Saints and Sinners (15 page)

Clarissa has guessed my predicament. I am invited to the coast. She has a cottage for me in the grounds. We make no secret of our muddles. She says to have a woman carnally opens up as many minefields as to have a man. She thinks a visit might help me. She is not sure about you. She has misgivings. She thinks you might be a philanderer. I tell her that is not so. I bought an English newspaper, to somehow reach you. Reading one of the supplements, I began to picture little hamlets, steep country roads, the faded coats of arms on manor gates, old people's homes, and flutes of white convolvulus attaching themselves to everything within reach. Then the picture slid into night, that hushed, depeopled time of night, when the cottages that Shakespeare occasionally wrote of are sunk in dew, poplars like ghosts along a hillside, fairy lights still twinkling outside the shut public houses, and I thought of you as being part and parcel of that landscape and prayed that you would admit me to it, to those cold mocking sensibilities, to those men and women sprung from the loins of admirals. I wonder why you chose me. A death perhaps. Often it is the death of a close one that sends us in search, so that we run here, there, and everywhere, run like hares, knowing that we cannot replace that which is gone.

I detest these cozy hush-hush affairs, which your kind excels at. Women in their upstairs drawing rooms, made up to the nines, at lunch hour, standing by the folds of their ruched curtains, with glazed smiles. Sherry and gulls' eggs in wait. The marital chamber stripped of all traces of a spouse. Lamb cutlets and frozen peas and lots of darling, darling.

When one is smitten, what does one want imparted and what hidden? If for instance you say "I am hell to live with," it has a certain bravura to it. Does it simply mean that you are lazy and sullen indoors, expect someone else, a wife or a servant, to pour the coffee or to put a log on the fire, but that you show yourself to best advantage when visitors are heard coming up the path, just as you are decanting the choicest wine? How I hate these games and subterfuges. Sunday lunches, Sunday dinners, Sunday teas, the gibberish that gets trotted out. A woman telling the assembled guests how clever her Dave is, while notching up grievances inside. It's ubiquitous. I was with a couple one Sunday when the wife pronounced on some book of poetry, whereupon her husband said, "Have you read it?" and oh the look, the withering look, that she gave back to him, saying have
you
read it, and in the icy aftermath, the hatred congealed.

The most telling moment was when you saw me in that crowded nightclub, come up from the Ladies and utterly lost. You were leaving the next morning. I had to make my way back to our long table and took a detour so that I would have to pass closer to you, but of course not touch you. Suddenly you stood up and said my name with great anxiety, as if we were about to be separated. Then you kissed me. They saw you kiss me and were surprised by your indiscretion. I don't remember how I got to my chair.

Again and again I pay my respects to our wall. Last evening, I went on a little foray before dark. The violet hour. It was quite beautiful, balmy and pregnant with the kind of promise that evening in this city heralds. Musicians had gathered and taken up their posts at several corners. Skeins of sound sweetening the air. At one corner an African boy held up his wares, ropes of pearls and scarves that fluttered like veiling. They looked quite magical. The whites of his eyes were orbs, full of the wonder of evening, the wonder of Africa, the sense of a day almost done. It mattered not to him that I didn't buy anything, that I ignored his entreaties to look. The violet hour. The homeless had already decamped for the night, in doorways, in recesses, on church steps, lying there in heaps, like sacks of potatoes. I saw one sleeping man pat his stomach and smile benignly. Perhaps he was dreaming of food, not the oily noodles left as refuse, but a banquet such as he had glimpsed through the window of some restaurant, a bounteous offering, the fruits of the earth. To think that he would waken hungry. Hungers of every denomination are on display.

Thunder shook the foundations of the hotel, but I was shaking anyhow. I had wakened from a dream of having telephoned your hotel in Paris, thereby showing my need. I was told that you were out. I telephoned again and again. At one minute to midnight I called again, but was told that you had not returned. Then five minutes later, when I called back, I was put through and you answered gruffly, having gone to sleep. I reckoned that you must have come in tired, or maybe a little drunk, and flopped down on your bed. In the dream, you recognized my voice immediately and asked how I knew that you were in such and such a hotel in Paris. I put the phone down because I sensed the naked terror of a man who believes he has just been trapped. It freaked me.

Without any deliberation, I decided what I must do. I rang the airline and found they had spare seats, probably because it was midweek I decided to take up Clarissa's invitation, to spring a surprise on her. The guest bungalow has its own kitchen and a little patio that opens onto a garden. I imagine at this time of year there will be those sharp, needly red flowers that resemble the beaks of tropical birds, and the pale pink corollas of flowering cacti, in terra-cotta pots. Why I imagine this, is beyond me.

No doubt the atmosphere at supper will be tense and there will be plenty of wine and false gaiety to relieve the strain, because strain there must be, considering the undercurrents. Clarissa is unsure, recognizing that she has a reliable husband in Todd, but keeps harking back to a favorite story by D. H. Lawrence, in which a woman rides into the desert, where she is stripped not only of her clothing and her worldly possessions, but stripped of her former self and her attachments.

Clarissa comes each morning, laden with boxes of shells and grout andphosphorescent paints. She arranges the shells in panels and fonts—magical configurations for houses and grottoes—bringing the whoosh of the ocean and intimations of the disgorged creatures that once lived and throve inside them.

Your name comes up all the time and the very utterance of it sends shivers through me. I have shown her one or two of your postcards, the more elliptical ones, but not, of course, your letters. She has her doubts. Even your handwriting she questions. She cites clandestine loves in life and literature strewn with concealment, jealousies, and betrayals. But I tell her, it has already begun. Even if I lingered here, there, or anywhere it would still run its course, in letters, in longings, and the whet of absence.

Not to go to you is to precipitate the dark, and yet I hesitate. It is not that I do not crave the light—rather it is the certainty of the eventual dark.

MEN AND WOMEN HURLED themselves through the revolving door of the hotel with an urgency, and so quickly did they follow one upon the other that Miss Gilhooley imagined it was bound to end in a stampede. Discharged into the hotel lobby, they flung out their arms or tossed their scarves, triumphant at having arrived. Miss Gilhooley drew back, waiting, as she hoped, for a pause in the hectic proceedings. It was then that Pat-the-Porter noticed her, standing somewhat tentatively on the lower entrance step — not a young woman but a striking woman in a gray Cossack hat, such as he had seen on an actress in a Russian film many years before. He held the door and drew her in, as he put it, "to the most distinguished address inDublin." He was an affable man, with sparkling blue eyes, proud of his girth inside that fine uniform and certain of the importance of his station. He had, as he soon told her, been working there for thirty-three-odd years, barring the two years when the establishment was closed for the massive revamp.

The hall was a veritable Mecca. Marble floors of shell pink, which an unthinking being could easily slide on, and countless chandeliers blazed and gave out a beautiful light that surpassed daylight and trembled within the many mirrors. A fire was blazing and on either side were dented leather buckets filled with consignments of logs and turf. The flower arrangements were particularly fetching—golden gladioli and lilies in high vases, and then nests of littler vases, which had deep blue orchids that had been severed from their stems squeezed inside, their faces pressed close to the glass, chafing at their imprisonment.

Pat-the-Porter was regaling her with some of the hotel's history from the time when it had opened its doors in 1824—the perilous days during the Rebellion of 1916, when gunfire whizzed in Stephen's Green across the road, and sure, wasn't the lounge famous for having been the very place where the Irish constitution was drafted. In between these snatches of history, he snarled at young boys, bellhops, with their gray pillbox hats set at jaunty angles, reminding them of their various charges. The couple in the Horseshoe

Bar were still waiting for their oysters, and the front steps needed more salt; he didn't want people breaking their ankles or their hips or any part of their anatomy. He was able to change his manner at a wink, soft and confiding with her, severe with the underlings, and giving a knowing half nod to the various swanks and habitues who came skiving through the swing doors and headed for either of the two bars or the Saddle Room. He would give her a booklet later on in which she could read all about the hotel, from its inception to the present time as a hot spot for movers and shakers, not to mention the English gentlemen who came for the stag parties.

Miss Gilhooley, he opined, would feel more at home in the sedate ambience of the Lord Mayor's Lounge, and so he escorted her to a table that was not too close to the entrance, in a recess, a little round table covered with a white linen cloth and on which there rested a folded menu. The elderly pianist, in an excess of energy, was bent over his piano, hitting the keys so fervently that a waltz sounded like a recruiting song. His bald pate glistened in the winter sun that poured through the bay window and onto his knitted gray-white eyebrows and his small purple dickie bow.

It would be true to say that her heart fluttered somewhat. Strange to think that she was about to come face-to-face with a great poet whom she rated above all other poets and especially the young whippersnappers with their portfolios of clever words and hollow feelings. His poetry evoked the truth of the land, dock and turnips and nettles, men behind their plows, envying the great feats of Priam and Hector, tormented men in small fields battling their desires. Again and again she recommended his poems to borrowers in the library where she worked, and once she organized a little entertainment where there were readings of his poems and refreshments afterwards. The audience was restless, finding the poems too depressing, so that there was fidgeting and coughing throughout.

Each time a new poem of his appeared in a newspaper she cut it out, assembling a scrapbook of him. Finding one addressed to a woman, whose name he wrote, she thought, He is not made of stone after all. They had first communicated some years before, when she asked if she could impose upon him to sign a copy of his collected poems, to be placed in a glass cabinet in the library hall. He sent a white, ruled, adhesive sheet, which carried his name and the date, February twenty-second. It was in deep black ink and the handwriting being so cramped and tiny, she felt he had a reluctance in writing it or sending it at all. The photograph on the back cover showed a formidable man, his forehead high and domed, the eyes hidden behind thick hornrimmed spectacles.

One autumn night, in an expansive mood, she sat down and wrote him a letter about the white mist. It appeared from time to time, wraithlike, twining the three adjacent counties, frail as lace and yet sturdy as it wandered, or rather seemed to float above the fields, above the numerous lakes, separating into skeins and then meshing again. He wrote back warning her not to get too carried away by the mist and concluded by saying, "I reject miracle in every form and shape."

Now she was here, picturing him arriving, somewhat awkward, in a long overcoat, looking around and being looked at, because he was famous and rumored to be fiercely abrupt with any who ventured near him. She had come for poetry and not love, as she kept reminding herself. Miss Gilhooley had had her quota of love, but had never managed to reach the mysterious certitudes of marriage. In her small town she was mockingly referred to as the Spinster.

She began imagining things they might talk about at first, the changes that had occurred in their country, changes that were not for the better, bulldozers everywhere and the craze for money. Money, money, money. The rich going to lunch in their helicopters, chopping the air and shredding the white mist, their wives outdoing each other with jewelry and finery, stirring their champagne with gold swizzle sticks, and Mrs. Jamieson boasting about their drapes from the palazzo of a gentleman in Milan and a tea set shipped from Virginia that had once belonged to a president of the United States. Pictures on their walls of bog and bogland, where they no longer set foot, priceless pictures of these lonesome and beautiful landscapes and pictures of bog lilies that lay like serrated stars on pools of purple-black bog water. It was not only the rich but those who aped them that were also money mad. That little hussy who sued the Church Fathers because the sleeve of her coat singed as she was lighting a candle actually employed the family solicitor to press for compensation and he did, egging her on, encouraging her in this rotten ploy.