Who Will Hear Your Secrets?

by Robley Wilson

  “The policeman didn’t say ‘murder,’ did he?”

  Delia shook her head. “Death happened,” she reminded him.

  “He wasn’t a young man,” Brian said. “It might have been natural causes.”

  “Then why the police—the uniforms, all the guns? Use your head,” she said. “And where is his friend Micheal?”

  “What does that matter?”

  “He chose the paint,” she said. “He marked the place.”

  The Gardai vehicles did not appear again outside the disfigured orange gate, though for two days an armed policeman stood guard—a genuine sentry beside the imitation sentry-box—and by the third day he too was gone. The pub owned by the Dalys did not reopen.

  During that time the weather turned magnificent: blue skies with billowy white clouds that scudded across the sun and cast restless shade on hill and valley. “The curse of the tourist,” Brian said. “Everything turns perfect on the eve of departure.”

  Even the black-faced sheep—whose wool until now had shown a dingy yellow-gray, each animal marked with a blue dye-stroke of ownership—changed character. On the sunlit green hillsides they were brilliantly white, their coats pristine, unmarked.

  “What’s happened?” Delia said.

  “They’ve been sheared,” Brian said. “Or is it ‘shorn’?”

  “They’re so brand-new,” she said. “So clean and white, so small.”

  * * *

  HOME IN BOSTON, Brian’s relatives—uncles, aunts and cousins— wanted all the details of the trip, as if Ireland were homeland instead of a place to visit quite removed from dead ancestors. Yes, he’d gone to Kinsale. No, he hadn’t looked up the great-grandparents, the hall where the records were kept being closed on Sunday. No, he and Delia had skipped Dublin; they had talked about taking the train up to Belfast, except that there was a flaring up of riots and bombings and an assassination that put them off. Perhaps next summer, or the summer after. And oh, here were crisp ten-pound notes carrying the picture of James Joyce, one for each of the relatives to keep because in January Ireland would convert to the euro.

  What neither Brian nor Delia could explain to his relatives was how they had gone to Ireland partly in the hope of understanding its divisions, but had only confirmed the tourist ignorance they arrived with. That now it was an ignorance made flesh and blood by a former priest with an invented name was deadly important to themselves, but it could not have enlightened others.

  On the way back from Ennis—that last day-trip of their Irish vacation—Delia had bought a pot of lavender at a garden shop in Limerick and set it on a windowsill of the rented cottage. She knew it was forbidden to take a plant out of the country, but while it was hers it freshened the place with a scent no less effective for all that it was a subtle one. The last morning, she broke off the blossoms, put them in an envelope and took them through Shannon security in her carry-on bag.

  As for Brian, what he brought home to the States was the image of the doe, its injured leg soaked with blood, the stark femur splintered, protruding, the two entry wounds in the animal’s breast like black holes in an obscure universe of death—and Monaghan, the author of this benevolent sacrifice, standing in torchlight, pistol still drawn. Long after he had broken with Delia, this was for Brian the perfect summing up of their holiday in Ireland: “Blood,” the old priest had said. “The reek of it.”

  An Age of Beauty and Terror

  It is a midweek evening; the restaurant called The Swan is not crowded. Thomas Madden and his wife, Edith, have been seated at a two-spot near a window—though it is after dark and nothing is to be seen through the glass—and are drinking their first martinis when Madden says, “Look.”

  Edith pauses, the martini glass at the level of her lower lip. “What?” she says.

  “Look. There.” Madden doesn’t point. He tilts his head and lowers his left eyelid. His wife turns.

  At a table in the corner farthest from the windows sits a middle-aged man—expensively dressed in a brown silk suit, an off-white shirt, brown tie with a plain gold pin—talking with the waitress. The waitress wears a long-skirted uniform, navy blue, with an open-neck white blouse. The man’s hand is under the young woman’s skirt; Madden has watched it from the moment it slipped under her hem, has traced its movement up the outside of her left thigh and around to her buttock, where it is now cupped indiscreetly, the skirt hiked up at the crook of the man’s elbow.

  “I don’t see anything,” Edith Madden says. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”

  “His hand,” Madden says in a hoarse whisper. “The man’s naughty hand.”

  “Naughty?” His wife swivels in her seat, the cocktail glass still poised at the level where her mouth will be when she turns back to the table.

  “His hand. Under the waitress’s skirt. Up her leg.”

  Edith Madden studies the man and the waitress. “No,” she says finally. “No, I don’t think so.”

  Madden makes a noise of exasperation, like a seal or a tired horse. What is the matter with you women? he wants to blurt out, but catches himself in time. Instead he sips his own martini and watches the guilty pair over the rim of the glass. The middle-aged man—actually, he is probably only a few years older than Madden— is buttering a Parker House roll, holding half the roll in his left hand, buttering it with the knife in his right.

  “He damned well was,” Madden says.

  “I think not,” his wife insists. “Not in front of the whole world.”

  * * *

  A DAY OR SO LATER, Madden leaves his office a few minutes before noon and strolls through a small, well-manicured park on his way to have lunch with a friend, a former colleague.

  It is spring, early May, and all morning Madden has found it difficult to pay full attention to the work on his desk. He remarks to himself that he is usually not easily distracted from duty, and that he has a history of being indifferent to Nature—to the seasons, the changing pitches of sunlight, goldengroves unleaving and all that sort of thing. Yet here he is, crossing a park, noticing that the trees are budded and the grass has begun to recover from winterkill. He breathes the balmy air with a sense of real pleasure. Perhaps he is undergoing a change of life, taking a new lease, entering a second childhood. He will have to ask Dr. Himmel.

  He is almost through the park; the wrought-iron fence that surrounds it is just ahead of him. Beyond the fence is the wide, much-trafficked street he will have to cross. He has in fact reached the gate, one hand on the coarse black rail of it, and has turned back to survey these unexpectedly attractive surroundings one last time before dealing with the traffic that lies between himself and the restaurant where his friend is waiting. And there he stops, his mouth open, his face amazed.

  What arrests him is a young couple at the base of an elm tree near the center of the park. The elm is a relic, many of its branches cut off and the juncture of those branches painted in shiny black ovals, a cable holding two of its upper limbs from surrendering to gravity. The couple, a man and a woman, are engrossed in each other. They have all their limbs, and they are surrendering to gravity in the most obvious way. Madden is transfixed.

  The young man is lying on his back in the shadow of the elm, the young woman bent over him, kissing him. As Madden watches—he cannot help himself—the woman unbuttons her blouse and strips it off. She is naked under the blouse, and her small breasts make her seem frail, intensely vulnerable. Again she bends over the young man. Her small, petal-colored nipples brush his lips, his tongue. She lifts her pretty face into sunlight, closes her eyes, presses the young man’s face against her breasts.

  Madden turns away. There are others in the park: small children with their mothers, men reading folded newspapers, a blond woman in glasses taking a deli-wrapped sandwich out of a brown paper bag. What is the world coming to?

  After lunch (“What is the world coming to?” he has said to his friend) Madden retraces his path through the park. The couple is gone, the park is empty and co
lder. Over the bare, pruned branches of a rose bush someone has draped a flimsy white blouse. It resembles a crumpled scrap of waxed paper, something discarded by a picnicker too indifferent to look for a rubbish barrel.

  * * *

  “WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO TELL YOU?” Dr. Himmel says. “That you’re having hallucinations? That the world is not as you perceive it? That you’re going crazy?”

  “Is that what’s happening?” Madden says. “Am I going crazy?”

  “Girl crazy,” the doctor says. “Woman crazy.” He crosses his legs and lights a cigarette, even though Madden has asked several times in the last five years that Himmel not smoke in his presence. “I ask you, Thomas, who knows you better than I do? Inside out, outside in, from the womb of your angel mother to the deathbed of your prick of a father—I ask you: Do I know you?”

  “You know me,” Madden admits.

  “So trust me when I tell you this has nothing to do with clinical crazy.”

  “Then what?”

  “Desire,” the doctor says. He blows smoke toward the brown drapes at the windows, studying it as if desire itself were a thin blue cloud swirling in sunlight. “Desire, guilt, the misgivings of a man who maybe can’t get it up so easily or so often as he used to, nostalgia for vanished youth. You name it, Thomas. Make me a list.”

  Madden sighs and sneezes. He is hearing abstractions. What Himmel is confessing is his ignorance: Madden may not know what’s happening, but neither does the doctor.

  “Suppose they’re hallucinations,” he says. “Suppose I am seeing things that aren’t real. What should I do?”

  “A little invented voyeurism,” the doctor says. “How could it hurt?”

  “It frightens me. I want it to stop.”

  Himmel shrugs and rolls the cigarette between his thumb and ring finger. “Count your blessings,” he says. “Enjoy the free entertainment your mind is giving you. Not even a cover charge.”

  “But it’s all too real,” Madden says. “I should have picked that blouse off the rosebush. I should have brought it to you.”

  The doctor sighs. “Your view of the female is essentially a contradiction,” he says. “You believe every woman is so innocent, you cannot imagine a man doing to her the things you tell me you see. At the very same time, you are yourself so naïve that you believe the woman will accept without protest—will welcome—any indignity the man visits upon her.”

  “Do I?” Madden says.

  “Do you not?” Dr. Himmel stubs his cigarette into the ashtray. “You must begin to explain yourself to yourself.” He consults his watch. “But not today. Next Monday; then begin.”

  Madden hesitates. “Am I addicted to sex?” he asks.

  Himmel pats Madden’s upper arm and steers him toward the office door. “You’re a man on the edge of middle age,” he says, “the prime of life. You should ask yourself this question: How can a normal urge be addictive?”

  * * *

  IN THE SAME RESTAURANT where Madden and his wife disagreed about what was being done to a waitress, the waitress herself appears at Madden’s table.

  “Let me tell you our specials,” she says. “The catch of the day is red snapper. The quiche is Lorraine. The soup is Wisconsin cheese.” She reaches to fill his water glass; her breasts are provocative, Madden thinks, trying not to peer into the generous opening of her uniform shirt. A small rectangle of plastic alongside the opening reads Halina.

  Madden notes that Halina is dark and remarkably tall. She is short-waisted, full-bosomed; her height is in the wonderfully long legs hidden beneath her ankle-length skirt. She stands within his easy reach, the sweating pitcher cradled between her pale, thin-fingered hands.

  “May I get you something from the bar?” she says.

  “You may,” Madden says. “A very dry martini, up, with a twist.”

  “That’s nice,” Halina says. “Why don’t you let me bring something else up with a twist?” She winks at Madden.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Sorry,” Halina says. “I was repeating your order out loud. It’s a bad habit of mine.”

  “That’s quite all right,” he says. He feels a cool tickle of perspiration down his sides, hears a buzzing in his ears.

  “You look at the menu,” the waitress says. “I’ll slip into a dry martini.”

  “Thank you,” Madden says. While he reads the menu, he remembers what the doctor has been saying about hallucinations. He especially remembers “What harm can it do?”

  He begins to relax. The martini will help. Beyond the hostess’s desk, Halina has gone behind the bar to chat with the young bartender while he mixes Madden’s drink. The two are laughing, and their laughter makes Madden happy; he feels he is a part of their conversation, a confidant, an equal. The bartender pours the martini and dumps the ice into a sink under the counter; he cuts a yellow ribbon of lemon peel into the stemmed glass; he plucks a green olive from behind the counter and drops it between Halina’s breasts. Madden can hear her surprised exclamation, sees her clutch at the hollow where the olive has disappeared. Then she giggles. The bartender shows her a tiny cocktail onion, then deftly pitches it in after the olive. Next is a maraschino cherry.

  “Two cherries there,” Madden calls out from his table. “For symmetry.” He is proud of the ease with which he has caught the spirit of the evening.

  Halina is startled, and turns, perplexed, to look at him. The bartender sets the martini on a round tray, and Halina delivers it to Madden’s table.

  “You asked for a twist,” she reminds him.

  “I’ll say.” Madden takes the martini, sips from it; the drink is watery. When the waitress turns to carry the tray back to the bar, he puts out his arm to block her way, his hand making contact with her plump bottom.

  The expression on Halina’s face changes from accommodation to disgust. She looks, coldly, at his arm.

  “Move it,” she says, “or I’ll break it.”

  * * *

  “YOU SHOULD GET OUT OF TOWN for a while,” Dr. Himmel says. “Go on a trip. Take the wife and make it into a second honeymoon.”

  “But what’s happening to me?” Madden says.

  “What do you think is happening?”

  “I don’t know. I seem to be turning into some kind of sex maniac. Everything I look at becomes suggestive, sexual, erotic.”

  “So, how do you feel about that?” Himmel says through the haze of cigarette smoke.

  Madden ponders. “Helpless,” he says. “Out of control.”

  The doctor nods and contemplates the ceiling.

  “If it’s the free entertainment you say it is, why can’t I enjoy it? Why do things always end badly?”

  “How ‘badly’?”

  “Unpleasantly. They depress me.”

  “What do you think is the answer to your question?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Then take some time,” the doctor says. “Think about it. Seriously—go somewhere for a nice holiday.”

  “But isn’t that running away from the problem?”

  “You’re already running away. Ask yourself a couple of questions: ‘Why isn’t some of this stuff happening to me? How come it’s always the other guy who gets to feel the woman up, who bites her pert little nipples, who plays kid games in her cleavage?’”

  Madden wonders if Himmel is going too far. “Are you saying I can only enjoy sex vicariously?”

  “Vicariously,” Himmel echoes. “You said it, not me. Take that trip. Find some unfamiliar scenery, places you’ve never been. Rest. Unwind.” The doctor leans forward, points a plump finger at him. “Listen to me, Thomas: life is not a dirty movie.”

  “Are you telling me I’m projecting?” Madden says.

  * * *

  “I’M GOING OUT TO THE POOL,” Edith Madden says. “Are you coming?”

  “I’d rather read.” Madden is propped against three pillows on the telephone side of the king-sized bed. This is in a Holiday Inn north of Boston, where the Madde
ns have already spent one night and plan to spend one more before driving on for a few days in Montreal. “You go enjoy yourself.”

  But after his wife has left the room, Madden decides he would rather not be alone with the novel he is reading and changes his mind. He puts on black swim trunks and a white robe, slides his feet into his sandals, and strolls down the narrow hallway to the pool. The longer he walks, the warmer and moister the atmosphere becomes, until the air around him is steamy and reeks of pungent chlorine. Stepping into the domed pool area, he sheds his robe and lays it beside a chaise longue; then he flops down onto the chaise and sighs. Himmel is right; unwinding is exactly what he needs.

  He leans down to draw the paperback out of the pocket of the robe and takes a good look around. A restaurant skirts one side of the pool area, a tiny bar is located opposite; not far away, tastefully half-concealed by potted palms, are pinball machines and video games. The adult pool is a straightforward rectangle, and not far from one end of it is a child’s wading pool, small and round. Together, the two pools look like a green exclamation point outlined in white tile. Edith is in the center of the larger, doing a leisurely backstroke. Beyond her, two young women are tossing a water-polo ball back and forth. Madden catches his wife’s eye and waves. Then he settles back and opens the novel.

  He has scarcely started reading when a small commotion distracts him: the two young women—both brunette, one in a red bikini, the other in a yellow—have given up playing catch and begun to shriek and splash water on each other. Madden thinks they are rather too noisy; it is as if they are trying to call attention to themselves, but when he looks around he doesn’t see any young men worthy of their interest.

  He returns to his book. Edith pulls herself out of the pool and stands over him as she towels her wet hair.

  “Are you going in?” she says. “You should probably get your goggles; they seem to use a lot of chemical stuff in the water.”

  “I thought I’d try and get through this,” Madden says.