by Martin Roper
Holfy should be the one doing the writing. Sometimes, when I’m working, I put my face in my joined palms to think and I smell her there, rising out of my skin, as once I smelled Ursula. So much time spent not writing, sitting there wanting it written. Wanting words to flow, wanting some blossoming story to come out of the past. But instead my mind tramps through old memories, I retell myself old humiliations, rewording them, reshaping them so they end the way they should have ended. I sit there staring at the wall, wondering when the pain will ever go away, and life will start to unfold as I know it is meant to unfold. I tell myself there must be a plan right here in this room, and somehow I am avoiding it.
Do you remember the lake in Pennsylvania? I warned you about the snapping turtles. Remember the stillness on the lake? Remember your glasses fell out of the rowing boat. We were drinking vodka gimlets and the homemade margaritas without the ice. It was sunny, and we let the boat drift, and we dozed, and there was gentle thud when we hit the bank and you were jittery in your sleep because the leaves brushed your face but you didn’t waken. I turned and woke you because I wanted you, and you said you missed Ireland, and you hated missing it, and I said shut up. Come here, I said. The clumsy rock of the boat and the fierceness of your fingertips. Soft fucking. Balance your sentences with arrogance and indifference. Put commas in the wrong place. This is our story and syntax will not hold it. It belongs only to you and me. Are you understanding what you have to say? I am considerably older than you. Trust me. Never help the reader. Refuse to accept that you have to explain anything. Do not care if they get to the end of the paragraph. The paragraph belongs only to us.
Assume no one will read this. It is the only way to write. Remember what your sister said to you before she died. And the dead become more and more right with the silent yawn of time. You rest on the weakest sentence. Your only charm is your pretence of sophistication. Write the story and make sure there isn’t a single line of fantasy in it. Danger lies in the truth. Write only what happened between you and me. It has to be as clear as a photograph—as clear as one of my photographs. The photo I took of you that day at Shelter Island. That’s not me, you said. You were wrong, it was you. It’s the you that you go to bed with, isn’t it? The years will make you that photograph. You and I are perfect devils. Avoid lies, especially if they seem necessary for plot. There is no plot. People sense lies. Lies curl and create ugliness like paper peeling off a damp wall. The greatest pleasure in death is that there will be no more arguments. The heart, when it stops beating, smiles. Open your legs and let me see you. I had forgotten your smell. Nature is so clever. Man are so sweet when they’re excited. Read me something by Yeats.
Never give all the heart.
Indeed. Never have children. If you have children you will have to grow up and that would disappoint me. Don’t go back to teaching—it sucks the marrow from your soul and your wisdom fades into the brick brains of those who can not learn what they do not know. Teaching is a wall falling into a vermilion sea. What I like most about you is your yellow flaring laugh and it lashing joyfully against the wind of your anguish. The first time you saw me naked and you asked me where did I get such a happy bottom and I said I grew it myself. I knew it would be good then. I never tire of your tongue. Such soft licking. People like driving on roads that are lined with trees and they like to see a bird flash across blue sky. If you take away the blue sky they will despise you. Do you know what we mean by happiness? Arriving back at the car and not having a parking ticket. Excitement is nightclubs and movies and getting drunk and watching children play sports badly and learning to be sophisticated with people who do not know the meaning of style. Excitement, then, is stepping into the artifice of adrenaline and knowing we can step out again and return to the familiar smell of the ugly boxes we call home. I do not want people to know about our life in Gansevoort Street.
Sadomasochism is the deepest form of love. It goes beyond any basic understanding of cathexis. Age matters. We think we can move beyond it but we cannot. People want to know how old you are before they sleep with you. As if approval is buried in years. People are like trees—you can tell their age only after they have fallen. The Sunday we cut down the lilac tree that was cracking the cement with its weight. I could never imagine sitting there looking at the tips of the Twin Towers without the lilac tree but of course I did get used to it. Everything changes. We get used to it all or shrivel.
There is only one thing I miss. No more will you kiss me and make me breakfast. How I loved the sound of you in the kitchen and your dreadful singing. How you loved the precision of the coq removing the egg tops. Nothing compares to you cooking for me. Such things make life bearable. You know less than when I first met you. This is the only sex that is possible between us now. Paper sex.
The night I came back from Brooklyn and the stereo was blaring in the apartment and you had all the strobes on and the fish lights flashing on the back wall and you were dancing on your own and it was a you I had never seen.
You would never dance in public. You said it told too much, the way people move to music. I knew that night that you would leave. Not then, not immediately, but there was something trapped in you that I hadn’t noticed before and watching you move to the music with Grace Jones I knew it: could sense our ending with the certainty I sense when a movie is ending. You wanted me to need you. The only thing I didn’t need was your need. I grew up in the sixties. You confused me with Jackie Kennedy’s generation.
Here is how I want you to end it:
At the street fair in Little Italy. We are at Florent’s show and we are sitting on a stoop and eating bratwurst. There had been a street fair. We had our fortune told. We had shot the plastic bears with water guns. We went into the empty church and there was an elderly couple sitting there with a life-size pink panther sitting between them and for once I didn’t take the shot even though I could have got it with the Leica. They got up then, she with the toy under her arm as if it were a tired child, and we kissed for a while in the church and when we came out, the fair was getting noisy. People everywhere. Cops smiling. We walked down through the village. We kissed in a doorway in Perry Street.
You want to capture my essence but you should know—even at this stage of your life—to know is impossible. You are a mystery to yourself so how can you know me. Women and men are railway tracks racing away in the distance, never meeting.
Holfy didn’t always speak with certainty. She had a way of talking, of asking questions, that made her sound neither rhetorical nor challenging. What I remember most of all was her hesitation. Is it Monday? Somewhere. Her tone was full of questions. When we were on the roof and having breakfast, she would start to go into what she felt the writing needed and as she talked I would watch the pigeons land and collect branches and fly across the street and build their nest over Judd’s Gym, and all the time I would know that she had an uncanny way of leading me into myself. On these rare mornings when the phone dint’ ring, she would speak and I would listen and it was as if God was placing a hand on us. But when she did break through her indecision, when she grew impatient with my mistakes, her voice rang like a bell on a clear day. It was impossible to argue with her then. I would go back to the writing and stare at it with contempt, as if it were toying with me, as if I were not responsible for the words I had typed that morning. So I would go back to the daisy wheel and type it again. Go back again. The sound of that machine always made me feel like I was working. That an honest day’s shilling was being earned for an honest day’s work, as my father would say. The only thing that is more important than writing is the confirmation that it is work. This is why publication matters. She could always read where I was going before I understood that I was making the journey at all.
* * *
The apartment is quiet. Botero is lying under the unmade bed, wagging his tail limply, eyes empty of hope: I never feed him morsels. I stick my head out the open roof window. Holfy is lying sunbathing on the roof. She is wearing the
dark brown one-piece and she turns and talks—she has someone with her. A woman wearing a violent pink bikini. A tray of drinks sits on a chair between them. A strange silence between them: not the spent, drunken lethargy of sunbathers.
—Hello, I say, voice so bright it might crack the ices in their glasses.
Both women look up and smile. The pink bikini is wearing mirrored sunglasses. Holfy holds out her arms for a kiss. I stoop and do not meet her lips—my kiss touches her forehead. She runs a hand lazily down my leg:
—You remember Magda.
—He remembers me.
I nod a perfunctory smile in her direction and her mouth smiles back. I am careful not to stare at her body: it gloats, it is so well toned.
—Three Pimm’s do you think, sweetheart?
—Why not?
I make the drinks, dunking the cucumber slices beneath the ice. So much is said with the flash of an insincere smile. I rest the glasses on the window ledge and stroke Botero. The unmade bed. My stomach tightens. Without thinking I spit generously into the Hungarian’s glass. We smalltalk a while. Holfy mentions dinner twice. But I’ve begun to dislike this dark bitch far too much to sit and eat with her. Magda asks me how my day was, in a vile parody of domesticity. She is a woman who asks questions either for direct information or else, as now, for self-amusement.
—It’s not a trick question, she says to my hesitation.
—Magda is a photo editor, sweetie.
I look at Holfy blankly and then at Magda who is smiling as if I am missing a punch line.
—My day was horrible.
They burst out laughing. The Hungarian slips her fingers inside her bikini bottoms and smoothes the fabric. A pigeon lands and collects a twig off the roof; drops it flying across the road; flies back; picks another. I pull myself out of the Adirondack and wave them goodbye.
—Call Florent? wonders Holfy to my back. I ignore her. She has recovered from the dead cat it seems. I do some work and try to dismiss the quiet hum of their conversation and burbling womanish laughter. I look up from the worktop, understanding what it is I hate about this Magyar: her self-assurance. She is the kind who comes to the city and can take it on; become even more sophisticated than New Yorkers themselves. She has tapped American naïveté and I am ludicrously jealous of her success. I go to my desk and write. Achieve nothing. I sit there, elbows on the desk, head in hands fed up with it all. Holfy drapes over my shoulder, cooing in my ear. Smell of suncream and Gitanes off her.
—Come talk to us.
She is as angry with me as I am with her but she is making an effort; she has not forsaken the night when the Hungarian will be gone.
—She’s having a difficult time. She’s divorcing. She’s married to a shit. He works in that nuclear plant?
—Henri works in a nuclear plant?
—Not Henri. Istvan—her husband. He’s a pig.
—How sad.
—Don’t. She’s a good woman.
—Right.
—I’ll call Florent. What do you want?
I shake my head despite the hunger.
—You are a sulker.
She gets food for three anyway. The two women eat on the roof. I give up pretending I will write and lie on the futon in the corner. It’s on the stroke of eleven. Nearly six in Dublin. The Angelus coming on the radio. Mother. Used to be putting the dinner out on the table then. Liked that time of the evening with her. Does she ever think of us. Sure. There’s not a day that passed. Never give her the chance to say that. Never. Quiet outside now. I write another letter to Ursula, another letter I will write and leave in the drawer. Life is quiet without you. No matter how I fill my days and nights the absence of you haunts me. My gut is wrenched with the loss of you. When I went back to Dublin I knew it was over for you. I could see the calmness of a decision made in your eyes. I made every mistake possible. If it had been the other way round I would have laughed to put you at your ease. But not you. You were a laser beam of directness. Everything swirled in confusion. I had fallen in love with your directness. You could fight your own battles and if you did not always win the argument, your dignity made it seem so. Your directness was chopping up any morsels of love I put on the table before you … I tear it up. I have to stop. Have to stop and go on. You’ll marry out if you marry her my father said. And my father was right. I am falling still. The pebble falling over the cliff falling. Falling into blue falling into the blue into the blue and still I don’t move in the heat in the sun I don’t move and there is a train going past, heavy rattle and thud of it going past and Daddy is walking between the seats and saying he’ll be back in a minute and Ruth is asleep and I’m on my own and everything is going past in the train in the blueness and he mightn’t come back and there was that time we were going to Galway and I was thinking I made a mistake in marrying you and it was forever and I had made my bed and that was it and the train is going past rocking and rocking and still I stay here and I’m falling into the blueness and still counting the carriages as they pass under the bridge, hoping for that next kiss.
* * *
Laughter from the television wakes me.
—Can you lower that a bit?
She ignores me.
—Can you please lower the television a bit?
—Yes, I can lower the television. As much as I want. I’m lowering nothing. This is my apartment.
Her apartment. Right. When I wake again music is playing. Bartók. How quaint. I sit up in the bed, and, although I can’t see them in the darkness, I know what I knew instinctively since I came in earlier. The apartment is soaked in their sensuality. I see myself as the halfarsed Urbanite I am, as Holfy must see me; as the Hungarian, with the unerring exactitude of the strange, sees me; as Ursula must have seen me when I came in soaking wet after ringing Holfy. All the lies swim about me; shoals of fish; the first time I heard myself lie to my father about the money I had stolen from his wallet to buy the Meccano set; the time I heard Ruth lie to my father about where she had bought the meat for dinner (and she knew I, small as I was, knew she was lying); my father lying that it was work kept us late when it was him stopping at Mrs. Marjoram’s on the way home; all the countless, unnecessary lies I told and continue to tell. I pick up the keys. Holfy laughs at some whispered comment and her laugh, her entrancing laugh, disgusts me. As I pass them in the darkness an arm reaches out to me, touches me:
—Come to bed.
Her voice contains no hint of Magda by her side. My heart is full of hate but instead I take up her hand and kiss her fingers; the ruby ring Robert bought her; my lips touch her skin for the last time. I think of her feet; the tanned hard skin she loves me to caress when she is tired. Her perfect arches. The tip of a lit cigarette glows as Magda inhales beside her. The lurid smell of sex. This is her life. This is her real life, tonguing this bitch. I am the present hobby. In the kitchen I fiddle with the key ring to remove keys and then give up. I have always held onto keys. Holfy’s. Even the keys to her place uptown. My father’s. Medbh’s. The house in Ireland. Botero charges out after me when he hears the door chimes ring and she shouts after me:
—Some cigarettes, please?
I pause to search for irony: something she will take to her grave but nothing comes. One day I will come up with a parting shot for someone. The dog looks up at me and then to his leash:
—No. Go in. Go in.
He looks up, sad eyes on him. I get a tub of yoghurt out of the fridge and he dances on his hind legs with excitement. I take the lid off and put it on the floor.
—Happy birthday, Bo.
He slurps messily and I leave before he finishes.
The gate is closed where we park the car. I bang on it with the keys. Lazy flickers from the Chinaman’s hut, he is watching television. I bang louder, loud enough for him to hear me. I will be glad to see the back of him. A prostitute, resembling a weary Aretha Franklin drifts along the sidewalk.
—Want in, honey?
Nothing more seductive than a nigge
r offering. Always wondered what dark meat would be like. Brown and purple, a strange combination. When I turn to look back he has already clopped past, his hands flicking up his orange miniskirt; shining black buttocks. He pauses without turning then walks on, bored. I wrap the gate and kick it. A light goes on. Chinky drags himself out of his chair and hits the button on the wall. He spits on the ground and I salute him.
—Hot night.
He ignores me as always.
—Where she?
—She come.
We are three feet from each other in the elevator. He reeks of cigarettes. He stops the elevator and walks in the general direction of the car; senses I have already spotted it; turns back to the elevator; waits. I turn the ignition and Janis Joplin comes on. Holfy’s cassette. Get it while you can. She could always push it further than me: that is her sin; that is the only sin. The car is tight between wall and pillar. Chinky watches, waiting for me to damage something. For two years I have wished this bastard a good morning and for two years he has looked at me the way he is looking at me now. I manoeuvre it out and drive into the elevator beside him. We drop slowly. This is the first purposeful thing I have ever done. We jolt to a halt. The exit gate rattles up. I reach into my wallet and take out a twenty. Already he is walking away. I call after him. He looks at me—at the tip—with passionate disinterest. He turns back to his hut. I go after him and stop him and offer him the money again. He looks up at me and for the first time I see him closely; he is alert and full of disgust. His breath is nauseating. I crumple the money in my fist and punch him full in his face. He falls back a step but holds his balance. Blood dribbles from his nostril. He smiles and turns to his office. I run like fuck, hit the down button on the gate and jump in the car. The gate starts to rattle down in front of me. I shoot out onto Little West Twelfth and almost hit a man pushing a falafel stand. I spin around onto Gansevoort and stop for a second. I can’t resist. I turn the carlights off and double back. He has his back to me with a gun in his hand pointing at the sidewalk. I reverse and makes for the Hudson Parkway. I always imagined that whenever I left this city it would be up along the Hudson River. I take the Lincoln Tunnel and feel freedom in the breeze rushing through the open windows. The last time I’ll have to put up with her age-thickened arse, her padded bras.