Martin Sloane (2 page)

And that had been Gypo Nolan’s lot.

Molly was still holding the box called Grand Central in her hands, staring at it as if the movie were playing deep inside it. How was that? I asked Martin.

Just about perfect. Except the candy store was called Goldman’s. She reads me like a book, he said to Molly.

She laughed. I can’t see you as a book.

He turned back to me. And the Grand Central had little pinlights stuck into their ceiling, so that when the room went dark, you could see above you a little pretend night sky. He raised his hands above his head and waved his fingers toward the ceiling.

Just like the one you’d see on a clear night over Dublin, I said.

Yes, said Martin. Just as if the roof had been lifted off.

Molly put the box back down on Martin’s workbench. She laid it down so gently it didn’t make a sound. Did your mother ever discover he’d let you go?

He got away with it, he said. It wasn’t the worst thing.

What was?

Martin raised his eyebrows at her, surprised that someone who’d known him only eight hours would ask such a question. Molly leaned against the bench, waiting him out. In the years I’d known her, she’d always been the kind of person who could expect answers to her questions, no matter how brazen. That was her effect on people; resistance was futile. But after a few moments of the two of them pointing their mandarin smiles at each other, she lowered her head and her black hair fell over her eyes.

It’s been a great day, she said. But maybe I should let you both go.

Martin moved around her and started collecting the boxes she’d pulled down from his shelves. Maybe Jolene can run you to the bus station, he said.

She watched him slide the artworks back into their cubbyholes — Pond, Linwood Flats, The Swan. Did your father ever see these? she asked.

He pushed Crossing into place. It was a box that put the viewer in the sky over a ship crossing the ocean. A woman’s face was painted on the deck, and where the smoke from the stacks washed across the glass front of the box, a man’s face seemed to hover. I wish he had, he said.

Well, at least he’s in them. It’s not a bad place for a person’s soul to end up.

No, said Martin, pushing the last box flush against the others. I suppose it’s a good place to be.

Bloomington

I.

THE SWAN, 1950. 6" X 14" COLLAGE. PAPER, SEQUINS, FOUND IMAGES. PRIVATE COLLECTION. DEEP IN A FOREST THE SNOW IS FALLING. BEHIND THE BARE TREES, A SWAN DRIFTS ACROSS A FROZEN POND.

SOME PEOPLE BELIEVE IN A CONNECTED WORLD IN
which every one thing is cognate with every other thing, the bell tolling for you, for me. In this kind of world, orders are revealed within our own order, our beginnings woven with other beginnings, endings with endings. In this way, life is seen to rhyme with itself. For a long time this was my own religion.

But now, if I go all the way back to my own birth, I find only disconnected memories. A dusty shag carpet, a writing pad by a phone, an orange wall. I think I can recall an early dream: bedroom curtains opening on a carousel? Later, my mother in gardening gloves, smelling like soil, or my father undoing her shoes for her when my brother was in her stomach. A banana-seat bicycle, a bumpy road between two towns, jackdaws creaking in the air over gravestones. Some time later, a piano brought down from Syracuse, the one my mother played as a girl.

But this childhood narration doesn’t rhyme with anything. Not even with itself, for what could a dusty carpet have to do with gardening gloves, or a piano with gravestones? So many times in thirty-five years, I’ve known the feeling of that little girl I once was being erased. The girl followed by the young woman who was then given the hook for another, later, woman. I feel only a rough kinship with them, like they are co-conspirators in what has become of me. A lifetime of versions. But the little girl? She’s gone. I don’t have her. It’s only when you’re old enough to understand that the past is gone forever that you begin to store your own life, and like most children, at least as I recall, I thought I would be eight forever. Or eight and taller, eight with hips, eight with boyfriends. Never anything but eight.

I probably didn’t start keeping track of my own life until I left my childhood home. Then I’d lie awake in my dorm bed testing to see if I could remember how all the doors in the house I no longer lived in opened. Which ones swung easily on their hinges, which had a sticking point you had to tug it through. Which doorknobs were loose, which stiff. The folding closet door in my bedroom that slid open on a track and then came off the track and swung free. I thought to myself, once I’d forgotten the doors of my childhood home, my childhood would truly be over.

Martin Sloane was fifty-four when I started writing to him, fifty-six when we became lovers, now that’s the thing that seems shocking, the raw fact of that. Before then, I had a clear vision, so I thought, of the kind of person I would eventually love. It would be someone a little like me. Like me, but with improvements. Someone more open, someone a little smarter, a little stronger emotionally. But someone who’d fit in back at home, should I have ever wanted to return. After meeting Martin, I went down my list. He
seemed
more open, but I couldn’t really tell. He
was
smarter, but emotionally stronger? Did I really want that tested? Did I want to
lose
that test?

The problem of what other people would think was more serious (I dreaded the gossip) but in the end it was more easy to deal with. By the time I couldn’t live without Martin, it didn’t matter what anyone thought.

The first time we met in person his face surprised me. Although he was thirty-five years my senior, his face was smooth, his short mussed hair jet black with only flecks of silver. (I was to have more grey in my hair by the time I turned thirty.) His nose was too big for his face, and his eyes were as dark as his hair. His face made me think of the busts of dead men, the illusion of living eyes made by holes in the stone. So that from one angle, they would seem pitiless, and from another, they’d spring to life.

He’d just walked off the bus in Annandale, where Bard College was. I was waiting with a car I’d gotten from Rent-a-Duck, a rusted-out VW bug with a pipe for a gearshift and a steel plate over a hole in the floor. He was lugging his artworks in a plain old garbage bag, and I rushed over to him and forced him to put the bag down and let me stack the artworks, so they could be carried, tower-like.

Just dump them in the back, he said.

Let me be in charge of them. You’re a guest now.

If anything breaks, I’ll fix it. We’d gotten to the bug. This is a great little car, he said.

They were out of Jaguars. I put down the boxes gingerly to unlock the trunk. The lid had to be propped up with a stick. Then he began plunking them in, like they were groceries. He put the last one in and took the stick out, and the lid slammed shut. I’d watched him with paralyzed wonder.

You can’t treat them like they’re permanent. He went around to the passenger side. They’ll get ideas. He tried to put the seatbelt on, but the business end of it had been melted into a glob in some previous disaster. This is going to be an adventure, he said happily.

I started down the country road that wound between towns, one side a river, the other a forest.

Can I work the shift? he asked.

What do you mean?

You say
shift,
I change gears.

Do you know how to drive?

No. But when I was just a kid, my dad had a Saloon car and once we drove it from Dublin to Galway and part of the way I sat on his lap and shifted the car. So I have that part down good.

Did you travel a lot with your family?

Just that once. So, you tell me when, all right?

You’re not sitting on my lap.

I can do it from over here.

Shift, I said. And so we drove the eight miles back to Bard, me calling the shifts over the labouring engine, and Martin trying to get the gear into the right position, until we were on campus and he jammed it in reverse as I was trying to get him to gear down. I heard something big and metallic drop down and smack the road and the car leap-frogged over it and we both flew out of our seats and hit our heads on the roof. The car came to rest in some grass. We sat there panting as people I knew gathered around.

Well, this is Martin Sloane, I told them, getting out. He’s going to have a show at the Blithewood. Martin was still sitting in the passenger seat, looking at his palms, dazed.

My friends helped him out, introduced themselves; some of them knew he was coming, knew how hard I’d worked to get him to town. Then everyone took a box and we all crossed the field to the gallery, the glass fronts catching and reflecting the light at odd angles so the little crowd looked like a broken mirror spreading across the green. Martin glanced back at me and laughed.

You having fun now? I said.

You think we’ll see any of those again?

You obviously don’t care.

He made an Oliver Hardy face and shrugged, then got in step with me and linked his arm in mine. I like your friends, he said.

I tightened my arm, my heart whacking against my ribs, and I pulled him against my side. I like you.

But I crashed your car.

That you did.

Bard College was close enough to my hometown of Ovid but far enough away that no one from there could walk to it in half a day. The campus was a pastoral green hidden in the woods. Grassy patches, whitewashed buildings, a chapel in the trees. Towering maples clenched in brilliant vermilion down the main drives. The big athletic field with its unmown edges reeking of springtime through the summer and fall.

I’d been assigned one of the smaller dorms at the edge of the playing field, more a cabin than a dorm, with an angled rooftop and a jumble of windows, called Obreshkove House. I was on the second floor, with a window pointing out to the forest, where I sometimes saw deer in the gloaming. Molly Hudson was my suitemate; she’d arrived on the first day of school while I was out registering for classes. She liked me, she later explained, on the evidence of my bookshelf, and alphabetized her own books in with mine, a gesture that touched me.

She was well prepared for college, and determined from the start to run our social lives with ruthless efficiency. I’ve bought us a little fridge, she announced on the day we met, in case we want to have cocktails with the friends we’re going to make. She opened the door to the fridge to reveal four cocktail glasses frosting underneath the ice-element, and beneath them a loaf of bread, a small bottle of mayonnaise, and a single packet of corned beef. For anyone who comes over peckish, she said.

I stood in the doorway, looking suspiciously on her good sheets and her fabric-wrapped clothes hangers. How old are you, Molly?

Nineteen, she said. Today. Just squeaked into the class of ’88.

She had no doubt that she was already the centre of a coterie that didn’t exist yet. Coming from a grief-darkened house (since the death of my mother, almost ten years earlier, my father had remained in a state of evergreen loss), I suddenly realized that a bright room on the edge of a forest was the perfect coming-out for me — a gradual emergence from sadness into a new life, fronted by one of the daughters of Syracuse. Molly was enrolled in a general arts program, but her father — an important attorney in that city — had made her promise to declare law as her major by the end of her sophomore year. They’d shaken on it, a “gentleperson’s agreement,” she put it, and one she was to keep.

I stood back in a kind of awe as I watched Molly adapt to the rituals of freshman life. She joined clubs, started petitions, put graffiti forward as an important grassroots expression of discontent. (She reversed this position when she entered an ecofeminist phase for three months in second year, declaring that spraypaint was an ejaculatory rape of the environment.) Naturally, she also began blazing sexual trails, ones I couldn’t follow due to an inborn shyness, and a rational bent of mind that was still working over the mechanics of sex. While Molly was mapping sensation, I worried where my eventual caring, expressive, gentle partner would put his knees. A parade of paramours began tramping through our suite as Molly (so I believed) methodically made love to our freshman year in alphabetical order. The sounds of sex — quiet, musical, desperate, or exquisite as they were — became the general music of those rooms. She never seemed to settle on anyone, which I took as a sign of incredible impartiality, but she surprised me late one night with the sound of her weeping. Moments before, I’d heard another of her lovers quietly close the door on his way out. I crept into her room, my housecoat cinched around my waist.

What did he do?

He left, she said.

I went to sit on the end of the bed. The air in her room smelled bearish. They all leave, I said. I thought you didn’t like them staying over.

I don’t. She was holding a pillow tightly over her belly. But I want them to come back. And with that, she lowered her face into the pillow and started crying again. I waited, bewildered, unaccustomed as I’d always been to giving comfort. I don’t think I was a cold person then, only that grief undid me. After a moment, she raised her red-streaked face and gamely smiled. Men like to leave me, she said.

At least they like you. I can’t get anyone to look at me.

Looking’s the problem, said Molly. They don’t care about anything they can’t see.

I moved closer, tentative, and put my hand on hers. Then they’re really blind, I said.

I suppose that’s the moment we became friends, rather than roommates; the moment the future started to get written.

The first-year classes at Bard were like panning in a river: they sifted people into groups, and before long it was easy to see the aggregates forming: the athletics groups, the drama people (with their little moustaches), the ghostly druggies, the frat boys. In the ranks of the English majors, I wasn’t sure where I fit in. I was neither welcome nor spurned by my classmates, but this was only because the rigours of reading left little time to develop social graces, and many of us were lonely. Relationships of a kind sprang up when you discovered someone in class held your opinion, although you might only discover this in the form of a well-rehearsed answer to one of the prof’s questions in a room of two hundred other English majors. “I liked what you said about
The Faerie Queen
” would be a safe opening gambit, but on the whole, the first-year English students were a raccoon-eyed, oily-haired group, whose interests (at least through to December) were restricted to epic poems declaiming the rewards of clean living. Without Molly at cocktail ground-zero, I wouldn’t have made any friends that first fall.