Martin Sloane (11 page)

Martin’s face hardened a little hearing that. It was clear it wasn’t the false part of the story, but he hadn’t been expecting such a thing in my past.

She went over the hood, I continued matter-of-factly, and a few minutes after that, a local chicken farmer found her and she was sitting up against the tree “like she was in a church pew,” he told us later, and she was looking calmly across the road at the orchards. Her sunhat was in her lap, and mayflies were stuck in the berry juice all over the hood of the truck. When there were enough people on the scene to carry her off the hood and bring her across the street to someone else’s flatbed, four men crossed the road with her body high above their heads so they could watch for traffic. They took her to Cortland, I said. Where the hospital was. I stopped talking.

Well, I know what part I want to be untrue, he said.

Actually, it’s all true, I said quietly. The part I was about to tell you wasn’t going to be true, but I decided not to tell it.

He nodded. What was it going to be?

I was going to say that it was just one of those tragic things that doesn’t mean anything.

Do you want to tell the real ending?

No.

I must have looked bad because he reached for me and pulled me gently across the bed and gathered me into himself. Later, we got dressed and went out for sup per and spoke of other things.

By the fall of 1999, I had been living in an apartment on Havelock Street in Toronto for almost seven years. My backyard looked over a park where mothers gathered every Tuesday to stoke a stone oven that had been built there by the city. They baked bread in the oven and made fresh pizza for their kids, and afterwards they all sang songs together, songs my own mother had sung to me. The women outside my window would have been children when I myself had been a child and now they were mothers.

I’d bounced back and forth from one place to another over the ten years, going from a basement to a flat and finally to a house, as if I were coming out of a long hibernation underground. It would have been a good decade in which to suffer a loss if I’d been able to get into all the healing that everyone was doing. I had co-workers in therapy, neighbours in yoga, and I briefly knew a man who drank his own urine. But keeping busy and the passage of time were the only things that helped. Coming up on ten years since I’d left the country of my birth, strangers no longer automatically lowered their eyes from mine. I did not give off rads of grief. I wore normalcy like a lead shield and sometimes I even smiled at people on the streets (something that Torontonians found stranger than open bereavement). Now I was a respected member of a teachers’ union. I bowled and I dated. Sometimes I laughed. And I was a citizen of another country, a citizen in
fact,
having given my motherland the old college try. In 1995 I’d become a Canadian.

The fall, of course, was always the hardest, and from September to mid-October, I was restive. My mother had died at the very end of summer, and the only man I’d ever loved had vanished at the beginning of fall. Perhaps fall to winter wouldn’t have been so difficult, but passing over from the heat of summer to the cool comfort of fall brought with it the illusion that not all hope was lost. There were still leaves on the trees, still the sun shone down and warmed the earth. Winter had not yet arrived. But I sensed it in the air long before anyone else would have felt the cold bite.

Did I think of Martin? I must have, but I was not aware of it in the way a person might be if words or images went through their mind. Bits of conversation, or flashes of time spent together. My memory of him was more like a ring I’d worn for many years that I no longer felt on my finger, its tiny weight comprehended in my experience of myself. Sometimes I looked down (as it were) and saw it, and was surprised by it:
Is that still there?
And so it was, it was always there.

And the other person I had lost, Molly — I thought of her from time to time as well. But in the fall of 1999, I actually heard from her. I was thirty-four then, and had long stopped dreaming of ever seeing my oldest friend again, or understanding what had happened between us. She was in Ireland. She’d found Martin’s artworks in a gallery there. She would wait for me if I would come. What she was doing in Ireland, she didn’t say and I didn’t ask. I just got on a plane and flew over. I’d been dating someone, a man named Daniel, but I couldn’t explain what I was doing, and so I just went. But I left a note. I knew at least to do that.

The plane approached the west coast of Ireland, and an older woman beside me leaned over my tray table and peered out through the window. The well-worn green graining every contour of the island, the shadows of clouds slipping over and down the hills. The woman’s ear was beside my mouth, like a lover’s.

“Has it been a long time?”

She hadn’t spoken a word to me the entire flight; now she nodded. She turned her face away a little, so I couldn’t see her eyes.

“Maybe nothing’s changed,” I said.

It was fall in Ireland too, the persistence of green from the air disguised the season. But on the streets, it was cool, and the leaves were shading yellow and orange. At home the city had smelled of willow and rain, of late honeysuckle and patio espressos and there was the sound of cicadas, their anxious longing, a sound I’d never heard before coming to Canada. In Dublin, the air had a cold vein in it, and the sky felt close, like the city was cupped in someone’s hand to keep the wind off a match.

I didn’t want the taxi to take me right to the hotel — I was nursing jetlag and serious doubts — so I got off at the bottom of the street outside city hall, where college-age kids rolled past on skateboards and mopeds, looking like models from a mail-order catalogue. I had expected sloth and decay, but the rumours (the ones promoted by the in-flight magazine) seemed true: Ireland had caught a second wind. On my way toward Aungier Street, I counted three Internet cafés.

I pulled myself along, the buildings and houses packed one against the other, thin red-brick buildings with businesses below and apartments above, a press of life. On the corner of the next block was Spa House, as Molly had described. I looked over my shoulder for no reason, then back at the hotel, and I saw Molly sitting at a table against the long street-level window.

I stopped on the other side. She wore a black sleeveless sweater and a green shawl around her neck. A long denim skirt and brown boots. Her hair, still long, was pulled back off her face, and fixed in a low pony tail so it swelled a little, a dark bloom of hair. She was warming her hands on a mug of something, staring out into the middle distance of the restaurant. There was nothing to do but go in.

She watched me come toward the table, not knowing what was the right face to show. So she watched expressionlessly. I took my coat off and draped it over my arms, a curtain drawn between us.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” I pulled back the chair across from her, but I couldn’t bring myself to sit in it. So I stood, awkward between gestures.

“How was your flight?” she said.

“It was fine, thank you.”

“Do you want something to eat? They have tea here, and biscuits, hard little biscuits.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said. She nodded, folded one hand over the other. She wore a wedding ring. “I don’t want anything,” I said to a waitress who’d come up quietly behind me, and was waiting with pen ready. Finally, I took my coat and lay it over the back of the chair. Molly’s eyes followed me down. We sat facing each other, two feet or so between us. The last time we’d been this close, we were holding each other.

“Have you been here before?” she asked. “To Ireland?”

“No. This is my first time.” She nodded and looked down at her hands. “How did you find me?”

“I did a search on the Internet for you. I found you on your faculty and then looked up your number. It wasn’t that hard.”

“Mm. And how did you find out about the exhibit? What are you doing in Ireland?”

“I’m here on business,” she said quietly. “I just came across the gallery. I didn’t know what I should do when I saw it. But I thought you had a right to know. Although,” she added quickly, “I had no way of being sure you
wanted
to know.”

“How did you decide then?”

“Selfishly,” she said. She brought her wan gaze around to me again. “I thought maybe it’d be good to see each other again.”

“
Really
.” She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “And is it?”

“I don’t know yet.”

We went up to the hotel room. An uneasy fatigue had taken over and I needed to lie down, to be alone with my thoughts. Molly had reserved only one room and I shuddered when she closed the door behind us. “Look,” I said. “I honestly don’t know what I’m doing here. I just want to say that. I got on a plane when you called. I couldn’t think of what else to do.”

“I’m sorry you felt pressured.”

“I made my own mind up.”

“I know. Whatever you want to do, Jolene, you just do it.”

I sat on the bed and took a deep breath. She waited, her hands in her pockets. “Last time we talked,” I said, “you hung up on me. Correct?”

“I hung up on you.”

“You were angry at me. Which is fine. We were friends, and that kind of thing can happen to friends. But I figured when you were ready —”

“Slow down —”

“I thought we’d eventually work it out. But you never did call again, and I had to decide how I felt about that. Do you know what I mean?”

“I know that we’re not friends anymore, Jolene.”

“Ok,” I said. “Whatever happened happened, am I right? We don’t have to talk about it.”

“If you don’t want to.”

She smoothed down her denim skirt and sat in a high-backed chair beside the window. There didn’t seem like there was anything else worth saying right now, but she sat there, thinking. I wanted her to leave. “Have you thought of what you’re going to say to him?” she asked me.

“No. I haven’t gotten to that point in my mind.”

“You probably want to think about it.”

I nodded curtly. Love provokes all kinds of behaviour and in retrospect it all seems warranted: you have to allow for passions. Friendship promises something, though, and with time I could think of Martin more easily than I could think of Molly. “I’d better sleep for a while,” I said.

She got up from the chair. “How do you want to work this afterwards?”

“What do you mean?”

“The gallery. Do you want me to come?”

This surprised me. “Oh. Well, you’ve been already, haven’t you?”

“Yes. The show’s down. I don’t know if I told you.”

“When would you have told me, Molly?”

“We can still find out whatever we need to.”

“Fine,” I said. “Why don’t I go look into it when I get up.”

“Okay,” she said, her voice a little strained, and she strode for the door. “We’ll talk later. When you get back from the gallery.”

After she left, I slipped out of my clothes and got in under the cool covers. My stomach was upset and I felt anxious and harried. I got up and locked the door and then got back into bed again.
You’re in Dublin
, I said to myself.
You’re in Dublin, what the fuck are you doing in fucking Dublin?
I’d come completely unprepared; I’d have called it faith if I thought it was anything but carelessness. But what choice had I had?

I felt the old familiar milling of panic in my gut and I picked up the phone to call Daniel. But it would be 5 a.m. in Toronto. I badly wanted to talk to him, but at this urgent hour, I would have had to explain everything to him. So I put the receiver back on its cradle and lay there feeling exposed under the covers.

Daniel had appeared right around my tenth anniversary in the city, as a result of a fire drill at an evening class I’d been teaching, as good a way as any to meet someone, once you reach the age that the regular congresses (parties, bars, other people’s weddings) have thinned out. I’d taken on work where it became available, since the things I specialized in were starting to get unfashionable around the time I showed up in Toronto. The evening class was a hybrid, something some smart person had thought up in one of the admin offices of the community college I taught at. For the first ninety minutes of the class, I came in and talked about literature. Then for the last ninety minutes, after a break, a real writer came in and taught a creative writing class. The two curricula were supposed to be linked, but the writer, a dandy with a cowlick, had his own agenda. I didn’t care. I was talking about Euripedes and Donne and Shakespeare and I was cheerful. It was always thrilling to introduce young students to authors I loved, allowing them passage through me to poetry. But then Cowlick would come in, and nod officiously at me, and hand out his weekly wisdom. I usually got one of the students to pass along his circulars to me. The most popular of them was called “Please Don’t.”

Please don’t set anything in a glade. Please don’t make the dwarf the villain. Please don’t call your main character “the boy.” Please don’t use the word “undead.” Please don’t speak of faeries, sprites, elves, nymphs, or anything translucent that speaks from a tree branch. Please don’t depict epic struggles with wolves, bears, or whales. Please don’t permit your characters to perform any nouns as if they were verbs. Please don’t allow the detective to explain it at the end. Please don’t use action verbs or texture adjectives in sex scenes. Please don’t write sex scenes.

“Good books break rules,” I told them. “Don’t sweat it.” And then we carried on reading. On the evening of the fire alarm, we were on Euripides’
Alcestis,
the story of Admetus, a man so loved by the gods that they aid him in a plan to cheat death. The plan is that one of Admetus’ elderly parents will die in his place, but it turns out that even the old want to live, and it is left to Admetus’ wife, Alcestis, to die for him. Students always applauded the courage and love shown by Alcestis, and when we were finished talking about her bravery and her sense of duty, I’d come in low with the bomb. “What sort of man would let his wife die for him? What sort of
jerk
would leave his children motherless so he could go on giving parties for the gods?”