Gone

by Martin Roper

  * * *

  The end of marriage was a quiet, tree-lined street, waiting for spring. Trees are courageous without leaves. We were going about our lives talking intensely about everything except the end of it all. And then one night I say it as we are driving home.

  We are stopped at a light in Blackrock, talking about her article. I look up at the large Santa Claus over the shopping centre and say I love you and you love me but it’s over and I don’t want it to be so but it is the truth and the light turns green and she says yes it is true and we drive home. It was tiny lies that lodged between us. Bindweed tightening around a tree. I am drinking a bottle of vodka a day now.

  * * *

  Winter comes bitterly. I go to the local flower shop to buy a potted green plant to celebrate. When the florist hears my Irish accents she perks up.

  —It closes up at night, says the woman, joining her hands.

  She smiles at my disbelief.

  —It’s a prayer plant. That’s its name.

  Then she mentions the Irish wedding and I make the mistake of feigning interest. When she invites me she sees my reluctance.

  —I divorced two years ago. Being a florist makes a girl realistic. I’ve sold a lot of wedding bouquets in those two years and I’m sure glad none of them were mine. Name’s Moira.

  She sticks her hand out just as a hefty woman comes into the shop, wide with a sweaty smile.

  —Morning, Justine.

  —I’ll phone you Moira the Realist.

  I take her business card off the counter. Justine smiles at me, oozing suspicion.

  —Whatever.

  —Thanks for the prayer plant.

  —You betcha.

  She is already chatting with Obesity.

  * * *

  There’s an oil spill on the highway and the traffic is backed up for fifteen miles. We sit there, stuck in her pickup. Elijah is skating around in the back, barking. We are already too late for the church so we go straight to the hotel. White crooked letters on a blackboard spell O’Hara and Flaherty reception. Queuing at the buffet, a man nudges in front of me. I am shocked by his rudeness in this country where staying in line is a commandment. I turn, see he is a priest and am about to say something when he smiles at me and says in a thick Irish accent:

  —Grand spread, isn’t it? And as grand a couple as ever I’ve married.

  —You must be starving with the hunger.

  He claps me on the shoulder, winks, the secret knowingness of the fickle Irish in America, playing it up for all its worth.

  —Begob, he says, another Irishman. Nothing like a wedding Mass to put a hunger on you.

  He nods and spoons meat onto his plate and looks at me again, long smile.

  —Are you long over?

  —Long enough.

  —What’s the news from home?

  How he says the word home. The faded rosiness of a place that no longer exists. I imagine that he is ten, perhaps fifteen years out of Ireland. Frank Patterson Irish leg-opener voice. Begob and musha and arra how are you.

  —Brutal.

  —But the North, he says, isn’t that on the mend?

  —Yes, the church are staying out of it. It helps.

  —You’re an awful man.

  Impossible to insult him. He claps me on the shoulder again.

  —Is there no roast beef here at all? he asks the server on the other side of the steaming silver pans. He’s wearing a grey wig with a hairline at the back that could have been cut with a garden shears.

  We go to the Ace of Spades out by the lake, a lake made to enhance the nightclub’s appeal. Hardly needed. A lot, the size of a football pitch, is full of cars. We park and cut through the maze, pass a car shaking gently and pretend not to see it. The club is huge—as big as the Pontoon Ballroom my father painted in Mayo. A couple are dancing on the floor with theatrical precision. Euphoria in the middle of blue-collar nowhereness. The dancer’s hand slides up and down her body in tortured ecstasy. She runs her hands between her nyloned thighs.

  —Choreographed sex.

  —Know them?

  Moira wrinkles her nose. The couple swirl, the woman mouthing the words of the song. Her mouth is losing its passion and her eyes close. I stop smiling at their spectacle. She is dancing with the man she had hoped her husband might be, the man she dreamed she married. I feel pity for his Travolta-like grimaces. A crowd comes in, noisy with their own excitement. The floor begins to swallow up the couple. I have no idea what I am doing here with this flower woman.

  —Dance? You Irish still dance?

  —Sure.

  It’s all seventies music, Abba and the like. A slow set comes on. The skin on her palms is rough like a kitchen scourer. We are uncomfortable so close to each other, smile, go and get a drink at the bar. She tells me she needs some work done on the apartment she’s bought. It went for a dime. She asks if I know of a handyman. No, but I know the song. Moira breeds rabbits.

  * * *

  Surface is everything. I watch the sky. A hawk waits in the breeze. His wings are still, like a kite. Light plays with the leaves of the tree. He drops like a stone and just as quickly takes off with a prone creature in his claws. The land is exhausted here. Dust rises for miles. Years wasted. Regret is useless but it snaps at my ankle like a dog afraid of itself. A hundred years from now, what difference any of it. I go in and make tea, such as it can be, in this city of poisoned water. It takes a long time to see.

  * * *

  Moira and I are talking in bed, she’s listening to me talking and I’m happy to be talking even if it’s the worn-out past. It’s someone listening.

  I stopped saying Da at school. The boys used to go Daaaa and call me Sheepshite. Then they called me Shovelhead because of the shape of my face. I stopped lots of things in school. I stopped talking in school. I stopped talking and I listened and waited for it to be over. It would get better when I got into secondary school. It got worse. I was twelve years old. I told Daddy I was leaving after the intermediate exams. He told me I was not leaving until after my leaving certificate exams and that was all there was to it. I was told I was going to get a good job. I waited. For five years I sat in class trying not to look at the clock. For five years the clock crawled to five minutes to four and the bell rang and I waited for the teacher to tell me it was alright to pack my schoolbag. And one day I was seventeen and childhood was over and my father said now go out and get a job and I did—I went to work. I was seeing Ursula. I was a man. I went and sprayed televisions in Clastronix. That was the good job. I began to fall in love with paint. I began to watch closely. I watched the arc of paint fanning across the sheets of metal. I watched the others and tried to see who had talent and who didn’t. Gerry had it. Slowly, I began to realise the mistakes I made were not simply in the wrist. Mistakes came out of the crook of the elbow, and up through the souls of the feet, the bend of the knee, the blink of the eye. Mistakes came out of the whole body. Slowly, I understood my eye had little to do with it. Paint shot out of the gun too quickly for the eye to right wrongs. I began to relax more, and as the weeks passed, the muscle in my arm strengthened, my wrist ached less at the end of the day and my neck was not as sore when I woke in the dark winter mornings. Now, when I painted, I started to close my eyes, and I could feel the paint hit the sheet of dull plastic. I began to listen to the hiss of paint as it flew across the sheet, began to follow the rhythm of paint. I would fall into a trance and then, one morning, I heard the paint sing, paint delighting in its own beauty. When I had decided that I had it mastered completely, when I believed I could paint without concentration, I examined my work, and to my horror, discovered it flawed. Paint could never be mastered.

  —You make factory work sound real poetic.

  —Everything is poetry to the young idealist.

  Every morning, as I changed into my work clothes and put on my gloves and mask, I would listen in a stupor to the crude talk on the floor. I pretended not to be interested. I probably even convinced my
self that I was not listening, but I was rapt. Beyond the facade of silence and disgust, I loved it all. I discovered the beauty of paint. We all went out every night and got drunk and we all hated the work and we all loved being grown-up. No one called me Shovelhead anymore.

  I was in love with Ursula. We married and I wanted a better job to show her I was better than anything she thought I was. We moved out of Dorset Street and into the place in Harcourt Street. We had parties in there all the time. I didn’t invite the people from the factory, not even Gerry. People from the Tribune came and got drunk. And they all tore strips off whoever the government was and were ferocious about the way the underprivileged were treated. It was the first time I heard people using the word underprivileged who weren’t talking on the radio or the television. I loved those parties. Mixing with the best of them. Loved hearing them talk shit about the working class, a class they themselves despised outside of the words coming out of their well-fed mouths. The most disconcerting moment about moving up the class ladder is realising your people are a pawn. I was of the working class unlike these masticating morons who were for it. I stop talking, turn to Moira and see she is asleep.

  Winter passes slowly, then without much of a spring, summer erupts. I am painting the hall door a glistening black. NPR has a day dedicated to war: a debate about gun control. The usual banter. The sun crackles on the paintbrush. Moira drives by and stops and yells out the window that black’s a bad colour, attracts the heat, then drives off, laughing. The door shines with the importance of its new coat. I make a vodka gimlet and sit and admire it. The pain dries in minutes. Ireland is mentioned on the radio. I reach down and turn it up. Peace: now what? says an American voice, serious as granite. A look at a people emerging from decades of hate. Voices speak. Lap over each other. Irish voices. Snippets of opinions. Tired, angry words pop like surprised bubbles. I make another drink and sit back, happy to hate the autistic pit of the North. The sun is beginning to drop, still brash with heat. Ireland. Fuck them, let them kill each other.

  I open my eyes to Ursula’s voice ringing in my ears. Sweat running down my spectacles. Her voice is speaking to me. I look around, terrified. Her voice is sharp as sunshine.

  —I don’t believe that. It’s complete nonsense, she says.

  I close my eyes and press my fingers against my lids.

  —I don’t believe that was ever true about women. I don’t believe you are taking anything seriously in asking that question—

  —But surely the very concept of beauty has been with us since the beginning of time?

  Dead air.

  —Has it not?

  I stare at the radio, waiting for her answer.

  —Not as long as stupidity, she says.

  I fell in love with you many times, Ursula. The seductiveness of that voice. I laugh out loud at the fight in you.

  * * *

  I go into the city to buy some Christmas presents. Disgusted as I am by it, nostalgia gnaws at me. I buy the Tribune to ease the homesickness. It’s full of colour advertisements and friendly, fluffy articles. Large photographs of skinny models. I trudge through the heavy snow-laden streets and find a seat by the window in the Tobacco Bowl. I read an article about the decline of the microwave; one about Northern Ireland; I read what’s on television—Ireland shrunk into the TV page. A boxed review of a programme about abortion; the reviewer’s initials in the bottom corner: UF. I look up from the newspaper and East Washington Street shocks me with its presence; two snow ploughs scooping up hills of snow like ducks dredging through mucky puddles for food. People pass, hidden in clothes to fight the freezing weather. We can acclimatise to anything. I see Ursula’s face, flushed with the cold, in front of me, feel her slide next to me in the booth and hug my arm with her being. The smell of her perfume. There is no ending, she goes on forever. Reading her, even such a frugal snippet, is like being inside her. I can see her sitting at the kitchen table with the electric fire on, scribbling agitated notes. To know her so well and to have wasted it all. I hate all the days and nights I gave her. Hate all the fights we had trying to resolve everything. Hate all the times I apologised to her. Hate that I loved her once more dearly than anything or anyone in this world and that time is past.

  Months pass. I walk for hours on the dirt roads that separate the cornfields. My mother’s breath on my face. The smell of lager off her, the excitement at the anticipation of her coming into me at night, kissing me and frightening me with her large eyes. A horse neighing somewhere. A dog barks back at it and then I see the house. It is in bad repair; the kind of house one expects an outlaw to be holing up in, waiting for the final showdown. There are three unkempt horses; one of them, the white one, large with foal. It takes me a long while to realise she is looking at me. Her stillness unnerves me. She is holding a paintbrush in her hand and she looks as if she is about to fire it like a knife thrower in a circus. I clear my throat. I heard your horses. My voice floats across the back of the grey pony. The fear in the air is mine; she is unafraid. I want her to know that I am friendly but the notion of my friendliness is probably absurd to her. I look around, expecting to see Holfy hiding somewhere. It’s too perfect: a woman painting in the middle of a cornfield. It must be a joke. She has the same build as Holfy and she is about sixty feet from me. I cough in warning as I approach her. She is older than she seemed from afar, strength in her eyes: a clarity. When she looks at me I can see she is not simply looking at me, she is looking at what I am. A lit cigarette between her fingers seems forgotten. The dog by her side watches me with the same mute lack of interest. She lifts her hand indifferently and takes a drag out of it. It is of no account to her who I am. She absorbs the air around me. Her eyes are unnervingly calm. Something else, too, but I can only sense it. The light perhaps. The sky falling off into blueness behind the shack. Old attachments. They pull inside and push me towards her. I am an abstraction to her. A shade falling beside a patch of sunlight; a splash of colour in her painting. My mother’s face on those drunken Saturday nights. The smell off her breath when she kissed me goodnight. The way she is holding the paintbrush. As if it is part of her. The ease she has with it as if the paint is coming out of her and not the brush. The rigid ease of her hand at work. The longer I look at her the more insane she appears. An old woman living here, alone, unafraid. As if to correct me I hear a clang, like the carriage of a train shouldering itself into silence. A youth is straightening a gas cylinder against the side of the house. He is blond, strong, unmistakably American. He runs a chain through the ugly torpedo shapes and locks them without once looking over. I lift my hand and start a wave. She watches me, waiting for me to go. I start off down the road, whistling. His appearance highlights her foreignness. Something about her is un-American. She is dark, Hispanic perhaps. The air is charged with my strained nonchalance. He is probably still not looking at me. He is no more than fifteen years old and yet there is a rude violence about his coolness. Of course she could not get by utterly alone; the heating would have to be brought in for her.

  * * *

  I am a mile or so from the house. I wonder about passing it today. She might shoot this time. America is trigger happy, and here in the Midwest the lock and load neurosis roars though silent fields, the perceptible sound of gunfire itself. I walk on; stop. I don’t want her to know I am curious. I am no threat, too slight to be a danger, even the kid could take me on. She is feeding the horses. She puts her bucket down and walks to the gate.

  —What do you want?

  Her question is so direct, the flatness of a worn stone on a beach. Stillness at the centre of her stare. Ruth skimming stones, three bounces, four bounces. Once, she skimmed eleven bounces. Our world record. Sacredness is unaware of itself. The woman turns away from me. She is not impatient for an answer, she is uninterested.

  —I don’t want anything.

  My voice is unexpectedly indignant. It shivers in the cold air. She pauses with her back still to me; nods her head as if that is explanation enough, wa
lks slowly back to the munching horses. To say hello, I shout across the field. My voice waivers between friendliness and irritation. But already she is absorbed in her work. I think about stepping over the low rusted fence. Confronting her. But she has done nothing except ignore a busybody. I walk for about an hour, feel their presence behind me but know it’s my imagination. I turn back.

  As I pass her house I think of some ruse for approaching the door, a question of some sort if the boy is in. But there is a blind look to the house that warns me off. I meet her a mile down the road. She is walking with the dog. She beckons for me to follow her.

  * * *

  —I wanted a home here. I like the bleakness. It leaves the mind open. This place was for sale. No one wanted to buy it. Like your place. The farmer shot his wife and his daughter-in-law in the kitchen.

  —This is the Baird farm? I thought it was on the other side of the highway.

  —This is it. They were chopping potatoes: the wife’s belly and the bones from her back hit the wall. I hang Frida Kahlo there. Big joke. No one wants to buy a place where death is. They left the pig houses, they left everything. The murdered farm, I call this place. People say it’s morbid. They spend their lives dead and they say morbid.

  The door opens from the only other room. The boy comes out, the corner of a wardrobe visible behind him. She sees my mind working. She smiles at the shock I’m trying to hide.

  —Why did he kill them?

  —Ronald Reagan. The banks shut farms.

  It was for sale that long?

  —People are afraid.

  —Of what?

  —Who needs a what? My name is Toscana.

  * * *

  I lie in bed thinking of the old woman lying in her bed. The boy must have parents. The noise of the fan keeps me awake so I get up and go into the kitchen. I pick up a plum and squeeze it for freshness. Juice breaks through the skin. Ursula would write a sensuous poem about such a plum. I hate knowing that I hate being alone. Holfy doesn’t answer my letters. No matter. I get up and make coffee. Toscana is just some crazy woman but at least she’s content in her madness. I can’t bear this middle of nothingness any longer, can’t bear the idea of another winter, this living without purpose. I finish the coffee and go to the Hawkeye and buy a ticket for New York. Moira agrees to take Pearl and Boogie but she will not be held responsible if Elijah eats them. She’ll see to the sale of the barn if it ever sells she says. Great at telling it as it is are Midwesterners.