Immediately, Michael cries out and throws a desperate forearm across his eyes. This too is part of the game, and the light, they both know, is a gesture rather than a necessity. But today, of all days, it feels important. She wants him to be able to study and enjoy the sight of her, and to have this memory for all the years to come.
‘Keep an eye on the time.’
‘I don’t want to go,’ he says, lowering his arm and wincing against the glare of the bare light bulb. He watches her standing in profile at the foot of the bed, straightening out the undergarments that lie draped over the back of a chair, until she can no longer deny the feel of his gaze and turns, slightly and briefly, to acknowledge him.
‘We need to think about moving,’ she says, hating how old she sounds.
But he is not yet ready to yield.
‘Come back to bed, can’t you? It’s still early.’
Time is a shard of glass embedded in the neck of the day. The afternoon has been as close to beautiful as any they have known together. Ageing brings certain joys, even as it tears others away. But as always at the turn of afternoon, the shadows have once more begun to deepen.
Occasionally, in certain circumstances, words get to be just words, worth their weight in sound purely for their cadences, inflections and sheer musicality, and with all meaning and truth set wilfully aside. Over the years, in such moments, they have discussed the notion of kicking free from the bullshit shackles of work, home, life and all the etcetera codicils, and just running away, flying north to set up again in some small town where there’s space to be had and no one has to know them or what they’ve done in the name of love. Finding some idyllic little nest fit for two migrating love birds, and starting over. She’s not after jewels. A bus ticket would be enough, and rental listings for apartments in Boston or swamp shacks in Louisiana. They’d get by, leaning on one another.
But if there is blame to be laid in this then it must be shared. Because talk is easy, when divorced from expectation. From early on in their relationship, they contented in the rumour of happiness, allowing their world to exist primarily in the abstract. Now only the rationed monthly afternoons are real; the rest is colour and shape considered mainly from skewed angles and odd distances, and devoid of – or removed from – most if not all sensibility. What they have, and have always had, are words, false promises that nevertheless ring with the essential notes of truth. Their love is well meant, and honest, and in no way lessened by their inaction. Time has deepened the understanding each has of the other, an understanding, free of judgement, that counts want, need and desire among its blessings, as well as a knowledge of what lies within the other’s heart. Fires can blaze and fires can smoulder.
Now, though, wanting is no longer in itself enough. Something is about to be broken.
‘Come on. Ten minutes. That’s all I’m asking.’
She stands naked, in semi-profile, on the floor at her side of the bed. For a few seconds her stare holds to some distant point, but then she looks at Michael and smiles. He holds out a hand to her, and she starts to reach for him but stops herself.
‘More coffee, I think. One for the road.’
‘I don’t want coffee.’
‘It’ll heat you up.’
‘You do that better than coffee can.’
She smiles again. ‘Ten years ago, maybe.’
‘Let’s stay.’ He struggles to sit up and settles for an awkward crouch, turning himself onto his supporting elbow.
‘What?’
‘We could,’ he goes on, flushed with a sudden enthusiasm. ‘The room is paid up until tomorrow. What’s stopping us?’
‘Well, let’s see. How about, my husband and your wife? Your sick wife. How about those minor details, just for a start?’
He struggles again to bring himself upright. The blankets bunch around his waist. Funny, how the mind works, she thinks, as her eyes of their own accord pull away from him and seek out the room’s chair, and the blue-and-white checked pattern of his boxer shorts splayed uppermost on the neatly folded stack of his clothes.
‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way.’
She can feel him grinning without even having to look.
‘Tell me about the way.’
‘Better yet, come to bed and I’ll show you.’
For a second, she considers putting him to the test. What he is proposing is, after all, exactly what she wants, which is for them to be able to spend the entire night together, separated from the world and its worries, free of the dictates of the clock. To be able to take their time with one another and maybe, in three or four hours or whenever the mood and the hunger overpowers them, to get up, dress and go hit the high spots, find some cosy little Spanish or Italian restaurant. Enjoy a bowl of paella or a plate of spaghetti, split a bottle of average red, all the while leaning in, rubbing knees and conversing in slow breaths, making the best and the most of the candlelight. If everything they have is to come apart, a day, a year, even centuries from now, wouldn’t it be something to know that at least they’ve had one perfect night together, and that they spent it eating, strolling, kissing and sleeping, properly sleeping in one another’s arms?
This is their chance. Tomorrow then would be molten terror, the nth degree of Hell, an ungodly maelstrom of screaming, tears and maybe – for the first time in all her married years – even a hand to the face, open or fisted but thoroughly earned. There’d be humiliation and fear, and entire histories and futures fractured and rewritten. Hearts, once they’ve been shattered, never fully or properly heal. But those consequences remain for now beyond the horizon because tomorrow is not today.
She lowers herself onto the bed. One leg folds beneath her, opening her body to him in a way that seems inviting until she brings her other leg up and into place. Part of the difficulty is that she knows the limits of her selfishness, and of her courage. Michael’s hand settles high on her thigh but he makes no further advance, and she does not react except to lean in, only because he is close enough, and kiss his face and, very gently, his lips.
‘Do you really want to stay?’ she asks.
Then, without waiting for a response, she pulls back again to a sitting position. His hand tightens a quick pulse on her thigh, and his silence is answer enough. She is sensitive to every perceptible shift, no matter how minute. A tone flattened, a filament of tension creasing the brow, a stiffness infiltrating movement. The day’s perfection hangs in tenuous balance, the knots waiting again to tighten. They are an argument waiting to happen, and it’s better not to push the issue because after twenty or thirty minutes, once the reality sets in, she’ll have to sit there and listen while he talks them back from the ledge, his voice small, his eyes in desperation, once again seeking the room’s corners or the sky beyond the glass.
He wants, more than anything, to be with Caitlin, in this room, here on Coney Island. Out here, with one another, they’ve found the world. The air is alive, the water shines, and there is an enduring sense of shivering stars and moonlight. But even though he and Barbara have fallen decades out of love, the cancer is eating holes in her, and she’s fragile. He will probably hide behind an excuse, a business call that needs making, a deal hanging in the balance or some heavyweight account about to fall to him after six intensive months of legwork, and Caitlin won’t call him on the lie, because she understands. They need to consider the pain their actions will cause. It’s a question of duty. Lovers, those that survive, learn to feed on scraps, to make the best of things, the best of everything. They lie, cheat and deceive, and they try their damnedest and more to keep the searing ache of want from tearing them limb from limb and open from belly to chin.
What this is, in essence, is cowardice, on both sides. And even when the excuse shifts a little, its colour remains the same. He’ll apologise, in a way that presses beyond the blandness of sincerity, a sorry not just said but truly meant, with a kiss in lieu of flowers, of jewellery. And she’ll struggle into her best and most saleable smile and
let him off his impaling hook with a flippant flick of the wrist, insisting that it’s fine, that it really doesn’t matter. They’ve already done the time on this, and the motions don’t change. If she lets it go that far, it’ll play out the way it always does, and she can either remain beneath the sheets and quietly watch him dress or else clamber out of bed herself and turn her back on him so that they might dress together. It’s not much, but it’s what they have. Either way she’ll talk all the while, playing the situation down, talking about almost anything else, the weather, the room, the idea she’s been toying with about changing her hair. Words that seem to mean something more than their timbre would suggest, down beneath their snaps and crackles, but which keep themselves out of necessity to whispers, or perhaps to gasps, and delivered around a smile heavy with all or most of her teeth showing and that holds in place even with her back turned. A smile made big so that there can be no room to spare for tears.
The best option is to do nothing, to just let him be. This is a game that time has eroded and refined, and a slip now might prompt exactly the wrong sort of offer, one that he has neither the means nor the inclination of backing up. But at least part of why they work so well together is her ability to see all the way through him. Secrets never stand a chance between them, because they are each far too easily read. Dreams are fine in their time and space, but pragmatism is the key to survival. That, and making do. Some people see a glass as half full, others see it as half empty. But there is a third group, a small, almost unnoticeable percentage, who want nothing more than the opportunity to quench their raging thirsts. The little moaning sounds and grumbled, out-loud wishes are a part of who Michael is, was and probably ever will be, and once Caitlin learned to recognise that side of him then acceptance came so much easier. Now his hand has warmed her thigh, and suddenly something shifts inside of her and she has to resist an urge to press herself to him. He is studying her body, the sidewise sag of her small breasts in this slumped position, the soft puffed bloom of her nipples reddened to puce by the falseness of the lamplight.
‘Sweetheart,’ he says, and now, finally, his hand comes to life, pushing like a tide forward and down into the crevice between her thighs, causing her breath to catch with a grunt. For a second their eyes meet. He is smiling, but barely. She is not, but she can feel herself yielding to the gentle press of his fingertips.
Before things can go too far, she forces herself to withdraw. And once they are apart, she turns her back, sits on the edge of the bed and cradles her face momentarily in her hands.
‘Watch the time. I have to be getting back.’
Then she pulls her fingers again through her hair and gets to her feet. He doesn’t protest, which reveals his advance as another empty promise. And because of all that could be coming, because there is a falling number now attached to each such day as this, turning precious every touch and whisper, she feels her throat begin to constrict, the way it does when tears are close and trying not to fall.
Making the coffee is a precise repetition of the earlier process, yet something seems off. She attributes this to the fact of the lamplight and how it changes so completely the atmosphere of a room, and it is only as the kettle hushes towards a boil that she realises the difference has to do with her state of undress.
When it feels safe to do so, she glances at Michael and grins. He is watching her, but his mind seems elsewhere. The blankets are bunched at his waist now, showing off his full undershirt-clad girth. Seeing this arouses pity in her, not as a thought but as something almost physical. She can feel it turning over in the bottom of her stomach. Pity and, again, the certain dread that all of this, what they have going, is running towards its end.
‘Did I tell you how beautiful you look today?’
He means it, but she lowers her eyes and laughs.
‘That’s easy enough to say when you’re lying in bed without any shorts on and I’m standing here naked in front of you.’
He shakes his head, no, but doesn’t need to bother with the word.
The kettle nudges towards boiling point, giving her an excuse to turn away. She knows what he has in mind to say and is thankful that he elects silence instead. Because she is too close to giving in. She busies herself with the coffee, out of necessity reusing the earlier cups, partially filling them with boiled water, swirling the water to remove the dregs and then tossing the mess into the empty white ceramic basin that sits perched on the far right edge of the dressing table. But even after she wipes out their innards with a wad of tissue, the cups retain a certain murk, the greyness of old newspapers. They have little or no weight to them, and turn translucent when held against any light. At home, in an environment where cleanliness approaches a clinically sterile state, she’d never tolerate anything as shabby or as off-putting as these. But here, she gets to feel differently. Here, dirt and its kind feels rather fitting.
She adds a sachet of coffee to each cup, then pours in the boiling water and stirs. The ritual acts as a kind of capping point, a summation. Coffee to say hello, coffee to say goodbye, or goodnight. She adds sugar, and carries the cups, rattling as before on their saucers, across the room to the bed.
‘Michael.’
Michael has, in the interim, closed his eyes. Her voice see-saws the name, which startles him awake. Actually, it startles her, too. She rarely speaks his name, or at least not his full name. She rarely needs to. In conversation there is no reason to do so, although he does enjoy calling her Caitie and she rather enjoys hearing it, especially during moments of intimacy. There is something gorgeous then about the way he says it, whispers it, as if it is a fact that she absolutely needs to know but for whatever reason does not, as if the shapely spike and drop of her own truncated name holds the only answers she will ever need.
‘What? Oh, yes.’
He sits up and takes the coffee from her, muttering thanks. She crawls back into bed, rearranges the pillows behind her and settles the blankets over her stomach. She leaves her breasts exposed. They are small but shapely still, splayed now by the posture of her body. Once she is comfortable, Michael passes her a cup, and for a while they sip in silence.
Even with the addition of sugar, the coffee tastes terrible. That lesson was there to be learned first time around but it seems that neither one of them was ready for the education. Instead of fusing, the sugar’s sweetness exists in a weird tandem with the bitterness of the coffee. She steals a look at Michael and sees that he is sipping too, in a dainty fashion, with the saucer held beneath his chin and the cup tipping in a set rhythm to his lips and away again, over and over. A kind of pale intensity has set itself into the flesh of his face.
From month to month, their routine barely deviates, yet a lot has changed over the course of their time together. Ageing has something to do with it, and not just in a physical respect. They are no longer the people they were back when their lives first collided. They have evolved, slowly, to where they are now, and to who they are, each massively influencing the other’s growth. Love causes people to consider themselves from more than one vantage point, and encourages them to become better than they are. Sometimes that is an attainable goal; most of the time, it’s not. But even trying counts for something. And even if, at the core, nothing does actually change, a new kind of consciousness at least comes into play, one that shadows every act, every decision taken or not taken. People in love, or in what they might in their own delusional state consider to be love, tend to live their lives with others rather than themselves in mind. And that makes all the difference.
In more ways than not, they are a better fit for one another now than when they’d first met. The way a favourite old sweater always wins over a new garment in terms of pure comfort. As much as anything, this is the gift that time has given them, the illusion of comfort. There is a preciousness in being able to open up to someone, in being able to say aloud the kind of things – dreams, dreads and longings – that it never seemed possible to share or discuss with anyone else. Betwe
en most people, a kind of fear exists. Love lies in getting past that fear to the open space beyond. Once that happens, failure is no longer important. But no one gets there easily.
Today has been a good day, better than many they’ve known. Often, the mood is just wrong, or one or the other of them is too tired, or too knotted with tension, or simply too elsewhere. Half a dozen times at least during the past two years, and less frequently though still occasionally over the past decade, their efforts at lovemaking have fallen flat. Age contributes to that too, though it is not wholly responsible. The first few times it happened, Michael’s reaction was to shut down. He couldn’t look at her, could barely bring himself to speak. She understood, and said so, rubbing his neck and telling him not to worry, assuring him that these things happened once in a while. But he’d gone beyond listening. Tension passes between people, the way electricity does. There is much more to the world than what the five senses catch; there are also vibrations.
Time’s truest gifts to them have been a tempering of guilt, a sharing of blame, and above all else a deeper understanding of who they are as individuals, and as a couple. Acceptance has become their mantra. Realising these things allows them to breathe in one another’s company, to not be afraid of saying the wrong words at the wrong time, and to be able to cope whenever the engine stutters and breaks down. Over time, they’ve come to understand that there are all sorts of ways of making love, and all sorts of love worth making. And even on the down days, neither one of them has ever seen the hours spent together as time wasted. They have learned to value the little things, the quirks and foibles, because it’s the flaws that most thoroughly differentiate one person from the next, the otherwise hidden peculiarities that make intimacy such a treat. Like the tiny freckle on the lobe of Caitlin’s left ear, just where a piercing would be, a kind of x marks the spot. It is a nothing detail, and is unlikely ever to trouble the classification of beauty, yet it becomes beautiful somehow, because it is hers and a part of her, a sweet little speck of a thing hauling focus to itself time and again during conversation and during the act of love. Or the way she snorts when something catches her just right and causes her to laugh too hard, the sound of it small and cute, just some up-breath reflex action of her tongue falling wrongly against her palate, leaving her helpless against its coming through. These are the aspects of a person that can’t be affected, just as Michael’s peculiar fascination with order and the straightness of lines and angles can’t be, or the problem he has with odd numbers, as exemplified by the way he can never stop mid-book on an uneven page and how, twice a day, at lunchtime and again last thing at night, driven by some illogical terror of imbalance, he has to empty out and count the loose change in his pocket. In his desk drawer at work, and tucked away in the locker beside his bed, he keeps small glass jelly jars full of hoarded pennies and nickels, a secret stash that he has spoken of only with Caitlin, and which he refers to, for her amusement, as his bank vault. Such blemishes and oddities are precious, because they keep away notions of dreaded perfection but also because they help to make each a little more real in the other’s mind. Time has given them this, and because of time’s revelations even something as simple as a cup of coffee has value for them now, even a bad cup, in a way that it could not possibly have had back when they were younger and in need of greater thrills.
My Coney Island Baby Page 16
