Irish Love

by Andrew M. Greeley

WHY DON’T YOU JUST ENJOY IT AS LONG AS YOU CAN.

  “I have to figure it out.”

  MAYBE SHE JUST ENJOYS BEING FUCKED.

  “Don’t be vulgar.”

  She kicked off her bikini bottoms and added them to the neatly folded pile. Then she leaned against the wall, head bowed, hands behind her back, a demure, fragile, almost virginal creature.

  “You shouldn’t stare at me like that, Dermot Michael Coyne.”

  “Woman,”—I gasped—“you’re me wife. I’m supposed to stare at you that way.”

  Since our marriage I had made love with many different women, all of them my wife. Nuala might be a sophisticated woman of the world, a furiously hungry nymph, an urbane and experienced sensualist, or a shy, skittish bog creature from the wilds of the West of Ireland. The last was, I often thought, the ur-Nuala, the one on which all the others built. In this particular bit of conniving, she was the frightened Galway innocent.

  “You’ll destroy me modesty altogether.”

  “Impossible. Stark naked like you are now, there’s always a veil of modesty around you.”

  She looked up, interested in this assertion.

  “That’s a load of shite, Dermot Michael Coyne.”

  “’Tis not, woman. ’Tis the modesty behind the modesty.”

  “You’re making fun of me Irish spirituality.”

  She argued that in the Irish way of things, there was always a reality behind the appearance—the mountain behind the mountain, the river behind the river. I had once suggested that this was Platonism. She had replied briskly that it was not so. Besides, the ancient Celts understood the truth long before them Greek fellas had come along.

  “Woman, I am not. It is impossible for you to be lewd.”

  “Och, Dermot, stare at me as long as you want. Don’t I love it something terrible when you eat me up with your eyes.”

  I had often told people that my wife reminded me of an ancient Celtic goddess, though I had not in fact ever met an ancient Celtic goddess.

  Now she was a naked Celtic goddess, one of which I had never seen either.

  Still, she’d do—long, firm legs, slender hips, trim waist, elegant breasts, the solid, graceful body of a woman athlete.

  And dangerously strong too.

  Her eyes were as blue as Galway Bay on a sunny day, her finely shaped face as mobile as Irish weather, and her voice hinted at echoes of church bells pealing over the bogs.

  She had been grimly determined to recapture her figure after the Mick had appeared, and she set about the task with characteristic intensity as soon as she had begun to take the medication. The last five pounds didn’t seem to want to go away.

  “Dermot Michael Coyne, do you realize that if I have six more children, I’ll have put on thirty-five pounds.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to have six more children.”

  “Regardless! And you just don’t get it!”

  I got it enough to fiddle with the scale in our bathroom at home on Southport Avenue so that the five pounds slipped away. Then she easily lost five more, which put her back at the weight at which she’d been aiming. She was quite proud of herself. I let it go at that. If it works don’t fix it.

  Then she had announced her fear that her waist would never return to its proper size. Wasn’t it a quarter-inch larger than it should be? Would ten pregnancies make her two-and-a-half inches fatter?

  I hadn’t argued that she wasn’t going to be pregnant ten more times. Rather, one day when we were playing, I had held her down amid much giggling, produced a tape measure, and informed her that her waist measurement was the same as that for her wedding dress and I wanted to hear no more complaints.

  She had pondered the tape suspiciously. How did I know what her wedding dress measurements were? I recited them all. She complained that a woman had no privacy at all, at all, and then added that it was probably yesterday’s exercise which had eliminated the offending quarter-inch.

  I note that no one holds Nuala Anne down unless she wants to be held down.

  I turned off the computer and walked across the room to where she was cowering against the wall. I rubbed the back of my hand down one breast and then up the other. I allowed the fingers of my other hand to play with her hard belly muscles. She arched her back and groaned.

  No man should have that kind of power, I thought, over such a beautiful woman. Nonetheless, consumed by adoration and concern, I continued my gentle explorations.

  “Dermot!” she sighed.

  I took her into my arms. She was trembling.

  “Aren’t you my life itself?” she moaned.

  SEE! SHE’S CLINGING TO YOU LIKE HER LIFE DEPENDS ON YOU FUCKING HER! YOU’RE LIKE THE PROZAC!

  I was incapable of arguing with him.

  As we ascended the heights of love everything else faded—the blood in the mountain hut, the explosion down the road, our fey daughter, our pregnant wolfhound, even her singing.

  Much later, sweaty and exhausted, we lay side by side, holding hands.

  “What did you mean, Nuala Anne, when you said I was your life?”

  “I didn’t say that at all, at all.”

  “Woman, you did.”

  “Hadn’t you driven me out of me mind?”

  “Still, you said it.”

  She sighed.

  “Isn’t it enough that you have me body? Leave me soul alone.”

  We began to dally with one another, as we often did when we were cooling off, a special bonus of pleasure.

  “When I’m involved, I want to know.”

  She sighed as she kissed my chin.

  “It isn’t just the Prozac that keeps me on this side of the deep end, Dermot Michael, is it now?”

  “’Tis the Dermot behind the Dermot?”

  “Sure, there’s no Dermot behind the Dermot … only God.”

  Somehow I didn’t want to be God for her.

  YOU’RE STUCK WITH IT, BOYO.

  “Now go to sleep, Dermot Michael. I don’t want you nodding off with me parents at supper.”

  3

  “WILL I be driving now?” me wife asked me, extending her hand.

  The gesture was more important than the interrogative form of her remark. The Irish language loves the courtesy of the question. The Irish mother, however, loves to be in charge. So what Nuala meant was, “I’ll be driving, so give me the friggin’ key.”

  We were to join her parents, Gerroid and Annie, at Ashford Castle for supper. My wife didn’t trust me on the narrow Connemara roads at night. Moreover, since she couldn’t mix the “creature” with her medication, she alleged that her driving freed me up to drink “all that I wanted”—never more than a glass or two of wine and a sip of Baileys.

  I had awakened, groggy and complacent, late in the afternoon. The springtime Irish sun was still high in the sky. In her terry cloth robe, Nuala Anne was huddled over her easel. I had noted from my comfortable spot in our bed that there was a lot of red on the watercolor.

  “Dermot Michael,” she had said, continuing to concentrate on her work, “why don’t you take herself on her second run now and check on the kids?”

  How did she know I was awake?

  Don’t ask.

  So I had dressed in my jogging clothes, tied on my Nikes, and kissed her neck.

  “Och, aren’t you the brilliant lover, Dermot Michael Coyne?” she had observed, still concentrating on the painting, in which I thought I saw five bloody bodies.

  “Brilliant” is the superlative degree of an adjective of which “super” is the comparative.

  “Am I now?”

  She had nodded her head slightly, in confirmation.

  “Isn’t the greatest pleasure for a woman in that moment when she gives herself totally to her man?”

  “You’d know that better than I would.”

  I had kissed her neck again.

  “’Tis.” She had sighed.

  “When she’s done that she knows she’s captured her man completely,”
I had suggested.

  She had paused, her brush poised over the painting.

  “Sure, if she hasn’t captured him completely, she has no business being in bed with him, has she now?”

  I retreated with as much grace as I could muster under the circumstances.

  Outside our bungalow, the tireless Ethne was frolicking with Nelliecoyne and a gaggle of three-year-old girls while the Mick relaxed in his car seat and watched the games with approval—and no apparent desire to join them.

  He was indeed a big lug, just like his old man.

  Fiona, who had also been watching the games, bounded up immediately, doubtless smelling my running clothes. In Ireland, unlike in Chicago, she was free from a leash when we ran.

  We started down the road to the Renvyle House Hotel. Our bungalow was on the lee side of the bare headland, so the Atlantic Ocean was more tranquil. Connemara is a string of barren mountains on the north side and barren lowlands on the south side, both little more than a network of lace held together among inlets, harbors, coves, and loughs. It is dramatically beautiful for the first two sunny days, and then, as far as I was concerned, harsh and depressing after that. On the rainy days it was, again in my fallible judgment, an antechamber of purgatory.

  No wonder, I thought to myself as we jogged along the narrow road, that my wife had some gloomy strains in her personality. No wonder she had thrown over her career as a singer.

  “I won’t do it anymore, Dermot Michael,” she had said one night in our room on Southport Avenue, as she lay in bed protecting the “poor little lad inside me.”

  It was a given, a foregone conclusion that our second child would be a boy.

  Fiona, inseparable from her mistress during these difficult weeks, stirred uneasily at the side of her bed.

  “Everything’s on hold till himself comes,” I had replied.

  “I don’t want anything on hold,” she had insisted. “I want everything canceled. No more recordings, no more concerts, no more Christmas specials, no more lessons with Madam. No more nothing, at all, at all.”

  “Oh.”

  “And it’s not me hormones talking either, Dermot Michael Coyne. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I’m sick of singing.”

  “It’s your call,” had been all I could say.

  “I hate it. I hate it altogether. I don’t want to do it anymore.”

  We didn’t need the money. I had been a total failure as a commodity broker, except for one very lucky day. I had given most of the gains from that luck to a brilliant stockbroker, who had turned each dollar into five during the great market run-up. Nuala had put her money into the market too—making her own investment decisions, naturally. My novels, which I worked on occasionally, brought in enough money to live more than comfortably. Our lifestyle was more or less frugal, save for buying a bungalow in Ireland, which could be rented to tourists when we weren’t using it.

  At twenty-five my wife had become a successful vocalist far beyond her wildest dreams. Her lovely, if limited, voice and her charm had won over both the United States and Ireland. Her most recent record, Nuala Anne Sings American had won her a platinum disk. She had worked hard at it, very hard, but seemed to revel in the work. Now she was quitting.

  “I can’t be a mother and a wife,” she had continued, “and continue this singing. Tell everyone I’m retiring.”

  So I had done just that. No one had believed me. Hormones, they had said. However, they had not seen the cut of my wife’s jaw when she made her decision.

  In the back of my head, down in the deep subbasements of my brain, there lurked a faint hunch that she might change her mind. However, I would not have gone long, as the traders say, on that possibility.

  As I had jogged along the road, yielding to the majesty of the ocean and the sky and the Twelve Bens mountains, I wondered whether I might be responsible for the problem. She had seemed so ambitious about singing before our marriage (despite her job at Arthur Andersen), that I had encouraged it and even arranged for voice lessons and her first recording. Perhaps I should have left well enough alone. Maybe it would have been better if she had limited herself to an occasional gig at the Abbey Pub in Chicago.

  She had loved to sing. Music was in her bones, in her body, in her soul. Now she wouldn’t even sing lullabies to our children.

  Still, she had hummed the Connemara Cradle Song today, had she not?

  A blue Garda car, coming up behind me, ended these ruminations. Our young friend from the morning got out of the car, much to Fiona’s delight. A short, slender man in tweeds, looking like an English tourist, climbed out the other side.

  “Mr. McGrail, uh, Mr. Coyne,” said the young woman, who was busy responding to Fiona’s enthusiasm, “this is Chief Superintendent McGinn from Galway City.”

  Fiona turned her attention to the detective.

  “Good girl,” he said as she embraced him. “Sure, you’re still a Galway lass, aren’t you?”

  He said a couple of words in Irish. The wolfhound, her tail still wagging, settled back on her haunches.

  “’Tis a pleasure to meet you, sir,” he said respectfully to me as we shook hands. “Deputy Commissioner Keenan from Dublin asked me to give you his warmest greetings.”

  “Give my equally warmest greetings back to him and to herself also.”

  “I believe you met Garda Sayers this morning.”

  “First name Peg?”

  The young woman blushed and grinned.

  “With an ‘I,’ sir.”

  “’The famous woman from the Blaskets is an ancestor. Her Irish has a touch of the Blaskets in it.”

  “My wife noticed it.”

  “We’re wondering, Mr. Coyne, if we might stop by tomorrow morning and have a chat with you about this little problem we seem to have.”

  “Dermot.”

  “Declan.”

  He had shrewd brown eyes, shrewd but warm.

  So our friend Gene Keenan told the Galway Gardai that me wife has certain skills as a detective. She had never said explicitly that she was giving that up too.

  “My wife will be more help than I am, but I don’t think either of us has noticed anything. However, we’ll be happy to talk to you tomorrow.”

  “A Galway woman, is she?”

  “Carraroe. Her parents still live there.”

  “One of the dark ones, is she now?”

  “Sometimes,” I conceded cautiously.

  “Peig will excuse me for saying it, but there’s a lot of that around Galway. Sure, the Iron Age has never quite ended here.”

  “And a good thing too,” Peig said vigorously.

  They returned to their car. Fiona hesitated briefly, torn between two loyalties, and decided on me.

  Renvyle House was built by the Blakes, a Protestant family, in 1680. During the Land League wars two centuries later, the Blake widow who owned the house turned it into a hotel. Poet and author Oliver St. John Gogarty (“plump, stately Buck Mulligan” in Ulysses) bought the hotel. Yeats and Synge hung around there. The “lads” wrecked it in the early twenties. The Irish government compensated for its destruction. It is a hotel again today and a nice place to hang your hat, especially if you’re a fisherman and it’s fishing season, which it was, or someone looking for a bit of peace and quiet, and itself having horses and a heated swimming pool and a great restaurant and a nine-hole golf course nearby.

  Peace and quiet, in my judgment, did not include exploding homes and hovels that smelled of blood.

  “Fishermen are friggin’ eejits, chasing dumb fish when they don’t need them to stay alive,” me wife had told me once.

  In front of the Renvyle House Hotel, we were stopped again, this time by a young man, probably just out of UCG, with a tape recorder and a mike. RTE radio.

  “Mr. McGrail, is it now?” he had asked shyly.

  Fiona had sniffed suspiciously and then approved him on a temporary basis.

  “Coyne,” I said curtly.

  He blushed with em
barrassment.

  “Of course, Mr. Coyne. Sorry.”

  “No problem,” I relented. “Everyone makes that mistake.”

  “And yourself a fine novelist too!”

  The kid was all right!

  “Could I ever ask you a question about Ms. McGrail?”

  “Sure, but don’t expect a straight answer. This is the West of Ireland after all.”

  He laughed and turned on his recorder.

  “Will she ever sing again?”

  “She has retired for family reasons. She considers the decision definitive.”

  “Do you think she will ever sing again?”

  “What do I know?”

  “Is it true that she’s painting instead.”

  “’Tis.”

  “Is her work good?”

  “Very good indeed. However, I’m her husband.”

  “Will there be a gallery exhibition?”

  “She said there will be … in twenty-five years.”

  He thanked me profusely and went into the hotel, doubtless to phone his interview to the station in Dublin.

  “Come on, girl,” I said to the dog, “back to Nuala.”

  She barked enthusiastically in agreement.

  We turned around and raced back to herself—against the wind, which was stiffening, as they say around this part of Galway, a place where zephyrs don’t exist. Fiona refused to run the last fifty yards, which was fine with me.

  We entered the house and heard the noise of womanly voices in the kitchen—where else would Irish women be? In the kitchen and talking!

  The weary wolfhound and I ambled out into the kitchen. My wife and my daughter and our mother’s helper, cleaning up after supper, were jabbering in Irish with such enthusiasm that they did not notice our arrival. My son, his mouth covered with baby food, however, grinned happily at me and crawled over to hug my leg.

  “Well, at least someone in the house welcomes me home!”

  The chatter stopped instantly, proof, as I thought, that they had been chattering about me. I picked up the Mick and swung him over my head, an activity in which he reveled.

  “Did you have a grand run, Dermot Michael?” my wife, still in the terry cloth robe, asked, trying to pretend that she was not flustered.

  “Didn’t your dog run out of steam?”