Tender (31 page)

T
wo or three weeks in, there came the night when James talked, in her bed, of a boy.

Of a particular boy—Zoe’s new boyfriend, Lucien—and of how very nice he must be to fuck.

Catherine staring at the ceiling. Feeling as though her heart was dropping down a well.

And ordering herself to ignore this feeling. To ignore this hollowness, huge in her.

Because she was getting what she wanted, wasn’t she? She was getting him.

She was holding him.

A line of poetry she tried:

Now every holding is a holding on.

(But not really. She was not really writing poetry anymore.)

The photos James was taking now: they felt like her poetry.

Four men by the side of a road, none of them looking at the camera.

How had they not seen him?

The bones in their faces so sharp and so fine.

The rain about to plunge from a sky the color of stone.

Or a boy, around their age, huddled in the corner of a bus shelter.

Not homeless; she did not think he was taking shelter in that way.

But tired, and curled in on himself, his hands flung like things no longer useful.

His runners scuffed and filthy.

His eyes tightly closed.

Zoe and Lucien; Catherine had not quite noticed this happening.

Lucien was English. Tall, and cheekboned, and shabby, the way all the English boys in college were. Hair like an ancient settlement, which only served to make the English boys look even posher, for some reason; the Irish boys with that kind of hair just looked slightly unhinged, looked wild. Why was that? What, exactly, was that difference in them?

(These were the kinds of things she had once loved to discuss with James.)

Lucien lived in a big, rambling house with a couple of other English boys, and Lucien’s room had a big double bed.

“In which,” Zoe said to Catherine, “he teaches me everything a girl needs to know.”

And what would that be like? Catherine imagined it: the huge, wide bed. The space of it. To have all of that freedom. All of that acreage. And to have someone in a bed like that, looking at you, and to look at them, looking at you, looking all the length of you, the truth of you—

So wet,
muttered James, one morning, and he sounded like someone stepping in out of the rain.

And well, was she stupid?

Was she so pathetic?

Because she knew his reasons for this were different from hers.

His reasons:

1. Touch
   
2. Forgetting
   
3. Fear
   
4. Convenience, now becoming Habit
   
5. The dark, unbearable cluster growing every day larger in his mind
   

Her reasons:

1. Him
   

So, yes, to Question 1, and yes to Question 2.

And no to Question 3, which was,
Does knowing make any difference?

She tried to find it, the song that would be their song.

The one about the drifters, going to see the world?

No, that was not them. That was not their song, either.

None of the songs were for them.

And, well, did everyone need to have a song?

Not everybody needed to have a song.

Staring, one lunchtime, at Zoe’s lips. Zoe’s lips, as they smacked loudly on a yogurt spoon, getting at every last trace of the stuff, wiping the plastic clean. Because what did those lips do to Lucien? What did Lucien look like, when those small, pink lips closed around his big, English dick? Because what would it be like, to be with someone, to do that for someone, and to know that just the sight and the fact of you doing it for them was amazing, was blissful, was—what was the word?

Enough.

That was the word.

Was enough.

And later that week, in Jenny Vander’s, trying on a dress she was considering for the ball. James with her, of course—James had not been allowed not to come with her—standing, arms folded, by the mirror.

“It’s nice,” he said.

Was it nice?

An old woman, going through the rails, stopping what she was doing and coming closer for a look.

“Buy it for your girlfriend,” she said to James. “Buy it now. She has the height for it. She has the coloring. She has the mouth.”

It would become another of their phrases, Catherine knew. Another of their hilarious, ironic toys.
She has the mouth.

And James would not hear of coming to the ball with her. James was not a Trinity student, he pointed out coolly and calmly; James was not going to spend fifty pounds on a ticket for a student ball.

But—

But—

But, colored lights, making all the familiar old buildings unfamiliar; but, the night-time sweep to Front Gate, surrounded by so many other people looking so well. James in a tux—
I don’t think Armani does a navy-blue tuxedo,
and they would laugh over that line again—and Catherine in the Jenny Vander’s dress, and they would walk in together, and they would dance together, and—yes, yes, boys, yes, boys, they would look at boys together, yes, of course, at all the beautiful, tuxed-up boys—but he would leave with her, that would be the important thing, and he would come home with her—

But no.

Emmet: “Reilly! Does the Longford County Council grant cover a ball ticket?”

And she looked at him, for a moment.

Quite lovely, actually, now; had that happened only recently, or had he always been that way?

The bright boy’s grin on him. The fresh, perfect clearness of his skin.

The blush, betraying him, the way a blush always did.

But he was impossible.

He was unthinkable.

He was an entirely different world.

Or, even an ordinary boy.

Nordie Liam—
Liam
—sitting on a bench with Lisa, just as Zoe had wanted it, smiling, laughing, chatting.

He was not someone Catherine would ever be attracted to. He was slightly short, and slightly shaggy—not in the Lucien way, in the Irish way—and he wore T-shirts with video game characters on them, and he was just the kind of boy you would not even see, really—

But he would see you, wouldn’t he?

And then you would see him.

And then you’d be off, the pair of you.

Off to see the world—

But no.

Because her day, now: wake, already drowning in him. Not that moment of precious oblivion; not for her that child’s empty instant before fully coming to. Her eyes opening, already fixed on the thought of him. Her mind bobbing up into morning, already logged and tangled with him. Her heart—

Fuck her heart.

She had a constant sensation of hunger, which only grew worse when she ate.

Even brushing her teeth, she was thinking of him.

Even locking the door of the flat, turning the key, feeling its clunky, stubborn resistance, its tiny attempt to refuse.

Even stairs made her think of him. Even stones under the soles of her shoes. Even rusted bicycles, propped up against wire fences; even the dour tones of a security guard, asking to see her ID card at the entrance to the library; even his dimpled, stubbled chin as he waved her through. The books on her desk, forget it:

That was from Hughes’s “The Rabbit Catcher,” that line.

Plath had a poem of the same name.

They were both about the same day, the day of a picnic in Cornwall. Walking on the cliff tops, Hughes had found a rabbit snare: ready, primed. Plath, furious, had tossed it useless into the trees; then had marched on ahead and done the same to another.

Then another.

Then another.

Hughes writing of her temper, of the rage in which she had simmered all morning; of his own forbearance in the face of it. And now, of how, as she destroyed the snares, the things he understood, the things people who were his people needed for food and for money, she was “weeping with a rage / That cared nothing for rabbits.”

Plath, in her poem from probably twenty or thirty years earlier, writing of the force of the wind, and of the blinding light from the sea, and of the gorse, its “black spikes,” and of how the snares “almost effaced themselves—/ Zeroes, shutting on nothing.”

And, “Catherine,” James said one night afterwards—said her name seriously, said it soberly, so that at first her heart leapt hopefully, at first her eyes thought they would meet, in his, something they wanted, something new—

But no.

“Catherine,” he said, and he looked at her, and seriously, soberly, he shook his head. “What are we doing? What are we messing at, at all?”

And Catherine: “No, no. Don’t ever say that. Don’t ever ask that. We can do whatever we want to do, James. We can do whatever we like. It’s
us,
James. We’re
us
.”

And his silence.

But his silence, by then, was as good as his loving word.

Because there was nobody like them. There was nobody else who had what they had.

A
idan, interrupting their morning coffee in Café en Seine far too often for Catherine’s liking, now. Just showing up, just by some kind of happy coincidence, to sit down at the table beside them. Often bringing others; often bringing his little friend, Liam.

It was just not good enough.

Catherine picked for herself and James a different, further-off café.

And what did they talk about?

Everything.

Because they were still them. Still Catherine and James.

Because he was still the one she wanted to talk to, listen to, more than anyone else in the world.

And was she still that person for him?

He said she was.

“Oh, Catherine,” he would say, holding her, the way he did; the way he always had. “Oh, Catherine. We’re an awful pair of eejits, do you know that?”

His arms tight around her. His breath so close to her face. His skin and her skin: nothing made more sense to her than this.

Summer just around the corner now. And there was a thought. So many of the others going away—Zoe on a child-minding job somewhere in Italy; Conor and Emmet to America on the J1; Amy to work in a beer garden in Germany; Aidan, hopefully, on a five-year mission to Mars…

Such peace and quiet, they would have, the two of them. So much time to be together, alone. She thought about baking. She thought about dinners, having them ready at the end of their respective working days.

She applied for a summer job. It was temping work, advertised on the English department notice board; no specifics but a request for good typing skills, and lateral thinking, and an ability to work with permutations and combinations—

“Porn, obviously, Citóg,” said Conor, when she told him about it.

“Ha.”

“Doyle says his next column was inspired by you, by the way. What have you been doing to that poor lad?”

Catherine stared at him. “His next what?”

“Well, I think he meant
Muck
. I don’t think he meant ‘column’ as a euphemism. But then again…”

What happens in the heart simply happens.

She gave James that line.

On a stall in the gift shop of the National Gallery, she found a postcard, a photo of Hughes taken by Cartier-Bresson in 1971. Hughes’s coat was unbuttoned, his tie askew; his head was slightly tilted, his gaze serious and clear. He was standing in front of a bookcase, the books piled on top of each other; closed in, like specimens, behind glass.

She bought it, and she wrote the line on the back of it, and she gave it to James.

Because it had become their line, in her mind, now.

It had become them.

“Hello,” said James, smirking, when she gave him the postcard, looking at the photograph, and then he turned it over.

His face changed.

“Oh, Catherine,” was all he said.

Nordie Liam—
Liam
—telling her that he was having people round for drinks before the ball on Friday, and could she come? Could she, and James too, come?

Hair like an ancient settlement—an Irish one. Apples of color high on his cheeks. His eyes a dark brown; she had not noticed that before, and she had always liked brown eyes. His accent, so quiet and so careful. “Cath-er-ine”: the three rolled syllables he gave her.

But no.

But no, no. No party. Aidan would be there, after all; Aidan in a tux. Aidan in a bow tie. Plenty of people in bow ties. So, no. They would not be going to Liam’s. They would not be going to any party before the ball.