THE RAIN OUTSIDE still hammers down. Luggage carts hurry to and fro. He lifts a biscuit, blows the tea cool. Sunday nights to Ireland. Wednesday nights to London. Thursdays to Washington D.C., at his law firm. Friday nights to New York. Sundays back out to England and Ireland again.
Sometimes it feels as if there is no motion at alclass="underline" thousands of miles in the decompression chamber, the same cup of tea in the same cup in the same airport lounge, the same city, the same neat car.
He wonders what might happen if the plane were delayed, how easy it would be to go home, ascend in the elevator, to turn the key, flick on the lamp, become that other man on whom he is equally intent.
HE IS GUIDED last onto the plane. A special privilege. As if he could be unseen. A nice thought: to be truly unseen. To own an influential anonymity.
He was always recognized in Washington. The push, the shove, the backslap. The corridors of power. What he disliked were the galas, the garden parties, the red carpets. Flashbulbs, press briefings, TV cameras. The irksome necessities. He was recognized in New York, too, but nobody seemed to care. The city was so brash that it was obsessed only with itself. In Maine, he felt at home, amongst his own people.
Out here, in this nation of cloud and air, they all know him, too. They are quick to hang his suit jacket, place the small bag in the overhead bin. He glances across and is glad to see that the seat beside him is free. No need for the kind nod, or the apologetic half-grin. He has his routine down firmly now. The window seat. Briefcase tucked down beside him. Shoes gently lifted, though not fully taken off, not yet. Something vaguely rude in the idea that you remove your shoes before liftoff.
The stewardess moves along the aisle. A tray, a tongs. He reaches for the white towel, holds it to his brow, and then cleans in the depths between his fingers. How quickly the towel grows cool. For once he wishes he had one of those confounded portable phones. What is it they call them? Cellulars. Mobiles. Handhelds. Just to call home. But his refusal to get a phone has become a point of honor now. He clings to the idea, an old-fashioned beating of the chest. He has spent sixty-odd years without one: no point in beginning now. Ridiculous, really. All his aides have them. His negotiating team. All the reporters. There have even been times, just before takeoff, when he borrowed one from his fellow passengers, just to make a quick call to Heather. His hand over the mouthpiece so as not to appear rude.
A menu is slipped into his lap, but he knows this month’s choices by heart: lobster bisque, garden salad, chicken cordon bleu, Asian noodles, beef tenderloin, mushroom risotto. The British are working on their culinary reputation, it seems. Their best, their brightest. They are a tough, intransigent lot, though they have softened a good deal in the past year or so. Embarrassed by what they have done for centuries in Ireland. Ready to leave. To hightail it out of there. They would wipe their hands clean in an instant, if only they didn’t have to do it in front of the world. They seem stunned that Northern Ireland somehow exists. How did they possibly ever believe that the country could have been good for them? What it all came down to was pride. Pride in the rise, and pride in the fall. They want to be able to leave with a measure of dignity. Tally-ho. Ta-ra. Voyeurs to their own experience. Living at an angle to the moment. And the Irish, down south, with almost the exact opposite dilemma. Embarrassed by the fact that it was taken away. Centuries of desire. Like the longing for a married woman. And now suddenly she is there, within your grasp, and you’re not quite sure whether you want her at all. Second thoughts. Other dowries. The mildew in the room where the past is stored. The Unionists, the Nationalists, the Loyalists, the Republicans, the Planters, the Gaels. Their endless gallery of themselves. Room after room. Painting after painting. Men on tall horses. Flags into battle. Sieges and riverbanks. The alphabet soup of the terrorists.
At first he couldn’t understand the accents. The spiky consonants. Angular and hard-edged. It seemed to him like an altogether different language. They came to the microphone. He had to lean forward to try to decipher it. The small punctuations of grief. Ach. Aye. Surely. Not our fault, Mr. Chairman. Six into twenty-six won’t go. They kicked the bloody door in, so they did. They pushed wee Peader out the helicopter. All due respect, Senator, we don’t talk to murderers. If Mr. Chairman would like to know what it’s like why don’t you come, for once, to the Shankill?
They were dumping out the contents of endless drawers on the floor. But he soon caught on. He began to tell the difference between a Belfast and a Dublin accent, between Cork and Fermanagh, between Derry and Londonderry even. All the geography that went into words. The history behind every syllable. The Battle of the Boyne. Enniskillen. Bloody Sunday. There was a clue in every tiny detail. Gary was a Prod. Seamus was a Taig. Liz lived on the Shankill Road. Bobby on the Falls. Sean went to St. Columba’s. Jeremy to Campbell. Bushmills was a Protestant whiskey. Jameson for Catholics. Nobody drove a green car. Your tie was never orange. You went for holidays in Bundoran or you went to Portrush. Fly your flag. Pick your poison. Choose your hangman.
Lord, it was a tangled web. One he would do well to sleep upon. One that needed an eternity of rest.
Still, he had grown to like them: the politicians, the diplomats, the spin doctors, the civil servants, the security men, even the loudmouths outside the gates. All of them with their own particular music. A certain generosity to them. All the dirty laundry somehow made eloquent. He was told once that any good Irishman would drive fifty miles out of his way just to hear an insult — and a hundred miles if the insult was good enough. The self-deprecation. The effacement. The awareness. There was something about the endless wrangling that has caught him in the glue pot and kept him there. The confounded intricacies. The edges of endeavor. The fascination with the impossible. He wanted to stay alert to what might be learned. And there was always a key in the anonymous moment. The women in the canteen. They nodded at him and caught his eye. The sad smile. The generous delusion. The lean forward. God bless you, Senator, but it’s a fool’s errand. Well, be that as it may, but I’ll still take the part.
HE WAS NOT beyond knowing that they thought him — when he first arrived — a quiet patsy. The Arab. The Yank. The Judge. Your Harness. Mohammed. Mahatma. Ahab. Iron Pants. They even called him, for some reason, the Serb. He wasn’t interested in playing himself Irish or Lebanese. Not for him the simple ancestral heart: he wanted to make himself the smallest continent possible.
Still, he was sure some of them wanted a slice of anger from him. To stumble somehow. To say the wrong thing. So they could apportion the blame away from themselves. But he figured out ways to fade into the background, stuck to silence, looked over the rim of his glasses. He disliked his own importance in the process. It was the others who had brought the possibility here: Clinton, Reynolds, Hume, Major. He just wanted to land it. To take it down from where it was, aloft, like one of those great lumbering machines of the early part of the century, the crates of air and wood and wire they somehow flew across the water.
A RED EYELID of sun out the window. The vaguely scattered morning clouds. London below. The hum and flood of plane lights. His feet have swollen during the flight. In the overhead locker he reaches for his sweater.
He is vaguely embarrassed that Heather dresses him these days. She knows a Persian tailor who double-breasts his suits. It took a little while to step into the crease. Even the very word bespoke. The sweaters are from Cenci or some such place. Something comforting in them. A small surrendering to memory. Odd that desire is made true by distance. He can pull on the sweater and almost be back on Sixty-Seventh Street. Odd, too, how a life can so easily reshape itself. Perhaps the failure that irks him the most is the original marriage. It simply didn’t work out. They tried, he and his first wife, they hung on, they failed, what was broken was broken. Ashes do not become wood. What he feared early on was the idea that his grown daughter might see him in his new suit and ties, and that she would say nothing at all, that the silence would go right to the core of failure.