As the door swung open, Caitlin slipped from his lap and hurried off to the bathroom, and this was something worth writing about too, something to be explored, the sense that, even at such a precocious age, she’d felt the need to hide what had just occurred, as if the wrongdoing was in some way down to her. Was this proof that guilt was an instinctive response rather than a social infliction, or was it that even at five or six years old she was sensitive to the precarious state of their family’s balance, to the fact that sides would have to be taken in such a feud and that there were no absolute guarantees as to how things would play out? She stood in the bathroom for a long time, with the door to her back closed but not locked, facing the window and caged in that white space, trying to decide if there was anything to be gained by crying. For something to do, and because the silence bothered her, she turned on the basin’s cold tap and let the water run. Her heart was beating hard. Everything felt out of place, though in the mirror above the sink she looked the same as always. A dime-sized crust of scab set her features at an imbalance, the result of a fall in the street a week or two before, a clumsy trip taken while chasing down a ball or skipping out a game of hopscotch. She’d cried over that, even though it hadn’t really hurt too badly, not once the initial sting of the impact began to fade, and she had climbed up onto Pete’s lap then, too. But that evening there’d been no drink, and he’d held her to his chest and rocked her gently, just as any father would, whispering sympathy until her tears subsided and the rags of her breath turned smooth again. Once she quieted, he set her back on her feet, drew her close and, in a gentle way, with nothing but love involved, kissed her wounded cheek. It wasn’t a deep cut, there was no need for a stitch. ‘It’ll be better before you’re married,’ he said, and she furrowed her brow and asked him, still feigning a pout, if that was a promise because what if she should decide to get married tomorrow? A week or two weeks on, the scab was still there, skewing her image in the mirror, and traces of it remained even into the next year, marring the photographs taken on the morning of her first Holy Communion, a penny’s worth of pink pebbledash the only blemish to her otherwise angelic beauty. A few of those pictures still survive, and the best of them shows her standing in the church doorway, head and shoulders in the shot, seven years old, her hair done in darkish reams beneath the gauzy bunching of a thrown-back veil, her hands tiny and pressed palms-together in prayer to just beneath her chin. She looks sweet, but for some reason not quite innocent. The pink mark catches the eye, but it is also impossible to ignore the fact that she is not smiling for the camera.
Once she began examining her life to such a degree, a new intimacy entered her writing. Her fiction took on a realism that it had not previously possessed, and real meant all the edges, all the ugly scenes, the boredom, tantrums and horror shows as well as the moments of beauty. In short, the kind of words that once said stayed said. And her process actually benefited from the accepting of someone else into her life-space, the sharing of things, food, laughter, a bed, bodies. It was a new kind of nakedness, thick with dread and exhilaration, and its freshness caused the world to crackle and spit. Energy sang from every surface and everything about her days and nights felt inspired.
Their financial situation took time to stabilise, but Thomas had a head for money and a talent for handling it. Initially, they’d had to drag hard to keep a stride ahead of obese tabs and rent that had too easily slipped a week or a month overdue, but by his careful and often creative cash-management techniques, and by putting the occasional bit of shoulder into it, he managed to keep even the most threadbare of ends together. Work-wise, he kicked like a chained bull in a bog to ensure they remained afloat, and he could do in a joyful way at twenty-two what he’d struggle to manage at forty. In business matters he was cold as a tombstone, and he hustled his wares to friends of friends and to the sort of flooded-basement companies that needed to cut every corner in the ledger and to squeeze those cents to shrapnel without paying anything even approaching the going rate, because twenty-two years old was an age still coated in the skin and brawn of youth, and at that age a brain for figures and a shake of salt in the bloodstream felt like more than enough, it felt like plenty. Back then, there were all sorts of names for that, balls being about the best of them, but the trick was to keep the faith in that imminent break without daring to go hunting too hard for the horizons.
Even when the mire seemed set to swallow them up, his self-belief, and his refusal to take no for an answer, kept them alive. And a change was coming. After several months spent bludgeoning the hotshot accountancy firm of Kinsey, Morgan and Davenport with enough beefed-up résumés to commemorate a small forest, he finally succeeded in breaking their will and got himself on the payroll, conditional on him finishing out his part-time community college degree, at the nickel-and-dime level of dogsbody numbers-cruncher. It was the pay-off for a life of stubborn persistence, very much at the asshole end of things, but a step on the stairs and a glimpse at the heady glimmer of faraway stars. And, most importantly, it gave them a small, steady influx of money in the bank, first of the month every month, guaranteed. For a couple so used to pressing the print off pennies, this new-found security was a wonder. The days took on a lightness they’d never previously possessed, and the nights turned soft and blue. He’d arrive home a little after six, or on school nights after ten, to find Caitlin waiting, ready with kisses that earned their smile, and they’d sit and eat dinner, chat about work and traffic and the hundred other things that cluttered up a shift in the city. It was a game of house, and they played like children, knowing their roles, acting grown up, but really only feeding the myth and filling a shared void. And when they gave in to what felt like the natural progression and set about finally tying the knot, that was something of a game, too. The formalities kept to a suggestive level, but Thomas was the first man to ever lay the chance of marriage before her, the first to show that or any kind of interest, and even if the magnitude of his commitment probably wasn’t everything it might have been, refusal didn’t feel like an option. At twenty years old, she could see no one else crowding her future, and incredible though it would come to seem from a later vantage, at that age dread held a significant amount of sway in her decision. Marriage, beyond the colouring of love in all its wild and gory splash, was a deal struck, a thing of give and take, of opening her legs when she didn’t particularly feel like it as well as when she did and of working to fulfil her half of perfecting a life together, or if perfect proved too high an aim then at least settling for bearable. He’d look after her, and she’d do her best by him. And in between, she’d find happiness in words. As a notion it was all clean air.
During her childhood years, back when her mother was at it with both hands and Pete bounced sullenly between drunken states, Caitlin had spent thought like free money on how marriage would be. The unspeakable had only happened once, but ever after, even beyond the day when Pete did not return home, she felt herself braced against more of it. Marriage was a mind-escape, and consisted on that fantasy level of smiling to beat the band, baking cakes and cookies, and kissing in the dark. It was dining out on candlelit nights and holding hands whenever the opportunity offered itself, and it was the pure happiness of having someone who would protect and cherish her, who’d lay down his life for her, if needs be, without a heartbeat of hesitation. Growing up withered most of her delusions, but at twenty, even after two going on for three years of togetherness through thin and thinner, a little of the dreamy stuff lingered. And love or less, the trump card that marriage held, at least in her estimation, was the clear-heeled escape from the dread possibility of a life lived alone.
In and out of the marriage, the writing flowed. She welcomed a lot of mornings from her place at the kitchen table, facing the window and perched above her page, wrapped in an old flannel nightgown and with her second or third helping of strong black French roast cooling in its mug, and more than once she’d stolen from bed with the clock only just the wrong side of midni
ght, alive and wide awake with the aftermath flush of lovemaking. The writing then was in the thinking and the forging. She wandered blindly, fighting frustration, finding her way by touch and sheer will, until stories formed. Yet once done, the results often panicked her. What she was doing didn’t in her mind equate with what other writers, real writers, were doing. To her, writers, the ones whose work earned them the title, remained essentially mythical creatures, names that seemed to evoke images and worlds in themselves. Hemingway, Steinbeck, Mailer, Updike, Nabokov were, to her, fictions forging fiction. These were not the names of anyone she’d ever met, and they were not a part of her landscape. Their processes and hers might have shared some elements, but the sentences they sculpted were full of musical assurance, humming and crackling with all the electricity of life. It was inconceivable to her that they could know anything of the fumbling desperation she suffered a draft or even five drafts into a story. Their words danced; hers lay comatose. She slaved over her stories, but there were entire weeks when her efforts at resuscitation raised only twitches. Writing, at that point, had become so much a part of her identity that stopping was not yet a viable option, and what kept her going was the realisation that she at least got to set her own rules, and that no one had to see the finished work if she did not feel comfortable about showing it. But it did little to soften her sense of inadequacy.
She’d been nine weeks married when ‘Foreign Affairs’, the first truly worthwhile thing she had written, was plucked from the slush pile at one of the mid-level national journals and pressed into print. By then, she’d already been through the shredder with the story, had suffered a good ten or a dozen form-letter rejections of the kind that can ball up your confidence and bin it like tossed paper, to the point where all faith in her own judgement had long since been worn away. She took the phone call with her arms coated to both elbows in the soapsuds of the evening’s washing-up. A man’s voice, dispassionate and cluttered with the distractions of other chores, each far more important to his day than she was, introduced himself and informed her, in a way that could never have passed for a request, of his journal’s interest in publishing her story, as long as she would agree to a minor edit in the second paragraph of page three and a couple of clarifying points elsewhere. She whispered her grateful replies in half-speed monosyllables, and after settling the phone’s receiver back in its cradle slumped to the floor and cried, without really knowing why. Thomas, thinking that something was wrong, got up from his chair in front of a ball game, lifted her to her feet and took her in his arms. Between sobs, she explained what had just happened, and he smiled and congratulated her even as his hand worked its way inside her blouse and began thumbnailing her left nipple to stiffness.
The success was minuscule, a pittance stipend and a few complimentary copies of the journal, but as a validation for her years of discipline and hard work, it felt immense. That evening she and Thomas celebrated with a five-dollar bottle of red wine and afterwards loved their way to sleep. And lying there in the clammy, post-coital darkness, with her husband face down beyond the blankets, and the bedside radio tuned low and soft to a west-coast ball game, she dared finally to entertain the notion of a career in writing. The things she thought about were wild, but in her mind, spinning as it was, hit all the corners. And in the weeks and months that followed, she set about making these imaginings reality, applying herself to the task with great discipline, approaching it as actual work, setting herself targets, daily word-count goals that she hardly ever met but which at least kept her focused and moving in a good direction. When ‘Foreign Affairs’ arrived in published form she held the journal in her hands as something precious, then sat at the kitchen table and feasted on its contents, reading it thoroughly from start to finish, everything apart from her own story, which she bypassed after a cursory bounce-through, not wanting its failings to sap the good from such a pleasurable moment. Even seeing her name in print had unexpectedly proven a cause of both anxiety and exhilaration: the latter because she happened to be sharing page space with some recognisable names, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet; the former because her story had opened up, albeit in thickly veiled fashion, such a piece of her own life for all the world to see. The names had been changed to shelter the guilty, and even people who knew her well would have needed to look closely in order to make the connections, but she knew. During the story’s writing she’d given no thought at all as to how it would be perceived, especially as it pertained to her, to the life she’d lived, and she consoled herself with the assurance that this was what writers did, that it was what Faulkner did, and Flannery O’Connor and Hemingway, and so on. They wrote what they knew and what they cared about. She closed her eyes and decided not to feel ashamed for following their lead.
Her advance moved at a snail’s crawl. Every day, she found an hour or two, sometimes more, for the page. She started no fires, and challenged herself only within the work, but by the time she’d reached her mid-twenties, that dreamed-of future seemed possible. There’d been disappointments, stories so intrinsically broken that they couldn’t be made to work no matter how much time and effort she committed to them, and even the few stories that did click had to survive tides of rejection before washing up on some agreeable shore, but the small successes kept her alive. Her sixth published story even earned her a small award, a piece of glass and a modest cheque, as well as inclusion in a year’s-best anthology, and this in turn brought letters of casual enquiry from three well-known literary agencies. She felt comfortable within the scale of a story and enjoyed the illusion of control, but a part of her had begun to crave a bigger canvas. Already, she was several months and probably fifty salvageable pages along on a short novel still keeping up the pretence of being a long story, work that she couldn’t yet bring herself to even speak about much less show to anyone but which had her bristling at the gills with the sheer joy of getting the words down.
By then, Michael had become a fixture in her world. They’d met in a bar some three years earlier, an accident of fate. Glances that became stuck, the exchange of smiles, the shift in her breathing; the way it happens the world over. The hole inside her hadn’t even been apparent until he set about filling it. He was with his cousin, and a bottle above his limit by the time they got around to talking, and even though it was he who approached her she played a part in leading him on. From the beginning, they both had the score down pat. Neither one of them was free and available, neither one had been out hunting a fix. But something clicked. She could feel the gears grinding, clockwork pieces bolting into place. The moment had that sort of deep physicality. And from there, it was almost easy. Resistance was minimal, and futile, because beauty really does lurk within the beholding eye. It would have been easy as sucking air to walk away. A quick shake of the head and that would have been that, a flirt, a drink and a full stop to finish the sentence. But when he asked her to dance she gave him her hand. Just like people do on the big screen. Hesitant, but only for effect, counting out the seconds and letting him hang, then raising herself to him, wrist bent for him to take. And even drunk, or even on the way to that, he knew on just the right instinctive level how this worked, gripping her daintily by the fingers but firmly at the hip once they found themselves a square of space out on the floor. They came together with the kind of bang heard or felt by no one else but them, and they moved clumsily, dodging rather than floating between tables, their connective style absolutely devoid of rhythm, their bodies separate from the beat of the music but not from one another. Talk felt out of place, but there was a cogency about their interactions. They danced, if what they were doing could at all be classed as dancing, and when it felt right to do so she lay her face against his shoulder and smelled the day he’d just put in, the long mean hours spent tucked beneath the hood of some heap. Greased and oiled, heavy to beyond exhaustion with sweat that fell shy of blood only by its colour and its reek. His night- and day-long stubble burned her cheekbone and temple, yet she returned for that s
ensation over and over, pressing to feel it and nestling so that his mouth would fall beside her ear, and sometimes, as they moved into a turn, against it, and his breath scorched a kind of fever into her then so that it took all she had to keep from grinding herself against his thigh.
That night, everything changed. The stars, rare and irresistible, with all their predestined alignments, fell into view. Alcohol excused some things but could not explain how being with him made her feel. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her husband, she told herself, and told Michael, the first time they’d slept together. Thomas had a kind of detached goodness. He worked hard for them, for their home, the things they needed. He was safe and loyal and not too demanding. He’d speak of love only occasionally, and only ever in gasps, always with his eyes clenched and maybe his heart clenched, too, as if it were somehow causing him pain. Out on the street or in the subway, turned out in a halfway-good suit and carrying a chrome and black leatherette briefcase, he always seemed so assured, able, even daring. In fact, he was a man of small, manageable ambitions. He talked a lot about reality but lived life a level beneath it, threading only where the bombs could never fall. A lot of men are that way, and a lot of women need that. Sometimes, she herself needed it. But need and want are different things. She loved him and she knew that he loved her, in as much as he was capable of loving anyone, though there was a lot he would not do for that love, and a lot she wouldn’t do either. She loved him but he never made her ache for him. And at her age, twenty-two years old, with so much just beginning to slip into place and so much of the world opening up for her, she was finding that she needed more out of life. Love had, for the first time, revealed its shades of intent.
My Coney Island Baby Page 10
