“Lover,” Julia repeated, rolling her eyes. “As though the rest of us are only going to Mass together.”
“Ha.”
“Anyway, what else are you writing about these days? Apart from Ed’s photos?”
“Well, I’m writing an essay, mostly, at the moment,” Catherine said. “For one of my English courses.”
“Oh, of course,” Julia said, her gaze drifting away. “You have to get your degree.” She gave degree the same intonation she had given lover: a low drawl of derision. Catherine hesitated to go on.
“Yeah,” she said, then. “I’m writing about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Julia, in the manner of someone who had just heard a very unfortunate piece of news. “What’s possessing you to do that?”
“The new book,” Catherine said, adding “His,” then, hardly necessarily.
“Oh, that book is insane, isn’t it? Insane.”
“It’s pretty intense, all right.”
“Intense? It’d give you nightmares for a month,” Julia said, shaking her head. “What was he thinking, writing those poems?”
“Well…”
“God, he’s such a fine figure of a man, though. Physically, I mean. We met him at a festival where Mick was reading a few years ago. Honestly. The whole room would weaken when he’d walk into it. Men, women, the lot of us.”
“I’m sure,” Catherine said, laughing nervously.
“But really, are you not just depressing yourself, writing about those two? I mean, it’s a terribly sad story. An awful waste.”
“I know,” Catherine said. “But really, I’m interested in the poems rather than in the lives.”
Julia smiled that same strange smile again. “I believe you,” she said, after a long moment. “Thousands wouldn’t.” Then she nodded at something over Catherine’s shoulder. “Oh, about bloody time.”
Then Mick Doonan was upon them, muddle-handing three glasses of champagne.
“Here we go, ladies,” he said, a little breathlessly. “Sorry about the delay. Forced diversion to Lesbos.”
“I’m sure you minded.” Julia cut her eyes at him. “Catherine here is just telling me she’s writing an essay about Ted Hughes.”
“Hughes?” Doonan said, as though Julia had just mentioned a difficult neighbor. “Huh.”
“Hughes and Plath, really,” Catherine offered, in response to which Doonan made a face of droll horror.
“Oh, Jaysus,” he said, rubbing a hand over his mouth. “Hughes. Hmm. Ever interview him, did you?”
“God, no,” Catherine said through a splutter of disbelieving laughter. “I’d die if I had to interview him. I mean, I’d love to. I’d never be able to, though.”
“Now, make up your mind, darling,” Julia said.
Doonan was looking at her archly. “Is that what you were like about the prospect of interviewing me?”
Catherine stammered. “Well…”
“Oh, leave her alone, Mick,” Julia said. “Sure you couldn’t blame her.”
“I’d say he’d give you the runaround and all,” Doonan said, sipping his champagne.
“I’m sure he’d be a perfect gentleman,” Julia said. “What do you think, Catherine?”
“I don’t know,” Catherine said, sweating now. “I mean, it’s hard to believe that he’s still actually alive. That he’s out there, writing something.”
Doonan gave a snuffle of protest. “For Christ’s sake, he’s only eight years older than me!”
“Well,” Catherine shrugged, “I meant in terms of, not age, but—”
“I know what you mean, Catherine,” Julia said, putting a hand on her arm.
“You mean stature,” Doonan said grouchily.
“Oh, shut up, Mick. You have absolutely nothing to complain about.”
Doonan clicked his tongue loudly and switched his attention to the photograph behind them. “What in the name of fuck is this, anyway?” he said, apparently to himself.
“Mick,” Julia said in a warning tone.
“What’s this lassie meant to stand for? The Black Kesh, is it?”
“Mick, please,” Julia said, still more sharply. “You’re making Catherine uncomfortable. And me, I might add.”
“Atlantic Avenue,” Doonan snorted. “Atlantic Ocean would be the best place for this stuff.”
“I love the way you’re wearing that cameo, by the way,” Julia said suddenly, and she reached out and touched the brooch with the cracked surface that Catherine had used to fasten her scarf. “So clever.”
“Oh, thanks. I’ve had it for ages. My father gave it to me.”
“Very nice. Does he collect?”
“Oh, no, no,” Catherine said, laughing, thinking of how her father had found the brooch one evening while he was out foddering the cattle; it must have fallen from a car, he had told Catherine, or maybe—he had preferred this idea—it had been buried for years and had only just come to the surface. It was almost intact, but not quite; part of the bone had fallen away.
“Where’s the rest of it?” Doonan said skeptically.
A ditch in Longford, Catherine was tempted to say, but she just smiled in what she hoped was a mysterious manner.
“That’s the point,” Julia said.
“Oh, you’re a deconstructionist, are you?” Doonan said with a theatrical shudder. “Well, keep it to yourself, darling, will you please.”
“Hello?!” she hissed two minutes later, grabbing James by the elbow; he was still part of the same group of people, which had expanded considerably, now forming several separate clumps, but still with Dunne at the center of it all, beaming, chuckling, receiving compliments, delivering evidently hilarious replies. James, as she marched up to him, had been watching Dunne reverently, as though making careful mental notes. He turned to her now, and when he smiled, it was blissful and radiant; he was high on champagne, obviously, but also on the thrill of having been included by these people, folded in by them, of having received their attention, their interest, their apparent respect.
“Hello, darling,” he said, moving to make room for her, but Catherine indicated with her eyes that she wanted him to step away; reluctantly, he did so. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said. “Have you met—”
“Thanks for abandoning me,” she said, and it came out more angrily than she had in fact intended, but it was too late to do anything about that now. James, an empty glass in his hand, seemed to reel with confusion for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Did I abandon you? You were the one who walked away from me when we were talking to Nate.”
“Nate from Brooklyn,” she said sarcastically, pronouncing the words the way Julia Doonan had.
James frowned uncertainly. “Yes. Nate. Ed’s assistant.”
“Yeah, well,” Catherine said sulkily. “I’ve been on my own for the last twenty minutes.” It was an outright lie, and it surprised her, but it had worked; James was moving towards her, looking remorseful.
“I’m sorry, darling,” he said plainly, and he put his arms around her, and he kissed her on the cheek, and he kissed her—giving, then, his usual little growl—close to the ear, and Catherine felt it in her spine, and she felt it in her crotch, and she forgave him; of course, instantly she forgave him.
“I got us invited to the after-party,” she said, still using the same sulky tone, which made no sense, but she found that she was not quite able to snap out of it.
James scrunched up his face. “I thought you were on your own for twenty minutes?”
“Well, apart from Michael Doonan and his wife,” she shrugged. “And they’re throwing the party. And we’re invited.”
“Oh, yeah,” James said casually. “Nate told me about it. He said the three of us can walk there together, quite soon actually, because he and Ed are staying with Michael and Julia, and he has to make a call to New York before the working day ends there.”
“Oh, OK,” Catherine said, feeling robbed of her pr
ize now. “Or we could go back to the Stag’s for a few drinks before heading up there? I don’t want to be the first people to arrive again.”
“No, no,” James said, waving this suggestion away. “We’ll walk up with Nate. It’ll be grand.”
The Doonan mews was off Harcourt Street. It looked small from outside, but inside it immediately opened up into two levels: an elegant hall gave way to a huge central room with a ceiling two stories high; the upstairs floor was a mezzanine, with some rooms closed off behind doors and one whole side given over to what looked like another open space. The walls were hung with art—Catherine recognized a Brian Bourke in the main room, a sharp-boned woman with blacked-out eyes, and a piece in gold and linen that could only be a Scott—and though the night was not cold, a fire burned in the high stone hearth. She, James and Nate were indeed the first arrivals; the Doonans, Dunne and a slew of others had been still taking their leave of the gallery when the three of them had slipped away, Nate teasing them, calling them “the terrible two,” and slipping his arm into James’s other arm in an imitation of how Catherine was linking with him. Here, the front door had been opened by a girl in a black-and-white waitress’s uniform, and others, dressed in the same way, were busy setting up long tables with dozens of glasses and bottles of wine. From a kitchen at the other end of the house, there came a spicy, delicious smell.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Nate said, as Catherine and James stood in the entryway, gawking. “I’m just going up to make this call. Make yourselves at home.” He glanced back imperiously. “Within reason.”
“Ha,” James deadpanned. But as soon as Nate had disappeared upstairs, he turned to Catherine, his eyes wide, his mouth open with amazement. “Fucking hell,” he said. “Where are we?”
“I know.” Catherine shook her head. “It’s amazing.”
“Imagine, Catherine,” he said, and he went over to a long white leather sofa and sat down. “Imagine living like this.” He patted the seat beside him. “Home sweet home, darling,” he said, and he laughed.
One of the uniformed girls came over to them, smiling, her hands behind her back. “Can I offer you a drink?” she said.
“Oh, Jesus,” James groaned. “We’re in heaven, Catherine.” He looked at the waitress. “Is there any way you can barricade the door?”
She laughed. “I don’t know about that,” she said, looking at them uncertainly; she was around their age.
“Ah, try, though,” James said, mock pleadingly. “Won’t you? We’re just going to have a quiet night in. Myself and the little woman here.”
“Eejit,” said Catherine, through waves of longing and confusion, and as they heard the rattle of the front door, she asked the waitress for a glass of red wine.
Very quickly, the house was full, and James had once again vanished into the fray; he had gone looking for the bathroom ten minutes previously, and had not come back, but Catherine was too concerned with trying not to look lost and pathetic to think about how angry she was with him. At first she drifted around the edges of the big sitting room, looking very closely at the paintings, studying them as though she was thinking of making a purchase; as well as the Bourke and the Scott, there was a McSweeney bog pool that she loved, and a little drawing that she could not identify, but she thought it might possibly be an early Jack Yeats.
“Oh, probably,” said the first person to whom she got talking, a woman in a flowing, peasant-style dress, with very long black hair; the woman had been standing alone at the mantelpiece, surveying the room, and Catherine, taking a deep breath and knowing that she had to take this chance to have a conversation, any conversation, had gone up to her. She was the journalist who had written the Irish Times piece, it turned out, and she had many long, dreary pearls of wisdom for Catherine about avoiding the nightmare that was a career in journalism. A man from the Abbey Theatre came up to talk to the journalist, and in that way Catherine got talking, for a while, to him, and a man who taught English at UCD came up to interrupt their conversation, and after a minute the Abbey man made his excuses and slipped away, and so Catherine was left with the lecturer, which was another fifteen minutes of talking to someone, and even though what he was saying to her was mainly unasked-for advice, Catherine did not mind, because talking to him, or being talked at by him, was preferable to standing around on her own again, and after him there was an actor she had never heard of, and after him a woman who had just finished a book about Michael Doonan’s books, so Catherine was able to talk to her for a long while, drawing on all the research she had found herself unable to use in the actual interview with him; then there was the man from the Abbey again, a little more tipsy and flirtatious now; then there was a young guy who wrote for The Independent, and who was actually quite cute, which reminded her to go and look for James, and by this time she had had two more glasses of champagne and maybe three glasses of wine, and talking to people was, by now, easy, talking to people was, by now, just, for heaven’s sake, what you did, and when she turned around next, David Norris was standing behind her, the actual David Norris, and she got into a conversation with him about American poetry, and he quoted at her a couple of lines from a poem he loved—Shoot, if you must, this old gray head / But spare your country’s flag—and she nodded, as though she knew of the poem, as though she had heard of it, and he smiled back, as though they did not both know she was lying, and Catherine was feeling delighted with herself, feeling she had discovered, at long last, the secret of being a grown-up, and she had seen several other people she wanted to talk to—the Doonans, for one thing, and she had spotted one of her English lecturers—when she found herself standing face to face with Nate. You look like one of the Kennedys, she had an impulse to say to him, but she managed to restrain herself. Nate, meanwhile, holding a tumbler of whiskey, seemed, for some reason, delighted to see her.
“Where have you been all night? Your sidekick and I are in the kitchen.”
“James?”
“James,” he confirmed, taking a mouthful of whiskey. “That guy can talk. What’s that thing?” He frowned. “That you Irish kiss?”
“We kiss?” Catherine said, thinking that she had misheard him.
“The stone,” Nate said. “The stone…” He arched his head dramatically backwards, staggering a little, the tumbler jerking in his hand.
“Oh! The Blarney Stone,” Catherine said, and then shook her head quickly. “Irish people don’t kiss that. Just tourists.”
Nate burst out laughing. “Whatever. Your friend James must give head to the Blarney Stone every morning. He doesn’t shut up!”
“Yeah. He’s never short of something to say.”
“And you’re the quiet one,” Nate said, skeptically.
“Well, compared to him.”
“Where’s your drink?” Just at that moment, a waitress passed with a tray, and he grabbed a bottle and poured a dark torrent of wine into Catherine’s glass. He pointed to a couch which had just come free. “Take a load off?”
He sat, giving a loud sigh of relief as his limbs sank into the leather cushions, and then he went still, suddenly, and frowned. “Oh, that’s bad.”
“What?” said Catherine, taking a seat herself.
“Saying Aaaaah when I sit down. I can’t believe that’s happening already.” He glanced at her. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“Eighteen?” he spluttered, and shook his head. “Man, eighteen. You kids.”
“What do you mean?” Catherine said coyly.
“You know what I mean,” he said, grinning at her. “I see it at every opening. Kids like you, showing up impossibly young and cool and beautiful, sucking all the oxygen out of the room. But—” he tipped his glass to hers—“thank you. It sells the art.”
“So,” she said, feeling she should show an interest in Dunne’s work, “how many hours a day would you usually spend in Ed’s studio?”
Nate looked at her blankly. “How do you mean?”
“Well, James probab
ly told you about when he was working for Malachy Clark in Berlin—he used to work twenty-hour days in there sometimes. Is it that bad in Ed’s?”
He looked no less baffled. “Why would I work in Ed’s studio?”
“I…” Catherine blustered, already feeling the blush climb her cheeks.
“I work in my own gallery,” Nate scoffed. “Ed’s studio? No, thank you.”
“I thought you did. Sorry.”
“No.”
“So you’re not his assistant?”
Amazement spread across Nate’s features; his mouth dropped open, his eyes locked onto hers accusingly. Then a shout of laughter took him, and he slammed a hand down on the couch cushion. “His assistant? His assistant?! ” To Catherine’s horror, he leaned forward, now, and shouted out to Ed, absorbed in a conversation by the fireplace. “Hey, Ed! Eddie! I’m your assistant now! You hear that?”
Ed Dunne made his face into a mask of horror and turned away.
“Yeah, the feeling’s mutual,” Nate said, sinking back into the couch. “Christ,” he said, squinting at Catherine. “Ed’s assistant. Do you know what kind of torture Ed puts his assistants through? What in Christ’s name made you think that? ”
“Well…” Catherine said, mortified, but Nate’s expression had already changed. He had worked it out, she saw from the way he was holding up one hand, nodding and laughing; he had understood.
“James?” he said. “Well, that explains the conversation I just had with him in the kitchen. For one thing, it explains why he kept wanting to talk about Ed’s darkroom.” He laughed again. “Half an hour of me being expected to take orders in Ed’s fucking darkroom and the only photographer in that studio would be from the NYPD.” He shuddered. “Christ. Our relationship only survives because I stay the hell out of his studio.”
Catherine’s breath did something, then, so that she had to make an effort to find it. She knew that it was important, in this moment, not to look directly at Nate; not to let him see reflected in her eyes the rapid calculations and realizations and rearrangements that were clicking and whirring and snapping through the channels of her startled brain. “Yeah,” was all she could possibly manage in the way of speech, and as soon as the word was out, she knew that she had botched it.
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