‘Rebecca has her Irish dancing,’ I say.
‘Well. Not today, she doesn’t.’
‘She has her showcase.’ I wail it out into the street, and disbelieve it at the same time. Because what Tom is saying (quite rightly) is that my concerns are not important, they are invented, they are something to keep me occupied while he does the serious stuff of earning money and being more properly alive.
‘Where are you?’ I say.
‘I told you, I’m at work.’
‘Where at work? Where are you, at work?’
He can’t put the phone down on me because I am in Brighton and recently bereaved. There is a long pause.
‘Come home,’ he says. ‘When will you be home?’
‘What’s it to you?’
‘Everything,’ he says. ‘What do you think?’ And it is my turn now, to cut the connection, and fold up my phone.
My boy undertaker is behind me with the door open, saying, ‘Do you need another coffee? Is there someone I can call?’
He has put his earring back in; a little sleeper of gold.
‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘It’s just the way it goes.’
I fell in love, I am beginning to realise, in my early twenties, when I met and slept with a guy from Brooklyn called Michael Weiss. He was in Dublin for an MA in Irish studies or Celtic studies, or what have you-we despised those courses, they were just something the college did to get rich Americans, and so I was surprised to find myself in love with Michael Weiss; surprised too because he was not a tall American with big prairie bones, but an average-sized guy who smoked rollups and talked with a Brooklyn pebble in his mouth, part slur and part contemplation.
Sleeping with him was very sweet, the way he would prop himself up to look at you and talk. He loved to chat while he was touching you, he loved even to smoke in this endless lazy foreplay that was all foreign to me then. I was twenty years old. I wasn’t used to sex that was so aimless and unspecific. I wasn’t used to sex that was sober, I suppose, and all this talking just made me uncomfortable: I thought he didn’t fancy me. I watched his face move and wished he would just get on with it-the astonishing bit, the thing we were both here for.
I think, in his ironic, slow way Michael Weiss knew that he couldn’t hold on to me, and all he was doing in those drowsy afternoons was trying to talk me down, like a cat in a tree, or an air hostess in charge of the plane. ‘You see that leh-ver to your right? I want you to ease that leh-ver down to forty-five degrees.’
And though we got through a surprising amount of it-sex, that is-all I can remember is my madness at the time, watching the day outside his window shift to dusk in jolts and patches. It was, perhaps, an adolescent thing; standing naked on the nylon carpet of his student bedsit and feeling the change of light to be impossible; like my skin was being stripped off, as the day gave way, in tics and lunges, to dark.
Michael’s father was an artist and his mother was something else. I wasn’t used to that either-most of the parents I knew were just parents-but he had this semi-famous father and this mother who made appointments and met people and dressed up to go out, and so he had all of that dragging behind him. It was hard for him to know what he was going to do when he grew up, because he had been grown up, at a guess, since he was ten years old. He wrote some poems, and they were probably quite good poems, but the idea of getting anywhere was a problem for him. There was money-not a lot of money, but some-and he had decided I think, even then, just to exist, and see what came his way.
So now he is just existing, as I am, though probably somewhere more interesting than Booterstown, Dublin 4. He is in Manhattan, say, or the canyons of LA, and he is taking his son to saxophone lessons, he is turning up to his daughter’s dance showcase on a Thursday afternoon, and finding all of that an important and amusing thing to do.
I went out with Michael Weiss for two years, on and off; driven crazy by his languor-made inadequate by it, and impatient for the world ahead of us, that was full of things to do. I was not sure what these things were, but they would be better than just hanging around all afternoon, kissing and smoking, talking about-what?-whether Dirk Bogarde was actually good-looking, and how, or how not to be, a Jew.
Now, of course, my afternoons are spent not watching the television, so I was undoubtedly right to distrust and finally leave Michael Weiss for a better, faster life, the one I have now, cooking for a man who doesn’t show up before nine and for two girls who will shortly stop showing up too. Having tear-streaked sex, once in a blue moon, with my middle-aged husband; not knowing whether to hit him or kiss him.
Switch on the light, I want to say. Switch on the light.
But it is not just the sex, or remembered sex, that makes me think I love Michael Weiss from Brooklyn, now, seventeen years too late. It is the way he refused to own me, no matter how much I tried to be owned. It was the way he would not take me, he would only meet me, and that only ever halfway.
I think I am ready for that now. I think I am ready to be met.
I am sitting at a street café table, with perhaps my fifth latte of the day, when some American kids pass by, two girls and a guy. One of the girls is saying, ‘You know what really sucks? What really sucks are those button flies, when you miss a button?’ and the guy says, ‘And you’re like…this, you know?’ with his hands crossed at the wrist in front of his crotch, like a picture of the flagellated Christ.
This is what they were like, the Americans at college in Dublin-clear and loudish and interesting, at least to themselves. Maybe it is what we were all like, though no one wore long-sleeved T-shirts under short-sleeved T-shirts in our day. And I don’t know if ‘sucks’ was a big word back then. I think about the boy’s gesture, and I wonder why it is such a horrible thing to say. If someone sucks, then they are the worst possible type. A spoiler. Such a social word, I think, a gang word, for a very private muscular motion.
This is the way my mind runs, as I fail to gather myself together and get back on a train to the airport while my brother is decanted and transported and embalmed (the whiskey must help), somewhere in the town behind me. I go into a few shops and try normality for a while, and end up sitting still while the loud world passes by, with a long coffee spoon in my mouth, sucking.
13
WHEN I WAS in college, I decided that Ada had been a prostitute-the way you do. It must have been around the time she died. I remember discussing my theory with Michael Weiss, who liked it a lot, though, as he pointed out, it was just as possible that she had been a nun, which was in his opinion pretty much the same thing, probably because he came from Brooklyn.
Well, yes.
Michael Weiss was the kind of person who took milk in his tea one day and decided against it the next, and he would, no doubt, have driven me crazy over time. But I think he said something true about Ada, or about the distance between me and Ada. Because I, too, might as well have been from Brooklyn, looking at the mysterious fact of her life and deciding on the one story that would explain us all.
I don’t think I made it to the removal, when she died-I probably spent the evening in Belfield bar-and the questions of who owned the house and where the money would go, once Ada’s body was taken out of it, were a matter of complete indifference to me. Though not this question, suddenly, of who or what she had been; the orphan, Ada Merriman.
I made it to the funeral all right. There is the frizz of my mother’s hair in the row in front of me, with our father on one side and, on the other, her sister, our Aunt Rose. There was a third child, a brother called Brendan, but he was probably dead by then, so these were the sad remnants of Ada’s luck: our zonked-out mother, Maureen, and Rose the art teacher, who dressed in Interesting Tweeds of emerald green and cobalt blue. The Hegarty siblings were in the row behind them: in-laws and babies were sieved out into further pews, and it is possible that we sat, even then, in order of age; ‘steps and stairs’ as people used to croon, though the staircase was now bocketty, with gaps and broken planks and disproportion between one fat stoop and the next. Grown up, we all looked like cuckoos, every single one of us: we all looked wrong.