Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin (30 page)

She tottered close to her lawyer and then she turned, heavy- eyed, to the bench.
—Oh, no, she said, I ain’t being coerced.
—Mr. Feathers, do you consent to immediate sentence and waive your right to presentence report?
—Yes, we do.
—And, Miss Henderson, do you wish to make a statement before I give sentence?
—I want to be in Rikers.
—You understand, Miss Henderson, that this court cannot determine which prison you will be in.
—But they said I’d be in Rikers. That’s what they said.
—And why, pray tell, would you like to be in Rikers? Why would anyone like . . .
—Cuz’a the babies.
—You’ve got babies?
—Jazzlyn’s got.
She was pointing over her shoulder at her daughter, slumped in the spectators’ section.
—Very well, there is no guarantee, but I’ll make a note to the court officers to be so disposed. In the case of the People versus Tillie Henderson, the plea is guilty and I sentence you to no more than eight months in prison.
—Eight months?
—Correct. I can make it twelve, if you like.
She opened her mouth in an unsounded whimper.
—I thought it were gonna be six.
—Eight months, young lady. Do you wish to adjust your plea?
—Shit, she said and she shrugged her shoulders.
He saw the Irishman in the spectators’ section grab the arm of the young hooker. He was trying to make his way forward in the court to say something to Tillie Henderson, but the court officer prodded him in the chest with a billy club.
—Order in the court.
—Can I say a word, Your Honor?
—No. Now. Sit. Down.
Soderberg could feel his teeth grind.
—Tillie, I’ll be back later, okay?
—Sit. Or else.
The pimp stopped in the aisle and looked up at Soderberg. The pupils small, the eyes very blue. Soderberg felt exposed, open, unlayered. A blanket of quiet fell over the court.
—Sit! Or else.
The pimp lowered his head and retreated. Soderberg let out a quick breath of relief, then turned slightly in his chair. He picked up the calendar of cases, put his hand over the microphone, nodded across to the court officer.
—All right, he whispered. Get the tightrope walker up. Soderberg glanced at Tillie Henderson as she was escorted out the door to his right. She walked with her head low and yet there was a learned bounce in her gait. As if she were already out and doing the track. She was held on each side by a court officer. The jacket she wore was crumpled and dirty. The sleeves were way too long. It looked as if two women could have fit inside it. Her face looked odd and vulnerable, and yet still held a touch of the sensual. Her eyes were dark. Her eyebrows were plucked thin. There was a shine to her, a glisten. It was as if he were seeing her for the first time: upside down, the way the eye first sees, and then must correct. Something tender and carved about the face. The long nose that looked as if it might have been broken a few times. The flare of her nostrils.
She turned at the door and tried to look over her shoulder, but the court officers blocked her.
She mouthed something toward her daughter and the pimp, but it was lost, and she gave a little winded sigh as if she were on the beginning of a long journey. Her face seemed for a second almost beautiful, and then the hooker turned and shuffled and the door was closed behind her, and she vanished into her own namelessness.
—Get the tightrope walker up, he said again to his bridge. Now.

My first- floor apartment. In a clapboard house. In a street of clapboard houses. Through the window, a quick flit of dark against the blue sky. It is a surprise to me that there are birds of any sort in the Bronx. It is summertime so there is no school for Eliana or Jacobo. But they are already awake. I can hear the sound of the television turned high. Our ancient set is stuck on one channel and the only program playing is
Sesame Street.
I turn in the sheets towards Corrigan. It is the first time that he has ever slept over. We have not planned it: it has just happened this way. He stirs in his sleep. His lips are dry. The white sheets move with his body. A man’s beard is a weather line: an intersperse of light and dark, a flurry of gray at the chin, a dark hollow beneath his lip. It amazes me how it darkens him, this morning beard, how it has grown in such a short time, even the little flecks of gray where there was none the night before.

The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own. One arm of Corrigan’s shirt is on, one arm off. In our haste we have not even undressed properly. Everything is forgiven. I lift the weight of his arm and unbutton the shirt. Wooden buttons that slip through a cloth loop. I pull the shirt along the length of his arm and off. His skin is very white, the color of newly sliced apple, beneath his brown neck. I kiss his shoulder. The religious chain around his throat has left a tan mark, but not the cross, since it sits underneath his shirt, and it looks like he wears a necklace of white skin that finishes in midair. Some bruises on his skin still: his blood disorder.
He opens his eyes and blinks a moment, makes a sound that is somewhere between pain and awe. He pushes his feet out from under the sheets, looks around the room.
“Oh,” he says, “it’s morning.”
“It is.”
“How did my trousers get over there?”
“You drank too much vino.”
“¿De veras?” he says. “And I became what—an acrobat?”
From upstairs, the sound of footsteps, our neighbors awakening. He waits out the sounds, the eventual thump of their feet into shoes.
“The children?”
“They’re watching
Sesame Street.
”
“We drank a lot.”
“We did.”
“I’m not used to it anymore.” He runs his hands over the sheets, comes to the curve of my hip, draws away.
More sounds from above, a shower, the fall of something heavy, the click of a woman’s high heels across the floor. Mine is the apartment that receives all noises, even from the basement below. For one hundred and ten dollars a month, I feel as if I live inside a radio.
“Are they always this loud?”
“Just wait until their teenagers wake.”
He groans and looks up at the ceiling. I wonder what it is Corrigan is thinking: up there, his God, but first my neighbors.
“Doctor, help me,” he says. “Tell me something magnificent.”
He knows that I have always wanted to be a doctor, that I have come all the way from Guatemala with this intention, that I was not able to finish medical school at home, and he knows too that I have failed here, I never even got to the steps of a university, that there was probably never a chance in the first place, and yet still he calls me “Doctor.”
“Well, I woke up this morning and diagnosed a very early case of happiness.”
“Never heard of it,” he says.
“It’s a rare disease. I caught it just before the neighbors woke.” “Is it contagious?”
“Don’t you have it yet?”
He kisses my lips, but then turns away from me. The unbearable weight of the complications he carries, his guilt, his joy. He lies on his left shoulder, his legs tuck into a bend, and he puts his back to me—he looks as if he wants to crouch and protect himself.
The first time I saw Corrigan, I was looking out the window of the nursing home. He was there, through the dirty panes, loading up Sheila and Paolo and Albee and the others. He had been in a fight. There were cuts and bruises on his face and he looked at first glance like exactly the sort of man I should stay away from. And yet there was something about him that was loyal—that’s the only word I knew,
fidelidad
—he seemed to be loyal to them because maybe he knew what their lives were. He used wooden planks to roll the wheelchairs up into the van and he strapped them in. He had pasted his van with peace and justice stickers: I thought maybe he had a sense of humor to go along with his violence. I found out later that the cuts and the bruises were from the pimps—he took their worst punches and never hit back. He was loyal to the girls too, and to his God, but even he knew that the loyalty had to break somewhere.
After a moment he turns to me, runs his finger along my lips, then out of the blue he says: “Sorry.”
We were hasty last night. He fell asleep before I did. A woman might think it thrilling to make love to a man who had never in his life made love before, and it was, the thought of it, the movement towards it, but it was as if I was making love to a number of lost years, and the truth is that he cried, he put his head on my shoulder, and he could not keep hold of my gaze, couldn’t bear it.
A man who holds a vow that long is entitled to anything he wants.
I told him that I loved him and that I’d always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it. He replied that I was not to worry, that the penny could come out of the fountain again and again and again.
He wanted to repeat the attempt at lovemaking. Each time another surprise and doubt, as if he did not trust himself, what was happening. But there is a moment when he wakes now—on this day that I will remember over and over again—when he turns to me and there’s still a hint of wine on his breath.
“So,” he says, “you took my shirt off too.”
“It’s a trick.”
“A good one,” he says.
My hand travels across the sheet to meet him.
“We have to cover the mirilla,” I say.
“The what?”
“The mirilla, the peephole, the spy thing, whatever it is called.”
There is a spyhole in every door of my apartment. The landlord, it seems, once got a good deal on these doors, and hung them all around. You can look from one room to the other and the curved glass makes it either narrow or wide, depending on what side you happen to be on. If you look into my kitchen, the world is tiny. If you look out, it stretches. The bedroom spyhole faces inwards, where Jacobo and Eliana can look in upon me while I am sleeping. They call it the carnival door. It seems to them, through the distortion, as if I lie in the biggest bed in the world. I puff myself up on the world’s largest pillows. The walls curve around me. The first day we moved in I stuck my toes out from under the covers.
Mama, your feet are bigger than your head!
M’ijo said that the world inside my bedroom seemed stretchy. M’ija said it was made of chewing gum.
Corrigan shifts sideways out of bed. His thin, bare back, his long legs. He steps to the closet. He puts his black shirt on a hanger, wedges the metal end of the hanger in the gap between door and frame. The dangling black shirt covers the spyhole in the door. From outside, the sound of the television.
“We should lock it too,” I say.
“¿Estás segura?”
These small Spanish phrases he uses sound like stones in his mouth, his accent so terrible it makes me laugh.
“Won’t they worry?”
“Not if we don’t.”
He returns to the bed, naked, embarrassed, covering himself. He slips beneath the covers, nudges against my shoulder. Singing. Off- key. “Can you tell me how- to- get, how- to- get to Sesame Street?”
I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it. Feel the rush of sweetness: we make love.
I do not even hear the pounding at the door, but Corrigan stops and grins and kisses me, a rim of sweat at the top of his brow.
“That’ll be Elmo.”
“I think it’s Grouchy.”
I step out of bed and remove the shirt from the hanger in front of the spyhole, look down. I see the tops of their heads: their eyes look tiny and confused. I pull Corrigan’s shirt on and open the door. Bend down to eye level. Jacobo holds an old blanket in his hands. Eliana an empty plastic glass. They are hungry they say, first in English and then in Spanish.
“Just a minute,” I tell them. I am a terrible mother. I should not do this. I close the door again, but open it just as quickly, rush out into the kitchen, fill two bowls with cereal, two glasses of water.
“Quiet now, nin˜os. Promise me.”
I step back to the bedroom, glance at my children through the spyhole, in front of the television, spilling cereal on the carpet. I cross the room and jump on the bed. I throw the sheet to the floor, and then I fall beside Corrigan, pull him close. He is laughing, his body at ease.
We rush, him and I. We make love again. Afterwards, he showers in my bathroom.
“Tell me something magnificent, Corrigan.”
“Like what?”
“Come on, it’s your turn.”
“Well, I just learned to play the piano.”
“There’s no piano.”
“Exactly. I just sat down at it and could immediately play every note.”
“Ha!”
It’s true. That is how it feels. I go into the bathroom where he is showering, pull back the curtain, kiss his wet lips, then pull on my robe and go out to look after the children. My bare feet on the curling linoleum floor. My painted toes. I’m vaguely aware that every fiber in me is still making love to Corrigan. Everything feels new, the tips of my fingers alive to every touch, a stove top.
He comes out of the room with his hair so wet that at first I think the gray at the side temples has disappeared. He is wearing his dark trousers and his black shirt since he has nothing else to change into. He has shaved. I want to tell him off for using my razor. His skin looks shiny and raw.
A week later—after the accident—I will come home and tap out his hairs at the side of my sink, arrange them in patterns, obsessively, over and over. I will count them out to reconstitute them. I will gather them against the side of the sink and try to create his portrait there.
I saw the X- rays in the hospital. The swollen heart- shadow from the blunt chest trauma. His heart muscle getting squeezed by the blood and fluid. The jugular veins, massively enlarged. His heart went in and out of gallop. The doctor stuck a needle into his chest. I knew the routine from my years as a nurse: drain the pericardium. The blood and fluid were taken out, but Corrigan’s heart kept on swelling. His brother was saying prayers, over and over. They took another X- ray. The jugular veins were massive, they were squeezing him shut. His whole body had gone cold.
But, for now, the children just look up and say: “Hi, Corrie,” as if it is the most natural thing in the world. Behind them, the television plays.
Count to seven. Sing along with me. When the pie was opened the birds began to sing.
“Nin˜os, apaguen la tele.”
“Later, Mom.”
Corrigan sits at the small wooden table at the rear of the television set. He has his back to me. My heart shudders every time he sits near the portrait of my dead husband. He has never asked me to move the photo. He never will. He knows the reason it is there. No matter that my husband was a brute who died in the war in the mountains near Quezaltenango— it makes no difference—all children need a father. Besides, it is just a photo. It takes no precedence. It does not threaten Corrigan. He knows my story. It is contained within this moment.
And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt. Corrigan glances back at me, smiles. He fingers one of my medical textbooks. He even opens it to a random page and scans it, but I know he isn’t reading at all. Sketches of bodies, of bones, of cartilage.
He skips through the pages as if looking for more space.
“Really,” he says, “that’d be a good idea.”
“What?”
“To get a piano and learn how to play it.”
“Yes, and put it where?”
“On top of the television set. Right, Jacobo? Hey, Bo, that would work, wouldn’t i t?”
“Nah,” says Jacobo.
Corrigan leans across the sofa and knuckles my son’s dark hair.
“Maybe we’ll get a piano with a television set inside it.”
“Nah.”
“Maybe we’ll get a piano and TV and a chocolate machine all in one.”
“Nah.”
“Television,” says Corrigan, smiling, “the perfect drug.”
For the first time in years I wish for a garden. We could go outside in the cool fresh air and sit away from the children, find our own space, shorten the nearby buildings into blades of grass, have the stonemasons carve flowers at our feet. I have often dreamed of bringing him back to Guatemala. There was a place my childhood friends and I used to go, a butterfly grove, down the dirt road towards Zacapa. The path dipped through the bushes. The trees opened into the grove, where the bushes grew low. The flowers were in the shape of a bell, red and plentiful. The girls sucked on the sweet flowers while the boys tore the butterflies apart to see how they were made. Some of the wings were so colorful they could only be poisonous. When I left my home and arrived in New York, I rented a small apartment in Queens, and, one day, distraught, I got a tattoo on my ankle, the wings spread wide. It is one of the stupidest things I have ever done. I hated myself for the cheapness I had become.
“You’re daydreaming,” Corrigan says to me.
“Am I?”
My head against his shoulder, he laughs as if the laughter wants to travel a good distance, down through my body also.
“Corrie?”
“ Uh- huh?”
“You like my tattoo?”
He prods me playfully. “I can live with it,” he says.
“Tell me the truth.”
“No, I like it, I do.”
“Mentiroso,” I say. He creases his forehead. “Fibber.”
“I’m not fibbing. Kids! Kids, do you think I’m fibbing?” Neither of them says a word.
“See?” says Corrigan. “I told you.”
My desire for him now is raw and sharp. I lean forward and kiss his lips. It is the first time we have kissed in front of the children, but they do not seem to notice. A sliver of cold at my neck.
There are times—though not often—when I wish that I didn’t have children at all. Just make them disappear, God, for an hour or so, no more, just an hour, that’s all. Just do it quickly and out of my sight, have them go up in a puff of smoke and be gone, then bring them back fully intact, as if they didn’t leave at all. But just let me be alone, with him, this man, Corrigan, for a tiny while, just me and him, together.
I leave my head on his shoulder. He touches the side of my face absently. What can be on his mind? There are so many things to pull him away from me. Sometimes, I feel he is made of a magnet. He bounces and spins in midair around me. I go to the kitchen and make him café. He likes it very strong and hot with three spoonfuls of sugar. He lifts the spoon out and licks it triumphantly, as if the spoon has gotten him through an ordeal. He breathes on the spoon and then hangs it off the end of his nose, so it dangles there, absurdly.