The Visitors (18 page)

—Stephen might be making that up, Jimmy.

—I said something like that, but he’s not, but I hear you’re painting again—

—Taking a class for the first time. But what about you, Jimmy?

—You lose track, Tess. The country is huge. I live in a matchbox—

—You won’t forever. Should I send you money?

—I’m fine, thank you.

—Ask if you need it. We’re all rotten with it now. We’re acting like the only problem we ever had was that we’d no money, like the way we lived at one time was a different country with different people, but Jimmy, you’re the sort who drives forward looking into the rearview mirror—

—I don’t look in the rearview mirror—

—You do so. And you should go and see Kevin and then ring me. He never once looked in the rearview mirror, I can tell you that much. But I know you and him were never close. I know you never liked him. You and him are so different in manner. Then he’s the few years older.

—I spent many schooldays running like a lunatic from him.

—Kevin had to be the biggest man in every room, but I admit I liked that in him.

—You still think about the two of them—

—Nearly every day, Jimmy, but we were all so hard on each other at times.

—And I still think about not ringing you after he died, after Hannah asked me to.

—I’ve forgotten that, Jimmy. You know I never stay mad at you for too long.

—I haven’t, Tess, but I should wash the flour out of my hair and eat something—

—Talk to me for another few minutes, Jimmy.

—What’s the weather like there today?

—A few showers this morning, but the sun came out around two, and the grass dried up, and I cut the lawn and took the dog for a walk by the river, and then I went to the bakery in the village and drank a cup of tea and read the paper. I’ll be seeing a few friends later on. One of them is bringing some fella who wants to meet me. I’m told he’s a
nice fella and he’s nice-looking. I hope he is, but Jimmy, you should go and see Kevin—

—I’m not going, Tess. You know very well I’m not.

—You have to go, Jimmy.

—I don’t have to go anywhere, Tess.

—Jimmy, like I said to you, you’re so stubborn. He just wants to talk to someone from home. “Yea, ere my hot youth pass, I shall speak to my people and say: Ye shall be foolish as I; ye shall scatter, not save”—do you remember that, Jimmy?

—Patrick Pearse, Tess. I forget which poem it is.

—The teacher beat those lines into us with her meter stick.

—It’s not “The Rebel” or “The Mother.” Oh, I remember, Tess. It’s “The Fool.”

—That’s it, Jimmy. So will you do that for your sister? Kevin’s our neighbor—

—Christ, Tess. Everyone’s our neighbor. Remember that.

—Fine, Jimmy, but you owe me that much.

For a minute we were silent.

—Jimmy, I’m sorry for saying that. I didn’t mean it. Are you still there, Jimmy? It’s Tess.

—I’m here, Tess. I heard you. Fine, Tess, I’ll go. I will.

•   •   •

The phone was ringing in the next room. This was six or seven days after Hannah told me he was dead. I was sitting at the kitchen table in the apartment, with a pen in my hand, looking through the help-wanted section in the local newspaper. Brendan was at his job in Detroit. The answering machine clicked on.

—Jimmy, it’s Tess. I got your number from Hannah. You should have rung me by now. Hannah told me you said you were going to ring. Pick up, Jimmy. I know you’re there.

I stood in the doorway and stared at the phone on the floor. Tess was still talking. And my hands were pressed to my ears when I crossed
the floor and turned the volume down all the way. Then I left the room and shut the door and sat again before the newspaper. I drew stars around the restaurant jobs that looked promising. I did it like an eager child in possession of a box of new crayons and reams of blank pages, and when I was done I wanted to suss out those restaurants, and so I wrote down their names and addresses, then I shaved and showered, ironed my clothes, and stuck a map of the town in my pocket.

On Main Street people were eating and shopping. On both sides of one restaurant doorway impatiens grew from fake wooden tubs. I forget now if that restaurant was on my list, but I went through the double doors and stood at a host stand in a foyer with high ceilings and windows. Behind the stand, carpeted stairs led to the next floor. Shining brass railings and blond wooden walls and at my feet black and blue tiles. On the specials board the soup of the day was minestrone. A smiling woman with menus appeared. She asked if she could help me. I said I wanted to fill out an application. She fingered her hair around her left ear, reached under the stand, and handed me one. She directed me to a seat at the bar and said I could fill it out there. When I handed back the completed application she asked about my accent. We chatted for ten or fifteen minutes. Her long black fringe was swept back. She resembled a softer version of Chrissie Hynde. And she was wearing this white old-fashioned man’s shirt. One with the stiff point collar. The kind my mother once ironed for my father for Mass. And less than a week after I’d filled out the application, I was bussing tables on lunch and dinner shifts. I had also signed up to take the GED. The community college was mailing its catalogue of winter classes.

The hostess was Sarah. She worked weekends in the restaurant. Two years passed before we really got together. Seven more months before we moved in—though that’s enough of that. On the restaurant application I wrote my name as James. And everyone I came to know from then on called me that and I never once said they should call me any other.

I erased Tess’s message that afternoon before I left the apartment. I
never listened to it. And when we did talk, months later, I told Tess the answering machine was broken, and I was sorry for letting time slip away. This I blamed on settling into the new town, the hassles of classes, and the restaurant job. But why didn’t I call? Why didn’t I pick up? And why didn’t I listen? I didn’t want them getting in the way. That’s why. And I was trying very hard not to think about him and those alive and dead connected to him.

•   •   •

I showered away the flour and I hard-boiled three eggs and spread them on thick slices of sourdough bakery bread with salt and butter. And then I rang Zoë.

—Stop by. Bring decent gin, my dear. I’ll go half. I have lemons and tonic.

—I’ll be right over, my dear.

I took a few hits from the joint. Next I was walking in the shadows of the maples. I said hello to people I often passed on that sidewalk, and they did the same: a sullen-looking student around my age, a tall elderly man who swept the downtown post office, and a hip young couple wearing colorful secondhand clothes.

A U-Haul truck was parked in the elderly woman’s driveway. Two men carried boxes up the ramp. In the middle of the sidewalk stood a thick-chested middle-aged man in a worn t-shirt. Sunglasses were propped on his forehead and his hands were fists in the back pockets of his cargo shorts. He stared up at the men hauling boxes and furniture out the front door. I stepped around him, and I was at the corner, about to cross the street, when I turned back. I stopped a few feet from him. He was still looking at the door. His hairy forearms were golden.

—I haven’t seen the woman on the porch in a while. I live up the street, I said.

—Mom can’t live alone anymore, he said.

He grimaced at the man bringing the scarred headboard of a child’s bed through the door.

—Only monks, nuns, and the unhinged can, I said.

He smirked, turned to me, then back to the door. The withered vines hung limp from the porch rails. The chair and the box were gone. I asked if he was born in the house.

—You bet, but most of the old neighbors are gone, he said. —Dad passed seven years ago at his desk on the back porch, his office desk. He sat at it every day after he retired, but Dad didn’t crunch numbers anymore, he wrote thrillers no one would ever read. Mom and I thought he was crazy. I’m their only kid, and I was saying for years they should sell the house and move south. But Dad, he loved the back porch and the traffic behind the trees. I still don’t get it.

I said the traffic didn’t bother me either, but I didn’t say I’d seen the paperback books and the metal desk. Nor did I say I’d found fifty bucks right where the U-Haul was parked. I politely asked where he now lived.

—Chicago, Evanston, he said. —Mom lives close by. The retirement facility takes good care of her. She doesn’t like it, but we all gotta deal. I’m selling the house. Mom talks about things I know nothing about.

He tapped his forehead with his finger.

—Sorry to hear it, I said.

—So much stuff. My dad’s stuff. I just need to get back home. Look up there.

He pointed to a string of dusty lights strung from hooks along the edge of the porch roof.

—Dad and I put them up one Saturday afternoon after we’d come back from a football game. I screwed in the hooks. He held the ladder. I was just a kid then.

He turned to me.

—You from Germany?

—Ireland, I said.

—Cool, he said, and his eyes went back to the men and the door. —My wife’s folks are from there. We plan on visiting when the kids are older, hike the moors—

—Walk the bogs, maybe—

—What’s the difference?

—The peat, I think.

—Sure, he said.

—Your mom and I never talked, but we waved at each other, I said.

—Mom does not remember anything, like Dad and I never happened, but I just need to get this place cleaned up. I got work back home. Getting a Dumpster in here later tonight. Gotta get rid of all this trash.

•   •   •

—Walter was telling the truth about the woman on the street, Zoë said, after I told her about meeting the son.

—But one fine day we’ll be like her, remember nothing.

—I’ll try to forget you said that, my dear.

We were sitting on the deck of Zoë’s second-floor apartment. On the small table between us, the gin and tonics with wedges of lemon, two candles burning, and a plate with soft cheese ringed by delicate crackers. I told Zoë I’d spent the afternoon talking to my sisters and brother. Then I told her Kevin Lyons’s younger brother was found dead in London.

—Cocaine nailed him, I added, and I hummed, “Riding out on a rail, feels so fine.”

—That’s terrible, my dear, I’m sorry to hear it.

—My brother and he were very close when they were younger. My brother’s upset.

—I bet he is, but how are you dealing with this?

—I didn’t really know him, my dear. He was younger. And I am gone from there such a long time.

Daylight was fading. Two fireflies blinked at the edge of the porch. The shadows of the candle flames darted along Zoë’s cheek and neck. She put her glass on the coaster, sighed, and said, —James, I must visit Austin next week.

—And I must visit Kevin Lyons, I said.

—A change of heart.

—I promised my sister, my dear. They love to drag you back into things.

I went to the deck railing and watched the quiet street. The cicadas were drilling inside my head. On the first floor of the house across the way, children sat on a couch before a huge television and ate out of bowls. A mother or a babysitter sat between them. I flicked my cigarette butt into the street and picked up the sweating glass from the railing. I turned to Zoë and leaned against the railing. She was talking about museum exhibitions in Dallas. Her father and her stepmom were flying in there.

—We come and go like fireflies above a field of alien corn, my dear, I said.

—Don’t be dramatic, my dear. What did you expect?

—Oh, the usual, my dear.

—Sounds like what you say to your bartender, my dear.

—Or your hairdresser.

—Do you consider my feelings?

—Indeed, I do, my dear.

—And I consider yours, my dear, but I need to deal with Austin, and you need to deal with this Kevin guy.

—When I felt lonely in Dublin, my dear, I used to think life would be perfect if I were that guy in the film
Marty
. He lived alone with his mother, in a New York City neighborhood. I can’t think of that actor’s name—

—Ernest Borgnine, my dear. The neighborhood is actually in the Bronx. My dad loves that movie.

—So did mine, and my mother, I said.

—I watched it with my dad many times, Zoë said. —It was set in the neighborhood he lived in as a kid, and so this is your answer, my dear. What next, Jesus? Buddha?

—Gin and tonics, my dear. The others never worked, but I was a teenager then, my dear, who wrote letters home to his mother, even
though he didn’t always tell her the truth, which kind of bothered him, but you could sit on the elderly woman’s front porch on Sunday mornings, read the paper, dally over your coffee and orange juice, watch the maples shed in the fall, bud in spring, and spread out the brilliant way they do in summertime.

—That’s the life you loathe, the one you’ve been avoiding—

—Fooling myself, my dear.

—You’ve had all these wonderful experiences, my dear.

—Another name we give to all our mistakes.

—Okay, Mr. Wilde. Look at Walter.

—Maybe he feels he’s free.

—Do you honestly believe that, my dear?

—Not for a second, my dear, and certainly not after meeting that woman. He must be miserable, wherever the fuck he is. Maybe he took to the road again.

—I imagine he feels he’s made a grave mistake.

—I’d like to know why he left, my dear.

—I bet he doesn’t know anymore, my dear.

—True, my dear, but when I first arrived here, I had that job bussing tables in that restaurant, and I also washed dishes a few nights a week for months because dishwashers kept quitting, but I needed the money, so you did what you did to get it.

—Some of this you have already told me, my dear.

—Well, I was eventually promoted to food runner. It was better money. A step up. What I did was take the trays of food from the kitchen to the tables. I got a small percentage of the waiter’s tip. I saw myself as down and out in the American Midwest, but there was this man from Nicaragua who worked in the restaurant—