Tender (11 page)

“I mean, German guys are good-looking, aren’t they? Some of them.”

He smirked. “Some of them. Oh, yeah, some of them.”

“Well, then. There must have been someone.”

“What do you mean, someone? Was I
with
someone? I’ve told you, I’ve never been with anyone.”

“No, I just mean, were you interested in anyone? I mean, was there anyone like Keith there?”

He shrugged. “There was a neighbor. Stefan.”

“Nice name.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Nice everything.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“He has the studio upstairs from Malachy.”

“And you got to know him?”

“He’d come in to us a few times a week, just for a chat or whatever. He and Malachy have known each other for years—he’s older, thirty-something.” He smirked again. “I think old Malachy has a thing for him and all.”

“Oh,” Catherine said, surprised. “Malachy’s gay?”

“Malachy’s nothing,” James said shortly. “Or, I mean, what Malachy is is not up for discussion. With him, I mean. There’s no question of talking about such things.”

“Oh,” Catherine nodded, not quite understanding what he meant, but not wanting to show this. She was feeling again her inadequacy, her childishness in the face of this world in which James had existed, a world she could not imagine: these older people, their studios, their being gay or not quite gay or whatever it was he was talking about. Her life—college, home, now the long days at her corner desk in the
Leader
office—was so narrow and ordinary by comparison. She would change this, she resolved now, whipped into determination by the wine. She would hunt out for herself a more interesting life. A more varied one. James was already helping her with this, she thought; she felt a rush of gratitude towards him again. He was eating now, so she did not bother him with this, and anyway, she was not sure she could put it into words—what could she say to him, thanks for being gay?—without sounding like an idiot.

“And there’s no chance with Stefan either?” she said instead.

James shook his head. “Stefan likes the ladies. Most of his sculptures are of the ladies. Or of parts of the ladies.”

“Oh.”

“Oh, it’s awful rubbish. Basically Rodin getting high with Koons. But it sells.”

“I can’t believe he’s not gay,” Catherine said, feeling very keenly the injustice of it. “Can he not be persuaded?”

“Oh, well, Catherine,” James said, in a tone which implied that things were very far from being as simple as all that.

“Isn’t there anyone?”

He glanced at her. “Anyone?”

“Anyone who
is
gay? There, I mean.” She stammered; she could not find the right way to say this. “In Germany, I mean. In your—”

James put his head to one side as though considering this very carefully. “Is there anyone who is gay in Germany? Hmm.”

“Stop it,” she said, laughing to cover her embarrassment. “You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean, Catherine,” he said, so warmly that she felt guilty, for some reason. “I know what you mean. But no. There’s nobody. At least nobody I’ve met.” He pointed to her plate. “Finished?”

“Not yet.”

“You look finished. Are you going to eat the fat? Longford savages.”

“I mean, not yet, you haven’t met anyone just yet,” she said, passing him her plate. “I mean, when you go back, you’ll be meeting someone.”

He spluttered. “Oh, will I now?”

“I mean, you
can,
” Catherine said, embarrassed again. “I mean, you
might.
I mean—”

“Jesus, you’re giving me worse odds by the second. I think you’d better stop.”

“Come on, James,” she said, laughing. “You know what I mean.”

“I do,” he said, and he rocked back on his chair. “Here’s hoping.” He lifted his glass, which was empty now, as was Catherine’s, but they clinked anyway.

“I have a feeling,” she said. “You’ll get a fella, and I’ll get a fella, and we can compare notes.”

“Hmm,” he said, his eyes on the night sky.

“Compare photos, even,” Catherine said, and she let something suggestive enter her tone, so that he looked at her, to check, and she winked at him to let him know that she had intended it, and they both laughed.

“God, I love wine,” Catherine said mournfully. “I wish there was more.”

“More wine!” he said, mock-aghast. “Where do you think you are, Clarence House?”

She pouted. “Do you have
anything
else to drink?”

“There might be whiskey,” he said doubtfully, standing with the dinner plates and leaving them on the windowsill by the front door.

“Then bring on the whiskey!” she said, thumping the table. She had never had whiskey before, actually, but it would be exactly right for now, she decided; it was exactly what was needed. She threw her head back and stretched her arms wide, and as she did so, James, passing by her chair, leaned down to put his arms around her. She could smell him; the shower gel he had used before dinner, mostly, and something warmer, too, something more muggy and slightly sour; the food, probably, or the wine, maybe a trace of sweat from under his arms; maybe he had been sweating, telling her all that he had. Poor darling. She hugged him tighter, her arms on his arms. James made a sound like growling, and with one last squeeze, he pushed his lips hard and quick to her jaw.

“Oh, Catherine,” he said, standing again. “Look at it.”

She looked: the garden in moonlight, the stars sharp and sure of themselves, the sweep of silent meadows down to the canal.

“I wish it could always be like this,” he said.

“Me too.”

“Just you and me, and this weather, and this quiet.”

“Yeah,” Catherine said, and then she found that she was holding her breath, and she realized why: so that she would not say something else, something rash or foolish, to spoil the moment, the way she usually did. This was new. This was something else he had given her: this pause.

“Yeah,” she said again, and above her, she heard James sigh.

“Now, drink,” he said, heading for the front door.
“Drink!”
He went into the house, closing the door behind him; through its glass, she saw him move through the sitting room into the kitchen. She felt rising in her a shiver of gladness and of excitement, and she savored it as it ran through her. Already, in the half-minute since he had gone, she had thought of so many things she wanted to tell him.

Catherine had said that everything would be all right, and a month later, after James had come out to his mother, Catherine kept saying that everything would be all right. She had to say this. She needed to say it. She needed to believe it, because James seemed to have gone to a place where such belief was not merely naive, but irrelevant.

“Yeah,” he would reply when Catherine tried to reassure him. There was no anger in his tone, no sarcasm; just this flatness which suggested that he was taking in her words, and all words, to be considered later, sometime later, when he could spare the energy to listen to them, and to decide whether to keep them or cast them aside. They were in Carrigfinn again; James had come down from Dublin to be with his parents for his last days before going back to Berlin. Catherine had come to Carrigfinn to be with him on short notice; he had phoned her at home in Longford right after the conversation with his mother.

“Catherine,” he had said. “I need you to come. I need you to come down here to me, Catherine.”

Catherine had been waiting for the call; she had told him to call her as soon as he had spoken to his mother. It would be all right, she had told him over and over; everything would be all right, she had been telling him now for weeks. OK, his mother might be taken aback, might not know how to respond at first, but she would come round, Catherine knew that she would. She would be great, Catherine told James; she would be brilliant. James had never believed her; James had disagreed with her every time, muttering about wishful thinking, muttering about things being more complicated than Catherine realized, and Catherine had argued with him—fought with him even—telling him that he just
wanted
to be pessimistic, that deep down, he must
want
his mother not to be OK with what he was going to tell her—and when she thought of that now, she felt so ashamed. She felt so—what had she been doing, with all of her big, clever theories? Who had she been trying to fool?

“Catherine,” he had said on the phone when he had called to tell her how it had gone, and his voice had been only a whisper. Only a trace.

No, he had said, not well, it had not gone well, and there had been the shock, then, of hearing tears in his voice, and of feeling—before the flood of sorrow for him, before that—of feeling a mean, indecent stab of discomfort at this; that he should cry, dissolve into crying, and that she should hear it. But he did not dissolve; he kept going, kept his voice going, and kept it clear. No, not well, he said, not well at all. And Catherine asked for the details, for the when and the how, asked whether the setup had been as he had planned it, whether the words had been the words he had rehearsed, they had rehearsed; asked about timing, asked about location, as though it was a proposal she was asking him about, rather than what it had been. As though it had been an asking, rather than a telling—but then again, had it not been an asking? Had it not been an appeal? Asking his mother to hear him, to see him, to regard him the same way she always had; and his mother, sitting there in front of him, had put her head in her hands.

“She put her head in her hands, Catherine, and she cried and she cried. And she pulled at her hair. She took hold of her hair, and she pulled at it, as though she was trying to pull it out from the roots. Which I think she was.”

“No, no,” Catherine said, trying to soothe him, but he did not want to be soothed.

“I need you to come down here,” he said simply. “I can’t be here by myself. Please, Catherine. Please come.”

She nodded. “I can come in the morning. I can tell them I have to go to Dublin for something to do with college. I can get the train—”

“No, not tomorrow, Catherine. Tonight. The late train. Please.”

“James,” she said, his name sticking in her throat. “Tonight’s impossible. How would I explain it? They know there’s no train that late going to Dublin. They’d know—”

“I don’t
care,
Catherine. I don’t care what you have to tell them.”

“I just don’t know. It’s so difficult.”

And it was his silence after she had said that that had made up Catherine’s mind for her. It was the sound of his breathing, shallow and slow.

“I’m coming,” she said. “I’ll thumb a lift out from the station when I get there.”

“Catherine,”
her mother said in disbelief when Catherine walked into the kitchen and told them that she was going to her friend James’s house for the night. She had not come straight off the phone; she had wanted to take a shower, first, and to wash her hair, so that she would be presentable when she got to Carrigfinn later. She had shaved her legs, too, because she had noticed, while she showered, that they needed to be shaved, and she had nicked herself in a couple of places, as she usually did, but the bleeding had stopped now, she thought. She was in her dressing gown, with her hair in a towel, standing just over the threshold of the kitchen door.

“Catherine,”
her mother said again, and she looked almost as though she might laugh, so impossible was this thing that Catherine had just done. To have said it just to her mother would have been one thing, but she had come in and made the announcement while both her parents were in the room; her father had just come in from the fields, and was sitting at the table, that week’s
Leader
open in front of him. He was in his overalls still, and he looked tired. The paper came out on a Wednesday, but he liked to keep it for Friday evening. He liked to sit at the table and read it from cover to cover and talk to her mother about anything that caught his eye.

Now he was looking at Catherine’s mother with the same expression with which Catherine’s mother was looking at her: an expression that said that this had to change, that this idea which had come into the air of the room needed, very quickly, to dissolve.

“I need a lift to the train station,” Catherine said, tying the belt of her dressing gown more tightly. “Or I can get a taxi, if you don’t have the time to drop me in. I’ll be back tomorrow evening, or Sunday.”

“Patricia,” Catherine’s father said; Catherine’s mother’s name. He sounded like he was pleading. Still he had not looked to where Catherine stood.

“Catherine,”
Catherine’s mother said again. She was standing at the counter; she was pouring tea. The teapot was old, and prone to leaking, and Catherine’s mother was the only one who knew how to use it without letting hot tea spill out of the sides, but it was leaking now, Catherine saw; her mother frowned at it, as though it was something she had not even known she was holding, and put it down.

“James asked me to come down this evening,” Catherine said. “His mother is sick. I want to keep him company.”

“Patricia,” her father said again, more insistently.

Catherine’s mother held up a hand; whether to him or to her, Catherine did not know. “Catherine, darling,” she said, gently. “It’s not a good idea for you to go to that lad’s house like this. Can’t you go tomorrow for the day? I’ll drop you off and pick you up, if that’s what you want.”

“No,” Catherine shook her head. “He needs me now. I have to—”

And that did it for her father.
Need
was the wrong word to have used, of course, it struck Catherine immediately—too much like desire, too much what the body did, not the mind—but it was out now. He turned to her. His eyes, the blueness of them—he had given those eyes to her. She had looked at those eyes, not five minutes ago, staring back at her from the bathroom mirror.
I dare you,
those eyes had said to her; and these eyes were saying precisely the same thing.

“Now listen, Catherine,” her father said, and just as her mother had done, he held up a hand. “Your mother and I cannot let you put yourself in danger. Your mother and I know things that you don’t know.”