by Martin Roper
She offers me a lift back into town but I decline. She offers again and I say yes, still not wanting to appear hurt. As we drive in along the coast road I look across the strand at Sandymount, at a late-night rider cantering along the sand near the edge of the ebbing tide, and beyond the Strand there is Dollymount beach where my father took Ruth and me with soggy tomato sandwiches when we were children, all of it fading now under the darkening sky, and as the city grows closer I force myself not to look in the direction of Bath Avenue as we head for the North-side. She is making conversation and I try to enter into it but am tired. Words separate us now. Words weave in and out like cordons. It takes forever to say anything that matters. Words are big and clumsy with us; they spill out failures. The things that have shaped our lives. The white trousers she wore that evening. The slope of her breasts beneath the blouse as she talked about Winnicot. I am tired of Dublin, of trying to make sense of my life here, tired of Ruth’s death, and as we cross the Liffey together for the last time it sinks into me that she is right: it is over. I am tired of her. I look at her hand on the steering wheel. If she were a colour she would be beige. I smile to myself at the cold boredom I feel towards her. For the first time in our life together, I let myself feel indignant in her presence and I think of a last parting shot. I think of all the times I did not retaliate in arguments and now I want her to remember the last words I will ever utter to her. I will cut her down just as I am getting out of the car and then close the door before she has a chance to answer. She pulls up outside my father’s house and she turns off the engine. I look at her. Maybe she too has a parting shot. But it is not in me to do it. I can almost hear Ruth whisper: Not worth it. No bitterness. Go the other road.
I will go back to New York. I will find something there. Something will happen. I haven’t let go of Ursula but I will. One day I will show her the indifference she feels for me now.
* * *
I cannot even remember the sound of my sister’s voice. It is gone. Her voice has become a huge silence. I loved her laughter but I can only remember that her laugh provoked laughter in me. Her sweet contagious music is gone. There is only the photograph of her gesticulating with the fork and the roaring silence of the page in front of me. The rest is words hobbling after indistinct memories. The true nightmare of death is forgetting. I forget Ruth, she who I believe I loved more than anyone. Knowing that I have forgotten much of what Ruth was, knowing I too will be forgotten. This is the face of survival. It does away with the fallacy of a pure, everlasting love between human beings. But there was the evening in the kitchen in the flat in Dun Laoghaire. I was sitting trying to meditate and wanting Ruth with me, wanting her back. The sound of the fridge in the corner was distracting me and I had almost decided to give up. Relaxed, open concentration alluded me. I got up, unplugged the fridge, and the room fell into silence. I looked out the window at two crows fighting with each other at the end of the garden. The sound of their squawking audible, even behind the glass. My mind cleared and there was nothing—that splendid moment that is akin to the hiatus that stretches between orgasm and sleep. Orgasm, that release from the self, and meditation the enclosure of the self. Ruth was there, before me. Her essence. A calmness as if nothing else existed. The same sensation of watching a film where an actor leaves the room and the camera doesn’t follow and yet the essence lingers in the full stillness of the moment. I felt her presence grow, then, and I felt happiness emanate from her and dumb fear gripped me in my gut and she was gone. I sat there, sweating and feeling as if there was a shard of ice stuck in my stomach. Sins became harder to live with.
I became intensely infatuated with the women I slept with while I was with Ursula, but I knew it was not love. I thought it was passionate lovemaking but it was nothing as calculated as that. I was getting over the problem I had had for years with her. I was trying to satisfy that pent-up sexual hunger that could not be satisfied. The heat of the sex was the one area of life where I was not acting. It was a desire to live, as if my own life was running out quickly, the way Ruth’s had. I heard a psychologist on the radio talk about near-death experiences and how these makes people change, how they reassess their lives, improve them. She was talking theory. That’s the problem with psychologists and priests. It’s always theory. Some evenings on the way home from work, or from the hospital, I would slip my seat belt off and drive faster and faster, imagining that it would be all over shortly. There was no fear in me of death, only a fear of the endless pain. But I would think of Ruth hearing of the news of my death and I would slow down and go and visit one of the women who I knew would have me. I poured all of myself into these women, all the longing and ache of life. As I lay in bed, I could tell they knew they were soothing what was locked inside me and I was embarrassed. I would never fall asleep until I was certain the woman was as drained as I was, sure she had come no matter how much sleep pulled me. I needed the mutual exhaustion. I had no expectations of these women, and, more importantly, they had none of me. There were no expectations at all except the pleasure of the moment. Until Holfy.
Holfy
She can only be described through her city. Even more specifically: Gansevoort Street. Melville walked this street here in the far West Village in New York City. The author of Moby Dick found it hard to get work on a street named after his relatives. Holfy took on Gansevoort Street in the early sixties. Stonewall was years away from her, and I was not yet born.
She gets bored easily. In 1974 she started a restaurant with her then lover in the heart of Greenwich Village. The Black Man’s Table still does well almost a quarter of a century later in a city that devours restaurants before the paint has dried on their freshly finished fronts. But the restaurant bored her, she had a disagreement with her lover, and she left. Success in itself seems as uninteresting to her as the same meal two nights in a row. Then she got herself into photography in a city lit by photographers.
Holfy started buying her own train tickets from upstate New York to Manhattan as soon as she was old enough. At eighteen she flew to Denmark and took painting classes. She would become a painter. She sat on both sides of the canvas. Life opened. A year later, when she returned to New York, she and Robert rented a dump on Gansevoort Street in the guts of New York’s meat district. They knocked down the wall between them and the adjoining vacant apartment. When the landlord found out, there was nothing he could do because the lease stated Apartment, second floor. There was nothing describing another apartment on that floor in the plans. It was fun in those days to fool the landlord. Like his tenants, Charlie Gottleib was young and vigorous.
At night, on Little West Twelfth Street, a sliver of a block from her doorway, prostitutes prance on the cobblestone roads that have been battered by Mack trucks delivering skirts of beef to New York’s finest restaurants. In the filthy night, these prostitutes glisten, looking more outrageously beautiful than supermodels and with smoother legs. On a summer’s evening, even before darkness gives the hookers mystery, cars stalk the area. Syringes litter the streets on Sunday mornings. A prostitute is slumped in a doorway, his silver miniskirt gathered on his hips. The smell of urine teases the breeze that wafts in from the Hudson River. It is quiet.
During the week, Duffy Dumpster trucks collect the rubbish. Other trucking companies collect the inedible meat refuse after eleven at night. The meat is sprayed with green dye to discourage the homeless from eating it. Bins, as large as small apartments, crash to the ground throughout the night as they are emptied. No sooner has the rubbish been collected than the meat deliveries turn into the street. They park every which way, engines coughing. When the drivers are blocked they rest their elbows on their horns until someone moves. By five, the hour between night and morning, the workers arrive. They scream at each other in Aramaic and Spanish. Someone speaks English. Holfy sleeps with her windows open to the mouth of the street.
She has made her home here for over thirty years. During the summer she cycles to her appointments on her bokety bicycle
, bouncing over the broken cobblestones and splashing through rivulets of blood that run out of the processing plants. If she’s out, the mailman drops off her photography packages at Florent’s restaurant next door. On the hottest days the stench seems visible and during snowy winter mornings the street is an abstract painting—Jackson Pollock playing with colours. I am entranced with it all but it wears off, although in the company of a woman like Holfy the excitement of living never fades.
Her studio is in this apartment. It is packed densely with contact sheets, negatives, photography books, film books, novels, poetry, jazz, classical, clothes, shoes, makeup, and light; the light she gained thirty years ago when she knocked down that wall. These days she feels guilty about the wall. Charlie never did well in the meat business. Soon, in his late sixties, he will break down and end up in an asylum. Photographs of old lovers are pasted on her walls. There are photographs of Robert in the last days of his illness. For her, it’s an expression of love, a visual depiction of how much he grew as he died. For me, it’s a macabre showing of decay, a photographic equivalent of Lucian Freud. His ghost lives here. Many of the photographs of naked men, their nudity compounded and not neutralised by their number. She photographs her friends for pleasure. She is in pursuit of an aspect of the personality they seldom display. She shoots quickly and seductively. She takes chances. She spends ages taping gels on her strobes and then doesn’t use them. She is restless when she works and yet somehow she captures most of her subjects in a state of tranquillity.
The first time I laid eyes on her she was shooting at the IBM kick-off. That was before I learned that I could be dishonest and live with fickleness. Fickle. That was the kind of word Holfy used. Fickle, and, credible. Credible was her most condescending term.
I was still staying with Gerry that first night I met her in the Puck Building. Gerry had been giving me the hint that I’d have to get my own place. IBM had won the Cunard account. Gerry had worked with Fintan, the guy who gave us both under-the-table work, and Fintan had worked with Cunard and got us an invite. She is crouching at my table taking photographs of the marketing director while he gives his lighthearted nautical speech. Gerry and I laugh, not at his speech but at his tic—constantly lifting his chin away from his collar as if the shirt is tweaking his neck. A finger taps my shoulder.
—That’s Mr. Welty?
She’s pointing her middle finger at the podium. I smile a yes at her. She finishes her roll, replaces it, writes something on the spent roll, and slips it into a fannypack. I watch her working for the rest of the evening. She has a precise economy of movement as she works the hall. I think about talking to her and then dismiss her—as one does with these idiosyncratic New York types. But I remembered that middle finger pointing.
Months later I am at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis benefit on Christopher Street. I forget now what I was doing there. Something altruistic. I was with William Davies. We had painted Bill’s gallery, and Bill was after Gerry. There she was photographing again. No sleek black suit this time. An official Keith Haring T-shirt with green shorts. She is laughing a lot. She seems to know a lot of the people she is photographing. She touches them gently on the arm, pushing them into poses. Someone hands her a glass of wine which she takes and then leaves on the sidewalk. Bill and I are sitting on an overturned barrel at the end of Christopher. The cops are relaxing; laughing at a drunken Judy Garland look-alike whimper that he isn’t in Kansas any more. Bill is watching me watch her.
—You like her?
—Who?
—Holmfridur. The photographer.
—You know her?
—Sure. The one and only Holmfridur Olafsdottir.
—Holmwho?
—Holmfridur Olafsdottir. Imagine crunching your teeth. She’s a fag hag.
She has her hair in a ponytail.
Holmfridur, he says again, smiling. He wants me to appear a little stupid, never missing the edge knowledge gives. He gets up with his half-eaten chicken drumstick and goes over to her. She responds much more warmly than he expects. Not the usual strained friendliness that trails Bill’s sick life.
—I’m Holfy, she says, giving me the gift of her hand. Long fingers. She speaks as if she has marbles in her mouth. She doesn’t remember me.
—We met—talked—at the IBM thing a few months back. At the Puck?
—Right. I remember.
She doesn’t.
—You asked me the name of some guy.
Her face darkens. She remembers.
—You’re the fuckhead who lost me the account?
—I beg your pardon?
—You said Welty was the M.D. and he wasn’t.
—I was just joking. I thought you knew I didn’t know any of those gobshites.
—Expensive joke.
She walks off.
—O, dear, you do have a way with women.
—Want to do it Bill?
He looks at me quickly to see if I mean it. He’s imagining pushing me down on my stomach but already I am walking after her.
—I love this garlic chicken, she says to some wrinkled queen, stripping a morsel from the bone and popping it in her mouth.
—I’ll pay.
She looks around at me.
—I’ll pay for whatever I cost you.
—Fifty thousand.
I pale and the queen laughs.
—It was five thousand, and future business.
—I’ll pay the five. I can’t get the business back.
—You’ll pay the five?
Earnest nod.
—Okay. Send the check here.
I take the card and walk down Christopher Street. I walk across to Washington Square, whistling. Then I think of the money. Lot of money for a phone number. That was the beginning of life with her.
I’m as sick of Gerry as he is of me. His girlfriend is some Jew with the classic honker who makes furniture out of sheet metal. He’s either too dumb or too indifferent to be bothered by her fake orgasms but it’s getting to me. I’ve put the word out to everyone I meet that I need something. The response is always the same. Everyone is always looking for a place. Every day there is always someone shouting in the window of the gallery wanting to know if it is being renovated into an apartment.
I start to pick up books again but it seems meaningless. Cynical voices. People who have nothing to say, saying their nothing with glossy panache. I begin to walk the streets a lot. In the evening I turn on the radio. The same voices discussing the same problems. I feel cold and put on my old jacket. Rummage for a cigarette. The letter that arrived yesterday that I was afraid to open. I had written in weakness and asked her to reconsider, to say yes. I find it in the inside pocket and open it. I feel shame rise as I read it. She is right.
What you say you want. What you need. I need to explore myself. I can’t believe you’re coming out with that shit. Are you looking for my blessing? Why don’t you just say it? You want to fuck around. You don’t have the balls to say it. You want to go and search for the balls you don’t have. You know who you should fuck? Yourself. And you know nothing of my passions. You are an assumption with a steady voice. You have become plausible. You sound like Brefini. He talks nonstop about how wonderful Una is and he wouldn’t change a nappy if shit was coming out her shoes. Shit smells so men like him—and you—take notice.
I am solid. Dependable. This is what you prefer to think. You pour stoicism into me. One thing I do know about us is that I got to know you well and you got to know me not at all. I am a mystery to myself—how can you claim to know me? This is not aphoristic babble—the kind you excel in uncurling at dinner parties. This is the truth. As for your honesty? Fuck your honesty. I wanted commitment.
You started listening less. Surely one needs to listen more as the mystery of two lives deepens. It’s harder to see what is already there. I can remember the month you stopped trying: the weary and contented roll away from me and the snoring. You can only be yourself through your work, you say. Such indu
lgent twaddle. I was always with you. Never for a moment did my mind stray from you—from us. What do words say, you ask. What do words say. Words are no proof. Actions are proof, you say. So you went into management for us? So you wore those suits for me? So you ate in the Orchid Szechwan every second day for me? So you went to New York for me. Proof is what I do not need, thank you. Proof is an ending. I was looking—I am looking—for a continuum.
Once I knew you; at your beginning; learning you like a petal learning sunshine. My hand on the smooth trembling of your desire. Such tenderness in the intensity of your restraint. You waited for me then. Love was in the containment of your release. Your fingers held the moment of my pleasure. You opened me to the pleasure of myself: my ankle surprised by the kisses of your lips. Finding excitement on the tips of my fingers. Afterwards, your flaccidness resting against me like a tongue. Your hand bringing me to climax. How that hand made me come. An hour later I could feel my uterus tightening and loosening.
You didn’t leave me in January. You left me a long time ago. Long before New York. You abandoned me when our minds conceived each other as a single entity. Abandoned: cruel, forlorn word. The tears won’t stop. I can’t believe I’m this weak. I never liked the way you whispered obscenities in my ear during lovemaking. I should have told you that long ago. I kept too much to myself. Mea culpa. Mea culpa no more. I’m telling people why you deserted. Is deserted too strong? Pick a word. I do think it would be inappropriate for me to be the bearer of your morality. We don’t want to shroud our lives in lies. Do we?
The darling wife, Ursula.
Remember. Every time you piss. Every time you put it in someone. Take a look at it and remember your wife.
We are in the downtown Guggenheim to see some modern art. She is educating me although she would deny such a grand claim. We are in front of an Agnes Martin, a blank canvas. The museum is empty save for us and the attendant. Holfy is talking about the artist’s life. I try to hide boredom, irritation at this pretentious canvas. I say nothing because my comments seem so ordinary, so commonplace they embarrass me. There is too much of my father in me to be taken in by this kind of art. How many bags of potatoes would that buy, he’d say. Holfy is talking about the artist’s spirituality. Her depth and commitment to statement. As I stare at the canvas, thin grey lines emerge. There is a grid system as clear as a map of Manhattan itself. Lines that are painted with the fine wet hair of a brush, the artist’s hand working up and down, across the large canvas. Hundreds of lines and each of them perfect—or almost perfect. The edge of the brush occasionally shows itself beyond the line it has formed. I begin to see the mind of Agnes Martin, the heft of years she spent in the desert.
