The eyehole darkened before she opened the door. She stood silently aside and let me in, completely calm it seemed, and then she closed the door and went to sit on the edge of one of the two single beds, waiting for me to enter without speaking. I stood beside the desk where there were a pair of room-service trays — a salad for lunch; a meat pie for supper, neither more than picked at. Her overcoat lay folded over a closed suitcase beside her.
From the bed, she regarded me with such cool-eyed tranquility that I thought somehow I’d forgotten a discussion from yesterday in which we’d agreed that I would go to Mrs. Bryce’s without her. But the packed suitcase implied that whatever turmoil she’d suffered had been eased by a decision. She saw me looking at it.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m going to go home.”
“Is that what you want?” I spoke without inflection.
“I can’t blame you for not trusting me, Jolene. I can’t force you to accept my company. So I should probably go.”
“You called Daniel,” I said.
“I thought he’d know if you’d just stolen off in the night.” I felt a flutter of guilt. “He sounds like a nice man.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I didn’t blow your cover,” she said. “Something about mixed signals and if he heard from you to say I was in the hotel.”
“You told him I was missing.”
She nodded just a little, a faint smile at the edges of her mouth. “I might have been a bit upset. Obviously, you reassured him you weren’t. Missing.”
“That and a couple of big fat lies seemed to take care of his confusion.”
“Well anyway, he told me to make sure you come home soon.”
“I will be going home soon. I don’t think there’s anything for me here either.”
Her expression darkened, a flash of anger. “If I’m going, the least you can do is be straight with me. I know you went to see Mrs. Bryce. And that’s fine – I haven’t done anything to earn your trust. But you don’t have to lie flat out to me.”
“Okay,” I said. “I went.” I had my hands behind my back, bracing me against the front of the desk; it felt right to keep them out of view. “She’s elderly. She lives with her sister. They’re two old, scared ladies, and they live in a house full of junk. The sister was so panicked she almost threw me down the stairs.”
“What did Mrs. Bryce tell you?”
“That she’s married to Martin.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. But he’s not around. He doesn’t live with her.”
“So where is he?”
“We didn’t get to that.” She nodded, and sat back a little. She knew where I’d gone, but at the same time, having it confirmed hurt her, I could see that. She rubbed the tops of her legs. At times, it had felt as if Molly had taken a simple gamble in contacting me. Perhaps, she’d thought, it would turn out that enough time had passed. The well-water would be clear again. This optimistic face, which she’d strenously worn more or less since I’d first arrived in Dublin, gave the impression that what ever came of this gamble suited her. But sitting on the bed before me, a look that shuddered into place and quickly passed spoke of something deeper. The pain of witnessing that look reminded me that I had once loved this person. It wasn’t so clear any more how I should behave.
“They really are married?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Are you planning to go back?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why is she putting on these shows for him?”
“She said she was doing what she’s been told to do.”
“He wants to see people again,” she said quietly. “Maybe he’s gotten to the point in his life where he wants to do something about this feeling that he ruined the happiness of the people he loved.”
“How could you know what he feels?”
“There’s his family. There’s you.” I stayed silent. “What if that’s what this is?”
“Almost everyone is either dead or too old to care anymore. There’s nobody here to make amends to.”
“You’re here.”
“It’s not his call I answered.”
“I know,” she said, her hand on her coat.
The room had become oppressively close and I wanted to go. I needed a bath, some food, and a long sleep. I pictured myself shoving food down, in hunger, in anger. I stood away from the desk and dried my palms on my thighs. “I should get going,” I said.
“Fine.” Her eyes on the coat, fingers worrying down the creases. “Good luck then. Whatever you decide to do.”
“Okay then,” I said, and I went toward the door, but then I stopped and came back, and stood beside the bed. “I don’t know what I’m apologizing for,” I said carefully, “but I am sorry. And I’m grateful that you called me.” She said nothing. “It was a kind thing to do.”
She nodded, and after a moment longer, it felt like there was nothing else to say. I stepped away from her and into the hall, my face burning.
My tiny single room had only a sink; to bathe, I had to creep down the hall to a shared facility. I could hear the murmurings of conversations behind other doors on the way there, faces I would never see, couples honeymooning, families on vacation. We finally made it to Ireland. You have got to go to Ireland. Whenever I ran into anyone who’d recently returned, praising the people and the music, I tuned out and just nodded. I always wanted to say, You mean it’s not a black smoking hole?
The bathroom was featurelessly white with a deep porcelain tub, the glazing worn off the bottom by an unthinkable quantity of naked rear ends. There was also a bidet in the room; not even a scrubbing down with boiling antibiotic could have convinced me to use it. I washed out the tub quickly with a facecloth and then filled it and slid in.
I dried my hands off and took a pocketbook out of the housecoat pocket. I’d brought it along with me, thinking when I left Toronto that it might be a good chance to read something I wouldn’t normally have had the chance to read. One of the books it seemed every smart person but me had read. I’d brought Stendhal: Scarlet and Black. A terrible or a fitting choice, I wasn’t sure yet. It was about a man who lied to everyone. Manipulated men to gain power and seduced women to make himself feel like a god, despite his contempt for beauty. He was a pit of hatred masked by charm and intelligence. Reading it, I wasn’t reassured that it was more than a hundred years old. It seemed to divide the world into those who are gulled into believing in love and those who eat others to survive. I read it for a few minutes in the tub, my mind wandering from paragraph to paragraph. Is it possible that we are so separate from others that their intentions could be so concealed from us? Do we drift into harm’s way, guided on the arms of those we love and trust? The pages began to curl in the steam, like someone drawing a cloak closed around them.
I drifted a while, leeching out the strange hours spent in Ireland that were like an acid in my muscles. As my body uncoiled, relief flooded through me, almost like the sensation of being at rest after a colossal orgasm: all the lead-up, all the quaking tension in service of one tightly coiled moment, happily released and gone. I had my life back now, even though it was at the cost of that desolate form in the room above me. I could go home tomorrow.
Images of the past two days floated to the surface of my consciousness: Molly’s wedding ring; her blank staring face seen from across the road from St. Patrick’s; her beautiful clothing. Then the image of the back of Mrs. Bryce’s hands came to mind, the dark blue lines laid under the vellum-like skin, as if an unseen tree was casting its shadow against her. From this, I may have begun to fall asleep, for I was back on the airplane from Canada, not looking down at the vermilion patchwork below, but into the whorled labyrinth of my seatmate’s ear, tipped up toward my mouth, a spiral starting in light and receding into black. I looked more deeply into the ear and saw a perfect darkness, and I realized that everything that made that woman who she was resided there, in that unreachable place. It
felt that if I pushed this image at the right angle it would click open and reveal itself to me. A ring, a treebranch, an ear. Has it been a long time? I said, just as I had on the plane, and the woman’s face turned; it was Molly and she said, I hate to fly … and I opened my eyes with a start. Short of breath, the bathwater cold. A thread unravelling. I ran back down to my room, the housecoat barely on. I dialled Molly. “You’re still there,” I said.
“I’m not leaving until the morning.”
“You knew about the artworks before you came to Ireland! You would never have willingly flown over an ocean to sign a contract you could have faxed. You’ve been looking for him.” She was silent on the other end. “How long have you been looking for him, Molly?”
“Don’t you ever want to take back something you’ve done, Jolene?”
“How long have you been looking for him!”
“Don’t be angry with me,” she said. “I want to do something for you.”
My heart was pounding in my neck. “Why? Why do you think you should? Why do you think you can do anything for me?”
“We used to be so close,” she said quietly. “I turned you away. Isn’t that awful? All you wanted was my help.”
“I did, Molly, and you said no. That’s another thing that’s ancient history.”
“Ask me again.”
“Who is making amends here? Is it you or Martin?”
“Maybe it’ll be both of us.”
I shook my head, which felt stuffed with cotton. “I would never have come back here for my own sake, Molly. I stopped searching, because there was no way to get on with my life if I didn’t. I helped myself, Molly.”
“I went back in my mind, when everything ended with Scott, to the last time I felt a part of someone else and that was you. That was the last time in my life I had a true friend. You probably have a lot of people in your life, Jolene, but I don’t. I don’t connect.”
“God, Molly … “
“Is it wrong to ask for a second chance?”
“No,” I said. I muffled the phone against my chest for a moment, panicked, unable to speak. How badly had I longed for those I’d lost? For those who were truly gone, with whom I’d never have a second chance?
I heard her voice against my ribs. “Jolene? Can we spend another day at this?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you’re downstairs in the morning, then we will. If not, thank you for this.”
“For what?” I said.
“Just for this.”
I spent until ten in the morning in my room. I ordered breakfast there, which I ate guiltily beside the closed windows. I didn’t want to get drawn any deeper into this, and yet I knew that it was out of my hands now. The die had been cast and I would go ahead now, not out of any morbid curiosity, or desire of my own (although of course my own questions still propelled me), but of all things, out of duty. I resolved to honour the old ties, the now not-as-distant feeling of love that had been summoned in her room the previous night, that required to be acknowledged.
I went down to the lobby, and saw her as soon as I stepped off the elevator, sitting beside one of the potted ferns. She smiled thinly at me, hiding her relief. We sat in the hotel restaurant, just as we had the first morning in Dublin and ordered tea. She wanted to go back to Mrs. Bryce’s.
“It’s a dead end, though,” I said.
“We have no other lead,” Molly said.
“Someone else must know him. Someone in the gallery world here.” She shook her head no. “You’ve checked.”
“I looked into it. She’s the only connection.”
“I don’t feel right about going back there,” I said. But I didn’t have a better idea.
We went out and flagged a cab. It was a third day of high clear skies, an unusual run of weather. We gave the driver a street name and sat back in silence. But instead of going south, as I had the morning before, he turned north and began crossing the river. Molly leaned forward. “You know our address is in Rathmines,” she said to him.
“Oh no, mum. I’m going to Phibsborough. You said Palmerston.”
“Palmerston Road.”
“Oh, road. Well that’s an entirely different direction.”
“I know. It’s Rathmines.”
He nodded at Molly and started to make a U-turn. “Well, an innocent misunderstanding and we’ll just turn the meter off and head back.”
“No, hold on,” I said, and I put a hand on his arm. The boulevards of O’Connell stretched up ahead of us. “Keep going straight. I want to see if I can get somewhere.” He crossed a bridge. “Phibsborough’s up there somewhere, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
Molly was watching me neutrally. “You’ll understand in a minute,” I said. I made the driver go straight up to the North Circular Road and turn, then again on Phibsborough, which, just as it should have, became Prospect on the other side of the canal. There had been a Prospect in Ovid too. I imagined the children down there, fishing, dangling their feet in the cold, clear water. “Here, turn right here,” I said, and he turned onto Iona Road. Immediately, ranks of brick houses on either side, small clean cars by the curbs, flowerbeds and trellises.
I counted the identical houses going past, the high shady poplars looming over the street like an archway. Seventeen, thirty-one, fifty-nine, seventy-seven. “Stop,” I said. A stately Victorian house behind a black gate. My hand dampened. The driver stopped and let his motor idle.
“Is this what I think it is?” Molly asked.
“I never forgot the address.”
We paid the cab driver and got out. He offered to wait and I told him to go back and wait near the roundabout. He stopped and idled, got out to smoke. The house in front of us was like every other one on the street, a two-storey row house with bay windows on both floors, floral-bouquet keystones above the windowframes. A simple brick arch led to a blue door, and the last of fall’s flowers were still on their vines. Molly took my hand, drawn to the house, the tangible remains. I stared at it. In my imagination, I rose into the air until I hovered outside the thin high window above the door. Saw the bed, the empty closet, the door leading to the hall. The heartbroken child, sitting upstairs in the gloom, listening to voices below. It was Theresa, of course, the other person in the hallway. Hers was the shadow I’d seen in Linwood Flats that night so long ago. Standing in her door, unwilling to comfort him, casting a shadow from her own lamp. I pointed to a window. “That was his room,” I said, disbelieving, and I turned around to the street. “It faced that one, that was the Beatons’. William Beaton was his best friend.” I showed Molly where Mr. Warren’s car had come from — was it number 16 or 18? — where the accident had happened, the little roundabout where our driver waited.
“How long did he live here?”
“I don’t know,” I said, whispering. “I don’t know anything before 1936. I think he was born here, but maybe he wasn’t. There are smaller houses nearby, but they might have lived somewhere else until he was born. This was the last house in Dublin, though. I know that.”
The door in front of us opened as we were speaking, and a man stepped out. He had his dog with him, a snouty collie. He asked us if there was anything he could help with.
“Sorry,” I said, “we’re just strolling.”
“It’s a lovely morning for it.”
I began to walk down to the circle, but Molly remained in front of the gate. “We teach architecture,” she said. “In California.”
“Really?” said the man. Molly’s face was fixed in a mask of calm. I’d seen that face on the steps of the Hofstaeder Gallery two mornings earlier. “These row houses go back, oh, probably to the 1890s.”
“Actually, 1866,” said Molly. “Do you know anything about the history of this one?”
“Oh no,” said the man. “We bought the house in ’92, from the Dwyers. Before then, I couldn’t even say.”
“Well, thanks,” I said. “That’s very helpful. Have a great day.”
>
He went to lift his cap at us. “Would it be all right if we looked inside?” Molly said.
I grabbed her elbow, but she was stepping forward. The man had already taken his keys out again.
“We always knew there was something special about the neighbourhood,” he said. “We bought it of course just to live in, but in a fine house like this you can almost feel it has some importance.” He waved us toward the door.
We followed him and I looked blankly at Molly. She shot me a glance.
“Well, you weren’t going to ask.”
The man had the door open and stood aside to let us enter. The house had the Sunday-morning scent of bacon and coffee; the fragrance of a happy, well-run household. “Look around. Those there are original balustrades,” he said. “In fact, just about everything is original. Would you like to take pictures?”
Molly pointed at her head. “I just keep everything in here.”
I walked through the front hall in a fog. I could not prevent the immediate influx of voices for which I was a lightning rod. They poured out of every room, static of conversations boiled down to essences in stories told ten or more years earlier. A beloved table being sold, the hush of listeners around a radio, the tinny huzzah of a phone or the bell of the knife-sharpener in the street. Children’s voices, and the sound of their chesty sobs, a door slamming and then anxious voices behind it, making plans. I turned slowly, imagining that the shades of previous owners — not just the Sloanes — packed the front hall and passed through us. Moments earlier, I had been upset with Molly. But now I was transfixed, numb with the eros of memory. I felt I could devour the very air. “Go up the stairs,” I said to Molly. She mounted and I followed. The house’s owner watched us mildly from the main floor.
“Excuse the mess in Janey’s room,” he said and then waved us on. The dog barked, possessed of common sense.
I walked silently up the stairs and brought Molly into the front room. We stood in the window. You could see directly across into the same window in the house on the other side of the road, but you could not see church steeples. I stepped closer to the window. Stood at one side and then the other. Made myself four foot. No church steeples. Nor bridges. In fact, even the canal was difficult to see. The row houses on the south side blocked almost entirely the view of the city. “This is interesting,” I said.
Martin Sloane Page 15