My Coney Island Baby

by Billy O'Callaghan

  She keeps at the coffee now until its dregs catch as grit between her teeth, then tight-jawed with triumph returns her cup and saucer to the dressing table and proceeds to peel away her clothes. Her own movements are devoid of shyness. Familiarity and an earned trust have set her free. She unbuttons her blouse, works open the clasp and short zip at the left hip of her skirt, her expression for the most part serious, attentive to her task, but softening to a hinted smile when she glances once towards the bed and finds Michael’s gaze nailed in place.

  Her body has weathered the ageing process well, and she is proud of the way she looks, but even back when everything had still been fresh and new and exciting, her nakedness never bothered her. Even at her best, pragmatism had seen her set her own bar, unconcerned with highlight or flaw and without any grounds for hyperbole or hysterics. Her beauty has always been genuine but tends towards the ambiguous, there but reliant on the moment and the right beholder, and on angles, a precise tempo of pulse or a particular aspect of light in certain wane. And even on the down days that see her beauty further reduced, when she is caught in a cold or when an occurrence at home has clouded her mind, Michael knows what to look for and where to find it. Because there is always some moment in even the worst afternoon when she’ll half-lid her eyes in answer to something he says, or in hesitation against some promise will let her mouth slip open to reveal the pink tip of her tongue over the rim of her lower teeth. Sometimes in bed, and touched just right, she’ll arch her back so that the lattice of her ribcage better defines itself above the fallen suck of her stomach, and her small breasts quiver with each gulped breath and somehow expand, or at least seem to take all focus, to own the focus, her exposed nipples rough and stony hard as unripe berries but pressing the air, insistent, flourishing, engorged. As a couple, they have learned to live for instants, those heartbeats when a cowl falls away and her light shines through, and the rest of the world ceases then to exist and there is only them, together, not only connected but fused.

  Compared with the languid Barbara, a woman so perfectly formed as to be hardly made of flesh at all but rather of gossamer and ivory, perhaps of glass, some substance hard and full of sheen and in its way eternal, her own modest, even slightly boyish figure has always fallen a clear rank short, a rank at the very least. And when the sun was hot and the summer clothes were out, the distance between them measured in yards, not inches. Yet in the naked state, or in close approach, stripped down to the satin rose underwear that she owns and sports exclusively for Michael and which always makes her feel so good, she finds herself overcome with a confidence that only rarely invades the rest of her life any more.

  It has less to do with love itself than with the degrees of love. With Thomas, her husband, what she has is a soft kind of love, something that has been watered down by time until the nature of it feels no longer enough. Thomas is a good man – a better man, perhaps, than she deserves – but he drums to a practical beat, and love to him means saucepans for Christmas, or steak knives, love to him is another bullet point on a long list, and never a priority. For some women, this would be acceptable, because other things matter, too, and, for some, matter more. Things like security, the comfort earned by hard work, the nice place and possessions, the yearnings for comfort met or at least acknowledged. These are all things that can speak of love, but only a kind of love.

  Michael is different. What they have going is not just about the physical. With him, she can be the version of herself that she hopes and likes to believe is the real her. His flaws are worth enduring for what he brings to her world, and for the way he makes her feel, for the way he lets her feel about herself. Feminists might scream that no woman needs a man in order to be so fulfilled, but they – the militant among them, at least – refuse to see that not every woman is the same, or strong all the time. For the likes of her, it is in the small but explosive bursts of passion that all of life’s truly worthwhile living gets done. More than anything else, it is his absolute consideration, his awareness and recognition of her as a person, whole and complete, that counts for so much, counts maybe for everything. From the first moment he brought her into his arms, she has understood just how much he cherishes her, how much every crease and bump and hollow of what she has to offer is worth to him.

  She reaches back and unhooks her bra, taking her time for his benefit, loving the fact that he is watching, and going slowly, turning her shoulders slightly as a tease, giving him every chance to prepare. They have paid for their piece of day with this in mind, though they’ve learned to keep their expectations tempered. Every step of a dance is still the dance. The thermostat is sluggish in doing its job, and the chill of the room stings.

  This is the moment for music. They both grin at once, the train of their minds hitting a kind of tandem step. She shakes her hips in exaggerated provocation and he scat-sings a bar or two of something bawdy, all throat-grunts and gibberish syllable-sounds. Then he draws back the blankets on her side of the bed, and she hurries to him at a little skipping run and plunges into his embrace.

  From here, the sex just happens. Something about her face propels him, a particular angling of her cheekbones and chin that catch the heavy light in a certain way. They kiss, eyes closed, hard enough to hurt. But stopping is not an option. She gasps, surrendering to his lead, as they momentarily break apart, a flat papery breath that turns audible even into its fading. His hands coat her body, her breasts first, gripping the flesh in a gentle but assured way, taunting the nipples with little strokes and plucks, then sliding down over her ribs to the jut of her hips. He talks, in whispers that bore into her, because it is one of the things he likes to do and because he can’t help himself, needing the approval of voice. Not words, exactly, or not identifiably so, but still in some language that she seems to understand, because in reply, or response, she tips her head back and catches his heartbeat kicking against her, through her, not just in one place but all over. She closes her eyes, opens them again when she feels his thumbs poking under the elastic of her panties. She tries to help but he eases her hand away and takes control of stripping her down. Working her body naked becomes easy once she yields. A game in itself.

  The play that follows then is not exactly one for the manuals, but the details are unimportant. Better by a stretch than what has often marked their trysts in recent years, and what there is of it is enough. For both of them. ‘I love you,’ he hisses again, somewhere in the high, the sentiment emerging as naturally as escaping air, the only truth worth saying. And she answers by wrapping herself beneath him and running her hands up and down the length of his back, her palms and fingertips riding the nubs of his spine as they rise and disappear, rise and then disappear. In union, their bodies feel so well met, even the parts that have lost their shape and turned soft, and there are moves they can make that still feel almighty, tricks they know of, having run these paths before.

  But nothing lasts for ever.

  IV

  Happy Families

  Books, for Caitlin, had never been anything less than a kind of sorcery. As a child she was constantly armed, and even by her late pre-teens she’d become so voracious a reader that the twice-weekly visits to her local library could barely sate her hunger. More than just educating her, books offered release and freedom in every direction. Desert islands and deepest space became as real as the Brooklyn streets; she learned of headless horsemen and river-rafting, Victorian-era London and dogs that would trek across continents to find their masters, and she got to know peg-legged pirates, pipe-smoking detectives and cowboys who drank and brawled but who loved their horses more than their women and who prized honour above all else.

  And almost from the time she could lay down sentences of her own, her ambitions were clear. She’d hear often, in the years ahead, even sometimes from teachers – cardigan-clad types who’d been made bitter as limes by the directions their own lives had taken – that the likes of her didn’t become writers, that her world wasn’t the world of stories. B
ut even at that young age, she knew differently, because writing was not about money and colleges and degrees but about seeing, and finding the right words, and about making sense of things. Paper was cheap – free, at her local library, at least to her, and always given with a smile, three or four pages at a time – and pens or pencils could be borrowed. And writing wasn’t about being good, either; it was about doing it, and wanting to do it. Needing to. She had stories in her head, jumbles of them, and lying in bed, listening to the noises of the night-time and watching the shadows crawl across her ceiling and walls, raised from the darkness by the headlights of passing cars, she’d play them out and fantasise about the books they’d one day make.

  Her earliest writing was in keeping with her age, full of angst and exaggeration, necessary in terms of foundation but otherwise worthless. Eventually, her adolescent scribbling did lose some of its romantic lustre and begin to take a serious shape, but it was only after she had broken from the giggles and tears of her childish years that her more thoughtful scatterings fell into place. The trick was making the time to look closely, at herself as well as her surroundings, and acknowledging and accepting the particular edges of emotion that were starting to break the skin, the longings and fears that had probably always existed for her on some level but which had never previously demanded attention. Feelings for and towards love, sex and all the in-between, the business of playing house, the sharing of self, the cooking, the cleaning, squeezing pennies, hustling through days. This was life, the quiet end of living that, nevertheless, had to be lived in full-blown manner. And amid the confusion of so much newness, her refuge became the nightly couple of hours spent lying face down on her bed, pouring little bits at first and then, eventually, everything of herself out onto saffron-coloured legal pads, herself in the reimagined guises of middle-aged housewives and little girls lost in forests, of soldiers fighting endless, futile wars and fishermen pinned down by demon storms. She worked longhand, using an old fountain pen, a cheap but well-meant thing gifted by somebody long since forgotten to the man she’d thought of as her stepfather, and which had been abandoned on the run for her to discover. With its tarnished chrome casing rubbed to the point of splitting and a chipped nib that functioned only when held at a particular angle, it felt heavily of near misses and squandered opportunities, yet it seemed crafted for the channels of her hand and acted as a conduit of sorts, the oracular means of getting the words down onto pages, the right words, coaxing them loose and making sense of them.

  By nineteen, the age at which her writing had really begun to blossom, she and Thomas were already living together. Cohabiting, as her mother called it, and kept on calling it right up until the day she died, a word to be clung to even after it had been made obsolete by a marriage vow, as if it implied something of them both, some deep creek in their respective characters. Cohabiting: a sour-milk word to turn anyone’s face, too many syllables over too short a span, too much in need of chewing. But that was Madge Healy all over and all the way through. Perhaps her mind had reworked its own past into something more presentable, or maybe it was just a generational thing, something Irish-blooded that worsened with maturity, but she, of all people, should have known better, and should have stood last in line when it came to passing judgement on others. Before her heart gave out while standing in a Brooklyn deli’s lunchtime queue, barely a week shy of her fifty-sixth birthday, she’d been a short stout type, thick all over, with sagging shoulders, big heavy breasts, fat arms and a broad face made ruddy from hot kitchens, from everything dealt with at a run and from nights spent full to teeming with cheap whiskey. Her eyes had the same hard wet green of pond grass and her puncture wound of a mouth was set full of tiny grey and always gritted teeth. She cut her own hair, dressed out of thrift shops and worked too long and too hard. At home, she burned everything she’d ever tried to cook in a way other than simple boiling, and the flavours of Caitlin’s childhood were those of incinerated bacon, watery potatoes and slimy, overdone cabbage.

  Madge took an instant dislike to Thomas, and never approved of him in her daughter’s life. He was not a man to be trusted, his hands were too cold, his eyes too steady. Liars, apparently, had such eyes. She’d found him that first night sitting on her couch, nestled close to Caitlin in a way that practically announced their intimacy. ‘He’s no good,’ she said, after he’d gone. ‘And he’s got no Irish in him either. You only need look at him to know that.’ It was such a stupid thing to say, on all counts, but exactly the sort of thing she would say. Beyond songs and soft accents, Irishness for her had been punches in the mouth and the kind of physical and emotional poverty broken in the end only by an unannounced desertion. She should have had her fill, but instead held to it as something godly. That night, she’d been to bingo, and a house rule had been broken. They were women alone, and couldn’t risk strangers. He sat slouched down onto the small of his back with his legs outstretched and spread wide apart, and when he spoke he seemed to taste his smile, which showed him off as cocky, the sort of boy who thought too much of himself and too little always of others, even those who’d get close to him. He put his hand on Caitlin’s knee and left it there, as if the gesture meant nothing, even when Madge began to stare, and he answered questions that weren’t even asked of him with sounds rather than words, little dismissive hums and grunts. She’d have understood that a great deal of what she was seeing was mere swagger, the kind of falsehood braggadocio native to a particular breed of late teen, but she still had genuine reasons for disapproving of him, at least initially, reasons that maybe could be argued against but not really denied.

  ‘He’ll knock you up,’ she said, after Caitlin had returned home a few nights later, a little after midnight, alone, her blouse looking rearranged around her slight body, a hot, sticky blush clinging to her cheeks. They’d been out for coffee, and split a slice of carrot cake, though he had confined most of his attentions to the butter-cream frosting. Caitlin thought it better not to admit that he liked to eat with his fingers instead of a fork or that they had shared the chore of sucking his fingers clean, right there in the café, where everyone could see. Her mother was waiting for dirt like that, evidence of flaws. Moving around the kitchen and preparing herself a sandwich of cheese and pickle that she didn’t even really want, she surrendered the facts of the night in a casual ‘Confiteor’ of shrugs and broken sentences that held only the illusion of transparency. Yes, he’d walked her home, and grudgingly, okay yes, they had kissed, in a dark part of the hallway downstairs. But it was just a kiss, hardly mortal-sin territory, and a kiss didn’t make him Jack the Ripper.

  The careful edit purged all mention of his attempts to coax more from her: his imploring insistence that they go on somewhere, by which he actually meant go back somewhere, back to his place, the little box room in the apartment that he shared with one of his brothers and one of his friends. He swore on his life that they’d have the room to themselves, without disturbance, but she just smiled and shook her head because no meant no but it also meant not yet. In the hallway, she let go of his hand but stood close until he kissed her, a long slow kiss that seemed a little nervous at first but gained in confidence as it built momentum, and she didn’t pull away when he began to pick open some buttons but did when he tried to push for a little extra.

  ‘He will,’ her mother said, her face twisting into a mean smile. ‘Mark my words. He’ll knock you up, and then he’ll be gone and you’ll be left behind. It’s happened to plenty before you.’ The abruptness of the following silence caused the words to press uncomfortably against what Madge really wanted to say, but she seemed to realise that the rest was better left implied, so she clenched her mouth shut and watched, breathing in hisses through her nose, as Caitlin cut her sandwich into neat triangles and stacked them peak-side up on a small plate, just as a restaurant might.

  Madge’s were the natural concerns of any single mother. Love for her had always been a cold plunge, a short-lived distraction of sunshine and laughter before
the inevitable wreckage on the unseen reefs. There’d been men in her own life, two in a serious way, and on both occasions she’d given up the whole of herself, to no avail. First, fleetingly, to Brian, Caitlin’s blood father but a man only ever known to the child by name and by repute; and then, later, to Pete, a different kind of man, who came and, at least for a while, acted the part. The misses left her damaged at a chemical depth, and once Pete walked out she turned stony against romance, locked herself down against the creep of it. On a surface level, it seemed no great loss, because she was tough and capable. But those who saw only surfaces didn’t get to know the countless nights when the low wet notes of her crying came through the wall into Caitlin’s bedroom, and Caitlin, after tossing and turning and covering her head with a pillow against the intrusion, had no other option but to get up, switch on the radio and try to drown herself in music. On those nights, sometimes deep into the small hours, the holes between songs heaved with broken-hearted weeping, and the songs themselves, even the ones that jumped to seemingly happier beats, caught the taint and turned melancholic.

  Her recollection of Pete is a blur of hints and imaginings. There are times when she can see his face as clearly as if he is sitting no more than five feet away, and other moments when her mind conjures only the shape of him, the ungainly and slightly apologetic manner in which he managed to fill space. His name rings occasionally through her thoughts, but it is always framed in her mother’s voice, and delivered with thrust, condemning and accusatory, a straight-armed blade. Pete shared somewhere close to four years of their collective home life, stepping into the fray during the weeks leading up to Caitlin’s third birthday, a tall, thin man, quiet except in drink and even then, more often than not, maudlin. On his days off he would take her by the hand and they’d walk to the end of the block to buy chocolate or ice cream or the sort of old-fashioned boiled sweets – bull’s-eyes and mint humbugs and acid drops and clove rocks – that she loved mainly because he did. She felt small and safe and happy beside him, skipping along at a little half-run to keep pace with his long strides, and proud that he’d agreed or elected to be her father.