Gone (16 page)

—Mister, are we sitting here all night?

—Dun Laoghaire.

—You want to go to Dun Laoghaire now?

—No. I want to go to Dun Laoghaire.

—No need to be smart about it.

We drive in silence. He'll talk. Eventually he'll talk. I can't think my own thoughts. I wait for him to talk.

—I got the mother-in-law drunk last night. And she a pioneer.

—Is that right?

—True as God. Injected the oranges with gin. She made a bit of a fruit salad after the dinner. She was hilarious with drink on her.

He lets me out at the pier.

I walk to the lighthouse and look out at the light sweeping the sky. I sit with my legs dangling over the edge. An icy wind blows in. Waves crash and slosh on the granite boulders. Foul sea. Foul wild sea. As good a time as any. The headlamps of a car shine on me.

—Are you alright there, boy?

The Garda Siochána come to pluck me from a wet death.

—Come on, so. Up out of that.

I go home and lie in bed. Imagine Holfy on me. Tonguing me; caressing me out of myself that first night. The shock when she punched me. Holfy knows who I am, what I am. Some women have the instinct of knowing men. Moments shatter. Ursula buying a flash for my father; bringing him up soup she made. His eyes on her; loving the switch to caring daughter-in-law. Knowing nothing of the people around his bed. His left hand is what I remember. Fingers black with nicotine. Lining up butts in the bedside locker in the hospital. The uncontrolled gurgling from his guts. Him falling into a stupor. Feeling death off him as tangibly as I felt it off Ruth. I should have talked to him. I felt sorry for him when I saw how terrified he was of dying. His face full of desertion. It took his fear for me to see him for something other than the misogynistic shit he was. But what use talking. There was never any understanding between us.

A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent. My last image of my life with Ursula is of the cats basking in hypnotic sunshine. Willy is sitting on the bonnet of the car. Vomit is stretched on a branch of the lilac tree. And Ursula is walking back to the hall door. A rather undramatic ending yet an ending nonetheless.

Desire

Even with Kennedy crammed the way it is Holfy is impossible to miss with the green tinsel around her neck. She is watching a man kiss a woman fleetingly, watching him take her hand and her baggage trolley and wheel away their lives. I envy them their easy affection

She has cut her hair and dyed it a burnished copper. A new woman to get to know. No matter what wild thing she does she manages to look stylish. She should look older with short hair—like any older woman trying to look younger. She looks harsh. She has painted her fingernails green, white and gold.

—You look young enough to be my lover.

—You always look the wrong age. Good funeral, was it?

She has misunderstood. I was trying to compliment her but it came out wrong. I tell her about my father's funeral, about Ursula's decision to give me a cut of Bath Avenue, the new house in Dalkey, telling her honestly I felt caught.

—So you're rich. Good, take me to dinner. It took three hours to get to the airport to collect your ungrateful ass.

We go uptown to
Café Luxembourg
but I don't enjoy it. Holfy drinks a lot and I ask her what's wrong.

—Did you see your wife?

—You insist on calling her that. It's like an accusation.

—It's called reality.

—We met. She's fine.

—And?

—And nothing. I told her it's over, that we've ended it too many times before. She came to the funeral which surprised me but it shouldn't have. She never liked my father but she does have a fine sense of propriety. That's something I never liked in her—too many admirable qualities.

—Won't make that mistake again.

—Nope. Bitches like you all the way from now.

She laughs and I'm relieved. We have our banter again, our ease with each other. That night, in her bed I decide I like the haircut. I judge too quickly. She will always be more sophisticated than me. There are two kinds of people: those who can't balance sunglasses on their head and those who can. I must tell her this.

*   *   *

I wake up and am uneasy. It takes me a long moment to realize that Holfy is crying. She is sitting on the floor with her back to the bed, watching television. People are laughing on the television, drinking out of champagne glasses outside some brownstone. Holfy's laughter coming from the television. I look at the clock on the floor: after four in the morning. And now for Whitman, her voice says from the television. There she is. Like everyone else she is wearing a flapper-style dress. The video of her wedding. Robert is quoting Whitman. It's the first time I've seen it and seeing him with her, seeing them laugh together, turns me into an imposter in her life. I have never seen or heard her cry before. I put my hand on her stomach. Her crying worsens.

—It's so hard, she says.

—Yes.

She punches the mattress.

—I loved him.

I don't know what to say to her.

—I miss Robbie.

—It's past, I say. It's over.

She nods furiously; empty words of solace. It is not past—it's present. Its in her body.

It's not over. It's never over.

Do you know how it feels to lie in bed at four o'clock in the morning with your heart beating in your chest as if you had run a race and all it is, is fear you didn't ever love me. Do you know how deeply such fear strikes? My heart thumps so fast, I think it's going to stop, think it can't keep up with itself. Probably you feel that way when you're inside her. I don't know who she is but I know you're gone. I knew it when you came back for the funeral. Part of me wanted to do it with you. Stupidstupidstupid me. I felt sorry for you because I knew you were upset because he was dead and you were still angry with him. I could sense her off you. I knew you'd put it into another woman. You really know nothing. Or maybe you know an awful lot. I opened to you, took you into me. Mornings at my desk I would feel the cold dribble of you leak from me and I would clench my muscles to hold
y
ou a moment longer. I have learned something new. I have learned my own hand. It's a far better lover than ever you were.

The rehearsed interest in your voice. You listened so attentively to me. But your tone of voice talks deeper to me than words ever can. I listened attentively, too. Three thousands miles away and I heard it in your voice. And I saw it in you, too. Saw you take the breath needed to say the words. I heard the voice come up and out of your gut, out of your tight throat. I saw you clutch the phone and close your eyes and say I love you Ursula. You needed to say my name. You never needed to say my name before. Your words are hollow. Your words rattling and clanging in a metal pail clattering on the cobblestones. I couldn't be with another. I've never even thought of what another man would be like. My eyes were never off of you. When we parted in the morning at the end of Baggot Street, and I turned the corner, I had to stop myself from looking back. I knew you were still sitting there in the car, looking at me and not looking for a gap in the traffic. I knew your eyes were burning into me and wanting me to turn and I never did. For ten years I never did. I felt, if I turned around and looked at you the violence of my love would be a gunshot. The traffic would screech to a halt, the buses would stop coughing fumes. Baggot Street would be hushed to silence; people would lean over O'Connell Bridge and stare, dumbfounded, at an unflowing river. The gulls in the sky would stop crying and falling and rising up on the air and the grey sky would lighten and the rain would be switched off and people would stand there with awe-opened mouths at the buckling power of my love for you. And when I walked into the office and said Good Mornings and heard Good Mornings coated with
Isn't she nice but a little dull, I
would turn and look at them and their faces would drain of colour and the telephones would stop ringing and the faxes would stop sliding out and the photocopiers would go quiet, the air-conditioning would go quiet, the clocks would no longer tick on the walls, the watches on their wrists would no longer tick. My love, if I ever carried my love for you openly on my face, would have stopped the world from turning. My tremendous, unreciprocated, love.

What you have soiled for some other woman's
Yes.
Yes is the longest word. There is only one Yes. Yes screams with certainty. Yes is what you put on my finger in the chapel in Trinity College. Yes defines everything. Yes is the creation of love, of beauty, what we were. After the first Yes there are no other Yeses. After Yes, everyone else becomes a joyous No. You have made us a No.

The money from Bath Avenue is through. £144,000. They liked the sound of tennis. Imagine, they paid that and they didn't even see the roses in bloom. The price is a good omen—not only is the market on the up—144 is a Fibonacci number.

I'm selling the house in Dalkey as soon as it's finished. I'm getting good at getting rid of things. Daddy will be furious. I'm going to move into town. I hate the drive in, in the morning. It's so irritating—I just bought a fax so I could get the copy in to them faster and now Fiona wants me to work in the office. They prefer it—me typing it in directly to the system. They want to see me earning the shitty money. I've been paying too much in parking. Everything. I won't bore you. Why am I telling you this? I should rip it up. Fuck it—it's the last blast. She had the gall to say it would be good for me with you away and all that—getting in to the office and away from the too quiet house. I'm sick of her. She commissioned an article on International Women's Day and gave it to our friend with the weeping crotch. Twofaced bitch. I'm sending you back the 8 X 10s you sent me. It was sweet of you to think of me but I really don't need photographs to remember.

I'm sending you £55,000. That leaves me with £89,000. It seems reasonable. I had to do it all; solicitors, estate agents, the moving. Let me know if you object.

I'd love you to object.

Ursula.

I am inside Holfy, bruising myself against her creased arse and thinking about Ursula. Imagining it is Ursula and she doesn't want me and struggles but secretly she enjoys it. That weekend we spent at her father's home; the shy way she bent away from me; her hands gripping the mantelpiece; lifting her skirt; warm pert buttocks against me; her father's laughter out in the garden; shuddering at her cheeks brushing the curled hairs on my stomach. Only later realising the thrill for her was doing it in her father's bathroom and I squirm at the odd relationship she had with the man. The evening we spent in Searson's. Ursula noticing me noticing some skirt walk past. The moment is irretrievable. Neither of us pretend it has not happened. I am not the kind of man to be tactless in that fashion and I bite my tongue for the mistake. A marriage has many endings. We said nothing. The first slip. Cracks in our lives we fall into; cracks become walls around us. I curse and curse and Holfy comes and all the time it is Ursula's back I am looking at in anger, it's her moaning I hear, her cunt surrounding me.

I have been lying for years—telling myself I want this kind of woman or that kind of woman. I want a woman I can fuck forever but have been too afraid to admit it. Ursula is a paragraph out of some feminist pamphlet. Holfy has changed my life. She fucks. She likes my seed leaking out of her. Soft bubbling of her cunt-farts afterwards. I was afraid of my wife's silent standard. The standards in her eyes she could never hide. That night I Searson's, I went and got us another drink and looked at Ursula in the Smithwick's mirror. She was biting the end of a hangnail. I thought then (and this was before we were married) I should walk out now. The coward leaves a thousand times and never leaves. Fifty-five thousand. About a thousand a month for every month I put up with the conceited bitch.

Holfy is kneeling by the bath, rinsing the sides with the shower nozzle. The bathroom is her temple: she keeps it immaculate. It has a resolute order. The bath is half the size of an Irish bath. Everything is bigger except the baths. I stoop and push a finger inside.

—Stop it.

She is rinsing as if she is alone. I ignore her. She is always ready.

—No. Go away.

Her voice full of breathless work. She is sponging the sides, chasing a long black hair clinging like a question mark on the blue tiles. The hair resists like mercury. I lick her but she will have none of it. Her hand reaches to stay upright and she slips. I am fully in before she even curses. I hold her hips firmly and wait for her acceptance. I can feel her planning. Nothing but a breeze in from the window. Footsteps on the sidewalk. A fit of coughing.

—Rape! she screams. The footsteps pause.

—Holfy, stop.

—Rapist!

I pull out.

She looks sideways at me, her eye a slit of anger turning to amusement. I pretend to be less shocked than I am.

—Now, she says.

I don't. Fear itself is both an attraction and repulsion. I get dressed and go out. The streets always offer solace. They are drilling on the highway. It's as if they are trying to break into my head. All my life I've been trying to prove to a woman what a man is without ever knowing what a man is. I've wanted to show the qualities that make a man wonderful. I have to stop caring about impressions.

Eventually I comply with Holfy's request. Part of me wanted to do it the first time she hit me but I pulled back. She explains it depends on the way it is done. We are playacting in bed, I slap her hard on her backside. There is no sound from her as if she is indifferent to my presence. I slap her again. She turns over and slaps me back, much harder than I thought she was capable of doing, harder than she would want. The insides of her thighs are wet with sweat. I kiss the redness, kiss the heavy thigh, kiss the leg, the back of the knee, search for pleasure with my fingers. Cut your nails. I go and cut them, change the music. I kiss her stomach. I'll never get my figure back now, she says. Her breasts are cold and heavy. She likes them oiled. Gentle soft caresses. Sweet moans now. Her eyes are closing with the slow fondling. Her body is heavy with pleasure. She is lost in her own pleasure. I slap her harder. I keep hitting the same place and watch it redden. She makes no sound. She is stooped as if concentrating on something else. I hit her as hard as I can and my hand stings with the crack of skin. I am disgusted with myself, disgusted that I can hurt her this way and yet it is not enough. I can sense disappointment in her. It's worse than the time with the straps. It's a widening between us. She can enter my world but I cannot enter hers. She tells me to look away from her and the force of the punch knocks me off the bed.