Gone (23 page)

—I don't want anything.

My voice is unexpectedly indignant. It shivers in the cold air. She pauses with her back still to me; nods her head as if that is explanation enough, walks slowly back to the munching horses.
To say hello,
I shout across the field. My voice waivers between friendliness and irritation. But already she is absorbed in her work. I think about stepping over the low rusted fence. Confronting her. But she has done nothing except ignore a busybody. I walk for about an hour, feel their presence behind me but know it's my imagination. I turn back.

As I pass her house I think of some ruse for approaching the door, a question of some sort if the boy is in. But there is a blind look to the house that warns me off. I meet her a mile down the road. She is walking with the dog. She beckons for me to follow her.

*   *   *

—I wanted a home here. I like the bleakness. It leaves the mind open. This place was for sale. No one wanted to buy it. Like your place. The farmer shot his wife and his daughter-in-law in the kitchen.

—This is the Baird farm? I thought it was on the other side of the highway.

—This is it. They were chopping potatoes: the wife's belly and the bones from her back hit the wall. I hang Frida Kahlo there. Big joke. No one wants to buy a place where death is. They left the pig houses, they left everything. The murdered farm, I call this place. People say it's morbid. They spend their lives dead and they say morbid.

The door opens from the only other room. The boy comes out, the corner of a wardrobe visible behind him. She sees my mind working. She smiles at the shock I'm trying to hide.

—Why did he kill them?

—Ronald Reagan. The banks shut farms.

It was for sale that long?

—People are afraid.

—Of what?

—Who needs a
what?
My name is Toscana.

*   *   *

I lie in bed thinking of the old woman lying in her bed. The boy must have parents. The noise of the fan keeps me awake so I get up and go into the kitchen. I pick up a plum and squeeze it for freshness. Juice breaks through the skin. Ursula would write a sensuous poem about such a plum. I hate knowing that I hate being alone. Holfy doesn't answer my letters. No matter. I get up and make coffee. Toscana is just some crazy woman but at least she's content in her madness. I can't bear this middle of nothingness any longer, can't bear the idea of another winter, this living without purpose. I finish the coffee and go to the Hawkeye and buy a ticket for New York. Moira agrees to take Pearl and Boogie but she will not be held responsible if Elijah eats them. She'll see to the sale of the barn if it ever sells she says. Great at telling it as it is are Midwesterners.

*   *   *

Manhattan is frozen with heat. Not even memories are left in New York. Life moves too quickly there to let memories gather anywhere. Street signs still the same: Jane, Horatio, Little West Twelfth, Bethune, Perry, Ninth Avenue. Pearl, Fulton, Canal, Elizabeth. Lafayette, Dominick, Cornelia, Bedford, Commerce, Barrow. Gansevoort. Restaurants with their cluttered greedy tables. Small bricks that give the buildings their quaintness. Turn a corner off Seventh Avenue and find a quiet step to eat one of those Middle Eastern take-away thingys. And it's early morning and sleepy workers hose clean the sidewalks all over the tired and dirty city. A Mexican sitting on the corner by the flower shop. His shirt. Welcome to America. Now Speak English.

Gone with the rush of the subway. I thought there was some sense to the way I was living, something unique about it all and that one day I would be rewarded and my choices—even the callous ones—would make sense. There is nothing left now except the bad decisions and the indistinct path of words leading the way to a semblance of integrity.

The meat shop is gone on Gansevoort Street, magically converted to an architect's office. I peer in through the shutters. The old hoarding that advertised the butcher's wares hangs inside the new trendy office, a hip relic of the past. Someone will pay money for it one day. I go to Florent for coffee to steel myself. But Florent is closed. I walk to the Serivalli playground on the corner of Thirteenth. The sound of a car passing on Eight Avenue. Even the Empire, lit with red and green, seems deserted. I go back. I have to face her.

I ring the bell and wait. His name still on the door. Robert Tansey. RIP Robert Tansey. A garbage bag moves in the doorway and I leap back looking for a rat. A hand touches my knee and a frail voice asks for change. I stare down at the darkness. The smallest I have is a ten. Have a good day, says the voice. Music from the top of the stairs. I decide to use the key. A black man, immaculately dressed in a black suit meets me at the top of the stairs. The hallway has a new smell. Ray Charles singing with that smile of his.

—How can I help you?

—
You
can't.

—You rang
my
bell.

I stop on the stairwell and look at the man and point past him at the open door.

—I rang that bell.

—Right. You rang my bell.

I try to look beyond him into the apartment.

—How did you get in here, Sir?

I hold up the key, a black man and a white man facing each other. America's defeat.

—You have a key to my apartment?

His blackness soaks into me. He appraises me a second longer.

—Just a minute, Sir.

He closes the door quietly. Suddenly her absence is apparent. She is gone. The apartment as it was flashes through my mind, the bed up against the window, the scattered books, the night I awoke to her watching the video of her wedding, the first time I was making tea and reaching for the blue jug with sugar in it. I run down the stairs and out into the street, I run until I am breathless at Thirteenth Street.

I think of Kahlo dying on the veterinary table and my crack afterwards about the N word and wonder if she rented it to the black as a last joke. Gerry might know where she is. I phone from the street. No answer there. No one will be around. Bill. Bill might be in town. Bingo. Bingo Bill. I ring information to find somewhere to rent a car. It takes twenty minutes in this 24/7 city to find somewhere that can rent me a car. I have to take the train from Grand Central to White Plains.

People want to help, that is part of the problem. We are insane, all of us. I feel insanity flowing through my veins, the insanity of being human. The painter living in the Baird house. That was what she was and happy in it. She needs nothing from the world, the purest form of madness. Then there are those on the periphery of it, those who sit and drink on porches. They are close to it, feel it in the July heat, smell it in the corn, hear it in the clacking of the corn leaves but they do nothing, they neither welcome it nor dismiss it, they sit paralysed with their own awareness.

I was raised on lies. There are none more powerful than the lies of the mother. My mother's lies were as natural as her milk. She lied about everything. It was her nature. Fear made her lie, and cunning made her successful at it. She never hid her lies from me; I was her conscience as she was the conscience of her mother. She didn't like her daughter, Ruth. She preferred the company of men, unlike most women. She knew Ruth would grow into a woman she could not trust but she knew my loyalty was unshakable. The blind trust of the son. I was seven when I saw her come out of the Carlton cinema with the man. I was on the mitch from school. She looked happy. I didn't understand why she was coming out of the pictures with a strange man but I thought of my father at work reaching into a corner to finish a ceiling. I knew it was wrong and I knew not to say anything. I had no mother from that day on. I looked at her like she was a movie star, observing her. I watched her live an automatic life at home. I watched her work and talk. My mother talked endlessly. But she was not living in our home, she was acting a life she had constructed and it was flawless. I never hated my father for his stupidity but I couldn't feel sorry for him either. Without bitterness, I felt he was living the life he deserved. I learned the value of silence and observation. Rarely is there a need to ask questions. Words can say whatever they like but bodies can't, bodies can never lie with any conviction.

I was sure my mother would be caught, or that she would be killed in an accident but that didn't happen. She simply left. I remember hearing the famous story of the woman on the radio saying her husband went out for cigarettes one night and didn't come back. I didn't believe her, it's one of those stories that exist forever. The woman was in love with her story, in love with the rejection. My mother didn't smoke. She just left. I was sure, too, that my father would meet someone right away. Men don't like to be alone. They always meet someone. He didn't. He just kept working and Muriel helped with us. He never lied to us. She isn't coming back I don't think, he said, but I'm not sure. We'll just get on as we are. There was a programme on the telly my mother liked called
Quicksilver.
I loved watching it with her. The man who did the program was called Bunny Carr and my mother said he looked like a rabbit. He didn't but she knew it made me laugh. Give yer man a carrot will ya, she would say. Jaysus, RTE must pick out the most stupid cunts in the country for that quiz, they never have to give much away. Coinín Gluaisteán she called him. I always thought she would write me a letter.
Dear Stephen, you understand. I know you know about the world and you know about your own mother and it doesn't matter about the rest of them.

She wrote no letter. She thought I was as stupid as the rest of them. Women work on the assumption that all men want is a fuck and that listening to men and nodding at men is enough. But I could see through women and had none of it, none of the learned ignorance, the convenient confusions they propagate.

My father painting. I was devoted to him. The grace of him on a ladder, reaching up to dab paint into a cornice. There was always the right amount of paint on the brush. I would foot the ladder for hours watching him, waiting for a drip to fall from the hairs of the brush. Drip, I would say on the few times it happened. I didn't know the word perfection but perfection describes his work. He measured a room for wallpaper simply by walking into it, and when he papered it he only ever measured once with the first length, then he would cut the rest with the large scissors without even looking at what he was doing. It was as if everything was in his fingertips and not his eyes. Ruth didn't see the work he did with his brushes. He used wallpaper and paint to cover ugliness in the way my mother used lies.

*   *   *

I am the last one to drive onto the ferry. There's a salty freshness in the air; it seems hard to imagine it's still New York I'm breathing. A loud colourful crowd playing Frisbee. Another crowd playing croquet. Everyone seems to know everyone else. Adirondacks scattered on the sloping lawn like tired swans. A redhead threatens to throw the Frisbee to me and I turn away before her gaiety forces me to join them. I sit and watch, memories of customers running through my mind. That Jewish woman who kept changing the colours just so she could devour Gerry with her eyes for an extra couple of days. A waiter asks what I'd like. A bucket of stout, if you're paying, Muriel used to say. Wine glasses stand on the arms of the abandoned chairs. Too hot for wine.

—Lemonade. No ice.

Each choice is a battle. Why New York is impossible. I regret the prospect of the lemonade. I could handle a vodka. For the sake of calmness. He comes with the drink.

—What is so difficult about remembering lemonade with
no
ice?

The waiter nods without apology.

—Tell you what: why don't you trot back and bring me a Pimm's cup.

—Ice?

His voice is friendly, his expression unreadable. I can do nothing but admire his polite rudeness.

—It always has ice.

I look away. I hate this kind of money, people on the edge of the really big money. I regret coming. A hammock is swinging between the trees. A woman's leg trailing to the ground. A Silver shoe at the end of a slim leg. Fireworks go off suddenly but she doesn't move. I scoop the ice out of the lemonade and take a gulp. A young child spread-eagled on her chest. She scratches his back and he giggles. His head hides her face from view. He giggles again. The ruby ring on the finger. I swallow the rest of the lemonade. I feel caught, naked. Florent has teamed with the redhead in croquet. He laughs too much. He waves a welcome to me as if he only saw me the day before yesterday. The weekend is elaborate foreplay for him. As soon as the waiter comes with the Pimm's I take the drink wordlessly and walk away, over to her. Halfway over to her I shout back to the waiter, Hey. Good Pimm's, more as a warning to her than as an apology to him.

I stand between her and the sun, my shadow falling across them. The child lifts his head and scowls at me. She smiles, as if she knew I was coming.

—Have you noticed the grass is so green here? Shamrock green. Emerald green. Paddy green. Green as the Irish themselves green. Take a seat.

The playfulness of her tone is so disarming that I almost believe she has expected me to arrive at this very moment, as if everything has been leading to this. I sit in the adirondack beside them.

—Coleman and I were just discussing that, weren't we?

Coleman, child runt, nods his skinny head resentfully.

—There are only two homes on the island to ignore the summer drought laws. The guy who owns Victoria's Secret and our host. What does that tell you?

—People come here to feel decadent without having to actually do anything. Fallout from the AIDS generation.

—Concise and comprehensive. Who knew? Thanks for the explanation, Stevie.

—How are you?

—I'd love a cigarette.

I take my jacket off and take a cigarette out of the pocket.

—Ugh. Not Parliaments.

I put the cigarettes back in my pocket and drape the jacket over the arm of the chair.