Martin Sloane (13 page)

“That doesn’t mean anything. He could have made another one.”

“Why?”

“Well, we could find out. This Mrs. Bryce is in Rathmines. We can be there in five minutes.”

I looked at my watch. “I’ve had enough for the day, Molly. I’m sorry.”

She squared her shoulders tensely, and then released them. “But you’re going to stay. You’ve decided to stay.”

“For now.”

We walked down to the stone and iron walls of Trinity College and around them to the main thoroughfare. There it seemed the traffic never stopped, coming from three or four directions, gyring, swarming, bursting onto the main street. Some busts lined the avenue there, dead-eyed political or literary heroes forever watching over the traffic lights. It was deep in the afternoon, and the fall sun warmed if we walked directly in it, otherwise a cleft of cold air threaded the streets.

We walked, hands in pockets, watching the thrum of activity. This was where my taxicab from the airport had turned, revealing the high brick Georgian buildings. The morning seemed like a year ago. I’d come in wondering what Molly would look like, what we’d say to each other. Now, she pointed down a sidestreet beside a large black-glass municipal building. “That’s Temple Bar down there,” she said. “It’s an area. Where all the hip young things go. There’s a bunch of nice restaurants and dance clubs and a few singles bars. I wouldn’t know what to do in one anymore, mind you.”

“You wouldn’t have to do much, I suspect.” She looked sidelong at me, pleased to be noticed in some way.

“Are you single?” she said.

“Not really.”

“I guessed you wouldn’t be. You’re a
catch
, as my mom used to say. I take it you’re not married, though?”

“More on the dating end of the spectrum. But you got married, didn’t you.”

“I did.”

“Siddons,” I said.

“Yes. It’s long over now.” She didn’t know how to gauge my interest, but she pressed on. “We got married in’90, we split up in’92. He cheated on me.” I tried to look empathetic.

“Why did you keep the name?”

“Being wishful. Although it’s just habit now and whether I’m Hudson or Siddons it doesn’t feel like it matters.” Christchurch appeared, with its stone ribs arcing into the ground. A dusty and forlorn place. “So what’s your guy’s name?”

“It’s Daniel,” I said quickly. I made a show of digging in my pockets for some change. “Which reminds me, I said I’d call.” I nodded toward the other side of the street, as if that explained something, and then I started crossing. I checked for traffic and dashed over the median. Then looked back, and Molly was standing at the curb, completely still, watching me.

I stood in front of a phone, a monolith of steel with thick clumsy buttons on it. I wanted to talk to him. I knew he’d say something to take the edge off what I was doing.
You’re fine
, he’d say, and I’d believe him.
This is no big deal.

And maybe I’d get emotional, I thought. I don’t want to be emotional. I don’t want to hang up the phone and still be here. So I stood there with the receiver beside my head, listening to the mechanical buzz.

I have to go.

You don’t have to go, you just want to go.

No, I have to go. I have work to do.

I have work too. But I’ve got all the time in the world for you.

You see, I could easily stay on the phone another fifteen minutes, Jo, but then I’d just find myself back at this part of the conversation again. So what’s the point.

To show you love me.

That would prove it, would it?

You’re so thick, Martin. Even for a man you’re thick. If you’ve got to go, go.

Well, I can’t go now. It’d be like dying in sin.

I just have to say: I love being in competition with your work. I don’t have other women to worry about, no no. I’ve got nails and glass and stuff cut out of comic books.

That’s not true.

Tonight we talk to a woman who caught her boyfriend making out with a pair of wind-up lips.

You’ve got all of me, Jo. All of me. Heart and soul.

Do I.

You do. Can I go now?

Sure.

Except now I can’t say I love you, can I? It’s going to sound like I’m trying to cover my ass.

It would never have occurred to me.

Molly wasn’t where I’d left her. I walked a ways along the other side of the street until I saw her in the gardens of St. Patrick’s sitting on a bench in front of one of the long walls of the church. In front of her, the miniature French lawns, with children walking the stone rim of the fountain in the middle. From the gate, her face was expressionless. She looked up after a moment and came over. We started walking down a sidestreet, back toward the hotel. “Everything okay at home?”

“Everything’s fine.”

“Good,” she said. For a few minutes, we walked in a tense silence, strenuously pretending to notice our surroundings. Finally, she said, “Is there something wrong? “

“Like what?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s just … this is awkward, like it’s hard for you to be kind,” she said.

I stopped, and she did as well, but a step ahead of me. “Kind?”

“Well, friendly, I mean.
Amiable
maybe.”

I shook my head, but she didn’t see me. “I didn’t think I wasn’t being
kind
, Molly. Uncomfortable, perhaps, but not unkind. Although maybe ‘kindness’ is sort of reaching for the stars here don’t you think?”

“I meant just more friendly.”

“Fine. I have an friendly question for you then. Why are we here? I mean, as opposed to me being armed with an address and a name and you back doing whatever work it is you’re here to do?”

“You can do this on your own if that’s what you really want.”

I shook my head, looking down. I could hear the drift and weave of pedestrians as they walked near to us, opening and closing like a river around a stone. “You don’t mean that,” I said. “So far, you’ve just given me the illusion of choice.”

“I’ll go if you tell me to.”

“Remind me how is it you’ve ended up here.”

“Business,” she said. “And I didn’t end up here. It’s a few days of work. I’m still a lawyer.”

“You have a client in Ireland.”

“It’s a laser eye clinic. An American franchise. I brought papers they have to sign.”

“I thought they had couriers for that.”

“That’s me: an overglorified messenger.” I just stared at her.

She pulled the neck of her coat closed with both hands. “Well, I’ll go then, okay?”

“I just want to understand how it is we’ve ended up both of us here.”

She stepped toward me. “I know you must hate me,” she said under her breath. “On some level — I’m not saying you think about me — just on some level. But even so, it would be good if we could talk a
little
.” She waited for me to step in. “I know we’re not friends,” she said, “but I did call you —”

“Was that an act of friendship?”

“Well, it was s
omething
.”

“I can’t get drawn into this, Molly. I’m here for a couple of days and then I’m going home. Naturally, if there’s something to be learned about Martin, I want to know. But apart from that, I don’t know how I feel about any of this.”

“But you
are
here. You decided to come and now you’ve decided to stay. So why not do some work?”

“On what?” I said, incredulous. I walked around her and continued back in the direction I believed the hotel to be in. I turned a corner, but after a few more yards it was as if my legs had filled with lead, and I found a bench beside a bus stop to sit on. It was the end of the workday now, and people were leaving the buildings on either side of the street, lining up for the bus, or else meeting with co-workers, friends, lovers, for the first evening drink. Then what? Dinner somewhere, or a movie, or back to the kids. Talking, or fighting; hoping for sex or good news. The big cycle of life in its glory and awkwardness. There were people walking slowly down the sidestreets, holding hands, or just ambling in alternating shade and light, their faces relaxed. I could still see the park, down a street to my left, its arboreal presence a form of omniscience. I imagined him skipping over the bridges there, a bag of nuts in his hand. Hiding from the world, running from it, going to visit the statue he loved of the man on the horse, King George. All the things that mattered were gone, the touchstones.

Molly came around the corner, walking slowly, as if she knew she’d find me tapped out on a bench. She sat down beside me and surprised me by taking one of my hands and holding it in hers. After a moment, I took my hand back. And then we just sat there like we didn’t know each other. To the people around us, waiting for their buses, it would have looked like she’d just mistaken me for someone else.

V.

CHILDHOOD GAME, 1959. 15" X 20" BOX CONSTRUCTION. WOOD AND GLASS WITH PAPER, FOUND OBJECTS, DOUBLE CHAIN MECHANISM. CALIFORNIA CENTER FOR THE ARTS. A CRANK IN THE SIDE OF A SHOOTING GALLERY ROTATES A SERIES OF ANIMAL HEADS ACROSS AN OPENING. BELOW, BEHIND GREYED GLASS, THE ANIMAL HEADS TRANSFORM INTO HUMAN FACES.

A BLITHER OF HALF DREAMS, PARTIALLY SEEN FACES
, distant sounds, and in one instance I was back in my childhood house methodically eating the furniture as my father stood by urging me on. When I got to the piano, I took it in a single silent mouthful. I opened my eyes, bleared, on walls that seemed to have sprung up in the night, the bare branches of trees from stories I’d been told as a child clicking against the windowpanes. It felt like someone had drawn my spirit out like dregs from a glass.

I’d gotten my own room the night before; it was the last single they had in the place and it was more like a horse pen than a room. I looked at the little clock on the table. It was already eleven in the morning. Molly was knocking.

“It’s time to get up,” she said through the door. “Let’s meet in the restaurant, all right?”

“Fine.”

In a moment she knocked again. “Just open up for a minute.” I tipped the brass guard over onto its track and opened the door. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable last night.”

“It’s okay.”

“I hope if I act cordial you won’t think I’m being too friendly.”

I tried to smile, and probably looked pained. “I didn’t say we had to act like strangers, Molly.”

“That’s good,” she said, “because we’re not.”

To be known: wasn’t that what had driven me for so many years? To have rooms I could go through, full of people I had histories with, whose stories I could pick up, carry with me? This was true as a child, in the house warmed by my mother’s hospitality, her talent for talk (so much of which I can’t bring to mind any longer). Then the smaller worlds of Bard and Indiana, but still filled with the dailiness of connection. Letting go of all that, and the expectations that came with it, was what had made life liveable after Martin vanished.
Not
to expect any answers, or to have any inquiries made of myself; to live in the world without the clutter of shared histories. I imagined Molly now sitting at one of the hotel tables, smoothing a cloth napkin over her lap and running her lines in her head. To be truthful, I wasn’t at all clear how I felt or what I wanted — I wanted peace between us as much as I wanted war. I wanted the peace of silence and separation, the resolve to keep my version of our friendship and my past to myself and never know what hers was. Since we’d been friends, she’d married and divorced. I knew nothing else.

Buttoning up my shirt at the window, I looked down at the bustle of the street, the whole mass of citizens and tourists oblivious to what those same streets had spawned. I felt weary, but no longer from the jetlag. It was anticipation-fatigue. I watched four people drop letters into the green mailbox at the curb. Mailing a letter is a highly personal gesture, despite its public aspect, I thought. The private letter is checked one more time for reassurance that the address is correct, as well as the postage, and the sender will slip the letter through the mouth of the bin, and wait to hear it drop into the safe darkness. It’s a private gesture, forced out into daylight. The sender of a business reply will shove her letters through the slot, taking no more care with them than she would with something tossed into a garbage can. All these particular congresses made me despair. All that communication lying in the dark of the mailbox, to be collected and sorted and coded and finally taken to proper destinations. A trusting commerce, a faith joined.

I went downstairs to the restaurant. Molly was sitting near the middle of the room, her back to me, and discussing something with the waiter. It was an animated conversation, and a couple of times, he agreed with her on something by leaning toward her, his hand on her shoulder. A cup of coffee steamed in front of her, and across the table, a pile of more than one of the daily papers. She had sat there, it was clear, most of the morning, waiting patiently for me to wake. It was hard giving myself special dispensation to dislike qualities in her that I admired. But I did it. And on impulse, I left the hotel alone.

The schools were letting out for lunch, and uniformed girls emerged from one as I passed it, their knapsacks covered in corporate labels. Boys from a nearby school had already gathered on the other side of the street, smoking and trying not to look too obviously at the exodus of sweet-smelling bodies, the red hair flowing down backs, socks slipping down to ankles. At the edges of the two groups, some casual pairing off had begun, movement both chanced and determined, like clouds forming, although the already serious lovers had simply broken rank with their groups and quickly found each other, consulting their watches and turning their cellphones back on. All that ritual normal to them, to be repeated every day until it turned into something else.

I went down Rathmines Road and turned on Belgrave, past the little Trinity church marooned on an island in the crux of four streets, and down Palmerston, an undulating road canopied with chestnuts, identical houses all the way to where the road turned. Mrs. Bryce’s distinguished itself by means of a Fra Angelico blue door, otherwise it was a clone of the others. I imagined Molly back in the hotel, knocking on my door again, becoming at first worried and then angered, maybe. And then I just forced her out of my mind.
You won’t have your way there
, I thought. I went up Mrs. Bryce’s walk toward wide granite steps and saw a woman crossing in the front window. She stopped and looked at me with confusion. I paused on the front walk, and as I waited trying to figure out how to present myself, the front door opened, and she stood there in an apron, as large as a furnace, her wattled arms crossed, looking at me with frightened eyes.