My Coney Island Baby

by Billy O'Callaghan

  She leans away, her breath carrying new weight. The skin at one corner of her mouth has begun to blush, angered to redness. He is the man she has known for so long, but there are times when the evidence of this seems slight, and she has to strain in order to assure herself that he remains unchanged. She cradles his chin and left cheek and with the pad of her thumb wipes away a gleam of saliva from his upper lip. On impulse, he opens his mouth and draws her in.

  ‘Do you?’ Her voice is hushed to the brusque above a whisper. ‘Or do you only think you do?’

  He opens the soft clench of his lips. Her escaping thumbnail taps his upper front teeth. He knows it makes no sound, yet he feels one. It lays a vibration into his tongue and the roof of his mouth.

  ‘When it comes to love,’ he tells her, trying to smile, trying to make less of the sensation, ‘is there a difference?’

  Her hand in his feels like the hand of a child. He examines it, scanning from the back of her wrist to the neatly trimmed moon-white crescents of her fingernails. The skin is pale and dry, thin as tissue paper but with none of that softness, soft only to the eye. Slats of bone press and grid the surface, and where the knuckles protrude the flesh pinches and darkens to some shade more defined. He traces these bones with his own fingertips. There is something of the galaxies about her substructure, cathedrals of mystery stretching beyond his comprehension, and every cell fascinates.

  In contrast to all this detail, her palm has the skin of a gourd. The lines that do exist seem faint, as if time has eroded them the way wind smooths and polishes rock, though he is aware that this may be due to a failing of his eyesight rather than an actual fact. At work, glasses have become a permanence, as much a part of the uniform as the collar and tie or the patent leather shoes. Without them, the edges run, and while he resists wearing them in front of Caitlin, red pinches straddle the bridge of his nose. She is not a fool but, for either his sake or her own, lets it go unmentioned. There are, he supposes, enough surface objections already, without the need to acknowledge any more.

  He opens her hand towards the window’s light, which helps. The lines clarify themselves somewhat, though continue to hold their immediate codes intact.

  Years ago, and prompted by some passing fancy, he’d read a book on palmistry. The bulk of what he learned has been long since lost, but he does recall a sense of the significance attributed to the three major lines. He knows, too, that this, her right hand, is her dominant hand. The lines of her left are, at least according to the lore, marks that she carried with her into the world and which speak of her potential as a person, of the talents and faults she was gifted and cursed from birth to possess. But her right hand tells of who she is now, who she has become through a melding of choice and fate, and these are the lines that also suggest who she might yet be.

  Trawling his memory, he reads what he can, starting where everyone always starts, with the lifeline, which arcs in a generous loop around the pad of palm at the base of her thumb. This is a game, but he treats it as more than that.

  ‘Interesting.’

  She smiles. He sees it through her fingers, the edges of her teeth and the smallest pink tease of tongue.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Just opening up a few of your secrets.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll give you a chance to confess.’

  To those who believe, everything means something: the length and sweep of the lines, their depth and intersections. Her heart line, which dictates not only health but love, runs in high, confident manner from the outer edge of her hand before curling to an end just beneath the index finger’s root. There is evidence of a forking too, part of the way across, with a defined second prong that follows the mainline along in lower accompaniment and then at a roughly midway point quite abruptly stops.

  A crater of dread opens up inside him. To bury it, or to hold it in, he brings his mouth to her skin. His lips track her fate lines, trying to follow their lead, hoping for some kind of understanding. And it occurs to him that after all these years he has stumbled upon an entirely new part of her to kiss.

  She responds to his mouth with small hiccups of laughter. But her eyes have tightened with anxiety.

  ‘Since when can you read palms?’

  ‘I’m part Gypsy. Did I forget to tell you?’ He grins, then begins to nuzzle her wrist. He can only imagine her pulse against the tip of his tongue, though it feels no less real for that.

  Her free hand beats at his shoulder. ‘Asshole.’

  His grin widens, but his efforts don’t falter. He kisses his way gently along the inside of her forearm and she watches, feeling the damp and softness of his mouth and, beneath it, the scrub of his chin, its shave already hours outgrown. And even as she again coaxes the fingers of her free hand through his hair and, smiling with pleasure at the very completeness of his efforts, pinches the waxy lobe of his right ear with little playful tugs, she is thinking of the Chakra points, remembered from a one-time yoga flirtation, and in particular of the palm Chakra. Illustrated in every derivative text as a large peering hieroglyphic eye fringed in beautiful comb-tooth lashes, it is said to act as the channel for administering and receiving medicinal energy. Michael’s attention to his task, with such determination trying to kiss away all her worries and fears, all of her life’s negative residue, at once amuses and impresses her, and while the act is not in itself particularly stimulating, not the way his mouth and teeth against the nape of her straining neck or nuzzling at the small of her back, or better still, between her legs, can be, the gesture in itself feels precious. Her smile hangs on, even as something shifts and turns suddenly warm inside. She pulls her hand back and they come together again, their bodies folding into one another’s arms. She shifts her weight and begins to kiss his cheeks and eyes and the flesh rumpled in such hard concentration just above his nose.

  ‘So,’ she says, sighing the words. ‘You love me. Well, if it’s any consolation, I’m afraid the feeling’s mutual.’ But even as she speaks, she is drawing herself back and rising from his lap.

  Michael gazes up at her; his face is boyish in the moment, wide open and devout, bleached with insecurity.

  ‘Then I suppose we’re stuck with one another.’

  She shrugs and reawakens her smile, or widens what is already there, a smile as vague as smoke, and when tears start to threaten she stoops and kisses him again but turns away before he has time to open his mouth and drifts once more around the corner of the bed to the window.

  Immediately on peeling back the net curtains, the afternoon thins. Touching the nets leaves a film of dust, real or imagined, on her fingertips, and she rubs them clean in an absent fashion against her thigh, then leans straight-armed on the shallow sill and brings her face to within inches of the glass.

  Back when Coney Island still counted worth a damn, the hotels out here were all silk and roses, existing as genuflections towards true luxury. The men wore fine suits to come here, and the women, even the molls, floated. Swing and big-band music decked the days and nights, small talk passed in fifties and hundreds, folding money, and you named your poison in whispers and with a certain kind of knowing look. But that was then, once upon a time. The passing years and decades cleared those decks, along with bangs and pocket watches and sterling silver cigarillo holders, and what remains now is basic, perfunctory, clean in that ugly, ravaged way of old and over-washed things. Good enough still for an hour or two but not for much longer. Deals are done in cash, because credit cards only complicate matters and tend to embarrass the takers and givers alike. Money buys you four walls and a bed, but what it really buys you is the bed, and a piece of afternoon for putting it to best possible use.

  This third-floor vantage peers out across a scrub of wasteland towards the ropy spindles of a lopsided and long-abandoned roller coaster. The view is apparently complimentary. Having slowed towards a standstill at this time of year, the hotel’s proprietors are, it would seem, grateful for any cus
tom, no matter how sordid or fleeting. Gazes here are trained to looseness. Nothing lingers, aware of what could be exposed, and they don’t believe in questions, because the risk is high that they will not like the answers. Today, the view probably feels like the least they can do. Left of the ruined joyride and some hundred yards or quarter of a mile further on, the upper half of a Ferris wheel’s candy-coloured exoskeleton perches, like some fossilised remains from prehistory, against the rise of the land. And unseen, but present in every pore of afternoon, the endless cant of ocean slopping in against and back from the shore. Caitlin’s breath presses the glass, mist forms and evaporates, adding further texture to the day. When she notices, she etches out the crude depiction of a smiley face, a quick imperfect circle, two jabbed dots for eyes and a long, debonair curl of mouth. The image survives a few seconds, then recedes to nothing.

  ‘Can you believe how long we’ve been coming out here?’

  ‘More years than it’s probably right to count.’

  ‘I know every stick and stone of the place, at this point. I could walk these streets blind without a single wrong step. And yet, there’s something about it that makes every time feel like my first time. Why do you suppose that is?’

  ‘Because you keep seeing it from different angles. The fresh balances out the familiar.’

  She turns from the window and leans back against it. Michael, still sitting on his corner of the bed, is undressing in an absent fashion. He has shed both his overcoat and sports coat, and the belt of his trousers hangs unbuckled. A few of his shirt buttons have been picked open, exposing a wedge of white thermal undershirt with a rounded neckline, but whether through apathy or distraction his fingers have lost interest in their task. His hands are settled now in a loose splay, one on each knee, and his gaze has become stuck in the middle distance.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I keep seeing you from different angles, too. But you don’t change at all, except that the view has gotten so old.’

  The weight of the following silence tips him out of his trance. He comes back in stages, looks at her and finally shrugs, not seeing the joke. Set against the window as she is, the light has reduced her, softening layers, bringing her down to a core. All he can think about is how beautiful she looks; how, on her, the years have meant nothing. It thrills and saddens him. They have the afternoon, and they’ve enjoyed a lot of these days, but he also knows that they should have made so much more of their time together, and they should have fought harder against the time spent apart. The problem, obvious in hindsight, was that they’d been too willing to ration their longings and too readily accepting of their lot, and only now, at this settled age, can they recognise that the turning of the world has spun them loose of some essential mooring. These few snatched hours, once the preserve of love or of something inseparably close to love, have become a pretence at satisfaction.

  ‘Christ,’ she says, ‘it’s like the Yukon in here. You’d think they could afford to burn a nickel’s worth of heat on the place. How do they even expect to stay in business, inflicting this kind of cold on their guests?’

  She rubs her arms in a brisk gesture from shoulder to elbow, then cups her hands together and sighs into them. The room is not really that cold, but the air in here does have a rawness to it, and if her action is exaggerated then it also makes a valid point. The problem, of course, is that the cold has followed them in from the street.

  ‘Coffee, I think. To fire the fire.’

  There is a plastic jug-shaped electric kettle on the dressing table, grape green in colour, perched on a round tray that also holds a pair of cups upturned on almost matching saucers, a scattering of sugar and coffee sachets and a few capsules of chemical creamer. The display could be part of a stage set, a modernist commentary on the instant and the artificial. Art for art’s sake, a stillness devoid of life.

  Michael is again attending to the buttons of his shirt. She watches his thick fingertips pick their way down over his stomach and thinks that the sitting posture does him no favours.

  ‘It’ll take more than coffee to fire my fire,’ he says. ‘With this cold we’ll be doing well to raise a puff of smoke.’

  Concentrating on his chore, he misses the offer of her smile. And beyond the window, the sky is turgid with the lumpen alabaster finish of a coming storm.

  ‘Let’s give the coffee a shot first,’ she says. ‘Then we can see how we stand.’

  She fills the kettle with water of questionable freshness from a tall, uncorked glass bottle that is already only three-quarters full, but when she taps the switch high up on the handle, a red light sparks and immediately dies. She shifts the switch again but nothing happens.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The kettle. It won’t come on.’

  ‘Try it again.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Keep trying.’

  ‘I did. I am.’ Her thumb rocks the switch open and closed. ‘It won’t come on.’

  Michael peels off his shirt and folds it with care, tucking the collar beneath his chin and extending the arms. Neatness matters to him. Caitlin thinks he is too obsessive in this. Barbara also thinks so, though she has long since stopped mentioning it. But he can’t help himself. It’s not a question of vanity but of order. The alternative – chaos – would be, for him, unbearable.

  ‘Wait,’ Caitlin says, raising one hand.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘I don’t understand. The light is out, but it seems to be working.’

  She leans in a little closer. Her hand continues to hang raised to one side of her, pressing the air. Michael stops what he is doing and also strains to listen. Within seconds, a small but distinctive whispering announces itself, rustling beneath the stillness, and then the first thread of steam begins to seep from the kettle’s spout. The light is an indicator, there to grant reassurance to the eye, and plays no part in the kettle’s ability to function, yet for reasons she cannot understand, its absence has stirred awake a peculiar unease.

  ‘A bulb must have gone,’ Michael says, as much to himself as to her, but his words are merely the ready acceptance of learned facts. And even the world was flat until someone decided otherwise.

  She nods, but remains troubled by the thought that ignorance is not blissful at all, but reckless.

  He takes off his watch, brings it out of habit to his ear, then proceeds to wind it. Few watches need winding any more, but his has some age and fits a different category. And because it belonged to his father, its value can only properly be measured in terms of sentiment.

  Once, some years back, he’d spoken a little bit about it as they lay in bed. She’d asked. They’d reached the cusp of some landmark life barrier, a notable anniversary of their initial coming together or maybe a thirty-fifth or fortieth birthday, one of those events that seems to count for so much until the next one arrives and renders it obsolete, and at that time, as well as they’d come to know one another, there was still much that remained unfathomed. They lay in one another’s arms, weary and content, with the sweat of their exertions cooling on their skin, chatting in that soft manner of dreams about things they owned, material possessions that they’d save first from fire should the need ever arise.

  ‘The watch,’ he’d admitted, after a moment’s thought. ‘I know it’s not much to look at, but it counts for something.’

  She’d reached across his chest and lifted it from the bedside locker. A steel-bodied thing, cheaply made and cold to the touch, with a frayed hide strap and a glass front so badly chipped and abraded that reading the time always involved a high element of guesswork. He let her scour it for secrets, then eased it from her hands and considered it himself.

  ‘Whenever I look at this,’ he said, ‘I feel like I’m a child again. I can see the old kitchen as clear as rainwater in my mind: the transistor radio keeping out the silence and my father at the breakfast table, turned towards the window for the early light or hunched close to the lantern, his eyes straining
and his awkward fingertips trying to synchronise the time with the first news of the day. Even back then the watch haemorrhaged seconds, but it ran, I suppose, as best it could, and it got to know a bit of life and too much in the way of death. The old man would wind it, and then he’d press it to his ear and incline his head until he felt confident that the beat was holding steady. It was his routine, but it was also more than that. It was how he grounded himself against whatever the day would bring, either in the fields or out on the water. And sometimes he’d notice me looking and bring it to my ear too, and I’d either close my eyes and listen or else concentrate hard on his smile. “Like a heartbeat,” he’d say, and I always knew what he meant, not even the words but the way he said it, proud and with a certain amount of compassion, and then he’d stand, push a hand into the small of his back and stretch away the knots, before reaching for his coat.’

  ‘That’s a nice memory,’ she’d said. ‘You’re lucky to have it.’

  But Michael shook his head.

  ‘It’s more vivid than just a memory. It’s as if I’ve only now lived it, or that I’m living it still. And maybe that’s the truth. Because the past is never really past for us, is it? I think it’s always there, inside us but always near the surface. The watch is a key to a particular door, useful for opening up that part of myself again. Other reminders open other doors. There’s something soothing about that but, the truth is, it also turns me a little cold.’

  Based on the things he’d said, and what she’d learned about the place from books, she understood his Inishbofin to be, at least back then, somewhere that turned its men old in a hurry, that aged them hard against rain and gales. And it was a place difficult to abandon in any way other than the physical. Until about ten years ago, when the sheer morbidity of the practice finally registered with him, he’d kept a small creased photograph of home tucked away in the back of his wallet. His father’s name was Seán, and the picture caught him on some bright day, coming in from the fields or from the boat, decked out in a flat knitted wool cap and a heavy black overcoat worn open across what looked to be a strong chest. He bore a certain resemblance to Michael, mainly in the shy and almost forlorn twist of his mouth and the way in which he pinched his eyes against the sun. She knew how deeply Michael hurt with the thought of how the old man had had to die alone, in the westernmost corner of the low field behind their cottage, on a damp late February evening after a few hours spent turning the soil of his potato drills in preparation for the planting of some earlies. He’d probably straightened up from his work and lingered as he often did to gaze out over the undisturbed emptiness of the ocean, seeing the water placid that day, stretching silver and smoke-blue towards the unseen raft of America and the suggestion of a setting sun. No one even missed him until the Thursday night, when he failed to show up at Hickey’s for his usual couple of pints and the few hands of forty-five, and he was not found until the Saturday morning, nearly five full days after his passing. His heart had given out and he’d fallen in a ditch, and when they finally found him, a few of the neighbours checking the bottom field as a last resort after they’d already swept the island and scoured the reefs around the nearby cliffs, they knew him for certain only by his clothes and the old sandalwood rosary bead that he held clutched in one hand, because rats and crows had already taken the buttery pulp of his eyes and much of the flesh from his nose, cheeks and throat.