Áine had written, but the letter took its time in finding Michael. By then, he’d already been gone nearly two years, and on most days Inishbofin still felt like the only reality. New York was not at all as he’d expected it to be, and until the letter arrived, home’s final tether had yet to give. But now, with such news, there could be no going back, and nothing much to go back to. He was working, but not steadily, labouring three and sometimes four days a week for a small-time subcontractor, a Dublin man named Hallissey who paid below the going rate but who at least paid in cash, no questions asked, so he was surviving. The bedsit apartment, all he could then afford, was a dive, a real step down even the most unreliable of ladders. The water coughed and rattled in the pipes, great shrouds of mould had to be scraped from the bedroom’s window wall every couple of weeks, and the apartment two doors down housed a young African male prostitute who was often to be found in the mornings either passed out in the hallway with his jeans down around his knees and a piece of hose rubber knotted tightly above one elbow, or else perched on the top step of the stairs, elbows on knees, rocking gently back and forth heaving with tears.
‘My father would still have died,’ Michael said, when Caitlin pressed. ‘Even if I’d been there. The inquest described it as a massive coronary. But it wasn’t instant. I know that field, every clod of earth. He’d have made for the ditch in order to rest until the worst of it eased. The pain would have caused him to pass out, but even so he probably took as long as an hour to go. If I’d been there he could at least have died with a bit of dignity. I could have held his hand the way he’d held my mother’s, and he could have gone into the grave looking like himself. He shouldn’t have been alone.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Caitlin told him, but he just shrugged.
‘We always tell ourselves that, don’t we? We try to absolve ourselves of guilt, or to at least lift ourselves above it. But that’s wrong. Because we’re never innocent. I had a responsibility to him. A duty.’
‘You had a responsibility to yourself, too. And to those you love now. You still do. We all do.’
They could talk like this, in the way of people newly coupled, because the ground between them had not yet muddied. A shared bed narrowed the margins of their perspective, and brought everything into apparent proximity. And with every edge so clearly defined, relative youth made it possible to hold onto the pretence that a love like theirs was easy, something hardly more than a matter of decision. The sight of Michael, even just the sound of his voice on the telephone, was enough to light her up, but she understood even then that what she saw and heard was only part of the man in full, little more than the tarnished casing. So they advanced with care, hopeful and cautious as to what might lie ahead, and they chipped away at one another, particularly during the aftermath moments of lovemaking, when they felt at their most intimate. Bruising the skin, over and over, with questions, each seeking out better ways to plumb the other’s depths.
Michael was at that time still grieving the loss of his little boy, still in so many ways braced against the shock of that, even as months became a year and then longer, and he gave himself up only in spurts, coming to the facts as half-remembered things. His life, his past, the people who had decked his wake. He spoke in a casual way, insinuating into the words a certain lack of importance, maybe trying to temper the impact of their revelation, even then and out of some harsh lesson already learned trying to hold back some essential aspect of himself. But images, splinters of the past, broke the surface and took their own shape, demanding attention. There was the small lump that his father had on the back of one wrist, a ganglion cyst, and how, having read of the most efficient treatment, the old man stretched out his hand, palm down, on the kitchen table and insisted, against his daughter’s pleas, that seven-year-old Michael slam the lump with a hulking leather-bound Bible. Because it needed to be a Bible. And, incredibly, it had worked; such faith was rewarded, but in that typically perverse way of most answered prayers, with the cyst being temporarily consumed in the great engorging swell caused by two shattered metacarpals. Or the unembarrassed baths that he and Áine had been made to take together as young children, and the glimpses he’d caught of the chocolate thumbprint birthmark on the high inside part of her thigh as they sat, knees bent and face to face, in the large green tin basin that had to be hauled in from the back yard and set before the blazing fire every second Sunday night of winter. The water was heated in pans on the range, and while their mother soaped their small thin bodies and their nests of tangled hair, they played like harpies, incessantly screaming about the cold and kicking and splashing one another in an effort to reclaim a few important inches of lost foot space. And there was the morning that he and Áine had found the decomposing carcass of a dolphin or porpoise washed up on one of the Westquarter’s deserted shingle beaches. Days dead in the water had seen it pulped beyond easy identification, but the damage confined itself mainly to the creature’s upper torso and the tail half had survived nearly intact. Decked in kelp, the dark lower skin gleamed with a suggestive iridescence in the smoky springtime light, and the ridged, grit-speckled tail flukes lay with the wide-open elegance of a Japanese fan or the unfurled wings of some creature from myth, and it had been no trouble at all to convince themselves and one another that what they’d stumbled across was actually the corpse of a mermaid. At Áine’s suggestion they’d knelt and sung to her, high keening funereal wails delivered in an Irish that was largely just sound because neither one of them knew enough of the lamenting words to properly lead. And afterwards, after they had finished their song and carried out a thorough examination of their find, they hauled the remains some twenty paces up the beach and set to hollowing out a grave above the high tide line, he digging with his hands, Áine using a piece of driftwood, having decided that even creatures of the sea deserved the dignity of a Christian burial.
Caitlin listened, and learned to cultivate her own masking sense of calm, even as she hoarded the scattershot details, each morsel a feast in itself but suggestive, too, of so much more. Every trail of recollection revealed something else of who he was, and she measured and tallied the pictures in her mind with the few photographs she’d seen. When speaking of his father, there was always sorrow in Michael’s voice, a crazing of guilt. Even after so long. But there was also clear evidence of love, and of unflinching admiration.
She wished, often aloud, that she could have had a chance to meet the old man, just to shake his hand, to kiss his cheek, to sit with him and talk about the small things that they unknowingly shared as well as the things that were unique in the purest ways imaginable to each alone. Long after his death, these second-hand memories of him continued to fascinate.
‘I honestly don’t know how he’d have taken us,’ Michael said once, after she’d pushed him on the subject. ‘Towards the end, the last year or maybe two, certainly before I left, he had turned back to the Church. Not that he’d ever strayed too far away, and I’d be stunned if he missed a single Sunday morning Mass his entire life, but even though the teachings were fairly deeply ingrained I don’t think religion ever properly took with him until the very end. Even then, it was probably more of a support mechanism than anything else, because there’s comfort to be had in actively keeping the faith. But there’d have been the question of Barbara. He was never the judgemental type and he’d been through enough to understand that right and wrong are not always laid in straight lines. I do know that he’d have adored you. If the old man had a type, you’d be it. But it’s circumstances. You can see that, can’t you?’
She could. And she could also see what Michael was not saying but still meaning, which was that even in situations of impossible hypothesis no son wants to be thought badly of in his father’s eyes, no son ever wants to disappoint. What she and Michael have together could very well pass for love, but it is also, by its very definition, adultery. They might prefer to define it otherwise, but there can be no denying the fact of that dirty little word. And the od
ds were probably a coin toss as to whether or not an old fisherman would have understood, or would have even wanted to understand.
There is something both pathetic and endearing about the way Michael sits here now, on the bed’s edge, chewing on the right corner of his lower lip. His upper body has, in recent years, thickened with fat. The undershirt is of the sleeveless style and bulges around his breasts and, only in part because of his sitting posture, is dragged tight across the great bloat of his stomach. The watch looks small between his fingertips, yet she knows his touch to be delicate and always considered. Then, just as the water in the kettle stirs towards boiling point, he stands, opens the buttons of his pants and lets them slip to the floor.
His expression is one of studied embarrassment. He knows she is watching him. She wants to look away, for his sake, but cannot. His body keeps no secrets; from statuesque to an entirely different kind of artful, she has accompanied the evolution, or devolution, and is as familiar with his flesh as she is with her own. Yet his blush is genuine. She stands there, watching and thinking of things that she can say, such as how much she loves him, and how it pleases her to savour the details of who he is. But she holds back, not because these thoughts aren’t true but because they do not feel like enough of the truth. At least, they won’t to him. Anything she says now will make him feel worse than he already does. So she keeps silent, and she looks because to do otherwise will have an effect similar to words.
Then his stare meets hers, and they connect. She sees him as his surfaces declare: wilting and slumped, thick-shouldered, hair beginning to thin, face wrenched by middle age. But there is a second shade in evidence too, one that perhaps only she can recognise. It is there, twisted into the details of his features, in the shadowy furrows beneath his eyes, in the shifting pinch of his narrow mouth, and it reveals him in full, a childlike innocent needing her as no one ever has, a man still strong to an inch beneath the skin but weak with insecurity that she will one day see him for what he has become, and reject him. It hurts to acknowledge what time and life have done to him, how he has begun to fade. The day is coming when he’ll be lost to her, and even when they have fallen far apart and can inform one another’s lives only as memory, she knows that his absence will cause a catch in the very turning of her world. She looks at him and it is as if a veil has fallen away because she can see it all, the various pasts and futures superimposed against his bodily self, layered like auras of state. What she wants to say is that, instead of being repulsed by his flaws, they hold for her a kind of elemental beauty. All of this is what makes him real for her in a way that no one else has ever so fully been, and she finds herself again overwhelmed by the furnace blast of love that even the merest hint of him can awaken. Her breath hacks her throat. Tears press her surface, threatening floods. He either fails to notice or elects not to.
‘Coffee,’ she whispers, needing to look away.
She rights the cups on their saucers, rips open a couple of coffee sachets and pours in the boiling water. Without asking, she adds a pod of creamer to his, and two of the little paper envelopes of sugar. She stirs, and the mixture turns the colour of sand.
When she looks again she finds him still sitting, though he has shed his socks now, and also his boxer shorts. The undershirt, still in place, covers most of what he has going but not everything. She lowers her eyes in a fun, brazen acknowledgement and smiles, because it feels like the thing to do but also because the situation, clear of societal dictates as to what classifies beauty, has turned quite suddenly and unexpectedly sweet. Beyond the window and walls a world hangs in wait, but for now it has ceased to matter. In here, together, nothing is hidden. He looks at her and she wonders if he knows, if he suspects. She is sure he does. Now is the time to speak, to say what needs saying and have it over with, have everything over. But she cannot. This moment is too perfect. He perches there before her, worse than naked. The undershirt makes a difference, concealing his shame, softening his insecurity at having fallen so far out of shape. Even using the rawness of the room as an excuse to keep it on is an exposure of sorts.
‘It’s cold to be sitting there like that,’ she says. ‘You don’t want to catch a chill.’
He meets her eyes, then laughs. The sound he makes is sharp, a jolt that hits and then stops.
‘Does it show?’ he asks, and without waiting for the kickback of a response gets up and moves around the bed. Farcical in his nonchalance, his ass for a second or two exposed bare and heavy, he pulls back the sheets on the side nearest the door and crawls in.
They drink their coffee, out of duty. Caitlin sits on the edge of the bed and notes with disappointment but not surprise its lack of give. The mattress is necessarily firm, without the promises of comfort, sweet dreams, or magic. It is yet another nod towards pragmatism, further evidence of the cold efficiency that caters to their kind of custom. Around here, promises have such a bad habit of not coming true, and expectation has proven the downfall of far too many.
Michael sips and winces. He tries but his eyes cannot keep a secret, and he abandons the cause at a little over halfway through, sets his cup on the bedside locker, and leans back into his nest of pillows, lacing his hands together behind his head. Happy to be watched, she keeps on, raises the cup and, just beneath it, the saucer, and drinks the way a bird will, pecking sips. Concentrating on the heat. The foul coffee coats her mouth, every forced swallow dragging with it a sour aftertaste, nasty in the way that instant can often be when you’ve become used to better. Not so long ago, their bodily hungers would have abided no such trifling distraction as coffee, but the gales of time have done for a lot of edges.
She feels very small beside him, and not just in a physical way. Safe too, sheltered, and happy at being desired. He says nothing. His patience seems unwavering. And it is as if time has stopped for them. The light of the afternoon washes over the bed, its blunt whiteness soaking every surface – the sheets, the walls, their bodies – with a soapy, deadening hue. Propped up by the pillows, he looks comfortable, but he is not smiling. The flesh of his bare arms and shoulders looks hard and smooth, like the stained marble of certain old fireplace fronts. Smoked from purity yet oddly clean, and with that sort of immaculate permanence. She has a sudden and almost unbearable longing to reach out for him, not in a sexual way but simply to wallow in the touch of his body, that flesh, to use her mouth on him, to taste his flavour. Black thatches of hair tuft his armpits, frail darkish crop circles suggest themselves through the thin white cotton of his undershirt where his tiny nipples poke to make their presence known. It amuses her, and in equal measure serves to break her heart just a little bit, that even after the hundreds of intimate occasions they have shared he still remains so bashful and embarrassed to be all the way naked for her. In physical terms, the years, particularly the last five or six, have not been kind to him. He carries an excess of weight now, and his stomach, which had been flat as paper when they’d first started going together, now presses and gently pummels her with every embrace. The fact that she minds this far less than he does, that actually she rather enjoys the snug closeness of it, the impacting security, is of no consequence. She has tried, often, to tell him this, sometimes making light of it, more times approaching the subject from its serious side, but his insecurity has closed him off to such words. He can’t accept her reassurances, so he elects to wear the shirt.
And she, for her part, has learned to let it go. Foolishness cannot always be explained; sometimes there is nothing else to do but accept. Age brings wisdom only to the fortunate, and his age is showing hard now, and has been marked by a notable downturn in his general health. Aside from the inevitable surface deterioration, the failing eyesight, the complications of excess weight, he’s become prone to worrying bouts of bronchitis, which seem to cling for months at a time, and is on daily medication for an angina problem still blessedly in its formative stages but which nevertheless fills her with unease at what menace might lie ahead. The details go unmentioned, except
when avoidance is not an option, when the problems penetrate their cocoon. He doesn’t discuss this with her, though he has mentioned it on two occasions. Once, a year and a half ago, because he’d had to put their arrangement back by a week in order to make a hospital appointment; and then again, several months later, when the initial medication was not correcting his levels to the doctors’ satisfaction and they’d admitted him for a couple of days and put him through a range of tests in order to accurately adjust the dosage. Both times, he spoke with Caitlin about the angina in the same way that he might speak of the weather, or some book he’d read or film he’d recently seen. She listened and nodded, shrugged when shrugging was required, understanding exactly how far she could push and how far he could be pushed before the cracks broke his surface.
My Coney Island Baby Page 7
