by Greg Fields
“You don’t have to sit in that hard old chair.” Her voice came out in a throaty purr. “Sit here beside me. We’ll both feel better.” Her eyes riveted on Conor’s. The two glints of sharp jade held him fast. Finnegan stood spellbound, unable to move, unable to respond.
“Take your wine and sit next to me, Conor.” She smoothed the bedspread with her hand. Slowly, languidly, ever in control.
“No, I don’t think I should,” replied Conor at last, helplessly, barely above a whisper.
“To the contrary,” cooed Lynda, “it would be very good for you. But if you don’t want to, then maybe I should try to convince you.” She stood and reclaimed Finnegan’s wine glass. She put it with her own on the desk. Finnegan took a small step backwards.
“What’s the matter, lover? You don’t find me attractive? Most men do.” She slithered up to him and slid her hand around his neck as she spoke. Her breasts rubbed the front of Conor’s shirt and she moved languorously from side to side to make him aware of them. Her lips brushed across Conor’s, her breath warm against his mouth. Still her green eyes did not stray from his. Conor’s lips trembled involuntarily; he felt his lower regions begin to stir.
Lynda pressed her lips hard into Conor’s, parting them with her tongue. She drew him onward, confident now of her succulent power, confident now of her control, of her domination. Conor struggled against his better instincts, indefinable at this point except as reflexes, unarticulated and programmed rather than logical. He was incapable of sustained thought. In a victory of conscience, he broke away and retreated to Glynnis’s bed.
“She won’t be back for another hour at least. I lied. We’ve got all the time we want, lover.” Lynda reached up and undid the buttons of her blouse.
“No . . . Not now,” stammered Finnegan, confused and lost.
“It doesn’t matter what’s right,” purred Lynda, now shrugging her blouse off her shoulders and slowly unzipping her jeans. “Not in the least. You want to, I can tell that, and so do I. Desperately. I want to do everything with you. Glynnis will never, never know.”
Her bra fell next. Lynda cupped her breasts in both hands and rubbed them. Conor stared at them, fully rounded, much larger than Glynnis’s, beautifully shaped. Lynda crossed the room to where he stood. She released her breasts and hooked her right hand on Conor’s belt while her left reached around to his back to pull herself against him.
“I’m yours, lover. Don’t disappoint me.” She dropped her hand and rubbed the front of his jeans. Conor’s eyes closed; he ran his hands through Lynda’s thick blond hair. He found the soft solidity of her breasts, and his breathing quickened.
***
“Conor, you’ve barely said a word all night. What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing, Glyn. I’m sorry. I thought I’d let you do most of the talking tonight.”
The dull familiar scenery of central New Jersey plodded by them. Conor felt as if they were not moving at all. He wanted this drive to be over. His head throbbed, a blunt edge pounding into his temples with each heartbeat. He wanted the long drive to be done, and this night to be done, and the entire weekend to be done. He wished that Glynnis would have found some excuse not to have come up this week. And if it were possible to transport oneself in time through the sheer power of thought, Finnegan would have done so. He would have pushed himself into Monday evening, where he could be alone with his reactions. Instead, he found himself behind the wheel of a car he did not wish to be driving and sitting beside his lover whom he did not wish to see. Not now. But no escape was possible.
“You must be tired, poor thing.” She reached across and rubbed the back of Finnegan’s neck. He flinched. Her touch felt like sandpaper. “Rough week?”
“Rougher than you could know. I just want to be home and in bed. My head is splitting apart.”
“Poor thing,” she repeated. “I’ll make you feel better. I’m tired, too. Maybe we can do good things to each other.”
“Glynnis, we do those things when we’re not tired and when we’re feeling fine. Tonight I think I’d rather just sleep.”
“Conor, don’t be mad at me because you had to wait. I had to get that project done, there were no two ways about it. You understand, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” he said after a deep sigh. “Yeah, I understand. And I’m not angry, Glyn. Just tired.”
“Lynda kept you company, though. She’s not bad company, is she? I’m glad you two finally got the chance to meet.”
He said nothing.
“Well, I hope you were more at ease with her than you’ve been with me tonight. You don’t seem quite right. Did she do anything to set you off?”
“I liked her well enough.” Conor stopped, then started again. “Or maybe I didn’t. I don’t know. Maybe she’s too wrapped up in herself to be what you’d call pleasant. Maybe she just tried a little too hard to be liked. I don’t know, Glyn. I honestly don’t know what I think of her. That’ll take time to digest.”
“You didn’t have that much time with her, Conor, certainly not enough to form a lasting impression. Be gentle in your thoughts, won’t you please? She’s had a rough go of it. Rougher than anyone could rightly expect her to handle without some ugliness coming through. I know her much better than you ever will, and I know she can be crude and self-serving and dishonest and cruel. But I know, too, that those are her last defenses. I love that girl, Conor. She can also be quite kind and compassionate. Beneath her brittle surface there’s a desperate longing to be appreciated. To be liked. She’s given up her vulnerability, but there’s still an innocence that she rarely shows, and never intentionally. I don’t expect you saw any of that.”
“In the short time I was with her I saw nothing that could even remotely be mistaken for innocence. Kindness and compassion reared their heads only for a brief peek.”
“That’s too bad. But at least she was company for you, even if a little jagged. Right?”
“Yes, Glyn. She was company.”
They finished the drive in silence, arriving at last around 9:30, much later than normal. Conor wanted to go straight to bed. The thought of the soft sheets beneath him in the cool, chirping darkness covered his pounding head like a balm. Let Glynnis fend for herself tonight. Let her prepare her own food if she wants it, let her swap stories with his friends. He must sleep, and soon.
But at the top of the stairs there was noise—music and the clatter of many voices. Conor Finnegan opened the door to find a small party, no more than a dozen or so of their closest friends. He regarded the scene with a scowl firmly set on his dark face.
Dan Rosselli bolted from the center of the room, grinning wildly. “Conor! Glynnis! Where the hell have you two been? We’ve been waiting for you, and you need to be here.”
“What’s up Dan? I didn’t know we were entertaining tonight.”
“Had to. Great news, brother!”
Finnegan guessed it at once, and his frown reversed itself into a broadly growing smile.
“Which school?”
“Georgetown.”
“Georgetown! Holy Christ, Danny boy, that’s fantastic. That’s . . .” and, unable to think of the right things to say, Conor Finnegan grabbed Dan Rosselli and hugged him with all his strength.
“Dan, I’m so God damned happy for you.”
“Thanks, Conor. Now go grab a beer while I hug your woman.” Which he did. Glynnis kissed him on both cheeks.
“We can talk about living arrangements later,” Finnegan yelled down the hallway. “Right, roommate?”
“Is that an offer?”
“If you can come up with half the rent.”
“Where?”
Finnegan returned with his beer. Glynnis had ducked into Conor’s bedroom to put away her bag. “Wherever we can find something where we outnumber the rats. My sources are looking.”
“Christ, Conor, that would be great, staying together like that.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t it? You’ll love Washington. And in three mor
e years I ought to be used to your cooking. Plan on it, Doctor.”
Finnegan hugged Rosselli again. Hopes are only hopes until pushed across the border of reality. And now all uncertainty, all concern, all the frantic desperation of not knowing whether one’s set course is proper, and, even if proper, attainable, could be jettisoned like the dead weight it was. Let arrogance and conceit, greed and egoism, creep in later after the thrill of accomplishment dwindles. For that would happen to a man of Dan Rosselli’s incontrovertible nature. Tonight, though, he was just a little boy, joyously open, unshakably pure.
Conor’s humor turned over. For an evening he could revive himself and toast his friend. He could ignore his headache, he could forget his self-pity. He could put aside all unhealthy notions, the burgeoning self-doubt, the crumbling sureties of passion. They would all be back with him tomorrow, or perhaps the day following. Jacob’s Angel would be there to be wrestled so that salvation might at last be attained.
***
Graduation, then, rose before them all as an act of irretrievable passage. It was left now only to Lanny O’Hanlon and Tom McIlweath to determine where they would land on the other shore.
O’Hanlon had his options. Just as Conor Finnegan, O’Hanlon had settled on a career in government, or, rather, politics. No altruistic pursuit of the common good entered his decision. Indeed, his resolution had been no decision at all but the natural evolutionary outgrowth of a path set for him since childhood by breeding, temperament and circumstances. Lanny O’Hanlon enjoyed power, the sensation engendered by the realization that what he did compelled the work of others. He enjoyed walking into a room and being recognized. In the last analysis, he concluded that if his personal characteristics might not in themselves generate respect, if men did not look up to him for his intellectual or physical or moral attributes, then he could create the same effects by virtue of political position, the job superseding the man who performed it.
Lanny O’Hanlon had to decide whether to stay in New Jersey where he had been offered a permanent position on the Secretary of State’s staff, a logical development of two years of interning with growing responsibility, or return to Boston where his father had (by dint of Lanny’s solid reputation, embellished a bit by fatherly aggrandizement) secured for his son a position as legislative assistant to the Speaker of the Massachusetts State Assembly. Both possibilities excited him, and both made sense. They were both clear entries to a sturdy career that could be fed by good work and better contacts.
At length, in late May, two weeks before he was to leave college forever, he decided to till the soil in Trenton using his own tools rather than return to work Boston’s using his father’s. Lanny suspected that his father still viewed him as too callow to set his own course. That had, after all, been the elder O’Hanlon’s motivation for arranging matters back home in the commonwealth. Trenton, on the other hand, had been created by Lanny alone. He decided to play the hand he had drawn for himself from an unstacked deck. His father understood perfectly and had no hard feelings, nor did the Speaker. He would always be there if Lanny found he ever needed his help.
Tom McIlweath had expected his decision to crystallize before him, a well-formed sediment of scholarly opportunities, financial realities and his increasingly confused, contorted feelings toward Anne Newbury. Long before Dan Rosselli had received his happy letter from Georgetown’s medical school, Anne had been accepted three times over in three scattered parts of the east coast, with Harvard at the top of the pyramid. There had been no party for Anne, just lukewarm congratulations from Tom’s friends and a celebratory dinner for two at an expensive restaurant. She would be in Cambridge for the foreseeable future, then. She had assumed Tom would readily follow, so when he balked at Boston University’s acceptance to its graduate program in Classics, when he let it be known that he was not firmly in tow, Anne had become aggravated. She coaxed and demanded that he come to a decision about his own future. She termed him weak for not doing so at once, and his hesitation caused her to grow sullen.
But Tom McIlweath did not wish to be directed by a relationship that offered as much insecurity and bafflement as it did emotional satisfaction. He resolved to view Anne as but one factor in a decision to be reached under composite influences. McIlweath had loosely concluded that he would continue to pursue the scholarly life, at least for now. At Rutgers, his research and translation work reassured him of both the broad nature of man’s intellect and his own capacity to understand it. That sense of accomplishment, the rarefied exhilaration of intellectual creativity, was not a small thing. It invigorated him daily. It allowed him to transcend whatever oppressive details of his humble lifestyle might at any given time be tarnishing his spirit. It allowed him temporarily to dismiss that haunting subliminal suspicion that, despite his efforts at devising an existence that defined his innermost character, all was not right. Nothing else he considered came close to exciting him as did the prospect of continuing his study of the classics on a higher level. This would do for now. It approximated what he wanted for himself better than anything else he knew at the moment.
McIlweath had applied to a number of graduate schools, taking care, in spite of his rebellious sentiments, that he had selected institutions that were not only good but were in cities that had medical schools to which Anne Newbury was applying as well. He told himself that this was just a precaution should he determine that his relationship with Anne was worth continuing. It would be a terrible development if, at the end of the year, things had progressed and their feelings had deepened only to have to navigate a geographic gulf between them. He would not have to attend near Anne, but he believed he should probably have that option.
Tom McIlweath was the last of the four to determine where he was heading. While his friends remained silent on the issue—Mac could decide for himself, they reasoned; besides, we have our own problems to solve—Anne constantly reminded him that he was still directionless, perilously so, and if he weren’t a fool he would head for Boston come autumn. McIlweath for his part carefully weighed the Classics programs at the schools which had accepted him and compared their financial offers, trying to find a decisive difference in what was essentially identical.
’Perhaps,’ he reasoned as he sat one night on the front steps of the apartment, ’perhaps I shouldn’t be so quick to abandon something which I had sought for so long.’ Images of Anne, her deep acceptance of him and the genuine emotional response she evoked despite all disagreements, despite all divergences of style and substance, flooded him.
’Perhaps I take her for granted. I don’t want to be lonely again. No matter how I phrase it to myself or try to rationalize it, that’s all it is, isn’t it? I don’t want to be lonely again. We need each other. It would be a sin, a tragic sin, to abandon one another. After what we’ve known of each other I could not stand it. I’d go blind, lifeless and numb, a creature of habit, a creature of response, but one incapable of projection.
’I see her there, with the depthless echoes of her blue eyes and the soft curl of her hair, the silky delicacy of her skin. I see her cold and alone, too, there in Boston, and it breaks my heart. I see her sadness, and I cannot stand it. She is a little girl still, afraid of the night. I cannot leave her there, and myself removed some place else, away from all warmth, all acceptance. I cannot . . .’
This last was true. Tom McIlweath could not leave Anne Newbury, not then, with any greater ease than a fetus can step outside its mother’s womb and walk away. He had known it for weeks, for months, for years, and he had attempted to deny it through a coldly logical assessment of his opportunities. He had attempted to deny the undeniable. In the end, it was all a charade. His ’opportunities,’ indeed. What opportunity did he truly have, apart from Anne? He knew it, had always known it, and no protest to the contrary could ever have dislodged the conclusion reached, without his consent that day, long before when he had sat next to her on a crosstown bus.
Tom McIlweath went back upstairs and in the quiet t
hickness of a gathering dark night penned his acceptance of an offer of admission to Boston University, a few miles away from where Anne would spend her next several years.
***
It all ended much more quickly than it had begun. The day dawned heavy with an impending rain that held off until after dark. No sun shone through the thick clouds that pressed down like a layer of turf on the occasion. The McIlweaths and the Finnegans had come east, the O’Hanlons had come south and the Rossellis had come north from the shore. They gathered to compare their sons and to recognize the processes of mortality that had acted upon them. They saw in each other indelible traces of themselves.
The Finnegans and the McIlweaths toured campus escorted by their son. Edward Finnegan, more than the others, was impressed. The great stone buildings, the wide trees, the crawling ivy formed an image of solidity, of permanence, of good people in worthwhile pursuits, and his son had been a part of it, a small niche in wood gnarly grown. He felt inestimable pride that young Conor, who bore a name reflective of a nomadic Irish heritage, should have come here on his own and, through the strength of his hard character, conquered it within his four years. He had indeed conquered it; he had made it all serve him, he had drawn from its energy, and his father saw that now. Edward Finnegan knew his son in these strange surroundings to be more alive, more confident, more assured, in sum stronger than he had ever been before. He knew, too, that through it all, Conor belonged here.
Katherine Finnegan was not nearly so appreciative. The campus dwarfed her, and she saw at once that it was peopled with men and women far different than her own traditional background had allowed her to be. Bold and confident intelligence, and the trappings of intelligence, had always intimidated her. She knew her son to be extremely capable, and that was obvious now. But he would have honed himself to this sharper edge no matter what he had done or where he had gone to college. Why had he to come here, to this strange place where the natives spoke with a peculiar accent, and rob her of eight years—four of his and four of hers? Now he would settle in the East and her only son, her only child, would be a world apart by emigration from the ways and elements which had nourished him so long ago. Nothing now could be regained; no recompense offered itself. Katherine feared her age and she feared loneliness. She was convinced that they both loomed immediately ahead. She wanted all this which was at hand to be done, so that she could leave this strange place, this place that had claimed her child, and return to the few sureties left her.
