“I know, I know, and the opening’s not till Tuesday,” he said. “But if you wanted — if you were able — I mentioned to Meghan there as we were leaving that I’d like for you to be able to call in for a private viewing on Monday during the day sometime, and could she arrange to have someone there.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. It’ll be mostly installed by then.”
“And will you be there?”
“Oh, no,” he said, flinching as though he had been stung. “I couldn’t — I can barely stand to look at them when they’re up myself, never mind to watch someone else looking at them.”
“Oh, sure, sure.”
“But I’d like you to see them. Just, you know. To see.”
“Sure,” Catherine nodded, and, feeling the need to make this somehow businesslike, she took her BlackBerry out of her jacket pocket. She toggled the screen randomly; the weather icon was what opened up. “What time?” she said, her eyes on the screen. “Ten thirty or eleven?”
“It’s up to you,” James said. “They’ll be there all day. Just go when it suits you. If it suits you.”
“Of course it suits me. I’m really looking forward to it.”
“OK,” James said, and he smiled at her.
“Thanks, James.”
“I’d better go,” he said, pointing towards the walkway as though it was something waiting for him. “I’ll chat to you?”
“I’ll chat to you,” Catherine nodded, and she watched him walk away. And when she walked away, she looked back at him, at his form going over the strange green bridge, his rucksack on his back, his arms swinging, like a tourist going to see what he could see.
But he was not the tourist, of course. The tourist was her.
* * *
His name was already printed on the frosted glass of the gallery window, low down, to the left of the entrance: James Flynn, and the name of the show, Twenty of You. Catherine pressed the buzzer and waited. The street was almost eerily quiet; on a Monday, the galleries were all closed to the public. The door opened a crack, and a young woman peered out; seeing Catherine, she smiled and ushered her in. She was Alice, she said, and James had called that morning to let her know that Catherine would be coming to see the work — could she get Catherine anything: coffee, water, anything?
“I’m fine, thanks,” Catherine said, glancing around the space; they were in the reception area, where a large desk — presumably Alice’s — faced a wall of catalogues of James’s work; the large hardbacks of the last two shows at Greene were there, along with the magazine-bound editions he had made with McGinley and the others, and the softbound catalogue from the first Lewis show. Catherine moved towards them, but then realized that the girl — Alice — was holding something out to her; a list, on an A4 sheet, of the works in the new show.
“Oh, no, it’s OK,” Catherine said, shaking her head. “I’d prefer just to look at them head-on, if you know what I mean. I always prefer to do it that way at first.”
“No problem,” said Alice, and she put the list back on the desk. “Well, the show starts in the next room and continues into the back room,” she said, pointing. “I hope you like it.”
All of the faces greeted her; all of the staring men. Young, most of them. Striking, all of them, each in their own way, but then that was James; that was what James did. And then, not all of them were staring, she realized; some of them were looking right out at the viewer, a sort of reckoning, but some of them were refusing, or simply not feeling obliged, to meet the viewer’s eye; glancing to the side or to the ground, to something other, something out of frame. Or maybe to nothing at all; maybe only to thought, to where a thought led.
Shaven-headed, the first of them — from the entrance, she moved to the right, to the man with the buzz cut and the vaguely disapproving mouth, the touch of bloodshot at the sides of his eyes. She did not like him, she decided; she was, somehow, afraid of him. Ridiculous, but that was her reaction, and she had learned, in all of these years walking around galleries, to realize that the reaction was the thing really worth looking at, was the place where the interesting, uncomfortable stuff was to be found.
The next boy was beautiful, the boy with the wax in his hair; more wax than he needed, but it did nothing to interfere with his beauty; nothing could. He was probably twenty-five, she thought, but he looked younger, maybe because he looked startled; maybe because the camera had caught him by surprise, clicking at him as he busied himself with something that could not be seen, something on the other side of the rock on which he was seated; it was a summer day, and he and James had been somewhere, a park, a mountain, somewhere, and James had taken up his camera and the boy’s head had turned. A bag at his feet. No trace of wariness in his eyes.
Smoking, the next guy. Not young. Standing at what looked like a bus stop. A check shirt, the sleeves rolled up. Blond hair on his arms. His fingers were stubby; the nails were flecked with something: maybe paint. He did not look like someone waiting. His eyes looking out to the street. He looked like someone who had not decided whether, when the bus did come, he would be getting on.
Long-haired and weary-looking, the fourth one. Dark shadows under his eyes. This was another formal portrait, like the first one; there was nothing in the background, there was no everyday clutter, no everyday world. There were no props. The wall behind him bare. His shirt blue, his chin dimpled, his impatience seeming already to have propelled him out of the shot. He hugged himself. He wanted to be away.
Five looked Irish, she thought. Some kind of embarrassment in his gaze; some kind of awkwardness. Ah, Jaysus, James, the photo might have been called, she thought, laughing to herself; but he was handsome, the dark eyebrows, the high forehead, the shirt collars askew.
Six was black, stretched out on what looked like a beach towel, though fully clothed. She glanced around, seeing another black guy across the way, and felt immediately ashamed of herself — counting, as though it was something she should even be noticing, but the reaction was the whole point, she reminded herself, and anyway, nobody needed to know. Alice, for example, coming smiling towards her now, an iPad in her hands; Alice did not need to know that Catherine had looked around and had counted the black faces, and nor did anyone else.
“Superb, aren’t they?” Alice said. She looked around the walls and nodded, as if in agreement with herself. “I love the one of Christian,” she said, and she pointed towards the door.
“Oh,” Catherine said. “I hadn’t even noticed.”
“The pieces go from left to right, really,” Alice said, “but I guess it doesn’t matter which way you look at them.” She gave a short laugh. “As long as you look at them.”
Catherine said nothing. She was crossing to the photo of Christian, which had obviously been taken on the same day as the one she had already seen; he was wearing the same clothes, the same sleeveless T-shirt and cargo shorts, and there were his dark curls, and there were his full lips, and there was the light tan on his skin, the tan he had brought with him, surely, to Carrigfinn; you did not get a tan in a place like Carrigfinn. This photo had been taken outside, out in the greenness and the warmth which it had been possible only to glimpse over his shoulder in the other one; at his back were the rusted bars of a gate, a gate into a meadow, and in the meadow the grass was high, the sunshine was flooding it; it glowed like a field made of light.
“That must have been June,” Catherine said in a murmur. “They haven’t knocked that field.”
“Knocked the—?” Alice was saying from beside her now, sounding confused.
“It’s nothing,” Catherine said. “Just a detail I noticed. It’s a beautiful photo.”
“So beautiful,” Alice said. “I mean, the look on Christian’s face. The way you can tell he’s just about to smile. And the way he’s leaning back onto that railing — something about the, sort of, playfulness of that, I love it.”
“Yeah,” Catherine said. “I love it too.”
“And I love the one of you.”
Catherine stared. “The—?”
“You haven’t seen it yet?” Alice said, walking towards the second room, and beckoning Catherine to follow her.
“I’m sorry,” Catherine said, her voice closing on itself. “There’s a photo of me?”
“Oh yeah,” Alice said, glancing back. “James didn’t tell you?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Fuck!” Alice said, putting a hand to her mouth. She immediately looked horrified. “Oh my God, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just — I assumed you knew — I didn’t realize it was a—”
Catherine was already walking past her.
“It doesn’t even look like you, really,” Alice said weakly, as Catherine passed into the next room, as Catherine caught her breath.
It was a photo of a photo. A photo of a photo in a bright blue wooden frame, standing on a bookshelf, books behind it; you could read the spines, if you wanted to, which Catherine did not, just at this moment; Catherine did not know, just at this moment, what she wanted to do, whether it was to stare at this small square of what had once been herself, or to turn her back on it and run. The photo had been taken at the kitchen table in Baggot Street that first day; not the first day, not the day they had met, but the day after they had first been together, the day after everything had changed. She was slouching, and straggle-haired — she was hungover — wearing her old flannel shirt, the shirt she had loved, the shirt she had bought second-hand from a market stall near St. Stephen’s Green the summer she was sixteen. In her hands was the Gary Larson mug Ellen had given her one Christmas, the one with the joke about Moses parting the waters, and the table was a mess in front of her: milk cartons, and tea towels, and the yellow plastic bowl for which nobody ever remembered to get any fruit. Somebody’s empty Marlboro packet, crushed as though it had been stepped on. A newspaper; a newspaper, by then already ridiculously out of date.
She was staring right into the lens.
“1998,” Alice read from her iPad. “Wow.” She cleared her throat. “I love the shirt you’re wearing.”
“Thanks,” Catherine managed.
“From which I did not know,” Alice said. “Nice.”
“What?” Catherine said, turning sharply.
“That’s what it’s called,” Alice said, offering her the iPad. “From which—”
“Let me see that,” Catherine said, taking it, and Alice held up her hands, as though to protest that she had been giving it to Catherine anyway.
From which (I did not know), Catherine, 1998, the description read. Catherine pinched it with thumb and index finger, enlarging it, as though to test it, as though to make it somehow more real. The words grew huge against the white background; they seemed to come closer to her, until there was space only for know on the screen. Catherine stared at it. She looked back to the photo, to the cheap wooden frame around the moment of which she had no memory. How could she not remember him taking that photograph? How had it slipped so completely from her store of things, when what it had been made of — James’s eyes fixed on her while she had her eyes fixed on him — had been what she had wanted so badly?
“It’s kind of strange, the way the brackets are,” Alice said, sounding a little nervous.
“I know what it means,” Catherine said.
Alice waited a moment but then, realizing that there would be no further explanation, she nodded and took a step back.
There were eight or ten other portraits in the gallery, Catherine saw now, looking around; Liam was there on the adjoining wall, the photo of him that James had taken in the hospital. She had seen it before; she forced herself now, to look at it, not to look away from it. She looked at the pillow on which his head rested, and she looked at the softness of his hair, and she looked at his skin, his young, perfect skin, and she looked at his eyes again, and she looked at the bandages on his neck and on his shoulders, and she looked at his hands. Her heart was pounding. Behind her, Alice was saying something, but Catherine did not know what it was. An adjective; it was always an adjective. As though an adjective could come close to this. As though an adjective could come close to any of them. Then she looked more closely, Catherine did, and she saw something she had not seen before, and she realized why the angle of the photograph seemed crooked somehow, seemed somehow haphazard; it was because the photographer was holding the camera only with his right hand, and because his left hand was covering Liam’s; it was because that was the photographer’s thumb, the photographer’s index finger, there, in the bottom corner of the photograph, laid over Liam’s hand. And that was why the frame was so tight. That was why the lens was so near. That was what explained that look in Liam’s eyes.
Catherine heard Alice clear her throat now, and say something, and as she glanced her way she saw how Alice’s expression jolted and then hesitated at the sight of Catherine’s tears.
“I’m sorry?” Catherine said, wiping them away. “I’m sorry, did you say something to me?”
Alice smiled apologetically. “I was just asking whether you had any questions.”
Catherine shook her head. “No questions,” she said, and she turned to look at the other faces in the room. “No questions at all.”