Colleen & Caitlin & Paddy
Migraine or you want to ask me something?” said Paddy to his daughter. “You got that squinty look going.”
Her withering migraines dated from long, long ago, for which reprieve she was beyond grateful. And nobody would want to summon up the memory of such icepick pain.
“I do not squint,” she squinted. “Do I?”
“See, right there, I can almost hear your face squeak. You sure no migraine?”
“Matter of fact I do have a question for you, so here comes your migraine. Let me inquire indelicately. You out of your damn mind, Dad?” Colleen knew that he knew what she was asking about. “I’m curious.”
“You’ve always been that way with your squinting curiosity, Colly. Let me know once you figure out my mental state.”
A talkative and confrontational child—her mother called her mouthy—since she exited mewling from the birth canal, she always enjoyed greater latitude with her father than her brothers did, and she capitalized upon that advantage.
“Fine, then, this just in: You are out of your mind.”
—
That exchange, such as it was, took place the day before Caitlin moved into the Family Fitzgerald home on Haymarket Hill. It might be easy to appreciate why a grown daughter would be less than thrilled to welcome with open arms her ageing widower father’s lover. Full stop: the very notion of his lover was too much, practically instilling vertigo as she contemplated the grotesque prospect. But still, her father indeed had his whatever-was-the-term for this new relationship, and this woman—all right, fine, his woman—was about to take up residence in the family home. At the same time, it may not be so easy to explain why, given who Colleen was, independent and freewheeling and open-minded, why she herself cared. To her, being judgmental was a mortal sin, not that she subscribed to the concept of sin, mortal, venial, or class B felony. Her mother of sainted memory continued to cast her long shadow in the psychic hallways of every Fitzgerald alive—with the possible exception, she was beginning to think, and she would be wrong about this, of Paddy Fitzgerald himself.
Her father wasn’t to be on the premises, but Colleen herself was, when Caitlin showed up with her dozen or so boxes of belongings and three beaten-down plaid suitcases, everything toted inside by Jonesy O’Dell and the bemused crew. According to the prearranged plan, she claimed the spacious sunlit bedroom adjoining Paddy’s master suite on the top floor, a tall-windowed room that compared favorably to the master. The sight of her bedraggled luggage made Colleen feel something like sympathy—and bafflement as well: as in how come her dad hadn’t bought new bags for her? This seemed like a missed stitch. Another missed stitch in addition to his not being present for the move-in. He explained he didn’t want to get in the way—but when did he ever not want to? Was he counting on his squinting daughter to represent the Fitzgerald welcoming delegation?
—
As she bustled about in her lime-green tennis shoes and shorts, hair pulled back with a lime-green scrunchie, Caitlin’s demeanor appeared hardly triumphant or festive—more like electroshock therapy aftermath. She was not orchestrating activities; she seemed content to be following others’ leads.
Jonesy was transporting a very large box in which Caitlin had packed her shoes. He peeked inside: must have been twenty pairs. He did have a job as a young man selling women’s shoes in a department store. One thing he learned on the display floor was that a woman whose feet were to him too large or too wide, no matter how pretty her face, how graceful her personal style, was not a keeper, at least in terms of what some might label his misogynistic or possibly fetishistic bias. The sight of her bodily misfortune was too sad to bear. On this score, he wouldn’t wish for Miss Caitlin to misunderstand, or question his probity and decorum, or to think he was being in the slightest bit inappropriate, so he would never breathe a word along these lines to her, but he did believe the pretty girl was possessed of supremely gorgeous feet. He’d never been berated as sexist by any of his many, many lady friends, but that revealed more about his social circles than anything else. More to the point, he knew better than to share his podiatric, or shoe salesman’s, point of view, most especially around the spirited Miss Colleen, who was always walking point along the women’s objectification trail.
“Where shall I put these ravishing shoes of yours?” he said.
Caitlin had no idea, and said put them anywhere he’d like, but she must have been weary or rendered uninhibited by the stresses of the move because she added: “You like them? I don’t think they’re your size.”
“Yes, I do admire them. And no, Miss Caitlin, they are most definitely not.”
“You yourself always wear beautiful shoes, Mr. O’Dell, like Paddy.”
“Mr. Fitzgerald is my role model in all matters.”
“You and me got that in common as well, then.”
“And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountain green and was the holy lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen. Or thus sings the bardic poet.”
“It sounded a lot like poetry.”
“Except for the wretched jingle, the England pleasant pastures part—bloody tyrants, the Brits. Please excuse the coarse language, Miss.”
“Thanks for your help, Mr. O’Dell. And the poetry.”
“Pleasure, Miss Caitlin.”
Paddy’s daughter observed doings from a distance. No doubt, Caitlin was taking an enormous leap. How could she possibly know what journey she had embarked upon? And then, how could the family know what was about to happen to them? She didn’t strike Colleen as the type of woman who blended into the furniture and wallpaper, and Fitzgeralds didn’t resemble potted plants. So high stakes were on the table everywhere, if not fireworks in the sky above Haymarket, the way Paddy Fitzgerald would have it. And so yes, indeed, she thought, solid chance her father was out of his mind.
But what’s that supposed to mean, Colleen asked herself, not moving into Dad’s bedroom? At the same time, she didn’t wish to visualize the stark domestic alternative.
—
Colleen expressed her meager enthusiasm to Matty this way: “On the plus side, now we know at least somebody can stand the son of a bitch enough to move in with him.” Her brother was also skeptical of Caitlin, and critical of the minx, as he labeled her, but he ultimately didn’t care a great deal one way or the other about his dad’s love life, the very nomenclature of which was unfathomable. Matty had his own problems, which he would share with anybody, provided an opening, which Colleen wasn’t of a mind to furnish—she had other matters pressing upon her.
Colleen followed up with Philip on the phone. “You didn’t know he was planning this?”
“It’s a respectful passage of time, I suppose, four years since mom, considering the man’s advancing age.”
“Pretty dramatic, don’t you think? You mean, he didn’t give you a heads-up?”
“And why would he, at this stage of his life, start telling me anything?”
“Matty calls her the minx. Red hair, stiletto heels, micro minis, like that.”
“Really, Colleen? Matty’s take on women, or any other subject, is automatically suspect. Why sound like a mean girl, why not give her a chance?”
“Easy for you to say, living in the security and safety of the Chancery, not here on the hill.”
He said that was a first; nobody ever put safety and Chancery in the same sentence. “Appearances can be deceiving. And maybe the two of them really love each other. Stranger things have happened.”
“Name three.”
“Okay, fair point, but love doesn’t come around every day.”
“Profound, Swami Fitzgeraldananda.”
“Actually, it is profound, Colly. Now, maybe he should have thrown in with someone more age-appropriate, but it’s his life, and hers. She just might be okay. Longer I’m a priest, the less surprised I am by the human race.”
“So you would hitch them up, Reverend?”
“Haven’t been approached, but canonically, priests cannot quote marry unquote anybody, that’s a sacrament performed by the couple themselves.”
“Blah blah Baltimore Catechism, you drunk?”
“Not yet, but after our charming conversation, that’s an increasingly attractive option. I’ll come by, welcome her to Haymarket, show her around where Paddy buried all the bodies…”
“Wait, stop, what?”
“And you and I can slip away and conspire about God only knows what.”
Philip could understand why his father didn’t alert him in advance of Caitlin’s move-in, but despite what he said to his sister, he remained perplexed by his father’s romantic turn. Not as much as he was perplexed about his own romantic developments, of course, and romantic was not the ideal word choice. Everything was happening so fast for him on every front. But if the old man had his few moments of joy late in life, more power to him. Was his dad actually going to marry the girl? Nobody knew or, if they did, was saying, and he should stop saying girl right now and start saying woman. It might be a tough habit to break, given the way his father referred to her: as a girl. He doubted the happy couple themselves knew what their future held in store. He had concerns about a woman described by his sister in the way she did, concerns he kept to himself, but of course he didn’t know her. The only important question was, how well did his father know her? But if he understood anything about his father, Paddy Fitzgerald’s prenup would be airtight.
—
Everybody was coming to terms with the new realities of the reconstituted Family Fitzgerald. For one thing, in no time, Colleen had to admit that, whoever Caitlin was, she didn’t come across as a gold digger. Of course, she could be too clever to show her conniving hand off the top. Yet the truth was, something about Caitlin fascinated Colleen. She was complex: elegant and awkward, self-assured and uncertain, silly and serious. She was certainly temperamentally different from every Fitzgerald, adding some fresh spice to the Irish stew, and that could be in and of itself a good thing. Maybe it was the case that Caitlin was warmly approachable around Colleen and affectionate to her father, but not in a syrupy, prepossessing way, and he seemed—what he wasn’t with his own kids—completely at ease with her.
It didn’t bother Colleen that if her father remarried, her “stepmother” would be ten years younger than she. She’d had all the mothering she ever needed, and all the mothering she didn’t need. She also wasn’t the type to be obsessed about financial ramifications, if, say, they ever married and Paddy passed into the Great Hibernia in the sky—would Caitlin inherit everything? Nothing? Colleen wasn’t greedy, and money mattered less to her than she supposed it should have, but that was a function of her being raised in affluence and therefore feeling entitled and moneyed by birth. The nearest she got to embracing the altered family dynamic was when she reminded herself that her father would not be dissuaded from doing what he wanted with his riches, and besides, why would he write off his own flesh and blood at this late date? Besides, the whole estate subject made her feel dirty and disloyal, so she resolved to put it out of her mind.
Originally, and more intensely, Colleen had questioned if she would ever tolerate the pretty pretty girly girl with a transparently sketchy past and a wacky wardrobe half out of Saks and half out of Victoria’s Secret, full of flashy bustiers and tight miniskirts and skinny jeans. But she liked to think that she was tolerant and had her own challenges to deal with and therefore wouldn’t write off another young woman wending her way however she could. To her way of thinking, women universally had a tough time making it in a patriarchal world.
But then, look what transpired. Before too long, to their mutual amazement, the two of them, Caitlin and Colleen, were hanging out together in the kitchen or in the gardens, talking and cooking alongside Hilda, or heading outside to tend to the olive trees and flower beds and to weed and to feed the plants, side by side with the serenading, happy gardeners. This was all part of a full-scale reappraisal of her whole life. For instance, not so long ago Colleen had renounced her vegan experiment—it wasn’t her, although she wasn’t completely sold on the corned beef concept, either.
“Vegetarian, I get, I guess,” said Caitlin, being diplomatic and measured, “but vegan sounds like work. Is eating supposed to be a job?”
“Thing is,” Colleen told her, “I was always hungry, like if I had the chance I could devour raw steak with my bare hands. My skin turned beige and blotchy. Boiled meat I could live without. Life without pepperoni pizza or burgers? It ain’t worth living. I’m not going to talk about the gas and the crime scene investigations unit bad breath, leave that to your imagination.”
“Thank you for sparing the colorful details,” said Caitlin, in a tone that initially startled and then amused Colleen, which transition perfectly summed up her increasingly nuanced, growing sense of Caitlin.
Paddy liked seeing his daughter visiting back home on Haymarket Hill, and liked it more that she had evidently taken a liking to Caitlin.
“It’s good, you coming around more. You happy where you’re living?” he asked her.
“What’s not to like about my apartment? It’s like a frat house for deviants—that could describe frat houses, period, I suppose. My downstairs neighbors are into whips and chains and leather, I can hear the creaks and snaps, and my upstairs neighbors are Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’m not converting to either.”
“That’s the sort of domestic account your loving da loves to hear. There’s plenty of room here in your home if you want a change of scenery.”
She was rendered speechless a moment. True, she did still regard it as her home.
So he was explicit. “You can move back, if you like, for as long as you want.”
There had to be a catch, and he read her mind.
“It would be nice to have you back home, if you’d like to be here, a squint-free zone.”
“Okay,” she said, surprising herself.
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay, then.”
“One, Dad, you gotta let up with the squinting thing, and two, what’s the tariff?”
“Tariff? Oh, Colly, Colly. Your money’s no good with me.”
She was out of work, and therefore broke again and had no money good or bad, and the next week she moved into the guest house. It felt like she had never left. And that was both good news and the opposite.
—
Colleen took Caitlin under her wing, turning into her personal reclama-tion project. It wasn’t long before she began to present her books to read, suggested movies and TV shows, and the young woman seemed receptive. So far Collen hadn’t broached the fashion challenges she posed or offered to go shopping with her to update the clothes, or to see what she could do to take down the bordello look a few notches. Could Colleen characterize her feelings as sisterly? Growing up, she felt close to Matty, but she had always fantasized about having a female sibling.
Colleen had moved around from job to job, school to school, never landing on a career, much less a vocation. She dabbled in marketing, in sales, in human resources. Her résumé would have appeared incoherent, had she composed one. But she herself wasn’t incoherent, so she always found some employer willing to give a smart, appealing young woman like her a chance, often in positions that proved to be over her head. Invariably she would lose interest in the work and then her boss’s confidence, and finally her job.
One day Caitlin and Colleen found themselves midday with nothing to do.
“Movie?” proposed Caitlin.
“Not in the mood. Lunch out? That Greek place with the fab hummus?”
“Think I need to check myself, taking in too many calories. I should hit the gym today. Want to come with?”
“Teach me to work the speed bag?”
Caitlin would, and also show her how to skip rope the right way.
“You know, a punching bag sounds like the ticket.”
“It is fun, let me tell you, you get all the frustrations out of your system.”
—
That was the first time they worked out together. Colleen was impressed, and acquired a few tricks and learned a new, taxing exercise routine. Afterward, in the tony gym café under soft track lighting, they sipped on their kelp and kale smoothies. Colleen had a question about this concoction: “People don’t die from drinking this?”
“Weren’t you the vegan? You get used to it.” She rattled off the replenishing nutrient bonanza in their cups. “After a while, it almost tastes pretty good.”
“Have to trust you on that one.”
Then their conversation, and their connection, took a precarious turn.
“What’s the plan, Caitlin?” Vintage Colleen move.
Caitlin bristled, bracing herself for that unexpected broadside she should have expected—people were like that with her, they made assumptions, they thought she required refinement, tutelage. “Plan about what?”
“About your own life.”
“I think I’ll meet you back at the…”
“Wait, wait, let me start over.” That was Colleen being Colleen, being direct, but it didn’t work this time, not with Caitlin.
“You do that a lot, I hear, starting over, how’s that plan working for you?” Best defense was a good offense, according to Caitlin’s default survivor’s mechanism.
“All right, fair enough, and point taken, but I wasn’t going there, really, Caitlin, really.”
“I’m nobody’s trophy, in case you’re wondering. Paddy—your dad and I, we have a bond, which I get it, that might not be understood by his family, or anybody. It’s too late to start caring about what other people think, which is what I learned from his example. I told him, day ever comes, which it might never come, knowing Paddy like I do, I’ll sign a prenup to nuke all prenups, so don’t worry about losing anything to me, Colleen. You think I’m in it for his money? Must be a rare talent, reading other people’s minds.”
“We’re getting off on the wrong foot, my fault. Let’s take a deep breath.” The way Caitlin went off, with so little provocation, might have signaled that she was protesting too much, but Colleen didn’t conclude as much. Caitlin was a hard girl to figure, or Colleen was working too hard, or both.
Caitlin nodded, signaling reluctant, and limited, willingness to listen—a minute more.
“I was asking what you—a smart young woman with…”
“Nobody’s ever called me smart, so stop.”
“Well, I just did ’cause it’s true, so what do you like doing?”
“I barely finished high school.”
“Education has nothing to do with smarts. You have an intelligent way of dealing with people, people are attracted to you.”
“’Cause I dress like I do, I guess.”
“If anything, the opposite.” She came this close to talking about the fashion choices, but it was bad timing. “You have so much to offer, Cait.”
Caitlin was taken aback, but decided she would tell the truth. “I like cooking, and I like reading the books you give me. I don’t always understand them, but I like them—because you want me to like them.”
“Well, you like them on your own terms, not because of me.”
“You know, your dad said something a little bit similar. He wants me to try new things, on my own. But I think he means it in a good way. One thing I like, I like food.”
“I cannot believe how you enjoy your food, you eat like a football player and you’re still what? A size zero? I gotta watch myself, but you can eat burritos and guacamole and chips and don’t put on a single pound.”
“Good genes. And working out like a crazy person.”
“Yeah, I noticed that, and I am gonna sleep well tonight, thanks to your kick-ass workout.”
“Anyway, your dad, he said why don’t I open a little café?”
“Ever worked in a restaurant? I have, and you either have restaurant in your blood or you don’t, and sweet cakes, unless you live and love restaurants twenty-four seven, you don’t. So what else?”
“Like I said, books, the ones you give me. I have read more in the past few months than I have my whole life.”
She looked to have been struck by lightning. “Hey, you know what? I saw the ratty old bookshop on the edge of town is closing up. Dodgy neighborhood, but that’s okay, that’s opportunity. The old man will buy it for you.”
“Wouldn’t that be kind of—what you said—patriarch-ish?”
“Yes, it could be patriarchal, but in your case not.” Colleen spun out the fantasy awhile—books, authors, customers milling about, touching covers, asking questions and offering opinions and being at the center of interesting discussions all day long. To envision all that was a sweet indulgence.
“You really think, Colly?” But she was simultaneously considering: talk about impractical Colleen’s pie in the sky.
“Listen, I want to thank you for making my dad happy. He hasn’t always been that way, after Mom, I mean.”
“Paddy was so devoted to her, I’ll never take her place, I know that, and I wouldn’t try.”
“Men and women, an unending mystery to me.” Her own parents had not paved the way to the palace of marital wisdom.
Caitlin raised her eyebrows, lowered her perfect chin, her skin flawless and aglow post-workout, and she looked knowingly across the table and said not a word, to which Colleen responded:
“Okay, I see what you’re doing there, but maybe I’m not gay. I mean, I was gay, and I could be gay again, but I’m not now. And I’m not saying men in the abstract interest me, though men in the abstract obviously have advantages over the other kind, taking my wacky brothers as samples of the species. And by the way, it’s not gay anymore, the word’s queer.”
Caitlin tried hard to keep up with the rapid pace of social change, and feared she, as young as she was, would never catch up. Colleen kept moving fast.
“Yes, I wanted to sleep with the women I slept with, the women I cared about. That doesn’t make me queer.”
“It doesn’t not make you not gay, I mean queer, right?” She was unsure if she said what she meant, or if she understood what it was she meant.
Colleen smiled. “Good point, people love who they love, men or women.” She sensed an opportunity to make a big statement, and she seized it with both hands. “You got that last thing right. I reject the entire patriarchal ethos of heteronormative.”
Caitlin liked the sparkly new words Colleen taught her, like patriarcish and heronormal, even if she was mostly unclear about them. “Me, too, Colly.”
Well, she did or she didn’t get what she was saying, but in either case, it was all right with Colleen. “Wait, if you did go into the bookstore biz, what do you imagine that would be like?”
She didn’t know. She had her doubts, she supposed. “Like the restaurant biz, isn’t it supposed to be in your blood?”
“I would help you, I would love that. Seems to me, you’d be a natural, because a bookstore isn’t about selling books so much as serving people who love their books, who live for their books. You’re a people person, which nobody ever accused me of being.”
“The personal touch, I get that, so it’s like any kind of business.”
“A little bit, seems like.”
Colleen had a radical proposal. “Floozy’s—you like that name? Edgy, no? It’s a bookstore for everybody, not just floozies, not just women who are floozies at heart, because you know what?” She was knocked back by the thunderbolt of insight. “When you get down to it, we’re all proud floozies.”
Caitlin felt dizzy after having one too many—of ideas. “You’re amazing, Colly.”
“I know, right?”
Caitlin sipped the sea-green smoothie and wrinkled her nose, having had her fill of the healthy potion. “Let’s get out of here, grab some beers, keep talking.”
“About time, girlfriend.”
—
That night the two women, after three pints apiece not quite sober but nowhere near legitimately hammered, rushed back into the house together, talking over each other. Immediately and excitably they raised the whole entrepreneurial topic with Paddy. He endeavored to take them seriously, and he listened when Colleen rolled out the concept, obviously devoid of specifics as to capital and liquidity and burn rates and sunk costs, all without spreadsheets and projections or accountants to reinforce her case.
“So we’re talking hypothetically, blue-skying then,” he said. “So let’s concede nobody makes money selling books in brick-and-mortar establish-ments. Do I have that right? Because I heard this rumor making money’s the whole purpose of doing business.”
They did agree they weren’t going to get rich hawking books, or break even. “At least off the bat,” Colleen said. And she made an attempt at worst-case scenarios, which had to do with competition from deep discounting of units online, so as to show off her tenuous grasp of the realities. She had already learned that publishers don’t sell books, they sell “units.”
“I should have bought stock in Amazon when I had the chance.” He often lamented his missed opportunities.
“Hey,” said Colleen, “Amazon doesn’t make money selling books.”
“Really?” said Caitlin. “No shit?” This didn’t sound heartening.
Here was the thing Colleen wanted her dad to understand. This store would be unlike any other store in town, it would be a warm, welcoming, inviting place for people to gather and to talk books and…
“And to buy books?” said Paddy.
“Yes, of course to buy books,” said Colleen.
“What Colly said,” said Caitlin, trying to further the discussion.
“Caitlin, you want this, a bookshop?”
“Yes, sweetheart, I think I do.” That might have been the beer talking, but she cast a look toward Colleen that amounted to Don’t I?
“And Colly, you’re all in, ready to work hard?”
“Absolutely, Dad.”
“Here’s the thing I want both you businesswomen to think through, and it’s a tough question. That old bookstore failed, so what’s your magical formula for making yours succeed instead?”
The two women searched each other’s eyes and wordlessly interrogated themselves until they arrived at the best possible answer they could come up with.
“Because it will be our bookstore,” said Colleen, “a Fitzgerald bookstore, that’s why, and we Fitzgeralds never fail.” She knew that wasn’t truly the case, that failure was also a Fitzgerald marker, but that didn’t make it the wrong thing to say.
Caitlin fell silent, and she was shaken to realize she had witnessed something monumental taking place. Somehow before she was conscious of this fact, she had become a Fitzgerald, too.
Now, to a businessman like him, that commercial concept sounded heartbreakingly naïve and nowhere near bankable, but he also knew that enthusiasm and confidence were indispensable starters—and unquantifiable. In and of itself, that factor did not mean the plan was unviable. “Whole thing sounds a little dicey, but you know what? I have a weakness for risky, and for my two favorite girls, so let’s keep talking.”
—
The two women got to work. They camped out in the bookstore neighborhood, they read everything they could find about starting a bookstore, they roughly sketched out projections and forecasts and budgets. They also had a great good time entertaining several excellent alternative candidates for the store name: Searchers Books, Chancer Books (as in, take a chance reading a good book), What’s the Story Books (as in Irish greetings), Bender Books (which sounded like a kick, a bit on the boozy side), but then how about going all in for it, as in Boozy Books? Upon further consideration, no, not unless they acquired a liquor license. Gobsmacked Books? No, but they were getting closer now.
“I got it,” said Caitlin, “I got it…Bang On Books. You like?”
“Fuck, yeah, I do. Bang On Books, we got a winner, baby. Bang On Books, love it.” Colleen was elated, and also impressed by her new partner in crime.
“But you know, gotta say, Floozy’s Books, I keep coming back to that. I might like it a little bit more.” She rolled around the word on her tongue. Floozy’s. Had she come back full circle to their initial idea?
“Well,” said Colleen, “the first idea can often be the best idea.”
“I know, I know, life’s like that,” she said, and wondered if that were true.
“So you make a good point—for a floozy.” It was a fun word to enunciate. “And that’s what we are, after all, a coupla floozies.”
Before they knew it, they had settled on it, and Floozy’s Books, should it ever come into existence, was destined to be its name.
Unlike the agonizingly prolonged land deal with the diocese, this contract came together quickly. Almost too quickly, Paddy sensed as he dug into the details, intuiting that the owners of the old bookshop, cash-strapped as they were, were too worn-out to go on negotiating with him, they had had their fill. But he left some money on the table, no reason to humiliate people in their bleak hour of financial resignation. And they certainly were upstanding human beings, not an everyday sight in his world, naïve as hippies, well-meaning in their tie-dyes and Birkenstocks, and, as he could tell, absolutely ill-equipped by temperament to run a business. Paddy would bring his acumen to the store once the girls took over. He did the due diligence, semi-diligently. This deal hardly constituted a major cash outlay. Financial exposure wasn’t his main concern, and he wasn’t sweating the details as he normally did. The capital investment in Caitlin and in his daughter, too—that was what he was making, and that was the risk he was taking and that was well worth making. Were he honest with himself, he wanted to please Caitlin, not that there was anything simple about his designs. That’s what happens when somebody like Paddy Fitzgerald falls in love, and he couldn’t deny anymore that, crazy as it seemed, unexpected as this development was, he was in love with the girl. Woman, he meant to say, knowing Colly would correct him if she were reading his mind, which was a talent that she, along with her mother, possessed in spades. He would get this, and everything else, straight eventually.
—
Paddy tiptoed into Caitlin’s bedroom and whispered, “Good morning, sunshine. You awake?”
It took an excruciating moment for her to reboot her brain. “No.” She sat up in bed groggy, as he retracted the crimson velvet curtains, opening her bedroom onto an ostentatiously clear blue sky. She winced to rein in the unbridled assault of daylight. “Now I am.”
“Meet me in the garage, baby.” He could barely conceal his exuberance.
She could barely conceal her puzzlement. Garage at this hour, why? Sleep was important to her. She’d been reading up about its restorative powers, about how as we age we need more not less sleep, all of which sounded instinctively right. She herself usually slept like a teenager and privately treasured the jewel of her bustling dream life, not that she could always reliably reconstruct upon waking the narratives and images that had cinematically dazzled her when her eyes closed. She heard that people apparently reclined on a psychiatrist’s couch and described in great detail their dreams, which apparently held some mysterious, unconscious key to their waking life. She supposed dreams must have some sort of deep significance, but for her the deepest significance was that her dreams constituted an alternate world she inhabited, traveled, and negotiated, as if she were a tourist of herself. Much like her so-called real life, her dream life instilled inside her questions and problems, too—but different ones. As for sleep, eight hours was fine, nine or ten much better. People used to call such a regimen “beauty sleep,” but she hadn’t heard that old-fashioned phrase lately. Would she have to cut back on her sleep quotient once she immersed herself in the book biz? She suspected that was inevitable. She seized the alarm clock Paddy had given her as if by this gesture she could freeze time’s relentless momentum. “It’s eight o’clock, Paddy.”
“I know, I know, I got up at six, so I overslept, too. Come out there when you’re ready, no hurry, fresh coffee’ll be waiting for you in the kitchen.”
For someone as graceful as she, whose body in fluid motion was normally blue-ribbon saluki graceful, she moved deliberately but in no way ponderously in the mornings, so it was almost nine when she appeared in the garage in her white bathrobe and fur-lined pink Gucci mules, coffee cup steady in her hand. Paddy was delicately dusting the hood of the Maserati as if he were tending to a high-strung animate creature.
She wondered what could possibly be so urgent. “What, you want me to help clean your car?” She looked incredulous, verging on slightly annoyed.
“You like the Maz?”
They’d had this kind of exchange a few times before. It seemed crucial for her to acknowledge every so often this proud possession, so that is what she dutifully did.
“It’s a beauty, always like when you take me out for a drive.”
“Good, very good, glad to hear. You can squire me around someday. Because, tell you what, Caitlin. Been thinking. The car’s yours.”
Speechless, she tried to let that piece of nonsense settle in. But she couldn’t achieve that result. “No, it’s your precious car.”
“Only now it is yours, because I just gave it to you.”
“No.”
“Yes, and please, here are the keys.”
—
Paddy Fitzgerald, almost before being conscious of this development, had rumbled onto the phase in his existence when mortality was no longer an abstraction but loomed an everyday yet inexorably invigorating fact of, well, life. The grim reaper richly deserved his reputation, he conceded, and was worthy to be dreaded, so Paddy was not blithely looking forward to the inevitable thunk and thump of the scythe on his door. He suffered no illusions as to the promises of the afterlife, or banked on his eligibility to cash in on them if they were ever to be made available. But he wasn’t on the cusp of becoming a Buddhist monk, either. It was nonetheless the case that with each passing day having possessions and generating wealth and wielding power mattered less and less, when for a once-upon-a-time impoverished Irish American kid, acquiring all that, reasonably enough, used to be an all-consuming enterprise. He would grudgingly admit there was a time when he first put Caitlin up in that penthouse that she herself was a type of gorgeous, prized possession. Here and now when it came to her and the Maz, however, he was being pragmatic. It wasn’t solely a matter of acknowledging the obvious, that he could not take it all with him. What sort of moron doesn’t grasp that first principle? Losing his son and later his wife underscored the limits of time in a devastating way. All the same, he felt baffled as to how, ever since Cait moved in, he caught himself thinking more and more about his late wife, Grace, but with a resonating difference, a difference he was struggling over. It wasn’t as if he were comparing the two women. Grace’s image was molten in his memory. Sometimes she was his new bride on the honeymoon, sometimes the mother of his children pressing cold cloths on their fevered brows, sometimes an old woman knitting and knitting deep into the night, or finally dying in a hospital bed, her warm hand going cold in his. Sometimes, somehow, all his images of her were superimposed upon each other, like a deck of playing cards. He missed her, of course he did. Not that he regretted Caitlin’s moving in. But it was almost as if he were only now beginning to understand Grace and to understand what their marriage had been and, if he dared admit this, what it still was. Which made no rational sense. But that’s what death does, he supposed: the incomprehensibility of it crushed everybody and everything in its path.
Meanwhile some other principle was now at work inside. Take the car as an example. Owning and driving the Maz once gave him deep and abundant pleasure, it was true, but the prospect of handing over the car to her—to Caitlin—gave him much, much more. He was relieved to have survived long enough to recalibrate his values—and happier to have found Caitlin in the first place. Because that was the truth: he was happier. Not happy necessarily in some absolute sense, but most certainly happier. Only in retrospect, that’s when we understand all there is to be understood. He now lived in the perpetual early gloaming of retrospect: the bright blazing fireworks on the horizon before the swoop into the black night. But what did that insight portend for him and his connection to Caitlin? Would it never be understood by him until he wasn’t around to understand it? And what did he mean by understanding anyway? Maybe it was crazy, maybe he was crazy, but he loved her. No, this wasn’t crazy. Unless it was crazy to love her, because that was the simple truth, that he loved her, even if it wasn’t simple at all.
—
“But your Maz is only for special occasions, you said.”
Caitlin was continually updating her self-conception and struggling to understand who she had become, but she knew that she had changed, she knew that for certain. She couldn’t erase the memory of the former life she renounced, and couldn’t dismiss it, either. As uneasy as her purchase was on the past, she was a woman “with a history”: that’s precisely how her mother would have euphemistically framed the idea of her daughter’s so-called career had the woman been around and had she ever given a flying fuck. Woman with a history, meaning a woman with a type of past that wasn’t a subject for polite conversation, whatever the hell that was, polite conversation, which was one thing Caitlin was unsure she had ever been party to. If it weren’t for that history of hers, she wouldn’t have ever known Paddy in the first place, so there was that element to factor in. Not that he and she explicitly discussed and broke down the sequencing. It was the truth, but the truth can be overrated, she believed, insofar as the truth was not ever obviously or absolutely factual, much like her, for whom truth was changing, for whom facts were mutable or perpetually slipping in and out of focus. Sometimes she stood in conflict with her own history, which made no sense, except for her it did. The closest she got to understanding how Paddy had come to terms with her and her past was that her past no longer mattered anymore, but if it did matter it only mattered insofar as that was purely and simply how he met her, under circumstances that were not so pure and not so simple: an instance of circular logic, she might have framed the thought, had she been familiar with that intellectual construct, and she wasn’t. Had Paddy resolutely, willfully, wishfully, magically wiped clean her slate, assuming her past life was none of his business and irrelevant to their relationship now? The Baxter business muddled the situation, and Ben, too, poor little baby Ben, and how Paddy reprocessed those fragments of her past. And when she revealed that part of her life, that was the morning when he changed toward her: he took her home for breakfast, and now it had become her home. Colleen might have characterized this possessiveness of his, if that was the term, as being predicated upon his essentially patriarchal predisposition, but Caitlin then could have countered: well, there’s an upside to everything. Then throw in this fact: time jumpstarted all over again when she and Paddy fell in love. A woman with a history suddenly had a new history, and a future. They both were now free, radically liberated from all the facts that had preceded them. And that stipulation had a benefit for him, too: the record of his own past was now, as far as she was concerned, wiped clean, too. Lovers routinely indulged themselves in the illusion they are starting over. That may be the central lure of the idea of falling in love again. Not that her memories pre-Paddy were fairy-tale cherished, hardly, but some of them indeed were in the ballpark—masochism gave her no thrill. Truth was, there was always darkness at the edge of town. She did what she had indeed done, she was who she had certainly been—only whoosh, not anymore. Then again, she never could expunge the recollection of one night when the goal consisted of making it to see sunlight again. Anybody who did the work she did had a story on that order to tell. She always assumed she possessed a first-class bullshit detector, and trusted her sixth sense about clients, not to mention trusted the madam who doled out her assignments, but this was the time when she learned she was naïve. The john tied her up, which was not part of the deal, and he unfolded his plan. She was his now, and he got off on her humiliation, and more than that, her terror. Before that night, she would have affirmed it was nothing but a job, it did not reach into her soul, her heart. But this guy had conceived a big buildup to his crowning moment. At her lowest ebb, he instructed her to tell him that she loved him. Nothing she could do about it. Make me believe you, he insisted. So she did tell him that, and did all she could to make him believe her. That was the night when her work did slither into her heart and soul. She couldn’t take a shot at him when she had the opportunity and the desire, once he’d untied her: he turned his back when he evidently had confidence he had broken her down to his satisfaction, and there was the fireplace poker within reach, but some primitive rationality kicked in: if she killed him, he would be with her forever. When he had his fill, he let her go and she was never quite the same. And he paid her, too, and disgustingly added an extra hundred and thanked her, the dirtiest money that ever crossed her hands. None of these images occurred to her this morning in the garage as Paddy extended her the car keys. That past life of hers taught her about the nature of a gift that is hardly ever a gift, that is, freely given, freely accepted, no strings attached. Instead, to her, a gift used to be a dangerous thing to accept, which is what she had gleaned from all the gifts many men had given her in the past, like that kimono she had worn around Paddy till she had to lie about and one day she threw away. A gift is a kind of contract, a kind of pledge. In her former life, she knew the transactional terms of any gift that came her way. She realized what she was giving up by accepting something given to her: she was giving up a part of herself in exchange. Almost since the first day she moved in with Paddy, a part of her worried this actualized fantasy would all come crashing down, that it was nothing other than a transaction, that this whole new life she had walked into was a dream from which she one day would be rudely awakened, that she would disappoint him, that she couldn’t possibly live up to the idea of her he had cultivated in his fantasies.
You know what she woke up this morning not thinking about? Money, that’s what. Until she thought about not thinking about money, that’s when she was thinking about money all over again. Once, and not so long ago, she used to think about money all day long, which goes a long way toward explaining her life choices, when she didn’t have much of it. The best thing about where she found herself now is that she never had to think about money in the same way as before. Sure, she had done things for money, and at some point who doesn’t? Name any people not canonized. But she had standards, she wasn’t walking the street, not that once or twice she didn’t come close when the pressure intensified, and not that she couldn’t empathize with those who made other choices—which were not choices at all. This line of reasoning caused her to wonder if she were trading in one sort of commercial transaction with men for a different kind of commercial transaction with a man named Paddy Fitzgerald. That’s when she felt her stomach spin-cycle so fast she had to hold on to the Maserati Dama Bianca to brace herself. But then the world slowed down and she said to herself, before she could say it to him out loud, that she loved him. Love was not supposed to be in the cards for her, only then it was. Incredible as it sounded, she did love him. But it was more than that. They did love each other.
—
Because then, because then, because then, what Paddy said next crystalized everything.
“Special occasion?” said Paddy. “Special occasion,” he repeated. “What’s a special occasion anymore? For me, waking up in the morning is a special occasion these days. And waking up in the morning having you here in Haymarket, that’s a ridiculously special occasion. So that’s why you can drive the Maz whenever and wherever you want, it’s all yours. Because you are the special occasion.”
Falling in love: At some point in their renounced past lives they’d both given up on the idea. Until this moment, that is, when they were not so sure they were sure about that.
“It’s too much, Paddy,” she said, glistening teardrops rolling down from her gleaming green eyes.
“So are you. God, sometimes you make me swoon. Love that word, swoon.”
“I don’t deserve you,” she said and she believed.
“You’re right about that, Caitlin dear, you deserve much better.”
He wished he could give her more, much more than a priceless car, and that’s precisely what he would see to for the duration of all the years stretching out before the two of them.