A Small Indiscretion (22 page)

I told him how I’d thought I was heading to England, not Ireland. How I’d had no idea I was going to be on the ferry all night and hadn’t booked a sleeping berth.

“You can have mine,” he said.

“That’s all right,” I said.

“No, really. You can have it,” he insisted. He said he would sleep on deck.

I studied his profile briefly, trying to decide if he was really handsome or not. His eyes were striking, but it was hard to tell about the rest of his face, because of the hat and the beard. He caught me looking at him, and before I could decide if this was a good or a bad thing, he stepped behind me and gathered my long hair in his hands and pulled it back off my face.

“England’s that way,” he said. “Ireland’s this way. We’re headed straight toward Ireland’s Eye.”

He was using my hair as a lever, holding it firmly, turning me
gently. It was not so different from the way I’d stood with Patrick on another ferry two days before, and yet it felt nothing like that. The sky was dense with cloud, but for a moment there was a parting, and a final gasp of sunlight appeared, edging the clouds in silver and giving the misty rain the appearance of slow-falling snow. His hands were cool and dry on my neck and his body was grazing my back. I wondered why I had been so set on tall men. There were only three inches of height separating this man and me—if I turned around we would be almost eye to eye—and yet that felt exactly right.

He was talking to me, telling me about where he planned to travel next. Nepal, to trek, he was saying, then to a town in India he wanted to see called Varanasi. I felt the words moving in his chest and exiting near my ear, and I felt him let my hair fall through his hands, then gather it up again, smoothing it firmly off my neck and back from my forehead. His hands seemed to capture the whole of my head, calming and settling it, but exciting it, too. How was all that possible?

It seemed important to know how long we would be allowed to stand this way. Two minutes? Ten? And how would I know when those minutes had passed? It would not be possible to keep track of something as unimaginative as time while I stood with him this way, understanding, finally, about love. Understanding the impulse toward acts of bravery and abandon, devotion and sacrifice. It was not a matter of concentrated effort. It was not the carefully orchestrated pursuit it had been with Patrick. It was not the selfish oblivion it had been with Malcolm, either. It was not that fleeting suspension of thought, of everyday neuroses, followed by their sudden reinstatement—along with new burdens, new obligations. It was a tender, certain longing, not to press forward but to remain in his embrace. To resist a shift in the wind or in the position of his
hands on my skin, his lips beside my ear, the hard pressure of his chest against my spine. To hold tight inside the cradle of meaning that was his body behind me, before the sun was swallowed up by the wet horizon. It was a moment that brought on a more or less permanent shift in my notion of the future.

But if he could do this with his hands, if he could form words, about a river in India, the Ganges, where the bodies of the dead were burned, if he was conscious and coherent enough to speak and move, then he must also be capable of letting my hair down and stepping away. That would be the very worst thing—if he were the one to end this before I did. I could not let it happen. I would have to stop it. I would have to be the one to step away.

But I couldn’t. I didn’t. I stayed there in his arms.

W
HAT ELSE DO
I remember? There was more beer. A flask of something stronger was passed around. Night fell and the ship passed through a squall. It rained harder and the ferry began to rock, quite violently, so that we could not stand on deck without holding on. I kept forgetting your father’s last name—so many superfluous consonants!—and asking him to write it down for me. He kept reminding me he already had.

We moved inside, out of the rain. Cathal-or-Manus played the fiddle beside the bar. I sat next to your father on a bar stool. The curtain dropped, and I wanted the evening to go on and on; I forgot everyone and everything I’d left behind.

Do I remember descending the stairs to the bottom level of the ship? Do I remember your father, or the redheaded boy, beside me, as I entered the berth of the ferry?

No. I don’t.

I do remember the berth itself, since I woke up there. A narrow
bed along one wall. Plaid blankets. White pillowcases and white sheets, turned down. A small square window with an orange curtain. A bathroom just large enough for a toilet and a sink and a hose on the wall that served as a shower. I remember, vaguely, the idea your father had proposed, that he would find a place to sleep upstairs so that I could have the berth to myself. It was an oddly chivalrous and old-fashioned idea, and I’m not sure I believed he meant it, or that I wanted him to mean it. What I wanted, by then, after all the hours sitting with him, drinking and talking, after standing in his arms at the railing of the ferry, was to fall into bed with him and to have what seemed inevitable happen right away.

I sat on the bed beside him. There was kissing. His hand began to move under my sweater, over my back, and the kissing took on a life of its own. Or, rather, the kissing seemed to envelop the whole of life, the whole of what was necessary in order to live. Everything outside of it—a hand, for example, thinner, smaller, reaching down between my legs—was a distraction insignificant enough to ignore.

It was not your father’s hand. It was the redheaded boy’s hand.

How had it materialized between my legs? How had that boy come to be in the berth, and on the bed?

I don’t know.

Maybe, as your father claimed later, I was slow to react. Maybe it took me a moment to differentiate the one hand from the other. To take in the substantial differences in size and temperature. Because, indeed, your father’s hand was very rough and very cool and reasonably large, and the redheaded boy’s hand was small and hot and smooth.

Perhaps it took me a moment to do the mental arithmetic. One plus one, plus one, equals three. One too many.

Then the redheaded boy coughed.

Your father stood up abruptly, knocking his head on a light fixture sticking out from the wall.

“Fuck,” he said, holding his hand to the back of his head. Then he took in the fullness of the situation, namely, the redheaded boy sitting on the opposite side of me with a hand between my legs, and a confused look passed over his face.

“What the fuck is this?” he said, not to the boy, but to me.

I found I could not reply.

Your father picked up his pack where he must have stowed it when he boarded the ferry, slung it over his back and turned and pushed through the door.

I shook myself free. I stood up and lurched toward him. But it was too late. He was gone. I turned back toward the Irish boy, furious with him now. He stood and tried to embrace me. I pushed him away.

“This is not happening,” I said to him. “You need to leave now.”

I shoved the door open. He went through it. I never saw that redheaded boy—whatever his name was—again.

T
HE MANY BEERS
. The liquor from the flask. The exhaustion. The rocking of the sea. All of it caught up with me at once, and I spent the night on the bathroom floor, heaving into the miniature toilet. I finally slept, and when I woke it was nearly noon, and we were landing in Rosslare. I could not find Jonathan anywhere. I covered every inch of the ship, every level, inside and out. Passengers were disembarking and I was alone and of course I could not remember Jonathan’s last name. Where was the paper napkin on which he’d written it? I checked my pockets, but there was only Patrick’s note. I watched passengers walk down the plank toward the dock. When there were no more passengers leaving, I hurried back inside and searched the bar for the napkin. I dug through the trash, brushing bits of food and garbage off my hands onto my jeans. There it was, near the bottom. Just as I unfolded the napkin, his whole name came
into my head—Jonathan Gunnlaugsson—as if I’d never forgotten it at all. Only then did I realize it was not going to help me much, not in the short term, anyway. It was not as if I could type his name into a search engine and find a cellphone number, since there were no such things as search engines or cellphones then. Where, exactly, had he said he was going to spend Christmas? Somewhere in Ireland. That was all I had to go on, and it was not enough.

A terrible loneliness took hold of me, not only because I could not find Jonathan, but because it was Christmas. I didn’t decide anything, really. I just did one thing, and when that was done, I did another. I took a DART train toward Dublin. The DART line carried on to Howth. I stepped off the little green train. I asked the woman working at the window about Hill House, where Patrick’s family lived, and she told me it was on the first road to the left off the main street. I had not eaten anything, and I was not feeling at all well. Directly beneath the station, I found the Bloody Stream. I put my nose to the glass and peered in at the chairs upside down on the tables, and the long dark bar across the back, and the fireplace in the corner with no fire. I turned toward the village, but it was deserted. I checked one hotel, then another, but there was nothing open, and not a soul in the street.

I walked back to the station, then past it, toward the harbor. Thin white clouds were stretched across the sky. Hundreds of boats floated dormant in the marina, their empty masts like a vertical game of pickup sticks. The scene filled me with nostalgia. Not for a life I had led but for all the lives I wished had been mine. A childhood on Little Cranberry Island, in Maine. A life here with Patrick, sailing one of those boats. A life raising dogs on a farm in the Midwest, summers spent in a cottage in a cedar forest on the shores of a great lake, August on a houseboat.

I walked around the yacht-club grounds, which were slick and wet from rain. I sat on a bench. The moon had already risen. A crow
called, shattering the silence and rising, dark and startling, into the sky. I felt the threat of evening in the changing light over the sea. A bleak little rain started up, growing heavier the longer I sat, crying now. Where were all the people I loved? I could feel them, flung about, the distance between us a crushing weight that I myself had put there.

I stared at the village beyond. There were houses built into the cliff. One of those was Hill House, where Patrick lived. I conjured an image of it—a roaring fire, the turkey cooking, Patrick holding court among his sisters with a drink in his hand. It disheartened me, this vision. It exhausted me. All the effort that would be required to ingratiate myself into it. But the sky was already bruising with the day’s end, and I was without shelter. I had made a grave error, a series of grave errors, and these errors had set me down here on Christmas Day, alone, at dusk.

I fished an umbrella out of my pack and made my way up the hill. It was getting dark now, and the rain was drenching my feet and my calves beneath my umbrella. My legs began to feel very tired and my shoulders were sore from the weight of my pack. The road was narrow and steep. There were more houses built into the side of the cliff than were visible from the harbor. They were squeezed together, not nearly as grand as they’d seemed from below. Finally I saw it on the left, a blue mailbox with the words
HILL HOUSE
painted on it, and a stone house with a steep shingled roof and small windows facing the street.

I touched my hand to my head. My hair was dirty. My shirt smelled. My jeans were wet. I had no makeup on. But it was too late to turn back.

I knocked on the door. An old man opened it. I thought he was old, anyway, though he was probably no more than fifty-five. He had a wide forehead and deep wrinkles around his mouth and nose. A fringe of graying hair went all the way around his otherwise bare
scalp. He wore an apron. At first, I thought he might be a butler of some kind. That is the extent to which I had Patrick’s origins built up in my mind. I thought they would have “help” and a grand dining room for the dinner parties for which Patrick’s mother had been so famous. In fact, the house beyond seemed modest, almost cramped, and it emitted a faint, dusky smell, along with the sounds and smells of home. Meat cooking. A piano being played. Voices. The clinking of glasses and pans. All at once I understood how far outside all of that I was, and how ridiculous I had been to have expected to step into it. I was wrong to have come.

Also, and more important, I felt a small gush of wetness in my underpants.

The man opened the door wider.

“John Ardghal, here,” he said, extending his hand and shaking mine. “Now, then, ah, who might you be on this dark and stormy night?”

He was not a butler. He was Patrick’s father, not what I’d expected, not a lost soul but a kindly one, very much present and alive. It was that kindness that made me lose my nerve. It was the curious, expectant smile taking over his broad, generous face that saved me from another grave error. Because if I’d said who I was, if I’d asked after Patrick, even though he was not there, because he was still stuck in Paris, I would have been invited in. I would have been given a drink and dinner and a bed. This gentle man would not have thrown a friend of Patrick’s into the weather at Christmas, especially not a young woman alone—and if that had happened, I would not have walked back to the village and boarded a train back to Dublin. It was those two small interventions—the well-meaning face, the gush of blood in my underwear—that sent me into a future with your father.

“I’m so sorry,” I said to Patrick’s father. “I must have the wrong house.”