Desire

Even with Kennedy crammed the way it is Holfy is impossible to miss with the green tinsel around her neck. She is watching a man kiss a woman fleetingly, watching him take her hand and her baggage trolley and wheel away their lives. I envy them their easy affection

She has cut her hair and dyed it a burnished copper. A new woman to get to know. No matter what wild thing she does she manages to look stylish. She should look older with short hair—like any older woman trying to look younger. She looks harsh. She has painted her fingernails green, white and gold.

—You look young enough to be my lover.

—You always look the wrong age. Good funeral, was it?

She has misunderstood. I was trying to compliment her but it came out wrong. I tell her about my father’s funeral, about Ursula’s decision to give me a cut of Bath Avenue, the new house in Dalkey, telling her honestly I felt caught.

—So you’re rich. Good, take me to dinner. It took three hours to get to the airport to collect your ungrateful ass.

We go uptown to Café Luxembourg but I don’t enjoy it. Holfy drinks a lot and I ask her what’s wrong.

—Did you see your wife?

—You insist on calling her that. It’s like an accusation.

—It’s called reality.

—We met. She’s fine.

—And?

—And nothing. I told her it’s over, that we’ve ended it too many times before. She came to the funeral which surprised me but it shouldn’t have. She never liked my father but she does have a fine sense of propriety. That’s something I never liked in her—too many admirable qualities.

—Won’t make that mistake again.

—Nope. Bitches like you all the way from now.

She laughs and I’m relieved. We have our banter again, our ease with each other. That night, in her bed I decide I like the haircut. I judge too quickly. She will always be more sophisticated than me. There are two kinds of people: those who can’t balance sunglasses on their head and those who can. I must tell her this.

*   *   *

I wake up and am uneasy. It takes me a long moment to realize that Holfy is crying. She is sitting on the floor with her back to the bed, watching television. People are laughing on the television, drinking out of champagne glasses outside some brownstone. Holfy’s laughter coming from the television. I look at the clock on the floor: after four in the morning. And now for Whitman, her voice says from the television. There she is. Like everyone else she is wearing a flapper-style dress. The video of her wedding. Robert is quoting Whitman. It’s the first time I’ve seen it and seeing him with her, seeing them laugh together, turns me into an imposter in her life. I have never seen or heard her cry before. I put my hand on her stomach. Her crying worsens.

—It’s so hard, she says.

—Yes.

She punches the mattress.

—I loved him.

I don’t know what to say to her.

—I miss Robbie.

—It’s past, I say. It’s over.

She nods furiously; empty words of solace. It is not past—it’s present. Its in her body.

It’s not over. It’s never over.

Do you know how it feels to lie in bed at four o’clock in the morning with your heart beating in your chest as if you had run a race and all it is, is fear you didn’t ever love me. Do you know how deeply such fear strikes? My heart thumps so fast, I think it’s going to stop, think it can’t keep up with itself. Probably you feel that way when you’re inside her. I don’t know who she is but I know you’re gone. I knew it when you came back for the funeral. Part of me wanted to do it with you. Stupidstupidstupid me. I felt sorry for you because I knew you were upset because he was dead and you were still angry with him. I could sense her off you. I knew you’d put it into another woman. You really know nothing. Or maybe you know an awful lot. I opened to you, took you into me. Mornings at my desk I would feel the cold dribble of you leak from me and I would clench my muscles to hold you a moment longer. I have learned something new. I have learned my own hand. It’s a far better lover than ever you were.

The rehearsed interest in your voice. You listened so attentively to me. But your tone of voice talks deeper to me than words ever can. I listened attentively, too. Three thousands miles away and I heard it in your voice. And I saw it in you, too. Saw you take the breath needed to say the words. I heard the voice come up and out of your gut, out of your tight throat. I saw you clutch the phone and close your eyes and say I love you Ursula. You needed to say my name. You never needed to say my name before. Your words are hollow. Your words rattling and clanging in a metal pail clattering on the cobblestones. I couldn’t be with another. I’ve never even thought of what another man would be like. My eyes were never off of you. When we parted in the morning at the end of Baggot Street, and I turned the corner, I had to stop myself from looking back. I knew you were still sitting there in the car, looking at me and not looking for a gap in the traffic. I knew your eyes were burning into me and wanting me to turn and I never did. For ten years I never did. I felt, if I turned around and looked at you the violence of my love would be a gunshot. The traffic would screech to a halt, the buses would stop coughing fumes. Baggot Street would be hushed to silence; people would lean over O’Connell Bridge and stare, dumbfounded, at an unflowing river. The gulls in the sky would stop crying and falling and rising up on the air and the grey sky would lighten and the rain would be switched off and people would stand there with awe-opened mouths at the buckling power of my love for you. And when I walked into the office and said Good Mornings and heard Good Mornings coated with Isn’t she nice but a little dull, I would turn and look at them and their faces would drain of colour and the telephones would stop ringing and the faxes would stop sliding out and the photocopiers would go quiet, the air-conditioning would go quiet, the clocks would no longer tick on the walls, the watches on their wrists would no longer tick. My love, if I ever carried my love for you openly on my face, would have stopped the world from turning. My tremendous, unreciprocated, love.

What you have soiled for some other woman’s Yes. Yes is the longest word. There is only one Yes. Yes screams with certainty. Yes is what you put on my finger in the chapel in Trinity College. Yes defines everything. Yes is the creation of love, of beauty, what we were. After the first Yes there are no other Yeses. After Yes, everyone else becomes a joyous No. You have made us a No.

The money from Bath Avenue is through. £144,000. They liked the sound of tennis. Imagine, they paid that and they didn’t even see the roses in bloom. The price is a good omen—not only is the market on the up—144 is a Fibonacci number.

I’m selling the house in Dalkey as soon as it’s finished. I’m getting good at getting rid of things. Daddy will be furious. I’m going to move into town. I hate the drive in, in the morning. It’s so irritating—I just bought a fax so I could get the copy in to them faster and now Fiona wants me to work in the office. They prefer it—me typing it in directly to the system. They want to see me earning the shitty money. I’ve been paying too much in parking. Everything. I won’t bore you. Why am I telling you this? I should rip it up. Fuck it—it’s the last blast. She had the gall to say it would be good for me with you away and all that—getting in to the office and away from the too quiet house. I’m sick of her. She commissioned an article on International Women’s Day and gave it to our friend with the weeping crotch. Twofaced bitch. I’m sending you back the 8 X 10s you sent me. It was sweet of you to think of me but I really don’t need photographs to remember.

I’m sending you £55,000. That leaves me with £89,000. It seems reasonable. I had to do it all; solicitors, estate agents, the moving. Let me know if you object.

I’d love you to object.

Ursula.

I am inside Holfy, bruising myself against her creased arse and thinking about Ursula. Imagining it is Ursula and she doesn’t want me and struggles but secretly she enjoys it. That weekend we spent at her father’s home; the shy way she bent away from me; her hands gripping the mantelpiece; lifting her skirt; warm pert buttocks against me; her father’s laughter out in the garden; shuddering at her cheeks brushing the curled hairs on my stomach. Only later realising the thrill for her was doing it in her father’s bathroom and I squirm at the odd relationship she had with the man. The evening we spent in Searson’s. Ursula noticing me noticing some skirt walk past. The moment is irretrievable. Neither of us pretend it has not happened. I am not the kind of man to be tactless in that fashion and I bite my tongue for the mistake. A marriage has many endings. We said nothing. The first slip. Cracks in our lives we fall into; cracks become walls around us. I curse and curse and Holfy comes and all the time it is Ursula’s back I am looking at in anger, it’s her moaning I hear, her cunt surrounding me.

I have been lying for years—telling myself I want this kind of woman or that kind of woman. I want a woman I can fuck forever but have been too afraid to admit it. Ursula is a paragraph out of some feminist pamphlet. Holfy has changed my life. She fucks. She likes my seed leaking out of her. Soft bubbling of her cunt-farts afterwards. I was afraid of my wife’s silent standard. The standards in her eyes she could never hide. That night I Searson’s, I went and got us another drink and looked at Ursula in the Smithwick’s mirror. She was biting the end of a hangnail. I thought then (and this was before we were married) I should walk out now. The coward leaves a thousand times and never leaves. Fifty-five thousand. About a thousand a month for every month I put up with the conceited bitch.

Holfy is kneeling by the bath, rinsing the sides with the shower nozzle. The bathroom is her temple: she keeps it immaculate. It has a resolute order. The bath is half the size of an Irish bath. Everything is bigger except the baths. I stoop and push a finger inside.

—Stop it.

She is rinsing as if she is alone. I ignore her. She is always ready.

—No. Go away.

Her voice full of breathless work. She is sponging the sides, chasing a long black hair clinging like a question mark on the blue tiles. The hair resists like mercury. I lick her but she will have none of it. Her hand reaches to stay upright and she slips. I am fully in before she even curses. I hold her hips firmly and wait for her acceptance. I can feel her planning. Nothing but a breeze in from the window. Footsteps on the sidewalk. A fit of coughing.

—Rape! she screams. The footsteps pause.

—Holfy, stop.

—Rapist!

I pull out.

She looks sideways at me, her eye a slit of anger turning to amusement. I pretend to be less shocked than I am.

—Now, she says.

I don’t. Fear itself is both an attraction and repulsion. I get dressed and go out. The streets always offer solace. They are drilling on the highway. It’s as if they are trying to break into my head. All my life I’ve been trying to prove to a woman what a man is without ever knowing what a man is. I’ve wanted to show the qualities that make a man wonderful. I have to stop caring about impressions.

Eventually I comply with Holfy’s request. Part of me wanted to do it the first time she hit me but I pulled back. She explains it depends on the way it is done. We are playacting in bed, I slap her hard on her backside. There is no sound from her as if she is indifferent to my presence. I slap her again. She turns over and slaps me back, much harder than I thought she was capable of doing, harder than she would want. The insides of her thighs are wet with sweat. I kiss the redness, kiss the heavy thigh, kiss the leg, the back of the knee, search for pleasure with my fingers. Cut your nails. I go and cut them, change the music. I kiss her stomach. I’ll never get my figure back now, she says. Her breasts are cold and heavy. She likes them oiled. Gentle soft caresses. Sweet moans now. Her eyes are closing with the slow fondling. Her body is heavy with pleasure. She is lost in her own pleasure. I slap her harder. I keep hitting the same place and watch it redden. She makes no sound. She is stooped as if concentrating on something else. I hit her as hard as I can and my hand stings with the crack of skin. I am disgusted with myself, disgusted that I can hurt her this way and yet it is not enough. I can sense disappointment in her. It’s worse than the time with the straps. It’s a widening between us. She can enter my world but I cannot enter hers. She tells me to look away from her and the force of the punch knocks me off the bed.

I walk the streets, am forever walking the streets, looking at the painted advertisements, looking at the small ways the city changes. The Marlboro man has changed. The advertisement of the safe company has been there forever. A giant vault. A splendid trompe I’oeil of a safe opening. I stare at it for a long time to see how it deceives the eye. Words are useless. I can’t get away from her. Nothing comes except words like anguish and heat and contempt. Hours spent doing nothing except replaying the worst moments of my life, trying to turn them into something they were not. Looking for redemption through recreating the past so that it shines, so there are no smudges. Go further, she says. When I go back to the apartment she is not there, a card on the kitchen table with a quarter glued to it. A photograph of a little boy on a fairground rocket. Fly to the moon is scrawled on it. I won’t give up, this time I won’t give up.

*   *   *

We are walking down Jane Street. The two huskies with the handkerchiefs tied around their necks are lying outside the flower shop. I stoop and stroke the green-kerchiefed one and she pets the red-kerchiefed one. She holds his head and shakes it vigorously. He growls and Holfy growls back.

—It was a good party.

She nods, holding the dog’s snout in her clenched hands. He tries to retreat out of her grasp but she is holding him too firmly in her large hands. She looks at me disinterestedly, the large yellow and brown bruise still visible under her eye.

—Did you want to stay?

—Let’s go home.

—No. Let’s walk some more.

We walk down Gansevoort, down Washington and end up heading towards the Village. It’s strangely quiet, the kind of night in Greenwich Village that I thought would happen a lot but it doesn’t. Everyone is somewhere else. They are at films and plays and galleries and openings and restaurants. And, of course, they are working to pay the rent. But tonight, they are doing all of that somewhere else. There is little traffic. She buys some cigars in the Village Cigar. The first time I watched her smoking. It seemed so unpretentious in her hand. We are walking down a quiet residential street, brownstones on both sides. My life was an act for a long time, she says. She draws on her cigar. My life used to be improvisation. I look at her and wonder if she is being serious. But she goes on.

—Isn’t that the way most people are? Living a life based on a kind of improvisation. An improvisation based on the fact that someone is watching the acting. Someone is watching how good we are at being ourselves when we are not ourselves at all?

—Only Catholics live like that.

—You say that because you are Catholic. If you were Jewish, it would be Jewish. The only way to live is to be selfish. Then you can give something to the world that the world might want. If you are both lucky.

We walk for a long time not talking. I am only aware we are holding hands and I am happy. We pass Cooper Union. It begins to snow, lightly, and as it falls we stop and look up at it, and because it is falling lightly, and it is windless and nighttime and lit up, the snow looks like it is falling from forever. It lands on our faces and melts gently on our warm skin and dribbles into nothingness. I squeeze her hand and tell her I feel more alive than ever I have. It takes practice, she says. We come upon a street full of stalls. Young people selling jewellery and scarves, woolly hats and sunglasses. The smell of hot food wafting from the other end of the street. We buy two hats with floppy ear covers. One red and one green. We would have to steal the huskies now. There are some people drug-dealing at the corner of tenth and the easy manner of it shocks me. We go into the Lion’s Head near Washington Square, a bar ruined by tourists like you, she says. This is the night I first have a vodka gimlet. Time slides into remembered first moments. It is one of those rare moments when we seem to forget everything, forget this insistence on living in the moment, the harshness, the impiety of sex, forget everything except the fat barman serving us.

*   *   *

She is sitting on the sofa reading the Paris Review. She has her feet up on my lap. She is absorbed in her reading. I pour her some fresh coffee and she uhms. A small icy part of me wonders if we can live a life together. I feel this horrible need for a commitment and try and push it away from me. I know this will be as much as it ever will be with her. Today we are together. Yesterday we were together. That is all. Nothing more than that. Tomorrow does not exist. It doesn’t exist in art so it doesn’t exist in life. She has never said that to me but I know it is who she is. It is how she lives. She lives in this moment alone. I sit in front of her and wait until she looks up at me:

—What?

—Nothing.

She goes back to the Paris Review, looks up at me again. She takes off her spectacles.

—What is it?

—Nothing.

—It wouldn’t work. You know it wouldn’t. Christ, I don’t know. It just doesn’t fit.

I get up and get dressed for the winter outside.

—We promised to be straight up. I’m being straight up.

I zip up my jacket and agree with her.

—Being straight up is what we said we would always do.

—Do you really want—

—O please shut up.

*   *   *

The streets are busy with shoppers. Happy Holidays. I long for Ireland where no one will be offended if you say Happy Christmas. I’m tired of it all. For so long I thought Holfy was attached to me. That she had all these elaborate defences. In the grocery store I hear a camera click. Some promotional people are taking photographs. I wander around the store and have no idea what it is I have come for. The sound of the camera shutter is all I hear. I stare at the shelves in the hope that I’ll see what it is I want. I feel as if I am a shoplifter and try to force purpose into my bearing. But in the end I give into the clicking camera. I see Holfy setting up the shoot we did last week and I am trying not to look so impressed. She is eating biscuits and smoking and trying not to drink coffee. We are on the roof. She tells me that professional photography is about knowing that the accident will always happen if you take enough shots. It’s about knowing that the best shots have only a little to do with skill and a lot to do with patience and spontaneity. Look at Cecil Beaton. The most boring photographer in the world. How can I help you? a voice asks. I am smiling at a rack of Italian wine and the shop assistant asks me again how he can help me. I look at him and can’t help but stare at an inflamed boil over his lip. The camera is still clicking. I tell him I’m fine and when he goes back to the counter I take the first bottle I see under eight dollars. Nice region, he says. I nod and look at his eyes and then at his hand offering me the change. The photographer is putting in a new roll of film. I want to tell him not to waste too much film on the shots. There is no spontaneity in an unopened wine bottle. She is right what she says about the self.

The man behind the counter doesn’t give me a bag. Can I have a bag, I say. What? he says. A bag. Can I have a sack? Sure, he says. I feel I lose more of myself with the addition of each American word: sack, trash, mail, sidewalk, store, highway. I am becoming America with these words. Words are all I am. I know this because I am in silence now. I have been in silence for all this time and I have not existed. We exist only when we speak. The geraniums are beginning to fade. Some of the leaves have turned a translucent beige and crack between my fingers. The healthy leaves give off their pungent smell. Geraniums smell of hopeful summers and suddenly I know myself as well as I know the smell of these flowers. I got a package from Medbh today. A six-pack of Club milks. I open one with my tea. Peel off the yellow wrapper. Then the foil. The remembered taste of the chocolate. It begins to rain hard and I feel overcome with sadness for a lost Dublin. It rains hard all day and starts to thunder. Lightning flashes whitely in the sky and I can no longer fool myself into thinking I am home. But Dublin is not home. How stupid of me to slip. I make more tea and pick up the letter again.

Inside the darkroom. The brutish honesty of the words. When I describe something inaccurately the words sit there, leaden and smug. Suddenly I am no longer pitying Ursula. Ever since we ended I thought of her as the vulnerable one. Such a lack of insight is impressive. The wind has taken up, and the leaves on the trees fight with it. I bite into another Club milk. I chew it tastelessly. I wipe some crumbs from my lips and am surprised by tears on my face. I wipe them off as if they belong to someone else. My eyes burn. I say my mother’s name aloud and I remember being in bed with her and holding her and she was telling me it was alright. There was no bogeyman going to get me. She would take care of me, she would. I was shaking and snivelling and she took the edge of the sheet and said blow and I blew my nose in the sheet and she said Lord Jesus that nose of yours is full of yuckies and I looked up at her and she made a disgusted face and I burst out laughing and she said I’m not washing that sheet because it will only attack me, and I am lost in her eyes. There is no safeness anymore. There’s just myself and the long memory of my mistakes. But I don’t want to end up like the ones who do not speak. The ones who sit and say nothing and pretend to be nice but are operating. Always gathering information and never giving. I don’t want a dry and cynical life.

*   *   *

I leave a wad of writing by Holfy’s bed with a note.

Please read. Be honest.

*   *   *

She writes a note on the bathroom mirror:

Like there is an alternative to honesty pour moi?

I have what I think is a common affliction: I want to be liked. It makes for both bad writing and uncomfortable living. I writhe inside myself. I don’t always behave in a nice fashion. I am sometimes arrogant, but this, more often than not, is because I am reacting against the tendency to be nice. My own company puts me on edge. When I come home, and close the door behind me and sit in the friendless silence I am afraid of what feels like the presence of God. I have vague memories of myself as a child playing on the road. I am alone, building a dam in the gutter to stop the rainwater from running into the shore. I remember my mother calling me for my tea and not wanting to go because my game was too exciting to leave.

One of the traits trailing behind courteousness is a pretence of stupidity. I think it is particularly true of my class. To nod and affect ignorance. To hide intelligence like stolen goods, as if thought is segmented by class. The brain runs and runs and runs.

Words leave me. They grow tired of banging around in my head, arriving at no sense. There was a time when I knew exactly what I thought but those thoughts no longer belong to me, they belong to a past that no longer exists. For a long time I had the instinct of a streetwise child but I have lost that common sense. I have pretended to be clever. I made the mistake of wanting to seem intelligent to some unknown reader. A reader who read so much and who understood so much that unless I was superb, would raise an eyebrow in weary disappointment.

What I have discovered is that I am lost. I am looking at myself in utter bewilderment. Whatever it is, it is unfathomable to believe in the love of God. How can a child understand God? God waited, as God always waits.

 

You have to go deeper. What you say to me in the quietness of the night when we can’t sleep. Your voice, that’s the voice of the writing—this is nonsense. This I you write about. Who is in your sentences. Who are you trying to please? Be as selfish as a cat. That’s the kind of writer you are, or, I should be more accurate, it’s the kind of writer you could be. Grip me by the throat and hold me until my face reddens. Otherwise you lose me. If you lose me I will never pick it up again. Do anything in my company but never bore me.

I drop the wad of paper on the bedside table. It has only taken her seven pages. I want to marry Holfy. I write in her darkroom. It’s the only place I can forget I’m living in Manhattan. Botero sits under the lamp, saliva dripping from his jowls. Holfy has asked me to write a story cutting into the weave of love and sex but nothing is happening. I want to go and make more tea but it is too early. I look at the rest of her note.

Forget about understanding death. My husband. Your sister. Your father. We do not have death in common. We have grief and life. Death lives on its own. Forget your sister. Every time I touch you I know Robert approves and if he did not I would not care. There is nothing to learn about death except that it is not living. Stop looking for meaning. Go back to the writing. When you know what’s going to happen in the next sentence stop. Stop. If the writing is not a mystery to you, you are writing dross. Make up your mind whether you want to write or type. Put Kahlo into the novel and call her Zoe. People need symbols. Put everything in it that people want and then cut the head off the expectation. Break the rhythm. Annoy. Make sure no one ever likes you. Never be accused of writing a smooth sentence. Smoothness is a soporific. Write about our love with unflinching honesty. Yes, I know you have little respect for honesty that doesn’t flinch. Perhaps you know this already but you don’t know what it feels like. You don’t know the meaning of the pleasure in pain. You don’t understand the joy of bruises. Bruises frightened you in the beginning. Sadomasochism is the most brutal acknowledgement that you are alive and that you can humble yourself before God. If ever you go as far as I want you to go with the writing, you will learn that God is sitting on the parapet in Gansevoort Street, waiting for your screams. And She is smiling.

Holfy should be the one doing the writing. Sometimes, when I’m working, I put my face in my joined palms to think and I smell her there, rising out of my skin, as once I smelled Ursula. So much time spent not writing, sitting there wanting it written. Wanting words to flow, wanting some blossoming story to come out of the past. But instead my mind tramps through old memories, I retell myself old humiliations, rewording them, reshaping them so they end the way they should have ended. I sit there staring at the wall, wondering when the pain will ever go away, and life will start to unfold as I know it is meant to unfold. I tell myself there must be a plan right here in this room, and somehow I am avoiding it.

Do you remember the lake in Pennsylvania? I warned you about the snapping turtles. Remember the stillness on the lake? Remember your glasses fell out of the rowing boat. We were drinking vodka gimlets and the homemade margaritas without the ice. It was sunny, and we let the boat drift, and we dozed, and there was gentle thud when we hit the bank and you were jittery in your sleep because the leaves brushed your face but you didn’t waken. I turned and woke you because I wanted you, and you said you missed Ireland, and you hated missing it, and I said shut up. Come here, I said. The clumsy rock of the boat and the fierceness of your fingertips. Soft fucking. Balance your sentences with arrogance and indifference. Put commas in the wrong place. This is our story and syntax will not hold it. It belongs only to you and me. Are you understanding what you have to say? I am considerably older than you. Trust me. Never help the reader. Refuse to accept that you have to explain anything. Do not care if they get to the end of the paragraph. The paragraph belongs only to us.

Assume no one will read this. It is the only way to write. Remember what your sister said to you before she died. And the dead become more and more right with the silent yawn of time. You rest on the weakest sentence. Your only charm is your pretence of sophistication. Write the story and make sure there isn’t a single line of fantasy in it. Danger lies in the truth. Write only what happened between you and me. It has to be as clear as a photograph—as clear as one of my photographs. The photo I took of you that day at Shelter Island. That’s not me, you said. You were wrong, it was you. It’s the you that you go to bed with, isn’t it? The years will make you that photograph. You and I are perfect devils. Avoid lies, especially if they seem necessary for plot. There is no plot. People sense lies. Lies curl and create ugliness like paper peeling off a damp wall. The greatest pleasure in death is that there will be no more arguments. The heart, when it stops beating, smiles. Open your legs and let me see you. I had forgotten your smell. Nature is so clever. Man are so sweet when they’re excited. Read me something by Yeats.

Never give all the heart.

Indeed. Never have children. If you have children you will have to grow up and that would disappoint me. Don’t go back to teaching—it sucks the marrow from your soul and your wisdom fades into the brick brains of those who can not learn what they do not know. Teaching is a wall falling into a vermilion sea. What I like most about you is your yellow flaring laugh and it lashing joyfully against the wind of your anguish. The first time you saw me naked and you asked me where did I get such a happy bottom and I said I grew it myself. I knew it would be good then. I never tire of your tongue. Such soft licking. People like driving on roads that are lined with trees and they like to see a bird flash across blue sky. If you take away the blue sky they will despise you. Do you know what we mean by happiness? Arriving back at the car and not having a parking ticket. Excitement is nightclubs and movies and getting drunk and watching children play sports badly and learning to be sophisticated with people who do not know the meaning of style. Excitement, then, is stepping into the artifice of adrenaline and knowing we can step out again and return to the familiar smell of the ugly boxes we call home. I do not want people to know about our life in Gansevoort Street.

Sadomasochism is the deepest form of love. It goes beyond any basic understanding of cathexis. Age matters. We think we can move beyond it but we cannot. People want to know how old you are before they sleep with you. As if approval is buried in years. People are like trees—you can tell their age only after they have fallen. The Sunday we cut down the lilac tree that was cracking the cement with its weight. I could never imagine sitting there looking at the tips of the Twin Towers without the lilac tree but of course I did get used to it. Everything changes. We get used to it all or shrivel.

There is only one thing I miss. No more will you kiss me and make me breakfast. How I loved the sound of you in the kitchen and your dreadful singing. How you loved the precision of the coq removing the egg tops. Nothing compares to you cooking for me. Such things make life bearable. You know less than when I first met you. This is the only sex that is possible between us now. Paper sex.

The night I came back from Brooklyn and the stereo was blaring in the apartment and you had all the strobes on and the fish lights flashing on the back wall and you were dancing on your own and it was a you I had never seen.

You would never dance in public. You said it told too much, the way people move to music. I knew that night that you would leave. Not then, not immediately, but there was something trapped in you that I hadn’t noticed before and watching you move to the music with Grace Jones I knew it: could sense our ending with the certainty I sense when a movie is ending. You wanted me to need you. The only thing I didn’t need was your need. I grew up in the sixties. You confused me with Jackie Kennedy’s generation.

Here is how I want you to end it:

At the street fair in Little Italy. We are at Florent’s show and we are sitting on a stoop and eating bratwurst. There had been a street fair. We had our fortune told. We had shot the plastic bears with water guns. We went into the empty church and there was an elderly couple sitting there with a life-size pink panther sitting between them and for once I didn’t take the shot even though I could have got it with the Leica. They got up then, she with the toy under her arm as if it were a tired child, and we kissed for a while in the church and when we came out, the fair was getting noisy. People everywhere. Cops smiling. We walked down through the village. We kissed in a doorway in Perry Street.

You want to capture my essence but you should know—even at this stage of your life—to know is impossible. You are a mystery to yourself so how can you know me. Women and men are railway tracks racing away in the distance, never meeting.

Holfy didn’t always speak with certainty. She had a way of talking, of asking questions, that made her sound neither rhetorical nor challenging. What I remember most of all was her hesitation. Is it Monday? Somewhere. Her tone was full of questions. When we were on the roof and having breakfast, she would start to go into what she felt the writing needed and as she talked I would watch the pigeons land and collect branches and fly across the street and build their nest over Judd’s Gym, and all the time I would know that she had an uncanny way of leading me into myself. On these rare mornings when the phone dint’ ring, she would speak and I would listen and it was as if God was placing a hand on us. But when she did break through her indecision, when she grew impatient with my mistakes, her voice rang like a bell on a clear day. It was impossible to argue with her then. I would go back to the writing and stare at it with contempt, as if it were toying with me, as if I were not responsible for the words I had typed that morning. So I would go back to the daisy wheel and type it again. Go back again. The sound of that machine always made me feel like I was working. That an honest day’s shilling was being earned for an honest day’s work, as my father would say. The only thing that is more important than writing is the confirmation that it is work. This is why publication matters. She could always read where I was going before I understood that I was making the journey at all.

*   *   *

The apartment is quiet. Botero is lying under the unmade bed, wagging his tail limply, eyes empty of hope: I never feed him morsels. I stick my head out the open roof window. Holfy is lying sunbathing on the roof. She is wearing the dark brown one-piece and she turns and talks—she has someone with her. A woman wearing a violent pink bikini. A tray of drinks sits on a chair between them. A strange silence between them: not the spent, drunken lethargy of sunbathers.

—Hello, I say, voice so bright it might crack the ices in their glasses.

Both women look up and smile. The pink bikini is wearing mirrored sunglasses. Holfy holds out her arms for a kiss. I stoop and do not meet her lips—my kiss touches her forehead. She runs a hand lazily down my leg:

—You remember Magda.

—He remembers me.

I nod a perfunctory smile in her direction and her mouth smiles back. I am careful not to stare at her body: it gloats, it is so well toned.

—Three Pimm’s do you think, sweetheart?

—Why not?

I make the drinks, dunking the cucumber slices beneath the ice. So much is said with the flash of an insincere smile. I rest the glasses on the window ledge and stroke Botero. The unmade bed. My stomach tightens. Without thinking I spit generously into the Hungarian’s glass. We smalltalk a while. Holfy mentions dinner twice. But I’ve begun to dislike this dark bitch far too much to sit and eat with her. Magda asks me how my day was, in a vile parody of domesticity. She is a woman who asks questions either for direct information or else, as now, for self-amusement.

—It’s not a trick question, she says to my hesitation.

—Magda is a photo editor, sweetie.

I look at Holfy blankly and then at Magda who is smiling as if I am missing a punch line.

—My day was horrible.

They burst out laughing. The Hungarian slips her fingers inside her bikini bottoms and smoothes the fabric. A pigeon lands and collects a twig off the roof; drops it flying across the road; flies back; picks another. I pull myself out of the Adirondack and wave them goodbye.

—Call Florent? wonders Holfy to my back. I ignore her. She has recovered from the dead cat it seems. I do some work and try to dismiss the quiet hum of their conversation and burbling womanish laughter. I look up from the worktop, understanding what it is I hate about this Magyar: her self-assurance. She is the kind who comes to the city and can take it on; become even more sophisticated than New Yorkers themselves. She has tapped American naïveté and I am ludicrously jealous of her success. I go to my desk and write. Achieve nothing. I sit there, elbows on the desk, head in hands fed up with it all. Holfy drapes over my shoulder, cooing in my ear. Smell of suncream and Gitanes off her.

—Come talk to us.

She is as angry with me as I am with her but she is making an effort; she has not forsaken the night when the Hungarian will be gone.

—She’s having a difficult time. She’s divorcing. She’s married to a shit. He works in that nuclear plant?

—Henri works in a nuclear plant?

—Not Henri. Istvan—her husband. He’s a pig.

—How sad.

—Don’t. She’s a good woman.

—Right.

—I’ll call Florent. What do you want?

I shake my head despite the hunger.

—You are a sulker.

She gets food for three anyway. The two women eat on the roof. I give up pretending I will write and lie on the futon in the corner. It’s on the stroke of eleven. Nearly six in Dublin. The Angelus coming on the radio. Mother. Used to be putting the dinner out on the table then. Liked that time of the evening with her. Does she ever think of us. Sure. There’s not a day that passed. Never give her the chance to say that. Never. Quiet outside now. I write another letter to Ursula, another letter I will write and leave in the drawer. Life is quiet without you. No matter how I fill my days and nights the absence of you haunts me. My gut is wrenched with the loss of you. When I went back to Dublin I knew it was over for you. I could see the calmness of a decision made in your eyes. I made every mistake possible. If it had been the other way round I would have laughed to put you at your ease. But not you. You were a laser beam of directness. Everything swirled in confusion. I had fallen in love with your directness. You could fight your own battles and if you did not always win the argument, your dignity made it seem so. Your directness was chopping up any morsels of love I put on the table before you … I tear it up. I have to stop. Have to stop and go on. You’ll marry out if you marry her my father said. And my father was right. I am falling still. The pebble falling over the cliff falling. Falling into blue falling into the blue into the blue and still I don’t move in the heat in the sun I don’t move and there is a train going past, heavy rattle and thud of it going past and Daddy is walking between the seats and saying he’ll be back in a minute and Ruth is asleep and I’m on my own and everything is going past in the train in the blueness and he mightn’t come back and there was that time we were going to Galway and I was thinking I made a mistake in marrying you and it was forever and I had made my bed and that was it and the train is going past rocking and rocking and still I stay here and I’m falling into the blueness and still counting the carriages as they pass under the bridge, hoping for that next kiss.

*   *   *

Laughter from the television wakes me.

—Can you lower that a bit?

She ignores me.

—Can you please lower the television a bit?

—Yes, I can lower the television. As much as I want. I’m lowering nothing. This is my apartment.

Her apartment. Right. When I wake again music is playing. Bartók. How quaint. I sit up in the bed, and, although I can’t see them in the darkness, I know what I knew instinctively since I came in earlier. The apartment is soaked in their sensuality. I see myself as the halfarsed Urbanite I am, as Holfy must see me; as the Hungarian, with the unerring exactitude of the strange, sees me; as Ursula must have seen me when I came in soaking wet after ringing Holfy. All the lies swim about me; shoals of fish; the first time I heard myself lie to my father about the money I had stolen from his wallet to buy the Meccano set; the time I heard Ruth lie to my father about where she had bought the meat for dinner (and she knew I, small as I was, knew she was lying); my father lying that it was work kept us late when it was him stopping at Mrs. Marjoram’s on the way home; all the countless, unnecessary lies I told and continue to tell. I pick up the keys. Holfy laughs at some whispered comment and her laugh, her entrancing laugh, disgusts me. As I pass them in the darkness an arm reaches out to me, touches me:

—Come to bed.

Her voice contains no hint of Magda by her side. My heart is full of hate but instead I take up her hand and kiss her fingers; the ruby ring Robert bought her; my lips touch her skin for the last time. I think of her feet; the tanned hard skin she loves me to caress when she is tired. Her perfect arches. The tip of a lit cigarette glows as Magda inhales beside her. The lurid smell of sex. This is her life. This is her real life, tonguing this bitch. I am the present hobby. In the kitchen I fiddle with the key ring to remove keys and then give up. I have always held onto keys. Holfy’s. Even the keys to her place uptown. My father’s. Medbh’s. The house in Ireland. Botero charges out after me when he hears the door chimes ring and she shouts after me:

—Some cigarettes, please?

I pause to search for irony: something she will take to her grave but nothing comes. One day I will come up with a parting shot for someone. The dog looks up at me and then to his leash:

—No. Go in. Go in.

He looks up, sad eyes on him. I get a tub of yoghurt out of the fridge and he dances on his hind legs with excitement. I take the lid off and put it on the floor.

—Happy birthday, Bo.

He slurps messily and I leave before he finishes.

The gate is closed where we park the car. I bang on it with the keys. Lazy flickers from the Chinaman’s hut, he is watching television. I bang louder, loud enough for him to hear me. I will be glad to see the back of him. A prostitute, resembling a weary Aretha Franklin drifts along the sidewalk.

—Want in, honey?

Nothing more seductive than a nigger offering. Always wondered what dark meat would be like. Brown and purple, a strange combination. When I turn to look back he has already clopped past, his hands flicking up his orange miniskirt; shining black buttocks. He pauses without turning then walks on, bored. I wrap the gate and kick it. A light goes on. Chinky drags himself out of his chair and hits the button on the wall. He spits on the ground and I salute him.

—Hot night.

He ignores me as always.

—Where she?

—She come.

We are three feet from each other in the elevator. He reeks of cigarettes. He stops the elevator and walks in the general direction of the car; senses I have already spotted it; turns back to the elevator; waits. I turn the ignition and Janis Joplin comes on. Holfy’s cassette. Get it while you can. She could always push it further than me: that is her sin; that is the only sin. The car is tight between wall and pillar. Chinky watches, waiting for me to damage something. For two years I have wished this bastard a good morning and for two years he has looked at me the way he is looking at me now. I manoeuvre it out and drive into the elevator beside him. We drop slowly. This is the first purposeful thing I have ever done. We jolt to a halt. The exit gate rattles up. I reach into my wallet and take out a twenty. Already he is walking away. I call after him. He looks at me—at the tip—with passionate disinterest. He turns back to his hut. I go after him and stop him and offer him the money again. He looks up at me and for the first time I see him closely; he is alert and full of disgust. His breath is nauseating. I crumple the money in my fist and punch him full in his face. He falls back a step but holds his balance. Blood dribbles from his nostril. He smiles and turns to his office. I run like fuck, hit the down button on the gate and jump in the car. The gate starts to rattle down in front of me. I shoot out onto Little West Twelfth and almost hit a man pushing a falafel stand. I spin around onto Gansevoort and stop for a second. I can’t resist. I turn the carlights off and double back. He has his back to me with a gun in his hand pointing at the sidewalk. I reverse and makes for the Hudson Parkway. I always imagined that whenever I left this city it would be up along the Hudson River. I take the Lincoln Tunnel and feel freedom in the breeze rushing through the open windows. The last time I’ll have to put up with her age-thickened arse, her padded bras.

I have to get past hatred. I think of God, the last refuge of the hopeless. Is God happy? God must be bored watching the same unimaginative mistakes repeated and repeated and repeated.