by Anne Enright
Phil took out his mobile and went, with a flourish, to switch it off.
‘Hang on. Sorry. One last call.’
It was to a florist. The flowers he had ordered for his mother? He had changed his mind.
‘Not an orchid – roses. Twelve. Red. Right. “To my darling mother on her birthday.”’
What a romantic.
When she thought about it later, this phone call was the weirdest moment of the whole three days – the helpless need he had to mark her cards. He loved his mother. No wonder he was still single. Catherine didn’t think they made them like that any more.
But at the time, it was the coincidence that startled her. This wasn’t about sex or betrayal, this was about flowers falling into a grave. It was about red roses or white. It was about dying or being alive. It was something she had to do.
Meanwhile, she did not know how these seductions went. Who moved? Who demurred? Did it last for three nights, or half a night? And would she be doomed, ever afterwards, to supplication and hunger; not being able to cross the threshold of his office, but standing in the rain at the door?
She left him to shower and change, then came down to dinner and flirted like crazy over the poached wild salmon. Her mother would have been proud of her. Actually, though, there was nothing else she could do – she could hardly speak, so she might as well simper. It was unbearable. At half past twelve she fled from the bar with a quick goodnight, and lay awake endlessly in the dark of her room.
She thought about Tom. Sometime before dawn she got out of bed and looked in the mirror: it was a different body in there. Grief had made her thin.
In the morning she called Phil’s room from the front desk and he climbed into the car beside her, his hair still damp from the shower. She drove to a larger, cheaper hotel in town, where they walked into the function room and they did their spiel, and were good at it. After which there was the whole afternoon to fill before darkness and sex, or no sex, one more time. Phil seemed amused by all this scheduling – the intimacy of it – and back at their own hotel, he suggested they go their separate ways for a while. What for? Catherine hired a horse and trekked a path behind the hotel that opened into scrubland high above the famous lakes. She looked at them far below; green and grey, as the weather chased across the water. She looked up at the sky, and across at the light, and around her at the lichened, small oaks with their dry, scrubby branches. The horse’s mane under her hand was thick and electric. She picked up the reins and turned towards home.
They met for drinks at five, by which time Catherine could not speak at all. Which was fine. Phil told her about himself – his scrambler bike, his trip to Mexico, his teacher with the strap. He was at his interesting best. But every time she opened her mouth, he just looked at her. Why was she always throwing things off kilter? There was something that had to happen before they had sex, a personal thing, and she didn’t know what it was.
‘Will you have another one?’ he said, waggling his empty glass.
‘Yes,’ said Catherine. ‘I think I will. My mother just died.’
He missed a beat.
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ he said.
‘Well, when I say “just,” it was actually quite a while ago, now.’
‘I see.’
‘Sometimes, it feels closer, that’s all. It sort of sneaks up on you.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think I know what you mean.’
It was, possibly, the rudest thing she had ever said.
Over dinner, she realised that he was trying to impress her. That was why she was supposed to listen and not talk back to him. Her mother used to tell her these things – she was not supposed to impress him: it was supposed to work the other way around. So she smiled, in an impressed sort of way, and tried not to think about the look in his eye, or the exact heft of his dick in her hand. She knew that if it didn’t happen tonight the whole situation would become unpleasant, so she planned her move, using the moment when they pushed back from the table to suggest a walk in the garden at the back of the hotel. He looked at her and nearly smiled. Good girl, he seemed to say. Well done.
They went out into the moonlight and walked in precoital silence down shallow avenues of clipped box. Some of the roses were out already, white and grey against the black of the bushes, and there were low pools of green where a line of lights showed the way.
It was May. The central path was shaggy with lavender not yet in bloom. Someone had thrown a sweater over the gatepost at the end of the walk that, as they got closer, shifted in the corner of her eye. Catherine looked. Oozing over the concrete ball was a dripping, black, velvet swarm. Clumps of bees fell from the ragged edges, or crawled back up the gatepost to rejoin the mass. It was like watching some slow liquid spill and then unspill itself; honey making its way back into the jar.
‘Bees,’ she said to Phil, who stood stock-still as she walked forward to stare at them. Then she ducked down to catch a falling cluster and set it back on the pile.
‘Jesus,’ she heard him say behind her. The bees were bristly and soft, and their tiny legs clung to her fingertips as she shook them back into the mess of black wings. She watched them until she could not tell them apart. Then she started to cry.
But this was not what she was ashamed of, finally, as Phil Brogan lost his moment and walked her back into the hotel. She was ashamed of what she had felt as she stepped away from her mother’s grave. That lightness – it was desire. And it was vast. The smell of the air and of the soil and the grass; Tom not supporting her with his arms so much as holding her to the skin of the earth. It was like she could fuck anything: the Killarney lakes and the sky that ran over them, and posh hotels with wafflecloth robes, and the pink scent of a rose that showed grey in the darkness, and the whole lovely month of May. She could swim in it, and swallow it, and cram it into her in each and every possible way.
All of it, that is, except for this unpleasant man, who could not face his own consequences, who stood outside her hotel bedroom and said, ‘What about a nightcap? You must have got a fright.’
Catherine looked at him. She did not know where the air stopped and her skin began.
‘Not really,’ she said.
SWITZERLAND
1.
She did him an injustice, she thought – the American. He was so full of himself. That was the way he arrived in her life, a cup that was brimful; a look on his face that said she didn’t know the half of it.
So talk to me, she said. Fill me in.
He was so healthy and new, with his recent blond hair and his fresh white teeth. He might have been made in the airport. He might have materialised in the hum of a security door frame.
Hello, Dublin.
So tell me about your grandfather, she said. About the cups wrapped in old newspaper that you found in a box under the stairs. Tell me about coffin ships and how you came from Connemara, really. Tell me about potatoes.
My great-aunt Louise, he said. When she went mad.
In the old country, she said.
In Connecticut. Rubbed the eyes off potatoes because she thought they were looking at her.
You just made that up.
No, it is true, he said. She went dotty. Quite literally. Ants, flies, mildew, mould – it was the spots that drove her crazy. She thought they were eyes. She thought the world was boiling with eyes. Gravel, for instance. Think about it.
Eyes or eyeballs? she said.
Actually, I made it up.
He wore a little fake history on his back; a white shirt, very thick cotton. It smelt of coppers and laundry blueing and the valet’s hands. It looked like something that fell out of a Lancashire loom into a little mill girl’s lap. But the cloth probably came from China – she told him – it fell out of a loom into a little China girl’s lap. Because everyone has money, these days.
He told her about the Mississippi Delta, the endless flat fields, and the cotton bales that are the precise size of the lorries that come to take them away. An
d the houses, which are the precise size of the cotton bales, as if the field workers live in lorry containers with a porch slapped on the front. He told her about a parade of African Americans walking down the road in the middle of nowhere, fantastically well dressed, following a slow hearse in the heat. Not another car in sight.
You win, she said. Take off that shirt.
What is this?
It is a competition. It is a poetry competition.
All right, he said. What about you?
Me. I’m the girl in the silk dressing gown with a magnolia tree flowering up the back. I am tired and overused. I like dark lipstick. Who are you?
As you said, I’m the American.
In the street he is handsome and long, but his legs – that look so easy under him – are large and massively hinged when he is in bed. He makes her feel like a child; his big body so indifferent and easy to scale.
I wish there was some other way of doing this, she said. Sex is just a shortcut, that’s all.
Well, yes it is, he said. But what the hell?
2.
In Dublin, he thought, the women fuck like we’re all in it together, like the place is one big orphanage and they’ve gone home for the night, and left us to play.
And it is all a joke. That’s the other thing about Dublin. The thing you don’t understand is that they are always only joking, even in bed. Until you leave – then they stand outside your window in the middle of the night screaming and throwing bottles. Or they take an overdose, maybe, just for a joke.
So he watched her.
Walking around her flat on the North Circular Road, or in his room in Harold’s Cross, trying to put a date on her, or a place – naked as she was – trying to fix her, even as he lost her to some small thing; the angle of her eyelashes, or the grain of skin pulled to a slant, when she turned to reach for the bedside lamp.
She said that sex was an act of the imagination, but he said it was a speech act. He felt that he was blurting something into her. And afterwards, he told her about his father’s death.
He remembered his mother’s friend, Caitlin, taking him and his brother to the park, to get them out of the house, leaving his mother to the extravagance of her grief. He was so young when it happened, he didn’t want to leave his mother behind. He thought she was being punished, somehow. He pictured her reeling from window to window, smashing things, stuffing her mouth with the back of her hand, when, what is more likely, she sat quietly in the dark, in a chair. There was no question that she loved his father. No question at all. And two years later she put on her gloves and walked out the door and got herself another one, another husband, just like that.
He liked the new guy well enough, but between the smiling lover and the dead father, he sometimes wondered how he grew up straight. For this, of course, they must thank his mother. Thank you, Mom. They must thank the extravagance of her grief. Because this is where he travelled now – into the heart of that disturbance. He was always running back to the house to look for her, and he found – sometimes one thing, sometimes another. In Thailand, he saw a model boat made out of chicken bones. In Berlin he saw a woman breastfeeding in a pavement café, and her eyes were animal; those big wide pavements with plaques every three yards to mark the houses of the slaughtered Jews. And in Dublin, he found …
You.
Ah, she said.
You know what I like about Irish women? he said. I like the way they still call themselves ‘girls’. And I like the weather in their hair. Which is romantic of me, but I am Irish too, you know. So I like your big family; all those brothers and sisters bubbling up, like the froth on milk. And, I hate to say this, but I love your accent. Also your dark lipstick, and all the history flowering up your back.
3.
They went to Venice for the weekend, and bought an umbrella.
They found it in a poky shop that sold umbrellas and nothing else. She thought it should be a black umbrella with a wooden handle – old-fashioned, because they were in Venice – but he picked up a green telescopic thing and said, What about this?
It has to be black.
What do you want a black one for?
Because we’re in Venice.
Already, the man behind the counter despised them. Tim picked up a big striped golf umbrella and tried to open it in the shop. Elaine ran into the street.
Come out. Come out here, she said. But he just kept working at the catch. She had to reach in to the dark shop and drag him out.
What? What? he said.
You can’t open it inside.
Why not?
The umbrella-seller was, by now, just about sickened by them; he was about to reach for his antacid tablets, or his gun.
It’s unlucky, she said.
Tim looked at her. Then he cocked his head and looked, for a long time, at the Venetian sky.
It was still raining.
All right, he said, and they went back in and asked for a black umbrella and they walked back out with it tucked under her arm and hoisted it in the narrow street, and then they lost it before dinner-time.
Everywhere they went in that town, she remembered the last time she was in Venice, with a different man some years before. It was like another town shifting under this one, a pentimento of cafés and churches that had all become smaller or bigger since she had last seen them; shops or squares that were always around the next corner, until she realised that the corner itself had disappeared. She chased a black-and-white church all the way into the Grand Canal and nearly walked into the water, so convinced she was that the church should be there. When she found it, somewhere quite different, the cool white-and-black marble had been overlaid with baroque gold. When did that happen? she said.
She had not been happy in Venice. The last time she was here the city had accused her of not being in love; or of being in love in some wrong or wrong-headed way. So here she was with Tim, making amends.
He insisted on using a map. Elaine said that if he didn’t bother with the map, then they wouldn’t get lost, because it didn’t matter where they went, it was all beautiful and all the same. Or all awful, maybe. After dinner, they ended up walking the periphery in the dark. There was a puzzle of streets to the left of them and, to the right, the open waters of the lagoon with real waves, just like the real sea. They walked a hopeful semicircle until the causeway came into view, then they cut back into the ghetto. They came across a fiesta in a small square, with trestle tables and bunting, accordion music and jugs of wine. The real people of Venice sat and laughed under a home-made banner for the Communist Party. They did not see the tourists pushing their way through the square, in the way that they did not see the pigeons at their feet.
Elaine lay in the hotel room, which was cheap for Venice, but which had, even so, a slightly tatty chandelier. It also had damp. She read the guidebook. It said that during the time of the Doges the prostitutes had to wear their underwear on the outside. Another guidebook said that they had to wear their clothes inside out. There was a problem of translation here – the prostitutes had to wear their inside clothes on the outside. They had to wear their hearts on their sleeves, they had to wear their wombs in a prolapse – not that that would be much use. She thought of wearing her bra outside her T-shirt, just here in the room, as a conversation piece, as a precursor to some vaguely syphilitic Venetian sex. But she just lay there until Tim came back, which he did, with a pistachio-flavoured ice cream to cheer her up. And because it was Venice, she had her period, so his penis was stained with the brown blood of it, marinating half the night, until he suddenly woke and went over to the wash-hand basin on the wall.
She thought that it was the cuttlefish in its dark ink that had brought it on. Or perhaps it was the canal, running black outside the restaurant door.
4.
In Mexico, they booked a beach hut from an old man who had lost the fingers of his right hand. He waved the stubs at them and mimed hauling in nets over the side of a boat.
‘Fiss,’ h
e said. ‘Fiss.’
They swam all day or hung in hammocks and tried to forget their diarrhoea. The coast road was full of crazy pick-ups with kids hanging off the back, but at dusk the people sank back into the forest and there was nothing left, except for a rare murmuring under the trees. The locals did not seem to shout much, or even speak. When they ate, their plates and spoons made no clatter.
Zipolite, the next beach up, was full of tourist trash who slept on the sand with their surfboards tied to their wrists; older types too, hippies and junkies who were madder than his great-aunt Louise.
One of them sat on the sand nearby as they were having dinner. He looked about seventy years old. A beach-bum, afflicted by sores – they were infected mosquito bites, or needle marks, perhaps. He stretched out his legs and looked in horror at the scabs, his face puzzling and straining, as though he expected maggots to crawl out of them. Then he attacked one with his nails, tearing at the skin.
It put them off their food.
Tim said he might have come down to dodge the draft.
They looked at him. History, there on the beach. Elaine said he looked more like a prisoner of war – the last GI, the one who couldn’t go home.
They paid the bill, and Elaine felt, as he put the money down, the pull in him to Be An American – a man who looked at the movies and saw his own home up there on the screen.
Do you ever want to go back?
You have no idea what my high school was like, he said. Everyone had a car. Everyone crashed their car. It wasn’t enough to score a girl, you had to score the girl’s coked-up mother. I went to school with guys so stupid, you look at them on the football field and you think, Why don’t we just eat them? The whole herd of them. That might be more useful.
The sun was sinking like a stone. The meal and the beer made their skin crawl in the heat. The food pulled at their blood, leaving the surface of them a sheet of sensation; prickles and irritations and the sense of someone at your shoulder, leaning in to whisper – what? – your name, or your other name, your secret. At the end of every day in Mexico they were brushed by shame; a dirty bird’s wing someone had dropped on the sand.
