He tries to engage me in conversation. A little light banter.
“Do you have a husband?” are the first words out of his mouth. Glancing over at him, I shake my head.
“Do you have a son?”
Why does he want to know this? Oh, never mind, the issue isn’t worth deconstructing. I simply shake my head a second time.
“Me, no wife and no sons.”
“Daughters?” I hear myself ask.
He laughs into his beard. “No, no. No daughters. Do you have a husband?”
I could swear we just covered this terrain. “No, I don’t,” I say pointedly, hoping it will be a firm indication that I don’t wish to converse with him at the moment. To emphasize my point, I return to my book.
“No wife, no sons,” he repeats, then asks me about sons again. I’m stuck in an endless loop with this man.
“Please excuse me, sir. I would like to read now,” I say, but this does not deter him. By this point, the flight attendant has come down the aisle offering drinks. My new pal asks for two scotches and two cans of Diet Coke, then mixes himself two repulsively lethal cocktails of aspartame and Johnnie Walker Red. When the attendant comes back the other way, my row-mate purchases two more mini-bottles of scotch.
Four drinks in about fifteen minutes’ time, and he becomes even more expansive. And of course he’s expanding in my direction, and not in the direction of the vacant aisle seat to his left. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable on the aisle?” I ask diplomatically. I’m dreadful with direct confrontation in these situations.
“Oh, no,” he assures me, taking my hand in his and giving it a squeeze. “I’m very happy.”
I pull my hand away. “Please don’t do that again,” I say firmly. I politely ask the fellow to move aside so I can get out of my seat, and instead of sliding into the aisle and standing up, he forces me to climb over him. It’s impossible for me to achieve this feat without many of my body parts making contact with his. I feel dirty and disgusting; totally violated.
Locating a flight attendant I quietly inform him that I would prefer not to spend the night getting manhandled by the gent in 28J. The attendant, Gary, is both sympathetic and appalled. “Do you want me to bitch-slap him?” he inquires energetically. I can sense that Gary would actually be up for this, so I politely decline his offer while asking if there’s another seat to which I might relocate for the remainder of the flight. “It’s practically standing room only in coach,” Gary says, scanning the section. “I feel terrible about this. Let me see what I can do.”
He confers with two of his colleagues for a minute or two. Breaking their huddle, he approaches me and says, “Collect your personal items. If you’ve got anything in the overhead bins, I’ll take it forward for you. We’ve got a couple of empty seats in business class.” I make a mental note to write to the airline to commend the staff of flight 107 on their graceful way of handling the situation.
Cheered to spend the rest of the night flight unmolested in a reclining seat, with the added ability to order champagne at will—not that I will at 2 A.M., but I love the idea that I can—I begin to settle into my new seat, when…
“Is that you—wait, don’t tell me your name—Jess?” A tall, broad-shouldered man with streaked blond hair unbuckles his seat belt and rises to his feet. Dick Elgar. A speechwriter for the enemy. I made the mistake of dating him briefly about a decade ago. Dick and I are what would happen if Carville and Matalin didn’t work out. “My God, I almost didn’t recognize you! You’ve lost weight,” he adds appraisingly. “You look great…thinner…taller…maybe it’s your hair…”
For the record, I have weighed a steady 117 pounds since college. I am still 5'6" and my hair has been a bit below shoulder length, medium brown with subtle caramel highlights, since Clinton was in the White House. “You need to work on your pick-up lines, Dick. And my name is not Jess.”
“Not Jessica? Are you sure? Wait—what does it begin with?”
“T.”
“Tammy? T-T-torpedo? Debbie?”
“Debbie doesn’t begin with a T.” I address the other residents of business class. “What does it say about me—or him—that I slept with this guy—more than once, in fact—and he can’t remember my name?”
“I do remember her name,” Dick says. “C’mon, Tess, I was just teasing you. You used to have a sense of humor.”
“That was because your candidate was a buffoon. Everything he said made me laugh.”
“C’mon, sit here,” he says, indicating a vacant seat adjacent to his own. “Let’s have a drink and catch up for old times’ sake. Damn, you look great. You look really trim. Are you sure you haven’t lost weight?”
“It must be all the Pilates,” I reply tartly, wondering why I engaged at all. I should have sidestepped this conversation several words ago. “Dick, you sure know how to worm your way into a girl’s heart,” I say, aiming for just the right amount of sarcasm. “I’m sure you’re giving Casanova a run for his money. But I would prefer to sleep, all things considered.”
I tuck into my new seat, and like a little girl with a birthday party “loot bag,” open the business class complimentary Dopp kit to see what goodies I’ve landed. Slipping on the abbreviated socks and donning the eye mask, I slide myself toward slumber.
Day 3 A.D. August 9 for the rest of the world
I’ve spent the afternoon in the company of Socrates and Plato, Bacon and Milton, Dean Swift and Oliver Goldsmith, Homer and Shakespeare, Newton and Locke, Cicero and Aristotle—and Jane Austen’s first love—Tom Lefroy, who eventually became Ireland’s Chief Justice. I wish I could tell her he didn’t turn out to be much of a looker in his old age. These venerated souls are further immortalized in marble busts that flank the length of Trinity College’s Old Library. What a magnificent place! I could move in there tomorrow. Twenty-thousand of the college’s oldest volumes reside in the Long Room with its cast-iron spiral staircase, the barrel-vaulted ceiling a subtle hint to the visitor that she is in a cathedral to literature, a bibliophile’s wet dream.
The lush lawns of the Trinity College Green appear to be the perfect place to take a nap, which is exactly what I did, after arriving at my hotel before my room was ready. Leaving my luggage with the bellman, a congenial Australian, I whipped out my laminated street map and hit the pavement.
I suppose the first stop for any first-time Dublin tourist is the Book of Kells. In our age of the computerization of everything, the very fact that every single aspect of this treasure was made by hand, from the vellum to the pigments to the illuminations, is staggering when one considers the years of painstaking workmanship involved. Having been introduced to Ireland through the experience of this gorgeous dinosaur convinces me that here indeed is a kind of special magic, the ultimate value placed on craft and beauty.
I want to be in love with this city.
I want it to change me. That’s why I came here.
I’ve already mailed postcards to Venus and Imogen and scarfed down a portion of Burdocks’s fish and chips, licking my fingers while admiring the gothic façade of Christ Church Cathedral. Alas, even on an enforced vacation I still seem to be multitasking.
I often find myself making fun of tourists in New York who, oblivious to traffic of all varieties, put themselves at risk of bodily harm, or worse, by looking up instead of looking out. So far today, my romantic gawking at any architecture older than my grandmother has nearly gotten me run over several times. And Dubliners seem even more bullish than New Yorkers when it comes to crossing major intersections: the pedestrians fording the avenues opposite Trinity College Green just put their heads down and charge.
Wandering the streets, I am struck by how much Dublin reminds me of home in so many ways: a similar cosmopolitanism to New York with its myriad restaurants of relatively obscure ethnicities, people of all shades, their accents and speech reflecting a polyglot community rather than the homogenized one I had anticipated. Where are the red-headed colleens, the freckle-faced bo
ys with their tousled strawberry blond hair? The statue of Molly Malone, known to the locals as “the tart with the cart,” seems a lot closer to the silhouette I expected. Bosoms overflowing her bronze bodice, to me the wench epitomizes the feisty spirit of the Irish working class. I realize I have sunk into stereotype of sorts, even though the stereotype in my mind is one I view as positive: the quaintness, the charm, the folkloric. Bronze Molly, too, is a relic of an ancient age.
However, my hotel, situated in a Georgian town house, satisfies my craving for old-world charm. The wallpaper (a muted floral), a roomy four-poster, late eighteenth-century furnishings, a giant claw-foot tub, fluffy towels, lovely little amenities such as lavender toiletries, and a window overlooking St. Stephen’s Green soothe the savage breast of this stressed New Yorker. Volumes of Joyce and Behan, the plays of Shaw and Sheridan, of Wilde and Synge and Yeats and Beckett, as well as Maeve Binchy’s latest novel, stand like paperback soldiers on the mantelpiece, waiting for me to call them to action. I wish it were cool enough to ask one of the staff to light a fire for me…
I can’t believe I fell asleep in the middle of writing in my journal.
I awaken a few hours later; in the interval the sky over St. Stephen’s Green has morphed from vivid blue to the color of dusty coal. What time is it? The alarm clock, an anachronism in this chamber of Georgian charm, informs me in digital carmine numerals that it’s 9:13 P.M. I’ve slept through dinner. Jet lag has exacted its price.
Downstairs, I approach the sweet French graduate student slipping tomorrow’s breakfast menus into cushiony leather folders. There doesn’t seem to be an official concierge in this hotel, at least not during any of the hours I’ve come and gone; guests seem to rely on the first visible staff member to answer any queries.
“I’d like to visit a real Irish pub,” I tell Justine, realizing how silly that sounds. “Which one would you recommend?”
“Do you like James Joyce?”
“Sure.”
Justine directs me to Davy Byrne’s not five minutes’ walk from the hotel. “Very famous,” she says, “but maybe not quite so much…atmospheric…as you would like. But there are several pubs on Duke Street. Why not try them all?” she suggests, shrugging with extreme Gallic joie de vivre.
“I’m tempted,” I reply with a wink.
“You are on holiday,” she says, which I interpret as a license to overindulge. “In Ireland.”
When in Rome…or Dublin, as the case may be.
Davy Byrne’s is terribly modern. In other words, even though Joyce drank here (which is a bit like an old American hostelry advertising “George Washington slept here”) and his fictional Leopold Bloom consumed a mustard sandwich within these walls on June 16, 1904, a lot has changed in a hundred-plus years. I am disappointed. And I don’t even like mustard. Nevertheless, I immediately learn that it’s impossible for an unescorted female to look around a pub (what am I supposed to say? “Just checking out the décor”?) without being invited to join someone for a pint.
A trio of ruddy-cheeked mates are sharing a joke, and of the three invitations I receive within my first half-minute inside Davy Byrne’s, I opt to join the crowd, rather than either of the two solo imbibers. Safer on a couple of counts, I expect.
“What’ll you have?” asks the oldest of the three, a wizened gent with a shock of white hair who looks like he’s worn the same tweed jacket every day, rain or shine, summer or winter, since Eamon de Valera entered Parliament.
I’m actually not much of a beer drinker, something I will not admit to on Irish soil. And if I do plan on exploring more than one pub to night, I reckon I’d better start slow, so I order a glass of Harp, thinking a “glass” will contain less than a pint. Oh, well, at least the lager is lighter than a stout. Guinness has always seemed to be more of a meal than a beverage. Then of course, if the Guinness were too strong, I would feel like a real puffball asking this bartender to smooth it out for me with a shot of cassis, per Venus’s coaching.
Conlan is my benefactor, a former parliamentarian himself, so maybe my hunch about the age of his sport coat isn’t far off the mark. His drinking buddies (“We come here every day after work since 1974”) are Tim, who the other two call Gogo and who owns a plumbing concern, and Joe, the youngest, who is a journalist. Within a half hour, I know all their life stories from snatches such as:
“You know, Joe’s da tossed him out on his arse when Joe confessed that he thought he might be a queer. He was all of fourteen at the time, but it torned out ’e was just experimenting, Joe was.”
“Gogo’s wife left him for his business partner.”
“Good riddance, I say.”
“I’m not disagreein’.”
“Ach, Conlan’s been a widower so long the statue of Molly Malone has been looking good to him lately.”
“Aah, you’re both full of shite. It doesn’t work anymore anyway! At my age I’d rather have a pint than a woman. At least I know I can lift me forearm.”
“There is something to be said for staying out as late as you please without fearing a tongue-lashing when you come home.”
“I niver missed Abby when she left. Had the last laugh anyway; me partner had the clap off a woman he met on a business trip to Paris and passed it on to her. Sorves ’er right, the tart.”
I marvel at how their accents turn such misogyny into music. And how some of the things I did expect from Dublin are proving to be true. Yet I am somehow comfortable here, a lone female amid the easy camaraderie of three men I didn’t know an hour ago.
I finish my pint of Harp and decline another, as Gogo buys the next round. “This may be terribly irreverent, but I’d like to visit another place that…well…fulfills my imagination’s fancy of a typical Dublin pub.”
“You’re wanting the oak paneling, then?” says Joe.
“The stained glass partitions?” adds Gogo.
“A cozy little snug?” concludes Conlan.
I nod.
“Do you like music?”
I grin.
“O’Donoghue’s, over on Merrion Row, is where The Dubliners got their start back in the sixties,” Gogo says. “Sometoimes we tree head over there after a few pints here. Anyone can sit in if they’ve a mind too. Conlan’s quite a good’un on the whistle. They’ve always got a local band playing there. Doesn’t matter who; it’s all the same to my tin ear. But fine, fine music.”
“Oh aye, O’Donoghue’s is a good one, but it doesn’t have the atmosphere that—”
“Tessa,” I remind them.
“Tessa. Are you Irish, then? Used to be a music hall singer named Tessie O’Shea. You’re not an O’Shea, are you?” Conlan looks hopeful.
“Craig. Tessa Craig’s my name.”
Joe frowns. “Sounds Scots.”
“Well, that was my married name anyway. My maiden name is…Goldsmith.”
“Ah, well then! You are Irish!” The delighted look on Conlan’s’s face says it all.
“Jewish, actually,” I admit, ever so slightly self-conscious.
“At the height of the troubles in the seventies, a man walked in here on a St. Paddy’s Day,” says Conlan, “and he begins talking to the bartender over a pint. And the bartender says, ‘I’ve never seen yiz before; are ya new in town?’ And the man nods and says, ‘Just arrived today.’ And the bartender, a proud Cat-lick himself, asks the man, ‘Are yiz a Cat-lick?’ The man shakes his head. ‘A Protestant, then?’ the publican says darkly. ‘No, not one of those either,’ says the man. ‘I’m a Jew.’ The bartender picks up a glass and begins to dry it, then he takes his cloth to wipe down the bar, momentarily lost in thought; something about the man’s reply still unsettles him. And torning to the man, the bartender asks him, ‘But are yiz a Cat-lick Jew or a Protestant Jew?’”
“That joke’s so old the cavemen told it to the dinosaurs,” Joe groans. As Conlan dismisses this criticism, Joe tells me that if it’s old-fashioned charm I’m after in a pub, my best bet is Blackpools. He draws a map on a
cocktail napkin and wishes me the best of Irish luck. Thanking the three of them for their generosity and hospitality while declining yet another round, I head out once more into the night.
Nine
As I wend through Dublin’s dark streets following Conlan’s chicken-scratched treasure map, I am conscious of not being frightened. Would I advise a slightly inebriated female in search of further entertainment to wander through Manhattan alone in the late evening clutching an ink-stained cocktail napkin as a Baedeker? Hell, no! But to night my body senses that I have a greater chance of getting lost than of getting mashed.
Blackpools is off the beaten path, at the fecund apex of a cul-de-sac, sandwiched between an Ethiopian restaurant and an internet café. At first glance the pub seems so crowded that patrons are spilling into the street, but then I realize that the sidewalk loafers are smokers, banished, as in New York, to the great outdoors. As a nonsmoker myself I rejoice in this exercise of civil obedience. But, ah, the irony of it. Oh, yes, happy is the day when imbibers can enjoy their alcohol without fear of succumbing to the dangers of second-hand smoke. Give me liver disease over lung cancer any day of the week.
Squeezing past the knot of tobacco-addicted drinkers, I cross the threshold of Blackpools to find it just as advertised: the cozy snug, the warm glow of lamplight on richly stained glass, the oaken paneling, and the faint lilt of folk music, scarcely audible above the din, for the pub seems to me a giant indoor block party. Laughter tinkles over the clink of glassware, punctuated by the occasional blare of an outright guffaw. A cluster in one corner has burst into song. A knot of football fans of myriad ages, genders, shapes and sizes (all loyally sporting their team’s jersey) parts like the Red Sea so that I can belly up to the bar.
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