by Martin Roper
I’m selling the house in Dalkey as soon as it’s finished. I’m getting good at getting rid of things. Daddy will be furious. I’m going to move into town. I hate the drive in, in the morning. It’s so irritating—I just bought a fax so I could get the copy in to them faster and now Fiona wants me to work in the office. They prefer it—me typing it in directly to the system. They want to see me earning the shitty money. I’ve been paying too much in parking. Everything. I won’t bore you. Why am I telling you this? I should rip it up. Fuck it—it’s the last blast. She had the gall to say it would be good for me with you away and all that—getting in to the office and away from the too quiet house. I’m sick of her. She commissioned an article on International Women’s Day and gave it to our friend with the weeping crotch. Twofaced bitch. I’m sending you back the 8 X 10s you sent me. It was sweet of you to think of me but I really don’t need photographs to remember.
I’m sending you £55,000. That leaves me with £89,000. It seems reasonable. I had to do it all; solicitors, estate agents, the moving. Let me know if you object.
I’d love you to object.
Ursula.
I am inside Holfy, bruising myself against her creased arse and thinking about Ursula. Imagining it is Ursula and she doesn’t want me and struggles but secretly she enjoys it. That weekend we spent at her father’s home; the shy way she bent away from me; her hands gripping the mantelpiece; lifting her skirt; warm pert buttocks against me; her father’s laughter out in the garden; shuddering at her cheeks brushing the curled hairs on my stomach. Only later realising the thrill for her was doing it in her father’s bathroom and I squirm at the odd relationship she had with the man. The evening we spent in Searson’s. Ursula noticing me noticing some skirt walk past. The moment is irretrievable. Neither of us pretend it has not happened. I am not the kind of man to be tactless in that fashion and I bite my tongue for the mistake. A marriage has many endings. We said nothing. The first slip. Cracks in our lives we fall into; cracks become walls around us. I curse and curse and Holfy comes and all the time it is Ursula’s back I am looking at in anger, it’s her moaning I hear, her cunt surrounding me.
I have been lying for years—telling myself I want this kind of woman or that kind of woman. I want a woman I can fuck forever but have been too afraid to admit it. Ursula is a paragraph out of some feminist pamphlet. Holfy has changed my life. She fucks. She likes my seed leaking out of her. Soft bubbling of her cunt-farts afterwards. I was afraid of my wife’s silent standard. The standards in her eyes she could never hide. That night I Searson’s, I went and got us another drink and looked at Ursula in the Smithwick’s mirror. She was biting the end of a hangnail. I thought then (and this was before we were married) I should walk out now. The coward leaves a thousand times and never leaves. Fifty-five thousand. About a thousand a month for every month I put up with the conceited bitch.
Holfy is kneeling by the bath, rinsing the sides with the shower nozzle. The bathroom is her temple: she keeps it immaculate. It has a resolute order. The bath is half the size of an Irish bath. Everything is bigger except the baths. I stoop and push a finger inside.
—Stop it.
She is rinsing as if she is alone. I ignore her. She is always ready.
—No. Go away.
Her voice full of breathless work. She is sponging the sides, chasing a long black hair clinging like a question mark on the blue tiles. The hair resists like mercury. I lick her but she will have none of it. Her hand reaches to stay upright and she slips. I am fully in before she even curses. I hold her hips firmly and wait for her acceptance. I can feel her planning. Nothing but a breeze in from the window. Footsteps on the sidewalk. A fit of coughing.
—Rape! she screams. The footsteps pause.
—Holfy, stop.
—Rapist!
I pull out.
She looks sideways at me, her eye a slit of anger turning to amusement. I pretend to be less shocked than I am.
—Now, she says.
I don’t. Fear itself is both an attraction and repulsion. I get dressed and go out. The streets always offer solace. They are drilling on the highway. It’s as if they are trying to break into my head. All my life I’ve been trying to prove to a woman what a man is without ever knowing what a man is. I’ve wanted to show the qualities that make a man wonderful. I have to stop caring about impressions.
Eventually I comply with Holfy’s request. Part of me wanted to do it the first time she hit me but I pulled back. She explains it depends on the way it is done. We are playacting in bed, I slap her hard on her backside. There is no sound from her as if she is indifferent to my presence. I slap her again. She turns over and slaps me back, much harder than I thought she was capable of doing, harder than she would want. The insides of her thighs are wet with sweat. I kiss the redness, kiss the heavy thigh, kiss the leg, the back of the knee, search for pleasure with my fingers. Cut your nails. I go and cut them, change the music. I kiss her stomach. I’ll never get my figure back now, she says. Her breasts are cold and heavy. She likes them oiled. Gentle soft caresses. Sweet moans now. Her eyes are closing with the slow fondling. Her body is heavy with pleasure. She is lost in her own pleasure. I slap her harder. I keep hitting the same place and watch it redden. She makes no sound. She is stooped as if concentrating on something else. I hit her as hard as I can and my hand stings with the crack of skin. I am disgusted with myself, disgusted that I can hurt her this way and yet it is not enough. I can sense disappointment in her. It’s worse than the time with the straps. It’s a widening between us. She can enter my world but I cannot enter hers. She tells me to look away from her and the force of the punch knocks me off the bed.
I walk the streets, am forever walking the streets, looking at the painted advertisements, looking at the small ways the city changes. The Marlboro man has changed. The advertisement of the safe company has been there forever. A giant vault. A splendid trompe I’oeil of a safe opening. I stare at it for a long time to see how it deceives the eye. Words are useless. I can’t get away from her. Nothing comes except words like anguish and heat and contempt. Hours spent doing nothing except replaying the worst moments of my life, trying to turn them into something they were not. Looking for redemption through recreating the past so that it shines, so there are no smudges. Go further, she says. When I go back to the apartment she is not there, a card on the kitchen table with a quarter glued to it. A photograph of a little boy on a fairground rocket. Fly to the moon is scrawled on it. I won’t give up, this time I won’t give up.
* * *
We are walking down Jane Street. The two huskies with the handkerchiefs tied around their necks are lying outside the flower shop. I stoop and stroke the green-kerchiefed one and she pets the red-kerchiefed one. She holds his head and shakes it vigorously. He growls and Holfy growls back.
—It was a good party.
She nods, holding the dog’s snout in her clenched hands. He tries to retreat out of her grasp but she is holding him too firmly in her large hands. She looks at me disinterestedly, the large yellow and brown bruise still visible under her eye.
—Did you want to stay?
—Let’s go home.
—No. Let’s walk some more.
We walk down Gansevoort, down Washington and end up heading towards the Village. It’s strangely quiet, the kind of night in Greenwich Village that I thought would happen a lot but it doesn’t. Everyone is somewhere else. They are at films and plays and galleries and openings and restaurants. And, of course, they are working to pay the rent. But tonight, they are doing all of that somewhere else. There is little traffic. She buys some cigars in the Village Cigar. The first time I watched her smoking. It seemed so unpretentious in her hand. We are walking down a quiet residential street, brownstones on both sides. My life was an act for a long time, she says. She draws on her cigar. My life used to be improvisation. I look at her and wonder if she is being serious. But she goes on.
—Isn’t that the way most people ar
e? Living a life based on a kind of improvisation. An improvisation based on the fact that someone is watching the acting. Someone is watching how good we are at being ourselves when we are not ourselves at all?
—Only Catholics live like that.
—You say that because you are Catholic. If you were Jewish, it would be Jewish. The only way to live is to be selfish. Then you can give something to the world that the world might want. If you are both lucky.
We walk for a long time not talking. I am only aware we are holding hands and I am happy. We pass Cooper Union. It begins to snow, lightly, and as it falls we stop and look up at it, and because it is falling lightly, and it is windless and nighttime and lit up, the snow looks like it is falling from forever. It lands on our faces and melts gently on our warm skin and dribbles into nothingness. I squeeze her hand and tell her I feel more alive than ever I have. It takes practice, she says. We come upon a street full of stalls. Young people selling jewellery and scarves, woolly hats and sunglasses. The smell of hot food wafting from the other end of the street. We buy two hats with floppy ear covers. One red and one green. We would have to steal the huskies now. There are some people drug-dealing at the corner of tenth and the easy manner of it shocks me. We go into the Lion’s Head near Washington Square, a bar ruined by tourists like you, she says. This is the night I first have a vodka gimlet. Time slides into remembered first moments. It is one of those rare moments when we seem to forget everything, forget this insistence on living in the moment, the harshness, the impiety of sex, forget everything except the fat barman serving us.
* * *
She is sitting on the sofa reading the Paris Review. She has her feet up on my lap. She is absorbed in her reading. I pour her some fresh coffee and she uhms. A small icy part of me wonders if we can live a life together. I feel this horrible need for a commitment and try and push it away from me. I know this will be as much as it ever will be with her. Today we are together. Yesterday we were together. That is all. Nothing more than that. Tomorrow does not exist. It doesn’t exist in art so it doesn’t exist in life. She has never said that to me but I know it is who she is. It is how she lives. She lives in this moment alone. I sit in front of her and wait until she looks up at me:
—What?
—Nothing.
She goes back to the Paris Review, looks up at me again. She takes off her spectacles.
—What is it?
—Nothing.
—It wouldn’t work. You know it wouldn’t. Christ, I don’t know. It just doesn’t fit.
I get up and get dressed for the winter outside.
—We promised to be straight up. I’m being straight up.
I zip up my jacket and agree with her.
—Being straight up is what we said we would always do.
—Do you really want—
—O please shut up.
* * *
The streets are busy with shoppers. Happy Holidays. I long for Ireland where no one will be offended if you say Happy Christmas. I’m tired of it all. For so long I thought Holfy was attached to me. That she had all these elaborate defences. In the grocery store I hear a camera click. Some promotional people are taking photographs. I wander around the store and have no idea what it is I have come for. The sound of the camera shutter is all I hear. I stare at the shelves in the hope that I’ll see what it is I want. I feel as if I am a shoplifter and try to force purpose into my bearing. But in the end I give into the clicking camera. I see Holfy setting up the shoot we did last week and I am trying not to look so impressed. She is eating biscuits and smoking and trying not to drink coffee. We are on the roof. She tells me that professional photography is about knowing that the accident will always happen if you take enough shots. It’s about knowing that the best shots have only a little to do with skill and a lot to do with patience and spontaneity. Look at Cecil Beaton. The most boring photographer in the world. How can I help you? a voice asks. I am smiling at a rack of Italian wine and the shop assistant asks me again how he can help me. I look at him and can’t help but stare at an inflamed boil over his lip. The camera is still clicking. I tell him I’m fine and when he goes back to the counter I take the first bottle I see under eight dollars. Nice region, he says. I nod and look at his eyes and then at his hand offering me the change. The photographer is putting in a new roll of film. I want to tell him not to waste too much film on the shots. There is no spontaneity in an unopened wine bottle. She is right what she says about the self.
The man behind the counter doesn’t give me a bag. Can I have a bag, I say. What? he says. A bag. Can I have a sack? Sure, he says. I feel I lose more of myself with the addition of each American word: sack, trash, mail, sidewalk, store, highway. I am becoming America with these words. Words are all I am. I know this because I am in silence now. I have been in silence for all this time and I have not existed. We exist only when we speak. The geraniums are beginning to fade. Some of the leaves have turned a translucent beige and crack between my fingers. The healthy leaves give off their pungent smell. Geraniums smell of hopeful summers and suddenly I know myself as well as I know the smell of these flowers. I got a package from Medbh today. A six-pack of Club milks. I open one with my tea. Peel off the yellow wrapper. Then the foil. The remembered taste of the chocolate. It begins to rain hard and I feel overcome with sadness for a lost Dublin. It rains hard all day and starts to thunder. Lightning flashes whitely in the sky and I can no longer fool myself into thinking I am home. But Dublin is not home. How stupid of me to slip. I make more tea and pick up the letter again.
Inside the darkroom. The brutish honesty of the words. When I describe something inaccurately the words sit there, leaden and smug. Suddenly I am no longer pitying Ursula. Ever since we ended I thought of her as the vulnerable one. Such a lack of insight is impressive. The wind has taken up, and the leaves on the trees fight with it. I bite into another Club milk. I chew it tastelessly. I wipe some crumbs from my lips and am surprised by tears on my face. I wipe them off as if they belong to someone else. My eyes burn. I say my mother’s name aloud and I remember being in bed with her and holding her and she was telling me it was alright. There was no bogeyman going to get me. She would take care of me, she would. I was shaking and snivelling and she took the edge of the sheet and said blow and I blew my nose in the sheet and she said Lord Jesus that nose of yours is full of yuckies and I looked up at her and she made a disgusted face and I burst out laughing and she said I’m not washing that sheet because it will only attack me, and I am lost in her eyes. There is no safeness anymore. There’s just myself and the long memory of my mistakes. But I don’t want to end up like the ones who do not speak. The ones who sit and say nothing and pretend to be nice but are operating. Always gathering information and never giving. I don’t want a dry and cynical life.
* * *
I leave a wad of writing by Holfy’s bed with a note.
Please read. Be honest.
* * *
She writes a note on the bathroom mirror:
Like there is an alternative to honesty pour moi?
I have what I think is a common affliction: I want to be liked. It makes for both bad writing and uncomfortable living. I writhe inside myself. I don’t always behave in a nice fashion. I am sometimes arrogant, but this, more often than not, is because I am reacting against the tendency to be nice. My own company puts me on edge. When I come home, and close the door behind me and sit in the friendless silence I am afraid of what feels like the presence of God. I have vague memories of myself as a child playing on the road. I am alone, building a dam in the gutter to stop the rainwater from running into the shore. I remember my mother calling me for my tea and not wanting to go because my game was too exciting to leave.
One of the traits trailing behind courteousness is a pretence of stupidity. I think it is particularly true of my class. To nod and affect ignorance. To hide intelligence like stolen goods, as if thought is segmented by class. The brain runs and runs and runs.
&
nbsp; Words leave me. They grow tired of banging around in my head, arriving at no sense. There was a time when I knew exactly what I thought but those thoughts no longer belong to me, they belong to a past that no longer exists. For a long time I had the instinct of a streetwise child but I have lost that common sense. I have pretended to be clever. I made the mistake of wanting to seem intelligent to some unknown reader. A reader who read so much and who understood so much that unless I was superb, would raise an eyebrow in weary disappointment.
What I have discovered is that I am lost. I am looking at myself in utter bewilderment. Whatever it is, it is unfathomable to believe in the love of God. How can a child understand God? God waited, as God always waits.
You have to go deeper. What you say to me in the quietness of the night when we can’t sleep. Your voice, that’s the voice of the writing—this is nonsense. This I you write about. Who is in your sentences. Who are you trying to please? Be as selfish as a cat. That’s the kind of writer you are, or, I should be more accurate, it’s the kind of writer you could be. Grip me by the throat and hold me until my face reddens. Otherwise you lose me. If you lose me I will never pick it up again. Do anything in my company but never bore me.
I drop the wad of paper on the bedside table. It has only taken her seven pages. I want to marry Holfy. I write in her darkroom. It’s the only place I can forget I’m living in Manhattan. Botero sits under the lamp, saliva dripping from his jowls. Holfy has asked me to write a story cutting into the weave of love and sex but nothing is happening. I want to go and make more tea but it is too early. I look at the rest of her note.
Forget about understanding death. My husband. Your sister. Your father. We do not have death in common. We have grief and life. Death lives on its own. Forget your sister. Every time I touch you I know Robert approves and if he did not I would not care. There is nothing to learn about death except that it is not living. Stop looking for meaning. Go back to the writing. When you know what’s going to happen in the next sentence stop. Stop. If the writing is not a mystery to you, you are writing dross. Make up your mind whether you want to write or type. Put Kahlo into the novel and call her Zoe. People need symbols. Put everything in it that people want and then cut the head off the expectation. Break the rhythm. Annoy. Make sure no one ever likes you. Never be accused of writing a smooth sentence. Smoothness is a soporific. Write about our love with unflinching honesty. Yes, I know you have little respect for honesty that doesn’t flinch. Perhaps you know this already but you don’t know what it feels like. You don’t know the meaning of the pleasure in pain. You don’t understand the joy of bruises. Bruises frightened you in the beginning. Sadomasochism is the most brutal acknowledgement that you are alive and that you can humble yourself before God. If ever you go as far as I want you to go with the writing, you will learn that God is sitting on the parapet in Gansevoort Street, waiting for your screams. And She is smiling.
