In the old country, she said.
In Connecticut. Rubbed the eyes off potatoes because she thought they were looking at her.
You just made that up.
No, it is true, he said. She went dotty. Quite literally. Ants, flies, mildew, mould — it was the spots that drove her crazy. She thought they were eyes. She thought the world was boiling with eyes. Gravel, for instance. Think about it.
Eyes or eyeballs? she said.
Actually, I made it up.
He wore a little fake history on his back; a white shirt, very thick cotton. It smelt of coppers and laundry blueing and the valet’s hands. It looked like something that fell out of a Lancashire loom into a little mill girl’s lap. But the cloth probably came from China — she told him — it fell out of a loom into a little China girl’s lap. Because everyone has money, these days.
He told her about the Mississippi Delta, the endless flat fields, and the cotton bales that are the precise size of the lorries that come to take them away. And the houses, which are the precise size of the cotton bales, as if the field workers live in lorry containers with a porch slapped on the front. He told her about a parade of African Americans walking down the road in the middle of nowhere, fantastically well dressed, following a slow hearse in the heat. Not another car in sight.
You win, she said. Take off that shirt.
What is this?
It is a competition. It is a poetry competition.
All right, he said. What about you?
Me. I’m the girl in the silk dressing gown with a magnolia tree flowering up the back. I am tired and overused. I like dark lipstick. Who are you?
As you said, I’m the American.
In the street he is handsome and long, but his legs — that look so easy under him — are large and massively hinged when he is in bed. He makes her feel like a child; his big body so indifferent and easy to scale.
I wish there was some other way of doing this, she said. Sex is just a shortcut, that’s all.
Well, yes it is, he said. But what the hell?
2.
In Dublin, he thought, the women fuck like we’re all in it together, like the place is one big orphanage and they’ve gone home for the night, and left us to play.
And it is all a joke. That’s the other thing about Dublin. The thing you don’t understand is that they are always only joking, even in bed. Until you leave — then they stand outside your window in the middle of the night screaming and throwing bottles. Or they take an overdose, maybe, just for a joke.
So he watched her.
Walking around her flat on the North Circular Road, or in his room in Harold’s Cross, trying to put a date on her, or a place — naked as she was — trying to fix her, even as he lost her to some small thing; the angle of her eyelashes, or the grain of skin pulled to a slant, when she turned to reach for the bedside lamp.
She said that sex was an act of the imagination, but he said it was a speech act. He felt that he was blurting something into her. And afterwards, he told her about his father’s death.
He remembered his mother’s friend, Caitlin, taking him and his brother to the park, to get them out of the house, leaving his mother to the extravagance of her grief. He was so young when it happened, he didn’t want to leave his mother behind. He thought she was being punished, somehow. He pictured her reeling from window to window, smashing things, stuffing her mouth with the back of her hand, when, what is more likely, she sat quietly in the dark, in a chair. There was no question that she loved his father. No question at all. And two years later she put on her gloves and walked out the door and got herself another one, another husband, just like that.
He liked the new guy well enough, but between the smiling lover and the dead father, he sometimes wondered how he grew up straight. For this, of course, they must thank his mother. Thank you, Mom. They must thank the extravagance of her grief. Because this is where he travelled now — into the heart of that disturbance. He was always running back to the house to look for her, and he found — sometimes one thing, sometimes another. In Thailand, he saw a model boat made out of chicken bones. In Berlin he saw a woman breastfeeding in a pavement café, and her eyes were animal; those big wide pavements with plaques every three yards to mark the houses of the slaughtered Jews. And in Dublin, he found …
You.
Ah, she said.
You know what I like about Irish women? he said. I like the way they still call themselves ‘girls’. And I like the weather in their hair. Which is romantic of me, but I am Irish too, you know. So I like your big family; all those brothers and sisters bubbling up, like the froth on milk. And, I hate to say this, but I love your accent. Also your dark lipstick, and all the history flowering up your back.
3.
They went to Venice for the weekend, and bought an umbrella.
They found it in a poky shop that sold umbrellas and nothing else. She thought it should be a black umbrella with a wooden handle — old-fashioned, because they were in Venice — but he picked up a green telescopic thing and said, What about this?
It has to be black.
What do you want a black one for?
Because we’re in Venice.
Already, the man behind the counter despised them. Tim picked up a big striped golf umbrella and tried to open it in the shop. Elaine ran into the street.
Come out. Come out here, she said. But he just kept working at the catch. She had to reach in to the dark shop and drag him out.
What? What? he said.
You can’t open it inside.
Why not?
The umbrella-seller was, by now, just about sickened by them; he was about to reach for his antacid tablets, or his gun.
It’s unlucky, she said.
Tim looked at her. Then he cocked his head and looked, for a long time, at the Venetian sky.
It was still raining.
All right, he said, and they went back in and asked for a black umbrella and they walked back out with it tucked under her arm and hoisted it in the narrow street, and then they lost it before dinner-time.
Everywhere they went in that town, she remembered the last time she was in Venice, with a different man some years before. It was like another town shifting under this one, a pentimento of cafés and churches that had all become smaller or bigger since she had last seen them; shops or squares that were always around the next corner, until she realised that the corner itself had disappeared. She chased a black-and-white church all the way into the Grand Canal and nearly walked into the water, so convinced she was that the church should be there. When she found it, somewhere quite different, the cool white-and-black marble had been overlaid with baroque gold. When did that happen? she said.
She had not been happy in Venice. The last time she was here the city had accused her of not being in love; or of being in love in some wrong or wrong-headed way. So here she was with Tim, making amends.
He insisted on using a map. Elaine said that if he didn’t bother with the map, then they wouldn’t get lost, because it didn’t matter where they went, it was all beautiful and all the same. Or all awful, maybe. After dinner, they ended up walking the periphery in the dark. There was a puzzle of streets to the left of them and, to the right, the open waters of the lagoon with real waves, just like the real sea. They walked a hopeful semicircle until the causeway came into view, then they cut back into the ghetto. They came across a fiesta in a small square, with trestle tables and bunting, accordion music and jugs of wine. The real people of Venice sat and laughed under a home-made banner for the Communist Party. They did not see the tourists pushing their way through the square, in the way that they did not see the pigeons at their feet.
Elaine lay in the hotel room, which was cheap for Venice, but which had, even so, a slightly tatty chandelier. It also had damp. She read the guidebook. It said that during the time of the Doges the prostitutes had to wear their underwear on the outside. Another guidebook said that they had to wear their clothes inside out. There was a problem of translation here — the prostitutes had to wear their inside clothes on the outside. They had to wear their hearts on their sleeves, they had to wear their wombs in a prolapse — not that that would be much use. She thought of wearing her bra outside her T-shirt, just here in the room, as a conversation piece, as a precursor to some vaguely syphilitic Venetian sex. But she just lay there until Tim came back, which he did, with a pistachio-flavoured ice cream to cheer her up. And because it was Venice, she had her period, so his penis was stained with the brown blood of it, marinating half the night, until he suddenly woke and went over to the wash-hand basin on the wall.