Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann

  After a moment he turns to me, runs his finger along my lips, then out of the blue he says: “Sorry.”

  We were hasty last night. He fell asleep before I did. A woman might think it thrilling to make love to a man who had never in his life made love before, and it was, the thought of it, the movement towards it, but it was as if I was making love to a number of lost years, and the truth is that he cried, he put his head on my shoulder, and he could not keep hold of my gaze, couldn’t bear it.

  A man who holds a vow that long is entitled to anything he wants.

  I told him that I loved him and that I’d always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it. He replied that I was not to worry, that the penny could come out of the fountain again and again and again.

  He wanted to repeat the attempt at lovemaking. Each time another surprise and doubt, as if he did not trust himself, what was happening.

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  But there is a moment when he wakes now—on this day that I will remember over and over again—when he turns to me and there’s still a hint of wine on his breath.

  “So,” he says, “you took my shirt off too.”

  “It’s a trick.”

  “A good one,” he says.

  My hand travels across the sheet to meet him.

  “We have to cover the mirilla,” I say.

  “The what?”

  “The mirilla, the peephole, the spy thing, whatever it is called.”

  There is a spyhole in every door of my apartment. The landlord, it seems, once got a good deal on these doors, and hung them all around.

  You can look from one room to the other and the curved glass makes it either narrow or wide, depending on what side you happen to be on. If you look into my kitchen, the world is tiny. If you look out, it stretches.

  The bedroom spyhole faces inwards, where Jacobo and Eliana can look in upon me while I am sleeping. They call it the carnival door. It seems to them, through the distortion, as if I lie in the biggest bed in the world. I puff myself up on the world’s largest pillows. The walls curve around me.

  The first day we moved in I stuck my toes out from under the covers.

  Mama, your feet are bigger than your head! M’ijo said that the world inside my bedroom seemed stretchy. M’ija said it was made of chewing gum.

  Corrigan shifts sideways out of bed. His thin, bare back, his long legs.

  He steps to the closet. He puts his black shirt on a hanger, wedges the metal end of the hanger in the gap between door and frame. The dangling black shirt covers the spyhole in the door. From outside, the sound of the television.

  “We should lock it too,” I say.

  “¿Estás segura?”

  These small Spanish phrases he uses sound like stones in his mouth, his accent so terrible it makes me laugh.

  “Won’t they worry?”

  “Not if we don’t.”

  He returns to the bed, naked, embarrassed, covering himself. He slips beneath the covers, nudges against my shoulder. Singing. Off- key.

  “Can you tell me how- to- get, how- to- get to Sesame Street?”

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  bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it. Feel the rush of sweetness: we make love.

  I do not even hear the pounding at the door, but Corrigan stops and grins and kisses me, a rim of sweat at the top of his brow.

  “That’ll be Elmo.”

  “I think it’s Grouchy.”

  I step out of bed and remove the shirt from the hanger in front of the spyhole, look down. I see the tops of their heads: their eyes look tiny and confused. I pull Corrigan’s shirt on and open the door. Bend down to eye level. Jacobo holds an old blanket in his hands. Eliana an empty plastic glass. They are hungry they say, first in English and then in Spanish.

  “Just a minute,” I tell them. I am a terrible mother. I should not do this. I close the door again, but open it just as quickly, rush out into the kitchen, fill two bowls with cereal, two glasses of water.

  “Quiet now, nin

  ˜os. Promise me.”

  I step back to the bedroom, glance at my children through the spyhole, in front of the television, spilling cereal on the carpet. I cross the room and jump on the bed. I throw the sheet to the floor, and then I fall beside Corrigan, pull him close. He is laughing, his body at ease.

  We rush, him and I. We make love again. Afterwards, he showers in my bathroom.

  “Tell me something magnificent, Corrigan.”

  “Like what?”

  “Come on, it’s your turn.”

  “Well, I just learned to play the piano.”

  “There’s no piano.”

  “Exactly. I just sat down at it and could immediately play every note.”

  “Ha!”

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  It’s true. That is how it feels. I go into the bathroom where he is showering, pull back the curtain, kiss his wet lips, then pull on my robe and go out to look after the children. My bare feet on the curling linoleum floor.

  My painted toes. I’m vaguely aware that every fiber in me is still making love to Corrigan. Everything feels new, the tips of my fingers alive to every touch, a stove top.

  He comes out of the room with his hair so wet that at first I think the gray at the side temples has disappeared. He is wearing his dark trousers and his black shirt since he has nothing else to change into. He has shaved.

  I want to tell him off for using my razor. His skin looks shiny and raw.

  A week later—after the accident—I will come home and tap out his hairs at the side of my sink, arrange them in patterns, obsessively, over and over. I will count them out to reconstitute them. I will gather them against the side of the sink and try to create his portrait there.

  I saw the X- rays in the hospital. The swollen heart- shadow from the blunt chest trauma. His heart muscle getting squeezed by the blood and fluid. The jugular veins, massively enlarged. His heart went in and out of gallop. The doctor stuck a needle into his chest. I knew the routine from my years as a nurse: drain the pericardium. The blood and fluid were taken out, but Corrigan’s heart kept on swelling. His brother was saying prayers, over and over. They took another X- ray. The jugular veins were massive, they were squeezing him shut. His whole body had gone cold.

  But, for now, the children just look up and say: “Hi, Corrie,” as if it is the most natural thing in the world. Behind them, the television plays.

  Count to seven. Sing along with me. When the pie was opened the birds began to sing.

  “Nin

  ˜os, apaguen la tele.”

  “Later, Mom.”

  Corrigan sits at the small wooden table at the rear of the television set.

  He has his back to me. My heart shudders every time he sits near the portrait of my dead husband. He has never asked me to move the photo. He never will. He knows the re
ason it is there. No matter that my husband was a brute who died in the war in the mountains near Quezaltenango—

  it makes no difference—all children need a father. Besides, it is just a photo. It takes no precedence. It does not threaten Corrigan. He knows my story. It is contained within this moment.

  And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 281

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  the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt. Corrigan glances back at me, smiles. He fingers one of my medical textbooks. He even opens it to a random page and scans it, but I know he isn’t reading at all. Sketches of bodies, of bones, of cartilage.

  He skips through the pages as if looking for more space.

  “Really,” he says, “that’d be a good idea.”

  “What?”

  “To get a piano and learn how to play it.”

  “Yes, and put it where?”

  “On top of the television set. Right, Jacobo? Hey, Bo, that would work, wouldn’t i t?”

  “Nah,” says Jacobo.

  Corrigan leans across the sofa and knuckles my son’s dark hair.

  “Maybe we’ll get a piano with a television set inside it.”

  “Nah.”

  “Maybe we’ll get a piano and TV and a chocolate machine all in one.”

  “Nah.”

  “Television,” says Corrigan, smiling, “the perfect drug.”

  For the first time in years I wish for a garden. We could go outside in the cool fresh air and sit away from the children, find our own space, shorten the nearby buildings into blades of grass, have the stonemasons carve flowers at our feet. I have often dreamed of bringing him back to Guatemala. There was a place my childhood friends and I used to go, a butterfly grove, down the dirt road towards Zacapa. The path dipped through the bushes. The trees opened into the grove, where the bushes grew low. The flowers were in the shape of a bell, red and plentiful. The girls sucked on the sweet flowers while the boys tore the butterflies apart to see how they were made. Some of the wings were so colorful they could only be poisonous. When I left my home and arrived in New York, I rented a small apartment in Queens, and, one day, distraught, I got a tattoo on my ankle, the wings spread wide. It is one of the stupidest things I have ever done. I hated myself for the cheapness I had become.

  “You’re daydreaming,” Corrigan says to me.

  “Am I?”

  My head against his shoulder, he laughs as if the laughter wants to travel a good distance, down through my body also.

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  “Corrie?”

  “ Uh- huh?”

  “You like my tattoo?”

  He prods me playfully. “I can live with it,” he says.

  “Tell me the truth.”

  “No, I like it, I do.”

  “Mentiroso,” I say. He creases his forehead. “Fibber.”

  “I’m not fibbing. Kids! Kids, do you think I’m fibbing?”

  Neither of them says a word.

  “See?” says Corrigan. “I told you.”

  My desire for him now is raw and sharp. I lean forward and kiss his lips. It is the first time we have kissed in front of the children, but they do not seem to notice. A sliver of cold at my neck.

  There are times—though not often—when I wish that I didn’t have children at all. Just make them disappear, God, for an hour or so, no more, just an hour, that’s all. Just do it quickly and out of my sight, have them go up in a puff of smoke and be gone, then bring them back fully intact, as if they didn’t leave at all. But just let me be alone, with him, this man, Corrigan, for a tiny while, just me and him, together.

  I leave my head on his shoulder. He touches the side of my face absently. What can be on his mind? There are so many things to pull him away from me. Sometimes, I feel he is made of a magnet. He bounces and spins in midair around me. I go to the kitchen and make him café.

  He likes it very strong and hot with three spoonfuls of sugar. He lifts the spoon out and licks it triumphantly, as if the spoon has gotten him through an ordeal. He breathes on the spoon and then hangs it off the end of his nose, so it dangles there, absurdly.

  He turns to me. “What do you think, Adie?”

  “Que payaso.”

  “Gracias,” he says in his awful accent.

  He walks over in front of the television set with the spoon still hanging off the end of his nose. It falls and he catches it and then he breathes on it once more, does his trick. The children explode in laughter. “Let me, let me, let me.”

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  cool, three short blows, one long blow. This, and he has no taste for cereal. This, and that he’s good at fixing toasters.

  The children return to the television show. He sits back and finishes his café. He stares at the far wall. I know he is thinking again of his God and his church and his loss if he decides to leave the Order. It is like his own shadow has leaped up to get him. I know all this because he smiles at me and it is a smile that contains everything, including a shrug, and then he suddenly gets up from the table, stretches, goes to the couch and falls over the back of it, sits between the children, as if they can protect him. He drapes his arms around them, over their shoulders. I like him and dislike him for this, both at once. I feel a desire for him again, in my mouth now, sharp like salt.

  “You know,” he says, “I’ve work to do.”

  “Don’t go, Corrie. Just hang around awhile. Work can wait.”

  “Yeah,” he says, as if he might believe it.

  He pulls the children closer to him and they allow it. I want him to make up his mind. I want to hear him say that he can have both God and me, also my children and my little clapboard house. I want him to remain here—exactly here—on the couch, without moving.

  I will always wonder what it was, what that moment of beauty was, when he whispered it to me, when we found him smashed up in the hospital, what it was he was saying when he whispered into the dark that he had seen something he could not forget, a jumble of words, a man, a building, I could not quite make it out. I can only hope that in the last minute he was at peace. It might have been an ordinary thought, or it might have been that he had made up his mind that he would leave the Order, and that nothing would stop him now, and he would come home to me, or maybe it was nothing at all, just a simple moment of beauty, a little thing hardly worth talking about, a random meeting, or a word he had with Jazzlyn or Tillie, a joke, or maybe he had decided that, yes, he could lose me now, that he could stay with his church and do his work, or maybe there was nothing on his mind at all, perhaps he was just happy, or in agony, and the morphine had scattered him—there are all these things and there are more—it is impossible to know. I hold in confusion the last moments of his language.

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  spent the night sleeping in his van down near the courthouse. He got a ticket for it. On John Street. Perhaps he woke up, stumbled out of his van in the early morning, and saw the man high up there, challenging God, a man above the cross rather than below—who knows, I cannot tell. Or maybe it was the court case, that the walker got off free, while Tillie was sent away for eight months, maybe that annoyed him—these things are tangled, there are no answers, maybe he thought she deserved another chance, he was angry, she shouldn’t have gone to jail. Or maybe something else got to him.

&nbs
p; He told me once that there was no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along—trying to wound his faith in order to test it—and I was just another stone in the way of his God.

  In my worst moments I am convinced that he was rushing home to say good- bye, that he was driving too fast because he made up his mind, and it was finished, but in my best, my very best, he comes up on the doorstep, smiling, with his arms spread wide, in order to stay.

  And so this is how I will leave him as much, and as often, as I can. It was—it is—a Thursday morning a week before the crash, and it fits in the space of every other morning I wake into. He sits between Eliana and Jacobo, on the couch, his arms spread wide, the buttons of his black shirt open, his gaze fixed forward. Nothing will ever really take him from the couch. It is just a simple brown thing, with mismatching cushions, and a hole in the armrest where it has been worn through, a few coins from his pocket fallen down into the gaps, and I will take it with me now wherever I go, to Zacapa, or the nursing home, or any other place I happen to find.

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  I knew almost right off. Them two babies needed looking after. It was a deep- down feeling that must’ve come from long ago. Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.

  I grew up in southern Missouri. The only girl with five brothers. It was the years of the Great Depression. Things were falling apart, but we held together as best we could. The house we lived in was a small A- frame, like most houses on the colored side of town. The unpainted timbers sagged around the porch. On one side of the house was the long parlor, furnished with cane chairs, a purple divan, and a long table, rough- hewn from the bed of a broken cart. Two large oak trees shaded the other side of the house, where the bedrooms were built to face east into sunrise. I hung buttons and nails from the branches, a wind chime.

  Inside, the floors of the house were unevenly spaced. At night, raindrops fell on the metal roof.