“THAT ONE will do just fine, Dermot Michael,” my wife said as she shrugged out of her sweatshirt.After each of our photo-taking ventures, she would pick one shot off the screen of my Dell and require that I print out a color copy. As I feared, this time it was a picture of the hovel up in the hills where she had smelled the blood of the three women. It was the last picture she’d taken before the fog had closed in on us. Already the light looked sinister.
“Isn’t it a brilliant picture altogether!” She removed the ribbon from her long black hair, letting it fall over her shoulders. “Print it out.”
My pulse rate shot up. More love in the afternoon. Even if I had now passed my thirtieth birthday, I was not likely to refuse.
We had returned to our bungalow—given its size and comforts, “villa” would have been a better label. Ethne, our tiny and ebullient mother’s helper (and herself a student at UCG—University College Galway), was waiting for us. She had poured out rumors about the destruction of “that gombeen man’s house.”
“Didn’t it scare the shite out of me? And didn’t I grab
for my rosary? … Aren’t the Gardai saying it was a professional job and if he was inside there’d be nothing but bits and pieces left and it could have been the lads or the Prots from up above and that there’s no reason to waste good explosives on such a worthless gobshite …”
“Maybe it was the Russian Mafia,” I suggested, a comment that stopped the loquacious young woman in her tracks.
Nelliecoyne, who had bonded with Ethne, rushed to embrace her leg. The two of them and me wife jabbered in Irish—about me I was sure. My son, placed on the floor, managed to pull himself in a crawl towards his adored minder.
Nelliecoyne had been walking at his age.
Overachiever.
Ethne swept him into her arms.
“How’s me favorite little boy in all the world today!”
“Dermot Michael,” Nuala asked, “would you ever unload me camera for me while we feed these hungry little demons?”
“I would, so long as you feed me too!”
More laughter and Irish chatter.
So after I had removed the diskette from her camera and loaded it into our Dell and flipped through her shots, Nelliecoyne arrived in the master bedroom, cautiously carrying a plate on which there was a salmon sandwich with the crusts cut off. She offered it to me as though it were a chalice with the consecrated wine.
“Ma says that you like peanut butter and jelly.”
“If Ma says so, it must be true.”
If my daughter should become a priest—which surely ought to be possible when she comes of age—they would have to ordain her a bishop.
“Ma says that if you eat every last bit of it maybe you can have some ice cream.”
“I had better eat every last bit of it, huh?”
I often had the impression that I was the third kid in the house.
Nuala’s shots were excellent. Naturally. She was good at everything she did. When I joined the rest of the ménage in the kitchen I found that there were roast beef, egg salad, and ham and cheese sandwiches, all on croissants, waiting for me.
Our cottage was often called a bungalow. However, it had nothing in common with the snug, sturdy brick houses by the same name on the west side of Chicago. Rather it was modeled on the style of British India, only far more elegant—four bedrooms, three baths, a family room with a large TV, a kitchen, a dining room, and a parlor, which was usually left vacant for the “gentry”—the little people—should they happen by. Nuala Anne did not exactly believe in the fairie, but she did believe, as she explained to me, in traditions.
It was hardly your stone-and-thatch Connemara cottage of not so long ago. Rather it had been designed for rich Yanks and, now that Ireland was bursting with prosperity, for rich Micks.
After I had more or less cleaned the sandwich plate, Ethne and the children withdrew to the nursery for the children’s afternoon nap, accompanied by Fiona, who had forsaken the master bedroom entirely since we had come to Ireland. Nuala and I wandered down to the master bedroom. Fortunately, given my wife’s proclivity for afternoon “naps,” the nursery and the master bedroom were at opposite ends of the house.
After she had chosen the shot she wanted me to print, she folded her sweatshirt neatly. Her bra was the same navy blue as the sweatshirt. In Nuala’s world, it was proper that undergarments match outer garments because, as she said, “You never can tell when someone might want to undress you.”
“Aren’t you going to print out me picture, Dermot Michael?”
she said as she deftly loosened the front hook of her bra.
“Momentarily distracted,” I murmured as I clicked on the print icon.
“Are you now?”
She folded the bra neatly—in Nuala Anne’s world everything was neat.
She peaked out of the drapes.
“Them gobshites are everywhere!”
“Media?”
“Gardaí.” She closed the drape. “I’m taking me pill now, Dermot Michael,” she said, popping a tablet into her mouth. “Just so you won’t call a divorce lawyer this afternoon.”
“One day at a time!”
She sniggered and tugged off her jeans.
“Doesn’t your daughter hound me about it every day … . Ma, have you taken your pill yet?”
It had become difficult for me to sustain the banter. After five years of marriage the sight of my wife’s breasts still intoxicated me.
Nuala Anne was conniving again, not that she ever stopped conniving. She knew what the afternoon seductions did to my body and my mind. She was scheming some convoluted and intricate Irish womanly plot. I didn’t mind the conniving. In fact, I sort of enjoyed it. Hadn’t Ma, my beloved Connemara-born grandmother, with whom my wife identified because they were both from Carraroe, been a conniver too?
“I may modify the threat from divorce to spanking you every day you don’t take it.”
“Now isn’t that an interesting erotic possibility,” she said as she folded her jeans.
Heaven help me if I ever tried it.
Was she perhaps trying to bind me closer to her against the fear that I might become impatient with her recent
problems? Or was she attempting to make up for the long hiatus in our sexual games when she was pregnant and recovering? Or was she seeking to win my support for her decision to abandon her vocal career? Or was she consoling me because I was now past thirty?
All these obvious schemes were improbable and unnecessary, as I thought she well knew. The scheme had to be more complicated and devious.
WHY DON’T YOU JUST ENJOY IT AS LONG AS YOU CAN.
“I have to figure it out.”
MAYBE SHE JUST ENJOYS BEING FUCKED.
“Don’t be vulgar.”
She kicked off her bikini bottoms and added them to the neatly folded pile. Then she leaned against the wall, head bowed, hands behind her back, a demure, fragile, almost virginal creature.
“You shouldn’t stare at me like that, Dermot Michael Coyne.”
“Woman,”—I gasped—“you’re me wife. I’m supposed to stare at you that way.”
Since our marriage I had made love with many different women, all of them my wife. Nuala might be a sophisticated woman of the world, a furiously hungry nymph, an urbane and experienced sensualist, or a shy, skittish bog creature from the wilds of the West of Ireland. The last was, I often thought, the ur-Nuala, the one on which all the others built. In this particular bit of conniving, she was the frightened Galway innocent.
“You’ll destroy me modesty altogether.”
“Impossible. Stark naked like you are now, there’s always a veil of modesty around you.”
She looked up, interested in this assertion.
“That’s a load of shite, Dermot Michael Coyne.”
“’Tis not, woman. ’Tis the modesty behind the modesty.”
“You’re making fun of me Irish spirituality.”
She argued that in the Irish way of things, there was always a reality behind the appearance—the mountain behind the mountain, the river behind the river. I had once suggested that this was Platonism. She had replied briskly that it was not so. Besides, the ancient Celts understood the truth long before them Greek fellas had come along.
“Woman, I am not. It is impossible for you to be lewd.”
“Och, Dermot, stare at me as long as you want. Don’t I love it something terrible when you eat me up with your eyes.”
I had often told people that my wife reminded me of an ancient Celtic goddess, though I had not in fact ever met an ancient Celtic goddess.
Now she was a naked Celtic goddess, one of which I had never seen either.
Still, she’d do—long, firm legs, slender hips, trim waist, elegant breasts, the solid, graceful body of a woman athlete.
And dangerously strong too.
Her eyes were as blue as Galway Bay on a sunny day, her finely shaped face as mobile as Irish weather, and her voice hinted at echoes of church bells pealing over the bogs.
She had been grimly determined to recapture her figure after the Mick had appeared, and she set about the task with characteristic intensity as soon as she had begun to take the medication. The last five pounds didn’t seem to want to go away.
“Dermot Michael Coyne, do you realize that if I have six more children, I’ll have put on thirty-five pounds.”
“I don’t think you’re going to have six more children.”
“Regardless! And you just don’t get it!”
I got it enough to fiddle with the scale in our bathroom at home on Southport Avenue so that the five pounds slipped away. Then she easily lost five more, which put her back at the weight at which she’d been aiming. She
was quite proud of herself. I let it go at that. If it works don’t fix it.
Then she had announced her fear that her waist would never return to its proper size. Wasn’t it a quarter-inch larger than it should be? Would ten pregnancies make her two-and-a-half inches fatter?
I hadn’t argued that she wasn’t going to be pregnant ten more times. Rather, one day when we were playing, I had held her down amid much giggling, produced a tape measure, and informed her that her waist measurement was the same as that for her wedding dress and I wanted to hear no more complaints.
She had pondered the tape suspiciously. How did I know what her wedding dress measurements were? I recited them all. She complained that a woman had no privacy at all, at all, and then added that it was probably yesterday’s exercise which had eliminated the offending quarter-inch.
I note that no one holds Nuala Anne down unless she wants to be held down.
I turned off the computer and walked across the room to where she was cowering against the wall. I rubbed the back of my hand down one breast and then up the other. I allowed the fingers of my other hand to play with her hard belly muscles. She arched her back and groaned.
No man should have that kind of power, I thought, over such a beautiful woman. Nonetheless, consumed by adoration and concern, I continued my gentle explorations.
“Dermot!” she sighed.
I took her into my arms. She was trembling.
“Aren’t you my life itself?” she moaned.
SEE! SHE’S CLINGING TO YOU LIKE HER LIFE DEPENDS ON YOU FUCKING HER! YOU’RE LIKE THE PROZAC!
I was incapable of arguing with him.
As we ascended the heights of love everything else faded—the blood in the mountain hut, the explosion down
the road, our fey daughter, our pregnant wolfhound, even her singing.
Much later, sweaty and exhausted, we lay side by side, holding hands.
“What did you mean, Nuala Anne, when you said I was your life?”
“I didn’t say that at all, at all.”
“Woman, you did.”
“Hadn’t you driven me out of me mind?”
“Still, you said it.”
She sighed.
“Isn’t it enough that you have me body? Leave me soul alone.”
We began to dally with one another, as we often did when we were cooling off, a special bonus of pleasure.
“When I’m involved, I want to know.”
She sighed as she kissed my chin.
“It isn’t just the Prozac that keeps me on this side of the deep end, Dermot Michael, is it now?”
“’Tis the Dermot behind the Dermot?”
“Sure, there’s no Dermot behind the Dermot … only God.”
Somehow I didn’t want to be God for her.
YOU’RE STUCK WITH IT, BOYO.
“Now go to sleep, Dermot Michael. I don’t want you nodding off with me parents at supper.”