by Martin Roper
—Tell me when.
I look at her, at the world she is entering. She hits me again. My eye closes in pain. Her wetness running down my stomach, turning cold. She hits with both hands now as if swatting flies. The pain seeps into the back of my closed eyes. I am listening to her breathing, to her squelching pleasure. She is holding my ears and kissing my mouth, kissing my mouth and licking my lips, my nose, my eyelids. She licks my ears and says something. She repeats words in what must be Icelandic. She punches me in the face and any sense of the erotic vanishes. In English she tells me to open my mouth. She clears her throat, and spits into my mouth. She thrusts harder and harder until my pelvis bone hurts. She comes and comes, rubbing into me slowly until at last she spreads her heavy body on me and is calm. I am hard, unspent. But she is lost in herself and my excitement wanes. Powerlessness has its own passion, its own relief.
* * *
We sleep through the day and fuck and eat and sleep and fuck. Someone rings the doorbell persistently in the early afternoon but goes away. We hear car doors slam throughout the day, laughter from the lunch tables outside Florent. We settle into our own silence. I want to ask her why yellow gloves? If the game goes both ways, if I should hurt her? She is lying on her stomach, reading. I rub her back, move down to her buttocks. She spreads. I wet a finger in my mouth and find her anus. Violation, more than anything, arouses Holfy. I go in behind her. Lovelylovelylovelylovely.
We are whispering to each other in the groggy morning. She is lying on top of me, beached. I ask her is there any advice she remembers her father gave her to carry through life.
—O, yes. Say thank you. My father works for the United States government. He is very polite. Very civilised. She looks at me to check if I am following. I amn’t.
—He was on the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer’s favourite scientist—besides himself. The telephone rings. We lift our heads to see the time. It’s after five in the morning. I think it might be my father calling. I always think an early call is him phoning to give bad news. She answers as if she’s been awake hours. It’s the first conscious realisation I have of disliking something in her: this need to always appear switched on.
—Hi Jay.
Kleinmeyer. An art dealer she had a brief affair with—he was buying some of her husband’s paintings. I met him once at an art dealer’s house on Claremont Avenue. She was so at ease there, drifting between the big money, pointing out Grant’s Tomb across Riverside Drive. It was more an art gallery than a home. She’s loquacious with him. She rolls away from the phone smelling of his power. How could she touch such a pig of a man. Belly vast against his designer shirt. It disgusts me that she let this fatso inside her body. She has told me she would do anything for a man who could do something unexpected. You men are all so fucking predictable.
—He must have had to come in behind you.
She looks at me, baffled, her phone smile fading.
—You know, with that belly of his in the way.
She grimaces. I get up and shower, soaping myself with the soap she uses. The plastic blow-up duck, Newt, nudging my legs. Her slender legs when she showers. One of her hairs on the soap.
I go to Florent for coffee. Reggie is serving. The face of Greta Garbo and the style of Madonna. I have never felt fully at ease with Reggie; I had an erection the first time I saw him dressed as Edith Piaf. Then I learned she was a he.
—Tiff?
He pours me a coffee and pushes the cup forward like a delicate floral arrangement.
—She’s a motherfucker.
—Biscotti?
I nod. Reggie is wearing a silver silk bra with a matching silver miniskirt. His skin is flawless.
—I’d like to get her and—
—Now now, I’m easily shocked Mick. Do let me know when you discover your true orientation. I adore leprechauns.
He blows a kiss and totters off. A black is rooting through a Dumpster across the street. I am as sick of New York as much as I am sick of her. Her eagerness. All that shit about the sixties. Anything is possible. Anything. She comes in. Waves Reggie away. She sits down heavily beside me, pulls the coffee over by its saucer, twirls it, and sips.
—I don’t sleep with him anymore. But I need the business. I have to be smooth with him. He gets off on it. He could give the Maxim’s jobs to anyone.
—You do well enough.
—It’s not a money thing. I want to make it with the photography. Really make it.
—And you need him?
—Him? Everyone.
She’s so full of contradictions. I don’t know where to start.
Andrew Raposa, indignant writer for The Nation, comes in and joins us. I beam at my escape, and stand up.
—Here, Andrew. I’ve been keeping it warm.
—You going so soon?
—No he’s not. We’re having a conversation here Andy, okay?
Andrew holds his hands up and walks backwards away from us. I smile awkwardly at him and he waves an understanding hand. She’ll stay and talk with him about this, and I feel myself close a little more.
* * *
She rolls over to my side. Her touch is an apology. I hate her. I turn and kiss her. I smile the smile she likes. We kiss. I caress her between her legs until she moans. I watch her pleasure.
—Turn over.
—Not yet.
Her eyes are closed.
—Turn over.
She gets up and turns. I go in fast and she takes in a breath, steadies herself. I plough as hard as I can into her. My anger bangs against her for all its worth. I am so angry I can’t come. I grip the fat on the sides of her buttocks and keep going, digging my nails into her. The sweat rolls off me and I begin to lose my breath. I think of hitting her hard and that does it—I come—and I pull out of her and sit panting on the bed. She gets up and lights a cigarette.
—Hey, that’s the first time we came together.
I wipe the sweat out of my eyes and give her the finger. No matter how bad it is with her, it is always intoxicating. Such pleasure in taking Holfy without ceremony. Once, just after she’s gone to the toilet. No time to wipe herself. That is the sin. To go further than desire.
She gets Photoworld, Good Gardener, Roof Gardens, J. Crew, Caring, Victoria’s Secret (not for the clothes, she says), Land’s End, L.L. Bean, Tweeds. A dozen catalogues, at least. As many magazines arrive for Robert Dead Husband. Alumni magazine from NYU, Daedalus Books catalogue, Film World, marketing blurb from Lincoln Center. The Time Machine Company catalog. Palladium Numismatics. Pieces of his life.
A Mr. Kutzko telephones looking for RDH:
—He’s not here. He’s dead.
—I’m dreadfully sorry, says Mr. Kutzko.
—You sound it.
—Excuse me?
—You need to update your listings. He died three years ago.
—Is Mrs. Tansey available?
I hang up on his Armani voice. New York never stops selling. Even the New York Observer comes with his name on it. Robert is everywhere. I share Holfy with a dead man.
* * *
In summer she does her tai chi on the roof. She started it with Robert the week before he died. Occasionally I look up from the worktop and stare out the window and there she is: arms outstretched, knees bent, the light fabric of her culottes flapping. She has the grace of a swan. When she comes in, I wash the roof tar off her feet with a basin of warm water and rub peppermint lotion into her toes. Bronzed and papery her feet are with age. I rub tiger balm on the pain in her lower back. She is the centre of my happiness.
She drinks vodka gimlets. Any drink that requires a mixer is a good drink in her eyes. I ask her to make me a manhattan. You want to drink New York, she says, without looking up from her negatives. She sits in her Bloomingdale’s underwear most evenings, when she wears underwear. She wears a black bra and no knickers and manages to look both dressed and coordinated. She understands the rippling secrets of fashion. I like the smell of her sweat, her juice, enjoy waiting for Holfy
to do her face in the evening. The transformations. Clothes reveal her mood. Surface is everything, she says one night. We are on the roof garden at the Met, watching the orange sun glide between buildings. Surface is everything. One of those irritating catchphrases that she is so good at pluming in front of me. Indeed, I say, watching the sun drop out of sight. She picks up my tone of voice and looks at me like I am a stranger. The distance of years seeping between us. I realise I don’t know her at all. All the talk we share, all the books, the music, is irrelevant in the face of this.
* * *
I go into the bathroom, look at myself in the mirror and feel far from home. I sit down on the edge of the bath and stare at the prints on the wall. Lichtenstein and Haring. I never really liked them. I am being unfair to her. She had these a long time, before they were known. There is other art crammed on the wall, most of the artists unknown. I am looking for a reason to dislike her. As if to taunt me I smell her cigarette smoke. She smoked Marlboro when she can’t get Gitanes, smokes with the kind of urbane sophistication that makes me want to start smoking again. I am trying to insert myself into life as if it were some intricate board game.
She comes into the bathroom and stands in front of me. She reaches down and scratches my head and I press the side of my face to her warm stomach. We stroke each other. We kiss and she sits on the edge of the sink. It is not making love. It is not fucking either. Afterwards I ask her what it is and she says she doesn’t know what it is but whatever it is it is not ineffable. She asks me never to use the word ineffable and she asks me to stop looking for truth. Approximate, she says.
* * *
Days pass, and then weeks pass and we don’t talk about the future. Her friends say nothing. People are happy that we are happy. And people—at least the people we know—don’t really want to know about my life in Ireland. This is New York City and we live in the present and the edgy excitement of what we might do next weekend is as far as we take ourselves. Approximate. This is all we ever do. There are no facts. Buildings are facts. Trees are facts. But trees and buildings fall and disappear as quickly as love between people disappears.
* * *
I am tying Holfy by the wrists and feet to the window gate with the yoga straps. I stand there looking at her moist haunches. The basin between her feet. She is wearing the silver shoes. The skin slack on the underside of her buttocks. Memories chink in my head like glass bottles. Ursula looking at me in disgust. I look at the contraption in my hands and I can’t do it. The pause tells her.
—Don’t worry about it. It’s who you are. Who I am. You’ve discovered a boundary in your life. Hooray. Untie me you scoundrel and let’s go do a New York thing.
It doesn’t deflate the humiliation. I lovehate her for making little of the failure. We go and do the NYT as she calls it and eat Merluza a La Vasca at Café San Martin. We have a bottle of Albarîno. She has strawberries and cream. I eat the natillas. She plucks the ends off the strawberries and flicks them into the ashtray.
—You see, there’s the hull and here’s the strawberry disappearing into my greedy mouth.
—Fuck off.
—O, dear, who knew?
She reminds me about the day in Central Park when we hired a boat and fucked on the secluded rock. Then she rowed off and abandoned me. We laugh at the memory but the evening is gone from us. Another wall discovered. Another loss. Leaves suddenly falling.
* * *
The message stuck on the kitchen table: Your father is sick. Go home. Take a taxi for once in your life. Flight at 7. Seats available. If you’re home by 4 you might make it to airport. Sorry. I’ll wait. Will always wait.
Botero jumps on hind legs looking for biscuits. I call Muriel but there’s no answer. The Aidan but no answer there. I scribble on Holfy’s note that I’m going and will call her from the airport. I pick up one of her cameras. I regret not having a photograph of Ruth in her last days. Might as well get one of him. He better be dying.
There’s a long queue to the metal detector. A woman is pleading with security about her pram.
—The pram has to go through.
—But they’re asleep.
—You’ll have to take them out. The pram goes through, Mam.
It’s fun to fly; to watch other people’s distress.
There is a phone in the seat of the airplane. I pull it out and look at it but it needs a credit card to operate. Fumbling, I try and to get it back in the slot. The man next to me taps me and asks if I want to use it, if it’s a short call. Three words. My credit card can spring for three words, he says. I’ll wait, too, I say to her answering machine. Wonder how much it costs to whisper three words into an answering machine flying over the Atlantic Ocean?
Father
The flight is a blank. I wait at the baggage carousel for fifteen minutes before I remember I haven’t brought any luggage.
I had forgotten rain. It is early morning yet the Dublin sky is so dark it might be a winter afternoon. Mater Hospital, I say to the taxi man with as little drama as I can manage. Ah, nothing serious? says he. Hope so, says I, sitting back and staring out the window. In the rearview mirror I see his mouth laughing the laugh of the ignoramus. The city is miserable with the fat cries of seagulls. I thought the familiarity would excite me. I had told myself I loathed going back but it isn’t true, I’m thrilled, thrilled even by the chattering taxi man who pierces me with asinine questions. I tell him I keep up with news. They have it all on computer now, I say, in the hope of heading off the lecture. He goes on and on, filling the car with a changed Dublin. Too late for me now it is, all this boom. I’m fiftyeight. It’s fellahs your age will be making it. He manages to make me a stranger in my hometown. The Dublin epidemic: to let the newly returned know they do not know their city. I have always loved this city. People talk. They are articulate and funny and hardy and hopeless at confronting reality and I like them. As we draw nearer to the city centre, depression pools about me. Familiar sights clamour, invading the husk of myself. An advertisement for Smithwick’s beer. My throat is dry from travel. The greenness of Irish buses. An advertisement introducing a fast route from Dublin to New York. It must be great over there, he says. Once, coming home from her studio, I told Holfy that the best thing about New Jersey was the view of Manhattan. Her laughter; her womanly laughter possesses me. I look at my watch. I would have breakfast in Bewley’s, get a taxi back to the airport, buy a ticket there and be in Greenwich Village by five. I could buy some cakes in that patisserie on Bleecker Street. I imagine her driving through the Holland Tunnel with the windows rolled up tightly. I could be waiting for her to push backwards through the door, arms laden with work. I could be sitting there, waiting for her to set down her camera equipment and lift her head with slow surprise when she hears me humming. Trouble is, he says, the taxis over there is like cages. You have to be fenced in.
* * *
In his hospital deathbed, Daddy tells me I was such a lovely little boy. Full of zest, he says, smiling. He is smiling into the past at the ten-year-old boy who idolised him. Who ran to get another bucket of hot water. Who squeezed the water out of the dirty rag into the gutter. The boy who loved working. The boy who didn’t want to go home at the end of a long summer day when other boys were enjoying the freedom of their holidays, my freedom being a man like Daddy.
—Like a young gazelle, he says.
—I was.
Full of immense fondness for his lost son. He smiles as if that boy will emerge out of the disappointment standing before him. Daddy, I want to say, I didn’t want to go home after the day’s work because I knew there’d be a fight. You’d pick a fight with Ruth. They took it in turns. I worked hard with you Daddy because I didn’t want to go home to our screaming life. You never knew anything, Daddy. You are a stupid and selfish bastard and you don’t deserve me at your side. I look into his bleary eyes and am moved to a lie.
—Those were the days.
—You’re right, there. No truer word spoken. Zest. You we
re full of zest. Is Canning still annoying you?
—Not any more. I don’t work at the spraying now. I’m in New York now.
—A kick in the chestnuts is the only answer for cornerboys like him. I grew up with his sort. They put a shirt and tie on and think they’re different. Where did you say?
—In New York.
—Aren’t you the big shot. You won’t reck us now. You’re your own man now with your own face.
I nod at him, wanting to get out but his eyes lock on me, he’s not done, knows these last days are his.
—Don’t remember do you, what you said after your mother left?
I should have left before the drugs mixed with nostalgia started working on him. I shake my head for him.
—One night you were crying in your bed and I came over to you and you asked me who would you look like now that she was gone. Everyone always said you were the spit out of her eye and you were worried you wouldn’t look like anyone now that she was gone. And I told you you’d look like yourself and that every day you’d look more and more like yourself. You used to ask me, Do I look like me today? And I’d say you look very much like you. There’s a lot you forget about yourself that your old Da remembers, don’t forget that. We’re not all gobshites just because we don’t have the secondary school education. If you ever see her, your mother, tell her there’s no hard feelings.
—None from you maybe. Maybe when I’m kicking the bucket I’ll feel the same. Not now though.
I phone Ursula and listen to the beeps on her machine. Busy girl. I go for a drink, call her again, go back to the Mater, he is sleeping. In the morning he will tell me he hasn’t slept a wink. I call her again. Still the machine, even more beeps. I walk down Eccles Street and stand at the corner thinking about what to do. Toetapping on the corner. What to do to do to do. Muriel has said I can stay with her. She made no mention of Ursula but the invitation says it all. I cross the road to get a bus into town. The 16 passes, going the other way. I recognise the driver from the years getting the bus out to Clastronix and wave. Only people I know anymore are strangers. I stare across at Birmingham’s where we often went for a drink when we lived over Youkstetter’s. She would meet me there after I came out from visiting Ruth. Should call it The Waiting Room. Or The Morgue. Before and after. No bus comes. Impulsively I wave down a taxi and ask him to go to the house in Dalkey.
