My Coney Island Baby

by Billy O'Callaghan

  And on towards midnight, after enough of the corners had been taken off and enough waiting had been done, they settled for a dance, there on the barroom floor. They stood in one another’s arms, dancing but barely moving, or moving like cobweb on a breath of night breeze, as tunes seeped one into the next. The skin of her temple pressed hot and damp against his cheek, and he bowed his head and told her things in murmurs that he had never shared with anyone else. Together, they felt complete. It wasn’t about sparks. This was fusion, nothing less. And soon after, when it came time for them to part, he scribbled down his office telephone number and asked her to please call him, tomorrow, tomorrow morning if she could. She said nothing, just read the number with concentration, then folded the scrap of paper in two and then in two again and slipped it into the change pocket of her purse. They kissed once, a brief and almost cursory coming together of their mouths, and then she nodded goodbye, slipped from his grasp and hurried to join her friend across the barroom floor. He stood where she had left him and watched her climb the open side-wall staircase to the street above without once looking back, certain that he’d neither see nor hear from her again. In that moment, something shifted inside of him, a churning terror at the prospect of being forced to live his life apart from her. Ridiculous, considering they’d only just met, but nonetheless truthful.

  ‘Talk about something else,’ Caitlin says now, in a whisper. ‘Please.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Anything. Tell me about work.’

  ‘Work?’

  Michael tastes the word before catching the drift of its actual meaning. Work is a safe option, like the weather, or politics, or whatever is going on with the economy; discussable fodder with the skeletal tract left neatly and reassuringly in place. In your forties your sense of longing shifts, and pleases itself in comfort rather than thrills.

  He smiles out of one corner of his mouth.

  ‘Work is fine. The usual towers of paperwork, buyers who try to stiff-arm you come reorder time – the office full to popping with liars, back-stabbers and thieves. Nothing changes. We’re hiring arch-criminals now, fresh from Ivy League borstals with their nose-flute accents and their grand-a-week coke habits. But they flap a Masters or a Doctoral certificate like it’s the utmost guarantee of peace in our time, and use it as nothing less than a licence to pillage. Hardly ten minutes of my working day goes by now that I don’t contemplate just damning the whole thing to hell and walking out while there’s still a bit of life left in my carcass.’

  ‘But you don’t.’

  He looks at her again, and shakes his head.

  ‘No, I suppose I don’t. Others can wake up one morning and just start running, clear across the world, some of them, like they’re Gauguin or Brando or Marco fucking Polo. But that’s a young man’s game. When we’re young and our horizons have yet to burn, we take risks that become impossible later on. Time makes us afraid. Maybe it’s just that we pick up so many anchors along the way. I have dreams, just like everyone else, but when I was a kid, forty seemed old. Now I have fifty in my sights, and I’m feeling every minute of it. The truth is, I’m not a brave man. Stupid, maybe, but not brave.’

  Caitlin slips from his arms and moves to his left side, and together they press their backs against the sheltering stalls and gaze out over the ocean. The horizon line has been rubbed away and there is nothing beyond the loose logic of suggestion to differentiate between water and sky. At a distance, everything seems soluble.

  She reaches for his hand, clasps it in both of hers and then gently traces her fingertips over his knuckles. The bones at the back of his hand fan close to the surface and veins show in bluish twists through the opaque skin. It is the hand of an old man, its strength waning. Flecks of hair crawl from under the cuff of his shirtsleeve and spread outwards in a jagged splay, shadowy as spilt ink. Answering some subtle shift in her touch, he opens and spreads his fingers for her, inviting, urging. Then they stand a while, just gazing at the ocean, holding hands. She smiles, inwardly, and he catches a sense of it and they lean in close and kiss again. And this kiss counts for more than their first pass. It lasts for five or ten seconds, warm time made something else by shut-eyed darkness. Her lips part and a moment beats just a thrilling hesitation too long before she gets the flit of his tongue.

  ‘Let’s go to bed,’ he says, dragging her body against his own again. He wonders if she can feel him through all the layers of clothes. He kisses her cheeks, slowly, and her eyes when she closes them. Her skin has an icy coldness from the lambasting wind, but she sighs with what feels like contentment, and he feels some of it, too. Out here, sheltering from a storm, it is almost possible to believe that the world has been made to exist entirely for their benefit, and that nothing else matters beyond their happiness.

  ‘You’ve got a one-track mind,’ she tells him. ‘You know that?’

  ‘I do,’ he agrees. ‘But it takes me where I want to go.’

  ‘Big shot.’

  ‘Biggest one in six counties.’

  ‘Oh, and modest, too.’

  ‘Naturally. And you know I’m only thinking of you, sweetheart. This is no kind of weather to be out walking. I’m just suggesting a way of generating some heat back into these old bones of ours.’

  ‘Less of the old, if you don’t mind.’

  The hand against the small of her back drops a few inches and takes hold.

  ‘You know the saying,’ he says. ‘The older the fiddle.’

  ‘And you fancy yourself as a bit of a player, is that it?’

  ‘Well, I’ve had no complaints so far.’

  She tilts her head to one side, pretending to give the matter due consideration, though of course there is really nothing to decide. He watches her, amused, and feels himself falling for her all over again. Her expression is that of a young woman, a thoroughgoing innocent. She touches one corner of her mouth in a thoughtful way, her eyes roll a little, and in that instant he understands that time means nothing, that age means nothing.

  ‘Bed.’

  ‘Bed.’

  Her laughter strikes sudden and demure, a little chirping cough that flares and is gone, but it leaves behind its shape, showing teeth and then a pinch of tongue. This is how they are. In that bar, all those years ago, with jazz weeping from the speakers, they’d danced in no less but no greater a way than this. Out here, the air around them provides movement enough, and the song of the wind sluicing through the latticework of the pier is all the jazz they need.

  ‘Let’s finish our walk first,’ she says, pulling away from him but keeping hold of his hand. ‘Then we can talk about what comes after.’

  Every stall and pitch is shut down, but it’s a sad fact of life that, even during high season, this place only ever runs at half-speed any more. Half-speed at best. Because Coney Island feels done for. A rot has set in. And yet, being out here on a day like this still feels good. So fit for broken things, it has become their place. The best may be lost but an air of romance remains, and settling is a matter of choice. They like it out here because it is far enough removed from where they are supposed to be. Out here, free of Manhattan’s vast claustrophobia, there is still sky to be had.

  And even on such empty afternoons as these, so torn asunder by winds blowing muddy with the threat of snow, memories of how the boardwalk was in better times feel barely a breath away. Days when, come March or April and clean on through the searing, sultry doo-wop months of summer to the very marrow of late October, the hot-dog stands and the ice-cream vendors turned a roaring trade, when for a nickel or a dime and right before your awestruck and disbelieving eyes, sackloads of sugar were spun into great mystical cotton-candy beards, when fire-eating unicyclists knife-juggled their way through acts of uncountable daring, when the timbers shook and thundered beneath your feet, rattling under the strain of stampeding kids, and the ringing bells of the one-armed bandits struck lucky all around. The air smelled sweet and salty then, the waves came and food was fried, and everyt
hing, everything, was noise, a wall of sound, sheer and unabated. The thrilled screams as teenage boys rough-housed with and manhandled their bikini-clad girls, the accordion wails of the buskers, the hip strains of the latest hit number leaking from a dozen boom-boxes all tuned to the same station, and now and again the stabbing thrusts of some nearby ride’s wildly spinning calliope song. All were mere ingredients in the melding cacophony of a hundred simultaneous rackets eager for their piece of day.

  And even on a noon so crushed by wind as this, being out here is still worth anything for the way in which it indulges their particular strain of make-believe. The stalls are closed, padlocked, but it is easy for Caitlin to convince herself that they are not actually abandoned at all; they have merely settled into a comfortable wintry hibernation. And the same can be said, and imagined, of the men who work these stalls, the fast-talking types who grin like crooks out of sheer job satisfaction but at least as much because it gives them the opportunity to boast of their missing teeth, or their golden replacements. Men who in different eras would have plied the trade of pirates, who wear T-shirts sweat-stained into an entirely different range of colours above and far beyond the call of their natural dutiful shade and who have too much hair in the wrong places and too little in the right. They are missing now, she tells herself, purely because they acknowledge the rules of seasonal employment, and have no doubt returned to the murk of the city in order to eke their way through these grim months, spending their time hunched above a jack-hammer or tucked into a short-order apron, or even, God forbid, a salesman’s suit. But they are brave, despite appearances, and wise too, because they understand the truth of things. They have the hearts of sea dogs but the keenness of explorers, and salt as well as fat courses through their veins. They can endure, and so they brace themselves and do what needs doing, the digging, the flipping, the flogging, because they know that daytime always follows night and that, soon enough, fortune will again smile on them and send them scuttling back here, armed with all manner of sugar, grease and questionable meat, to bask once more in the summery splendour of some truly lovely boardwalk living.

  Gleams of pleasure can be had even from those times rightfully owed to sadness. It is simply a matter of sifting for gold, and the passage of time grants wisdom of a kind. Buddhists strive to live like that, keeping strictly within the moment. Caitlin knows that the day ahead holds darkness, and there are matters which need discussing and which will likely see all of this brought to its dreaded brink, but for now she can smile, and mean it. Since the night she and Michael danced their way into one another’s lives, a shared day has never passed without her feeling at least a few seconds’ worth of overwhelming joy. Such moments might occur during sex, but the feeling has never been exclusive to that, and often simply walking hand in hand can be enough, or having her name spoken by him in that certain kind of breathless way. When guilt or doubt gets in, she cries, without hesitation and denying herself nothing, because these hours are so limited. In this manner, negativity is washed away even as it emerges, and the tears become something separate from herself. She has learned that it is possible to cry and still feel good. Such a sensation, she is sure, can only come from love, and every detail of theirs is intensified in its distillation.

  She no longer questions her feelings. If she feels like smiling, she smiles. You learn to make the best of any situation, or else there is only death. The news about Barbara is terrible. Caitlin has seen cancer up close, having at nineteen years old been forced to watch it pick away layers of her mother, until what remained was a piece of meat living out its last, a body beyond the comprehension of anything except pain. These past two and a half decades, give or take, Barb has existed along the periphery of her affair with Michael, a ghostly presence, tall and slim and statuesque, immaculately hewn yet blanketed in some eternal melancholy. Beautiful, if beauty is strict in limiting itself to chiselled and Romanesque, but never less than pretty to any eye, her corn-coloured hair worn forever short and full, running a gamut of perms, bobs, bell-cuts and pageboy looks, always obliviously underlining some definition of stylish. But associations have the effect of whittling away reality. When Caitlin thinks of Barbara now, her mind dredges up the image of a cramped hospital room, just like the one that had housed her mother, a small box of space lit by nothing but hallway leakage and reeking of an antiseptic designed to mask something immeasurably worse. Flowers in an opaque glass vase, their vivid colours dimmed but a well-meant gesture good to the eye from a yard or more away, conning with the illusion of life thanks to some water and a little chemical encouragement. And in the bed alongside, slumbering beneath ten ebony inches of wall-mounted crucifix, a body withered nearly to dust, a face recognisable from every angle as nothing less than the face of cancer, and turning human again only when daylight waxed or when those big sad molasses eyes fluttered momentarily open.

  Braving the wind, they push on, out towards the end of the pier. Michael keeps his teeth clenched and bared, his gaze fixed to a point fifty or one hundred yards ahead, as if this will somehow help them to their destination. When they do reach the end, the protective railing holds them back, a barrier in advance of the abyss, because Coney Island is today a precipice. Years and decades have layered the timber with a rind of mucus, the ghoulish algae-tinge of ocean and ocean breath. And beyond is where the Titans dwell, Caitlin thinks, feeling for the half-remembered lessons she learned in school. Myth, of course, but myth is only so until proven real, and belief is really just a question of awareness, of knowing where to set the line between the stubborn absolutes of fantasy and truth. And watching how the ocean comes and goes, thickening, churning, always alive, always breathing, bullying and pressing the shoreline and then abating in order to gather again ahead of the next onslaught, she thinks about the Titans and imagines a casual gaze passing right over them, either by accident or out of ignorance misreading their features and expressions as nothing but tide, the long scan of waves, water glassed with light and reflected sky, failing to recognise exactly who or what the hell they are.

  ‘Are you dreaming?’ Michael asks.

  She glances up at him, wanting to catch some keenness in his expression. But she has misread his interest. His eyes continue to search over the realms of ocean. In the distant east, the water looks like sheets of corrugate, the ridges shining dull as tarnished steel, the troughs thick with shadow.

  ‘I think I am,’ she murmurs in reply.

  ‘Of us?’

  She hesitates. ‘Of us, and other things.’

  Something in his face shifts. Concentrated mainly in the flesh bagging around and beneath his narrowed eyes, in different light it could almost be a wince. But these gales make serenity difficult.

  ‘I suppose I can live with that,’ he says. ‘As long as I’m somewhere in the mix.’

  ‘You are,’ she assures him, but she looks away to keep from having to talk about what most needs saying. The end times have never felt closer than now but, with these few hours available to them, there’ll be time enough for the hard words and the different flavours of goodbye.

  Luxuriating in the spray that dusts their faces, they look out across the plain of water that stretches to the horizon and all the way beyond. So many thousands of surface miles cloaking uncountable leagues of depth. And such secrets. This ocean has an aspect of space, in that a vast acreage of what lies beneath is mere theory. There because it must be there, as God is, for believers. Or the Devil, or the perfect note, or the man in the moon. Or the air. All that’s needed is a leap of faith. Science and myth differ in scores of wild, ferocious ways, but have at least this in common. And six feet under, down where the day’s light can no longer penetrate and where even the strongest winds fail to reach, lies a whole other existence, running to a perfectly ordered cycle of feeding, multiplying and dying. Getting on with things, but beating to an entirely different drum. Down there, right and wrong cease to exist, and the earth itself is the only god that counts, the only one capable of disturb
ing the accepted reverie.

  Everything is changing. Too late, Barbara’s cancer has invented possibilities. Beautiful women often age badly, and trying too hard somehow only quickens the rate of deterioration. For others, though, the problem is a surrender into neglect. Michael said once that it was losing the child which entrenched Barbara’s isolation. Always with a tendency towards the fey, she was knocked a step out of time by James Matthew’s death, and into some in-between state from which she’d never quite returned. Even when you had her in a room you rarely had more than a piece of her. Knowing this, and accepting it as a certain truth, has for decades helped assuage their guilt. Because even if the cancer now should break her entirely down and twist her into something monstrous, it will probably only matter to the surface of who she is. Her depths, if Michael is correct, have already long since met with ruin.