The Christmas tour was to leave midmorning. I packed slowly, still high from the lovemaking, unsure how to sneak around Bridget, fearful of facing Joe, who had fallen asleep with no promises. Too, I was unsure of where or how to get around, through, and out of Dublin.
Joe awoke. “No, no, no. You stay put, Colleen. We’ll tour together. I can show you the country.”
I closed my tapestry suitcase. This was what I wanted, unconditionally, truly, madly. I envisioned what I would tell my friends. The LA envy I would engender. The pictures I would take.
Bridget burst into the room in what surely was a black mourning dress. “Get on with the tour, girlie. I think we’ve all had enough.”
Joe jumped out of bed, uninhibited in his nakedness. Bridget gasped and turned her head. “We’re staying here, Bridget. It’s Christmas Day.”
“I don’t care.” She spoke to the wall. “You two are not staying here. That behavior will not take place in a reputable house. I want this girl out.”
“Reputable? Here? That’s a fine tune to play.” Joe grabbed his clothes. “I’ll take her into the city. I’m on holiday, anyway.”
Bridget waved us both off. Her old-fashioned dress swished as she hurried out of the room.
“Are you packed, Colleen?”
I pointed to my tapestry suitcase. He dressed and lugged it out the door.
In Ireland’s northwest coastal region, during the Troubles, there were still sights where only ghosts would walk. Ireland was a lonely island, dark and rainy, with a brooding cloudy atmosphere. I felt I had stepped out of the boundaries of sanity, history, reality. With no native language to describe it or label it, I became one with whatever the earth and wind and water was to its universe. Ireland made no sense to me. But I was with Joe Donnelly, and Joe Donnelly was what I wanted.
Joe sat still and quiet in an abandoned core of an early-Christian church. We’d spent five days searching ruins, visiting museums, tracking down O’Casey, Joyce, Yeats. We were both exhausted, reserved. The walls of the ancient structure were barely two feet high. Joe sat silently and stared at an altar that no longer was, in one of those manic-depressive undertows that had periodically appeared in the midst of our passionate days in Dublin, Cork, Kildare, Connemara — a time full of sex and drink and James Joyce. There was peace on that coastline. It was still, empty. I teetered on an old stone wall, carefully balancing, challenging myself to keep from falling to my left, which would land me in the ocean several hundred feet below the cliff, or falling to my right, where I would land on soft, wet, chalk-like sand just feet from Joe. But I was confident in my happiness that week, and I knew I could balance and by balancing could enjoy both worlds on each side of me — the vast, rough, raging sea to one side and the quiet stillness of Joe on the other.
“Come here, Colleen, before you fall to your death.”
Ah, he sounded like a man who would raise children, love a wife, work hard and long, build a home, a future, a life with a good-looking, accomplished, quite intellectual American woman at his side. If not for the pain and horror to come, those words, spoken in a deteriorated church on an empty coastline in a dilapidated country, would be the words that still echo from that short week. I jumped from the stone wall and stood at the entrance of what was left of the church.
“Colleen, did you ever think about the humiliation that poor bugger felt when you left the night before your wedding?”
“No, I didn’t. LA people are incapable of feeling humiliation.”
“Why did you do it?”
“I didn’t trust it would last forever. I told you that.” I sauntered over and sat next to him. “I knew that happiness would end with the vows. God would find me and make me miserable.”
“Are you capable of love, then?”
“I don’t know. It depends upon how much happiness is involved. I’d hate to see myself happy then lose it.”
“Have you ever loved a man?”
“What odd questions. I don’t really know.”
“Will you marry me, then?”
“Marry you?” My heart leapt, my body shook. Such words from the man I dared not dream would spend his life with me.
“Yes, I want to marry you,” he said. He looked young and innocent at that moment in his black trousers and new sweater, like an earnest schoolboy. “You’d get happiness that could last forever. I’d get, well, I suppose I’d get everything I wanted.”
While traveling with Joe during the previous five days, I had occasionally found him resigned, perhaps fatalistic. Once, in a small pub near the university in Cork, an old school chum joined us. This happened everywhere we went, an old mate here, a school chum there, a childhood buddy down the row. In Cork, the man plopped down at our table and ordered us three pints. From his rumpled suit, white shirt, and food stains on his tie, I assumed he was university stuff. I kept guessing all the while he talked. A surveyor? An out-of-work grade school teacher? A government worker?
Oddly, Joe never introduced us. He let the man ramble on about his and Joe’s childhood. Had he seen the new parish priest, Tommy Casey? Their old schoolmate? The one who had a thing for your sister, Bridget? Joe chuckled. The man took the chuckle as encouragement to go on about Bridget. Was she still running the family B&B? Should have kept it as your home, Joe, “’stead of running all over Europe trying to make something of yourself. You can run, but as they say, you cannot hide.”
He turned to me. “Have you met Bridget?” He wiped foam from his mouth. “Bridget Donnelly is the type of woman who would make a man a wonderful grandmother.” He laughed at his own joke. “A wonderful grandmother, except the explosive parts.” He snorted until droplets came from his nose. “The Donnelly family. What a bunch—”
I started to ask what he meant when Joe stood, grabbed my hand, and we left. He remained silent the rest of the day. No amount of gentle humor could bring him out of it. I had quite enjoyed his chum. Traditional Irish pub, red-faced, curly-haired drinking mate, dark ales, laughter — quite a picture postcard. I said nothing to Joe. I don’t think I wanted to know. I let Joe brood.
But in the unexpected proposal of marriage, he’d also sounded depressed. If I had not been so distracted by the idea of it, by his gorgeous being sitting alone in that ruin, by the romance of the brooding Irish, I would have cared enough to question him. But the perceptions of love levitate a woman. I melted every time I looked at Joe, awake or asleep. As I lay next to him, I dared not think of a life without him. My emotions were so deep, my reactions to his body, his mind, his sexuality so fulfilling. We had been like two beings sailing into oblivion, with no anchor, no stopping point, no handle. So powerful was our lovemaking, I felt like a feather or leaf floating from the heavens, touching earth only when the morning light hit the lace curtains. I felt that if I could take a deep breath, I would swallow the world, as he had swallowed me. For that second, I felt there was a rewarding God, there was a heaven and angels and life ever after. I stopped watching my backside.
“But,” Joe said, “you have to marry me now.”
“Now?”
“Back in Dublin. Tomorrow. I want to get married tomorrow.”
“Why tomorrow?”
“Because, Colleen, you have a history of leaving the chap at the altar. The reason is no fookin’ mystery.” He waved me off as though I were a child. At the time, I liked the off-handed way he controlled my questioning, the drawn-out owl-type oooo that turned fuckin’ into fookin’. The style gave him a bit of shabby sexiness. “We’ll marry tomorrow. I have to get back to work on Monday.”