireland too, the persistence of green from the air disguised the season. But on the streets, it was cool, and the leaves were shading yellow and orange. At home the city had smelled of willow and rain, of late honeysuckle and patio espressos and there was the sound of cicadas, their anxious longing, a sound I’d never heard before coming to Canada. In Dublin, the air had a cold vein in it, and the sky felt close, like the city was cupped in someone’s hand to keep the wind off a match.
I didn’t want the taxi to take me right to the hotel — I was nursing jetlag and serious doubts — so I got off at the bottom of the street outside city hall, where college-age kids rolled past on skateboards and mopeds, looking like models from a mail-order catalogue. I had expected sloth and decay, but the rumours (the ones promoted by the in-flight magazine) seemed true: Ireland had caught a second wind. On my way toward Aungier Street, I counted three Internet cafés.
I pulled myself along, the buildings and houses packed one against the other, thin red-brick buildings with businesses below and apartments above, a press of life. On the corner of the next block was Spa House, as Molly had described. I looked over my shoulder for no reason, then back at the hotel, and I saw Molly sitting at a table against the long street-level window.
I stopped on the other side. She wore a black sleeveless sweater and a green shawl around her neck. A long denim skirt and brown boots. Her hair, still long, was pulled back off her face, and fixed in a low pony tail so it swelled a little, a dark bloom of hair. She was warming her hands on a mug of something, staring out into the middle distance of the restaurant. There was nothing to do but go in.
She watched me come toward the table, not knowing what was the right face to show. So she watched expressionlessly. I took my coat off and draped it over my arms, a curtain drawn between us.
“Hi.”
“Hi.” I pulled back the chair across from her, but I couldn’t bring myself to sit in it. So I stood, awkward between gestures.
“How was your flight?” she said.
“It was fine, thank you.”
“Do you want something to eat? They have tea here, and biscuits, hard little biscuits.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said. She nodded, folded one hand over the other. She wore a wedding ring. “I don’t want anything,” I said to a waitress who’d come up quietly behind me, and was waiting with pen ready. Finally, I took my coat and lay it over the back of the chair. Molly’s eyes followed me down. We sat facing each other, two feet or so between us. The last time we’d been this close, we were holding each other.
“Have you been here before?” she asked. “To Ireland?”
“No. This is my first time.” She nodded and looked down at her hands. “How did you find me?”
“I did a search on the Internet for you. I found you on your faculty and then looked up your number. It wasn’t that hard.”
“Mm. And how did you find out about the exhibit? What are you doing in Ireland?”
“I’m here on business,” she said quietly. “I just came across the gallery. I didn’t know what I should do when I saw it. But I thought you had a right to know. Although,” she added quickly, “I had no way of being sure you wanted to know.”
“How did you decide then?”
“Selfishly,” she said. She brought her wan gaze around to me again. “I thought maybe it’d be good to see each other again.”
“Really.” She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “And is it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
We went up to the hotel room. An uneasy fatigue had taken over and I needed to lie down, to be alone with my thoughts. Molly had reserved only one room and I shuddered when she closed the door behind us. “Look,” I said. “I honestly don’t know what I’m doing here. I just want to say that. I got on a plane when you called. I couldn’t think of what else to do.”
“I’m sorry you felt pressured.”
“I made my own mind up.”
“I know. Whatever you want to do, Jolene, you just do it.”
I sat on the bed and took a deep breath. She waited, her hands in her pockets. “Last time we talked,” I said, “you hung up on me. Correct?”
“I hung up on you.”
“You were angry at me. Which is fine. We were friends, and that kind of thing can happen to friends. But I figured when you were ready —”
“Slow down —”
“I thought we’d eventually work it out. But you never did call again, and I had to decide how I felt about that. Do you know what I mean?”
“I know that we’re not friends anymore, Jolene.”
“Ok,” I said. “Whatever happened happened, am I right? We don’t have to talk about it.”
“If you don’t want to.”
She smoothed down her denim skirt and sat in a high-backed chair beside the window. There didn’t seem like there was anything else worth saying right now, but she sat there, thinking. I wanted her to leave. “Have you thought of what you’re going to say to him?” she asked me.
“No. I haven’t gotten to that point in my mind.”
“You probably want to think about it.”
I nodded curtly. Love provokes all kinds of behaviour and in retrospect it all seems warranted: you have to allow for passions. Friendship promises something, though, and with time I could think of Martin more easily than I could think of Molly. “I’d better sleep for a while,” I said.
She got up from the chair. “How do you want to work this afterwards?”
“What do you mean?”
“The gallery. Do you want me to come?”
This surprised me. “Oh. Well, you’ve been already, haven’t you?”
“Yes. The show’s down. I don’t know if I told you.”
“When would you have told me, Molly?”
“We can still find out whatever we need to.”
/> “Fine,” I said. “Why don’t I go look into it when I get up.”
“Okay,” she said, her voice a little strained, and she strode for the door. “We’ll talk later. When you get back from the gallery.”
After she left, I slipped out of my clothes and got in under the cool covers. My stomach was upset and I felt anxious and harried. I got up and locked the door and then got back into bed again. You’re in Dublin, I said to myself. You’re in Dublin, what the fuck are you doing in fucking Dublin? I’d come completely unprepared; I’d have called it faith if I thought it was anything but carelessness. But what choice had I had?
I felt the old familiar milling of panic in my gut and I picked up the phone to call Daniel. But it would be 5 a.m. in Toronto. I badly wanted to talk to him, but at this urgent hour, I would have had to explain everything to him. So I put the receiver back on its cradle and lay there feeling exposed under the covers.
Daniel had appeared right around my tenth anniversary in the city, as a result of a fire drill at an evening class I’d been teaching, as good a way as any to meet someone, once you reach the age that the regular congresses (parties, bars, other people’s weddings) have thinned out. I’d taken on work where it became available, since the things I specialized in were starting to get unfashionable around the time I showed up in Toronto. The evening class was a hybrid, something some smart person had thought up in one of the admin offices of the community college I taught at. For the first ninety minutes of the class, I came in and talked about literature. Then for the last ninety minutes, after a break, a real writer came in and taught a creative writing class. The two curricula were supposed to be linked, but the writer, a dandy with a cowlick, had his own agenda. I didn’t care. I was talking about Euripedes and Donne and Shakespeare and I was cheerful. It was always thrilling to introduce young students to authors I loved, allowing them passage through me to poetry. But then Cowlick would come in, and nod officiously at me, and hand out his weekly wisdom. I usually got one of the students to pass along his circulars to me. The most popular of them was called “Please Don’t.”
Please don’t set anything in a glade. Please don’t make the dwarf the villain. Please don’t call your main character “the boy.” Please don’t use the word “undead.” Please don’t speak of faeries, sprites, elves, nymphs, or anything translucent that speaks from a tree branch. Please don’t depict epic struggles with wolves, bears, or whales. Please don’t permit your characters to perform any nouns as if they were verbs. Please don’t allow the detective to explain it at the end. Please don’t use action verbs or texture adjectives in sex scenes. Please don’t write sex scenes.
“Good books break rules,” I told them. “Don’t sweat it.” And then we carried on reading. On the evening of the fire alarm, we were on Euripides’ Alcestis, the story of Admetus, a man so loved by the gods that they aid him in a plan to cheat death. The plan is that one of Admetus’ elderly parents will die in his place, but it turns out that even the old want to live, and it is left to Admetus’ wife, Alcestis, to die for him. Students always applauded the courage and love shown by Alcestis, and when we were finished talking about her bravery and her sense of duty, I’d come in low with the bomb. “What sort of man would let his wife die for him? What sort of jerk would leave his children motherless so he could go on giving parties for the gods?”
They’d sit silently in their seats, looking down at their papers.
“It’s okay,” I said. “But do you see how Euripides fools us? We think he’s telling us a story of sacrifice, but he’s telling us one of cowardice. That’s the mark of genius. To get you to put your faith in the wrong place in order to be shown your own failure of nerve.”
We went back to the beginning, with a new understanding of the play, and I handed out the roles. It was a delight to have the old words spoken aloud. But then the alarm went off and everyone began bundling their things up. We went out into the quadrangle, following the stream of students in other classes, and I watched with dismay as most of them simply disappeared through the archway and into the street. But when I looked around me, my entire class was still present, looking at me for guidance, the dozen or so of them as sweetly helpless as ducklings. I rounded them up near a spruce in the corner of the quad and we all sat down and took our books out again. The alarm continued, dully, to sound. “Go on then,” I told one of the boys. We were at the part where Admetus sends his wife off with poetry and tribute.
“My heart/ shall be against your heart,” he read, “and never, even in death/ shall I go from you. You alone were true to me.”
“Bullshit!” murmured someone else knowingly, and everyone laughed, in on Euripedes’ game now.
“Right,” I said, “nice send-off, buddy. He’s telling her the consolation prize is that when he finally kicks, he’ll let himself be buried with her! What a creep.” I noticed then a man leaning, shoulder against the wall, about ten feet from us. He wore a brown suede jacket, his long hands hanging out of his coat-sleeves. I continued, “Anyway … Alcestis goes. She does her husband’s bidding. And it is a brave thing, a dutiful thing, to die. But what is the duty, and why is it brave?”
A young woman raised her hand eagerly. “Because if she says no, the children are next.”
“Thank you, Alison. The children are next. What an incredible story is under the one we’re being told.” We’d gotten to the kernel of the play, and I knew they felt what I felt: Euripedes was alive. His mind was alive and we were talking to him. An aura of intimacy had joined us to him. Now, finally, the alarm had stopped and it felt like the air around us expanded to fill the silence. But we’d run out of time anyway.
“Too bad,” I said. “We’ll finish the play next week.”
They gathered up their things, murmuring amongst themselves, and they thanked me (to be thanked for teaching!) as they filed out under the archway. I slung my handbag over my shoulder. The man was still standing against the wall. “You a fan of the classics?” I asked him.
“Not really,” he said. He pushed off the wall and strolled down the little incline toward me. “Unless you mean Otis Redding.”
“He’s a little after Euripedes,” I said, and began walking toward the street. The man walked beside me. It was an easy thing. Without so much as introducing ourselves, there was an agreement that we would walk now for a little while together. I slowed my step. “You teach here?” I asked him.
“Yeah. A photography course.”
“Which one?”
“‘Someday My Prints Will Come.’ You know it?”
I laughed. “That’s clever. Did you make that up?”
“No, it’s true. I teach here. Although the course is called ‘Taking Pictures Is a Snap.’” He smiled, enjoying himself, and walked with his hands in his jacket pockets now. He was a little younger than me, maybe not yet thirty, with warm eyes and a handsome, square face. His hair was messy, in a studied kind of way (I imagined him mussing it until it was right). “I know you,” he said.
“Really? Where from?”
“U of T. I took your Milton and Donne courses.”
I skipped ahead a step and walked backwards, trying to see if I remembered him. “You look a little familiar,” I said.
“Daniel Silver. It was a few years ago.”
“It would have to be. I haven’t taught there since 1996. What kind of mark did you get?”
“I passed.”
“Mm.” I fell back in step with him, squinting up at him. The streetlamps were coming on.” How tall are you, Daniel?” His face creased a little at that. “Careful how you answer.”
“Five eleven.”
“Were you going to ask me out for a drink? Talk about how you could have improved your mark?”
“I got an A. Must have been one of your weaker moments.”
“This is probably another one.”
I slept for two hours and woke with my nerves jangling, a bolt of fear as I took in the room and remembered where I was. Molly had b
een back while I slept: there was a sandwich on the desk and a business card for the Hofstaeder Gallery on Dawson Street lying on top of the Dublin A-Z. I got dressed and went down to the lobby, looking desultorily for Molly in the lounge, but she wasn’t there. I went out into the street, devouring the sandwich as I walked toward Dawson. I carried a vague memory of some of the streets I was walking in, and as I passed down York toward St. Stephen’s Green, it felt as if the place shimmered in outline, like someone was lowering one rendition of the place over another. Flickerings of a dream glowed in the back of my mind (strange how some dreams remain impressed on the mind like books, while others seem like distant memories of places visited in childhood).
There wasn’t much that would have matched this Dublin against the one I held in trust. That other Dublin rumbled with trams, street-sellers hawked flowers and fresh fruit; it was full of cobblestone and horses, a dozen daily newspapers sold by competing newsboys with their cries — Ir -ish PRESS! Heggald here! In-ep-IN-en! — everyone, including the children, wearing hats. Little stores with knick-knacks on offer, all the boys on the street trading little lead cars, wind-up figures, soldiers made by Britains, the best toymaker in the world. This Dublin was cleaner and brighter, although I had no doubt that that Dublin was clean and bright too, but in a way that was completely inaccessible to me. Dublin, to Martin, was all the world for the first ten years of his life. Its streets the sum of his longitudes and latitudes, its river the only river in knowledge, and its parks the wilds of the world. No, this Dublin was bright in the way shiny things are bright; reflective not pervious. There were tourist malls with American brandnames, streets closed to cars, and the reek of European money and fast food. Nostalgia was being sold in the shops along the Green, the bright windows of the boutiques full of images of a rustic past. A pet store had Celtic crosses to be hung from your cat’s neck; tourists came out of another wearing Guinness T-shirts over their sweaters.
Martin Sloane Page 9