“Wouldn’t it have been an interesting experience now?”
BLEW IT AGAIN, the Adversary crowed.
Suddenly Nuala stiffened in front of me and then collapsed into my arms.
“It’s so hot, Dermot Michael. Call the fire battalion before we all perish with the heat.”
Gently I guided her to our seats.
‘Terrible, terrible hot. We’re all burning up. Our lungs are filled with smoke.”
Then she began to sob softly.
“Is your wife all right, Mr. Coyne?” a cabin attendant asked.
“Bad dream.”
“It’s not a dream,” Nuala insisted when the young woman had returned to the small kitchen where she was preparing breakfast. “It’s really happening.”
“It’s all right, Nuala Anne,” I insisted. “It’s all right.”
Gradually her sobs subsided.
Shot on the way to Mass. Something like that had really happened in Irish history. Who was it? And when? Lord Edward FitzGerald?
I’d call George from Dublin. He knew everything.
“Haven’t you married a crazy woman, Dermot?” she said with a sniffle.
“No,” I said. “I married the finest wife in all the world.”
She snorted again, as if to say, “Thanks for the compliment, but you and I know better.”
Actually, I didn’t know better. She was indeed a wonderful wife, fun to be with, glorious in bed, undemanding, eager to please me. Too eager. When I complained that she slammed doors and pounded through the apartment like a herd of horses and slammed doors like a security guard, she apologized and walked on tiptoes—making me feel like a heel. I had also protested when she turned her compulsive neatness loose on my desk. “I can’t find a thing,” I growled. Tears sprang to her eyes as she apologized.
It wasn’t that big a deal.
Something was wrong, badly wrong, but I didn’t know what it was.
YOU’RE A LOUSY HUSBAND AND A WORSE LOVER, the Adversary sneered.
I didn’t answer because I was afraid he might be right.
Yet she certainly seemed satisfied with our lovemaking. She praised my skills in bed. I was the greatest lover in all the world, she insisted—which I knew I wasn’t.
I tried to talk about what our problem might be, and she dismissed me brusquely: “How could anyone have a problem with such a wonderful lover as you, Dermot Michael?”
Yeah.
They served us our continental breakfast.
“Haven’t I become so much a Yank,” she said, “that I want a much bigger breakfast?”
“Are you a Yank or Mick when the media ask you?”
“Won’t I have a good answer for them now?”
Which meant that she wanted to surprise me, too. Nuala played very few situations by ear. She doubtless had all the answers ready for the catechism that would greet her as soon as we walked out of customs.
“We are now crossing the coast of Ireland just above Galway,” the pilot announced. “You can see Galway Bay through the clouds.”
Her fey interlude forgotten, she climbed over me to look out the window.
“Och, sure, Dermot Michael, isn’t it the most beautiful place in all the world? Isn’t the green brilliant altogether?”
She arranged herself on my lap, a posture I was not about to protest.
“It comes from all the rain.”
“Shush, Dermot love. It’s me home, even if it is a mite damp.… OH! Isn’t that Carraroe down there?”
We had not visited Ireland on our honeymoon. “Haven’t I seen everything there is to see?” she had said, waving her hand in a dismissive gesture that meant only an eejit would suggest such an absurd notion.
“ ’Tis,” I said even though I couldn’t see.
“Isn’t it the first time I’ve seen it from the air.… Oh, Dermot Michael, isn’t it lovely?”
She wept again, this time at the joy of a brief glimpse of her little village from the air, the village that had been her world before she had left for Trinity College only a couple of years before.
“We should have come back here long ago!” she added.
Being, like I said, a sometimes-wise husband, I did not observe that I had proposed it as a honeymoon stop.
“I can hardly wait to see me ma and me da.… Och, Dermot, there’s a great sadness on me!”
More tears. I put my arm around her, eased her back into her seat, and held her close.
“Well,” she murmured, “at least I’m glad you’re along to take care of me on this focking trip to this focking country.”
A change of mind? Not at all, not among a people for whom the principle of contradiction does not apply.
“Haven’t you been taking care of me,” I replied, having learned the proper responses in seven months of marriage, “since we were married?”
“Go ‘long wid ya!” she said, patting my arm in approval.
Mostly she had taken care of me. At least she organized everything, though she was always wary for the slightest sign that I might disapprove of her plans for anything from a movie to the furniture for our home across the street from St. Josaphat on Southport Avenue. She also decided that we’d be wise to keep our apartment at the John Hancock Center because it would always be a solid investment. Besides, she liked the swimming pool there better than the one at the East Bank Club.
“More privacy, if you take me meaning, Dermot Michael.”
I did not disagree.
Her meaning was that we could return to the apartment and make love with less delay than if we had to drive from the East Bank back to DePaul (as our neighborhood, also known as Lincoln Park West, was called).
She also took charge of my investments. This meant that she talked to the broker and commodity trader who presided over my ill-gotten gains from the Mercantile Exchange and the profits from my novel—as well as, in a separate account naturally “so there won’t be any confusion,” the royalties from her recordings.
“Sure, aren’t you a poet and meself just a focking accountant?”
Who was I to argue with that wisdom, especially when the trader whispered into my ear that I had one very shrewd wife.
Sure, hadn’t I known that all along?
I am often referred to by the women in my family as “poor Dermot.” That does not mean impoverished or suffering. Rather, it means that Dermot is a nice boy; isn’t it too bad he doesn’t have a clue?
About what?
About anything.
Or as one young woman not of the family had said at a black-tie dinner in the Chicago Hilton and Towers, “Yeah, he’s a handsome hunk and kind of sweet in a dull way, but he’s useless. He’ll live off her for the rest of his life.”
I was forced to constrain Nuala from tearing out the eyes of the aforementioned young woman.
“Sure, aren’t you a great novelist and poet!” she had whispered fiercely before I pulled her into a corner of the massive lobby of that gargantuan hostelry.
“And a brilliant commodity trader, too!”
Her humor returned. “Well, I didn’t say that exactly, did I now?”
The pilot announced that we were approaching Dublin Airport. Below us the bright green fields, a jeweler’s display of emeralds, glowed in the soft light of the rising sun.
“It looks like God has swept away the Irish mists to celebrate your return,” I said to my wife.
“Do you really think He has?” she said, clutching my arm more tightly.
“She,” I corrected her.
“ ’Tis true.” She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.
Another knock on me is that I’m lazy. It’s true that I don’t work very much, but the objection is aimed at the fact that I don’t have a regular office or even a regular job. The youngest of a family of hot-shot professionals, I am viewed as a kind of spoiled baby who sits around and does very little. I get no points for having written a novel that was on the Times (New York, that is) best-seller list for fifteen weeks in hardboun
d (and was now on in its paperback manifestation). The occupational category of “writer,” to say nothing of “poet,” is not altogether acceptable in River Forest, Illinois. Moreover, to make matters worse, there is no visible evidence that when I start writing I work very hard at it.
I had done practically nothing since our marriage except scratch out a poem or two and develop (mentally) an outline for another novel for which I had a contract. Nuala had worked frantically on her voice lessons and her recordings while I had devoted myself mostly to enjoying her—a delightful full-time occupation. Moreover, I had engaged in this enterprise without putting on weight, as most young men of my generation do in the months after their marriage. Admittedly, Nuala Anne had shamed me into it by her good example.
Besides, running with her or swimming or working out together was part of the fun. She was fun in bed and fun in every other aspect of our life together, fun and funny, outrageous, contradictory, unpredictable, zany. Spouses, I have been told, often grow weary of each other. I could not imagine Nuala Anne ever boring me.
YOU’RE A SENSUALIST ON A SUSTAINED ORGY, the Adversary had informed me before he got on my case as a lousy lover.
“Yeah,” I replied without the slightest feeling of guilt.
There were some problems in our marriage, clouds on the edge of paradise.
My wife was afraid of me. Though she played the role of organizer and administrator of our joint fun and fortune, it was always with a shadow of worry in her blue eyes, as if I were a drunken wife beater.
“I am not an ogre,” I said to the little bishop.
I go to George the Priest when I want facts—such as who was the Irish leader shot on the way to Mass. I go to George’s boss when I want advice.
“Indeed,” that worthy had commented.
“Yet she’s habitually afraid that she’ll offend me.”
“Adoration,” he said with a loud sigh.
“I am not adorable.”
“Arguably.… Yet she began to adore you on that now legendary night you met at O’Neill’s pub. Nothing that has transpired since has caused her to change her opinion.”
“Will she get over it?”
“She will perhaps adjust to it.”
That was bad enough. More recently I thought I detected an even darker cloud. Nuala had begun to suggest that she was half-convinced that she was not half good enough a wife.
“Does that make 25 percent?” I had asked the little bishop.
“More like 200 percent.”
The Airbus touched lightly down on the green fields of Ireland. Nuala applauded enthusiastically, not because she doubted a safe landing but because she was on Irish soil again.
I had tried to discuss this strange notion with her, but she ruled me out of order.
“A lot you know, Dermot Michael Coyne, about what’s a good wife.”
Finally, she was worried about not being pregnant. Our plan—well, her plan—was that we’d have our children (arguably, as the bishop would say), three of them, before she was twenty-six, so our nest would be empty by the time she was in her earlier forties. The first would be a girl with red hair and green eyes who would be called Mary Anne (Nell after my grandmother, with whom Nuala has some sort of mildly scary psychic relationship).
Who was I to disagree?
However, the first pregnancy was not happening according to plan.
“On the average it takes seventy-five acts of intercourse to produce a conception,” I observed, quoting, though hardly by name, George the Priest.
“Och, Dermot Michael, haven’t we done it more often than that?” she said somberly.
Who’s counting?
Nuala Anne, obviously.
I was sure she had consulted with my mother, who is a nurse, and that Mom had reassured her. Not that it had done any good.
So my Nuala had gradually become more pensive, more preoccupied, more obviously thoughtful, and less the exuberant organizer and imp than she had been only a month or two before our trip to Ireland. I had no idea what to do.
YOU’RE A FAILURE AS A LOVER AND A HUSBAND, the Adversary insisted.
“Shut up,” I told him.
I was confident on neither subject. I remembered the South American novelist who said that after thirty years of marriage he knew his wife better than anyone else in the world and knew that he would never understand her. What did I know about the complex puzzles that stirred in the depths of my wife’s soul? What did I know about a woman’s orgasms? The woman from River Forest who had seduced me and then dropped me when I refused to go to work for her father had done a lot of screaming, but, looking back on it, I doubted that she had known any more about sexual abandon than I did. Nuala insisted that I was a wonderful lover and adamantly refused to proceed beyond that assertion.
I half-believed that she was half telling the truth.
The purser, in a brogue as thick as Nuala’s, explained about immigration and customs as the plane taxied to the terminal.
“Well,” said herself, “I’ll have to get ready for them nine-fingered shite hawks, won’t I now?”
“Won’t you have to get ready to cream them?”
I had learned from a book that when the Irish answer a question by asking a question they are following in English a form adopted from the Irish language that adds emphasis to what has been said. Sometimes. Also, the word self added to a pronoun is a trace of the original melody in the language the English had stamped out—though every immigrant group before Cromwell had adopted Irish as their own tongue.
Nuala Anne sighed loudly.
The plane finally snuggled with relief against its jet bridge. Since we were in first class, there was less of the gang fight for the recovery of baggage from the compartments above our seats than there usually is. I was grateful for that. Once, on our honeymoon, a very pushy matron of uncertain nationality had shoved me aside to retrieve a large bag and then, having jerked it out of the compartment, bounced it off my head. I collapsed into a handy seat and thus cleared the way for Nuala Anne to charge after the woman, shake her fiercely, and threaten that if she ever dared to hit her husband again, she would kill her. The terrified perpetrator, not understanding a word but knowing she was in deep trouble, fled for her life. Two cabin attendants who had watched the contretemps in horror rushed to my aid. Having assured themselves that I would probably survive, they awarded us two bottles of champagne.
“Nuala,” I had said as we left the plane, “that woman didn’t understand a word you said.”
“Ah,” me, er, my beloved beamed, “didn’t she get the point now?”
As we were leaving the plane in Dublin, one of the cabin attendants grasped Nuala’s hand.
“Och, Nuala Anne, I love your songs. Have a grand concert over at the Point.”
Point in Irish English is pronounced as if it were the same thing from which one consumes a half-quart of Guinness.
Nuala stuck out her hand in my direction. I reached into the Aer Lingus flight bag I carried and produced a CD. She signed it with a flourish and presented it to the delighted cabin attendant.
Ah, you say, isn’t Dermot Michael Coyne a nice young man? Doesn’t he carry around copies of his wife’s recordings so she can give them to people?
And doesn’t he do it because the wife has asked him to, very politely and timidly of course?
In the arrivals hall, a small girl child with red hair rushed up and embraced Nuala’s calf—a not infrequent reaction of children when they see her.
Herself lifted the delighted rug rat high into the air. “Sure, don’t I want one just like you,” she said with an enormous smile. “But I think I’ll let your parents keep you.”
The parents knew who she was and smiled proudly. I produced another CD and Nuala autographed it for “Ciara with the bright green eyes!”
We recovered our vast pile of luggage—you can’t go on a concert tour without many changes of costumes, even if it’s only a one-concert tour. Nuala took charge of her guit
ar and the small Celtic harp I had bought her when she came to America. I piled the rest on a cart.
“And meself coming to Dublin for the first time,” she murmured disapprovingly, “with only one small bag.”
“Same wonderful young woman,” I argued.
Again she snorted derisively.
“Nuala Anne,” I said as we entered the green customs gate, “what’s a nine-fingered shite hawk?”
“A journalist,” she said grimly.
God help them.
1 Irish Whiskey
—2—
“NUALA ANNE,” demanded an angry young woman with a dishwater blond ponytail and hard eyes, “do you believe in God?”
We had stumbled out of the customs area to be greeted by a tall, skinny priest with a somber face and a jutting jaw, bald but young. He had tried to wave off the media, but they swept him away. There were eight of them, not counting three TV cameramen—five women and three men, all distinctly hostile.
“Sometimes,” my beloved replied.
“How often do you go to church?”
“Wouldn’t it be a shame not to go to Mass every morning and meself living right across the street and the man I sleep with going every morning?”
As though I were the leader in this devotional practice. Nuala was setting up the nine-fingered shite hawks.
“Why do you go to church if you’re not sure there’s a God?”
“Wasn’t I after saying I believed sometimes?”
After is a trace of the Celtic pluperfect.
“Do you believe when you’re at Mass?”
“Sometimes.”
“And when you sing all those stupid old hymns?”
“All the time.…”
Based on my own experiences with journalists, I dislike them all. They were for the most part rude, envious, and dumb. The Irish variety were even worse. However, such comments as “stupid old hymns” did not bother me, because I knew that my poor spouse outnumbered them.
“And yourself not married to the man you live with?”
“Dermot Michael”—she turned to me as I stood there utterly useless—“you’re the man I sleep with, aren’t you?”
“I think so,” I said with my best straight person smile.
Irish Mist Page 2
