She shook her head. “I’m always meaning to go to more stuff at IMMA.”
“Oh, well. And he had a thing at MoMA too, though I presume you didn’t see that?”
Catherine opened her mouth to reply, but he talked over her.
“And in September we start getting ready for a big show in Madrid, at the Museo Nacional, and then I think Rome, then Tokyo.” He frowned. “No. Tokyo first. Tokyo in February. That’ll be a fucking nightmare.”
“Do you get to go to all these places?”
“Oh, no. I’m just a studio assistant. He has special slaves to go traveling with him.”
“That’d be amazing.”
James winced. “I’d take being on the road with yer man in the lorry over Malachy any day, to be honest with you.”
“Oh, right,” Catherine said, with a laugh that quickly slid into nervousness, because James was regarding her very closely now. He was stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray, and staring over at her, and he was smirking slightly, and he was looking her up and down. He nodded to himself.
“Hmm,” he said.
Catherine twitched; her left leg shot out in front of her as though a doctor had tapped her on the knee. “What?”
“No, no,” James said, as though she was mistaken about something. “Just thinking.”
“Thinking about what?” she said, sounding breathless.
“I’m just trying to think how our Malachy would do you.”
She lurched sideways, as though he had made a grab at her, and he burst out laughing.
“Oh, I love seeing what people’s self-consciousness looks like,” he said, grinning. “Everyone reacts differently when you point a camera at them. All I had to do with you was mention the idea, and you nearly went through the wall.”
“I did not.”
He squinted. “Still. I can see how he’d do it. Dead on.” He framed Catherine with his hands. “And very close up. Close enough to see your pores.”
She shook her head vigorously. “I don’t like—”
He waved a hand. “Nothing to do with it, what you like or don’t like.”
“I hate close-ups,” Catherine said. “I always have spots, or blackheads, or something. And my teeth.” She clamped her mouth shut.
“What’s wrong with your teeth?”
She shook her head.
“They work, don’t they?”
She shrugged.
“You can chew things?”
“Obviously I can chew things.”
“Anyway. He’s not interested in people being beautiful. That’s not what old Malachy is about. So you can rest easy.”
“Thanks very much,” she said, almost sullenly; she did not like the way this conversation was going. Had he just insulted her? Had he just implied that she was ugly?
“You’re welcome,” he said, flashing her a smile. His own teeth were not that great, actually; a bit crooked, and quite yellow. She was suddenly very tired, looking at him; she found herself wishing that Amy or Lorraine would come home now and take over with him; that one of them would come back to relieve her. He filled her with curiosity, but at the same time, there was only so much of this kind of conversation that she could handle with anyone she didn’t know well, especially with a boy. She was getting better at it after a year of college, but it was still so difficult for her, having to come up with things to say and then having to come up, immediately, with ways to answer; she felt it like a physical weight. Now, for example, as he sat there, lighting up another of Amy’s cigarettes, what was she supposed to say to him? Ask him some more about Malachy’s photographs, what they looked like, probably, but she did not trust herself to do this properly: she could not be sure of having the right words. He’d said portraiture. He’d said abstract. There had been some photography in her Twentieth Century course, but she had clearly not paid close enough attention. Are they sad, or are they serious? she thought about asking, but that sounded so simplistic; she imagined James giving her some lecture about the irrelevance of emotion. Were the people Malachy photographed naked? That seemed like something she could ask, maybe, but then that was probably a question that would be asked only by someone who did not understand art at all, someone who was, basically, perving on the idea of naked people.
James pushed out a long sigh. “So, Catherine.”
She swallowed. “So,” she said, making a last, desperate grab at a possible topic with which to divert him from whatever it was he was going to say to her. But nothing came. She nodded, as though accepting her fate.
“So,” he said again, winking at her. “Any fella?”
A sort of dull queasiness washed over her, like a trace of the hangover she had just about shaken off, but it was nothing to do with booze, this feeling. It was to do with something else, and there could be no denying that she had walked herself right into it. This guy, this guy she did not even know, except from a photograph, except from some drawings which were, come to think of it, still under the mattress of her bed; she had let this guy in — or, more precisely, she had let this guy let himself in — and she had got up to talk to him, and she had drunk tea with him, and she was sitting here, now, watching him smoke, and she was wearing these ridiculous shorts that she never wore, that exposed far too much of her legs, and her shirt was not even properly buttoned, and so of course he thought she was up for it; of course he did. She cursed herself. How was she supposed to talk herself out of this corner? She stared out the window, to the oblivious blue sky. From the armchair came a pointed throat-clearing. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him wave.
“Hello?”
“Sorry,” she said, glancing back to him. “Sorry, I heard you.”
“So that’s a no?”
She swallowed. “It’s just not something I really have time for at the moment, being in a relationship.”
He blew out another plume. “Ah, sure, who’d have you? The state of your teeth.”
She stared at him in disbelief. “Oh my God!”
“Ah, sure, you’re as bad as Shane McGowan, Catherine, let’s face it. Worse again. Half of them broken. The other half rotten.”
“Fuck you,” she said, sitting bolt upright. Her heart was thumping. “Fuck you, you fucking redhead!”
He threw his head back and laughed in huge, heavy peals, his throat long and exposed, his mouth open as though he had turned his face up to the sky to drink in the rain. He roared with laughter. He thumped the floor with the heels of his hands. He inhaled hard, and he dropped his chin, his eyes tightly closed, looking as though he was trying to steady himself, and then he was off again. He could almost have been crying. As soon as that thought struck her, Catherine could not stop seeing what he would look like if he actually was crying; could not but see him in the grip of a sobbing fit. It was so strange. She had never seen a man cry. She was not seeing one cry now, either, she had to remind herself, but still. She felt a weird thrill at the sight of him; a squeamish sense of staring where she was not supposed to stare. When he finally stopped, gasping for breath, sort of moaning, as though it had all been too much for him, this torture she had put him through, she had forgotten what it was they had even been talking about.
But James had not. “Oh, Catherine,” he said, shaking his head. “Catherine, Catherine. Your teeth are lovely.” He was picking up his cigarette; he gestured, now, with it up and down the length of her. “The whole lot of you is lovely. Sure the fellas must be queuing up for you.”
“No,” she said vehemently, and then instantly worried that this was the wrong answer. “I mean…”
“Oh, come on.”
She decided to take a different tack. To sound less available.
“Well,” she said, feigning hesitancy, “I suppose I have spent the year messing around with someone, but it’s nothing, really. Nothing worth talking about.”