A Small Indiscretion (23 page)

I
FOUND A
bathroom in the Howth station and changed my underwear and shoved in a tampon. I caught the last train back to Dublin. I stepped from the station and entered the first hotel I saw, a rundown bed-and-breakfast with peeling paint on its front door. I rang the bell on the desk. A small woman emerged. She informed me that I was just in time; Christmas dinner was being served in the dining room. And there was one room available with a single bed. The room was in the attic—it was not very nice, but perhaps it would do?

I said it would do just fine. I left my pack with the woman and walked into the dining room. Alone at a corner table—in a white shirt, with his hair combed back off what was indeed a handsome face, its beard shaved away for the occasion of Christmas dinner—was your father.

W
E SPENT THE NIGHT TOGETHER
in your father’s room. The bed was tilted, and when we woke up we were squeezed together on one side. There were two nightstands with yellow faded doilies and a chair with worn-out upholstery and a smell like wet laundry. It was a shabby room, a shabby hotel. But the shabbiness did not bother your father. He told me, that morning, that he liked to choose function over form, usefulness over aesthetics.

“Is that why you chose me?” I asked him. “Because I’m useful?”

He kissed me. “In your case I made an exception and went for beauty.”

Later, I picked his towel up off the bed and hung it over the shower rod. I folded his sweater and set it on the chair. He allowed me to do these things, even though I had not allowed him to do what he’d wanted the night before. I had fended him off, barely, not because I didn’t want him, but because I was mostly sober and felt it might be prudent. He was old-fashioned in some sense; he would respect a girl who saved something for later. Also, there had been the matter of the blood.

He had asked me at dinner, point-blank, what had happened with the redheaded boy on the ferry, and I had told him everything I remembered,
and assured him I hadn’t let the boy touch me after he left. He seemed satisfied with my reassurances, and in my mind we’d put the matter behind us for good.

He said he was starving as soon as we woke up that first morning, and he insisted we eat in the dining room right away. Already the patterns were being set down that would over time lay grooves of wear on the floors and walls of our house and our hearts. Already the table that was to become our life was being laid. Already it was food first, love later.

After breakfast in the dining room, we returned to his room and got back in bed. I had taken the tampon out first thing that morning, surprised there had been so little blood, and pleased that there was no reason to continue to fend your father off. He put a condom on. We made love. I folded myself into the blanket of his body, and it was like folding myself into my future. I came, and he came, and we collapsed into each other, still kissing, and he held me in a way that made me feel everything was finally all right.

When he pulled out and looked down, the condom wasn’t there.

“Oh, fuck,” he said. “Fuck. I’m so sorry. I should have checked. I should have pulled out.”

I found the condom inside me, and inside the condom, nothing at all. Whatever had been released had been released directly into me.

“Fuck,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s all right.”

I wasn’t just saying that. I believed there was no need to worry. I believed my period had come and gone in a day. I didn’t keep track of that sort of thing very carefully, then. I didn’t know about spotting in the middle of a cycle. And I didn’t know sex could make you bleed, even when it was not your first time.

W
E VENTURED OUT
of our room at some point. I told the woman at the front desk I would no longer be needing my room. I told Jonathan I’d pay for half of his, but he laughed at me.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “I have money.”

“Then why don’t you buy a new pair of shoes?”

“Oh, I will. I just haven’t gotten around to it. And besides, I like these shoes.”

We walked around Dublin. The rain was gone and the sky was clear and cold. I wondered about Malcolm. I wondered whether I would still have a job if I returned to London. It had all come to seem rather dim and distant—Malcolm, Louise, my desk at the office. It suddenly seemed far removed from this new life with Jonathan in Dublin.

Patrick, on the other hand, still felt acutely present. I was falling in love with your father, but my feelings for Patrick had not been left behind. All of it was rushing together, making a psychedelic mess of my heart.

We visited a cathedral. Jonathan dropped a few coins in the prayer bucket and lit a candle and knelt down on the cushion and folded his hands and told me faith was the center of his life.

“What do you mean by that?”

“What do you mean what do I mean?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think someone like you would be religious.”

“Well, I’m devout.”

“Really?” I said. Here was a flaw, a flaw that might release me back into my irresponsible life. I felt a glimmer of relief, or hope, followed by a ringing of alarm.

Then he laughed. “Not really. I’m a recovering Catholic, like all the good Catholics of our generation.”

“Oh,” I said. “So am I.”

“Would it have been a deal-breaker, if I had been some kind of religious fanatic?”

“Yes.”

“You almost sound disappointed that I’m not.”

“Maybe I don’t want to fall for you. Maybe I want to keep being badly behaved.”

“I’m not stopping you.”

“You said you wouldn’t love me if I wasn’t good.”

“I won’t.”

“Well, then, see?”

Over lunch he read to me from the guidebook. What did we want to see next? Dublin Castle? Trinity College? The famous prison? The factory where Guinness was born? He had a way of making the day, every day, feel festive and promising.

For three days after that we toured the city. On the fourth day, Jonathan consulted the guidebook again and decided we should take the DART train to “the charming seaside village of Howth.”

I did not object.

We got off the train and decided to start with the castle. It turned out to be in the middle of a golf resort, but the structure itself was sufficiently dark and deteriorating to make it worth the trip. The sky was a stifled gray, and the wind was coming in fits and starts, stirring the branches of the massive oaks. Blackbirds circled over the stone battlements, and Jonathan read to me from the guidebook. The castle had been built in the fifteenth century and was still owned by the St. Lawrence family. There was a legend of a girl named Grace O’Malley, who showed up at the castle at dinnertime to find that the gates were closed, so she abducted the son of the castle’s owners and extracted a promise that the gates would stand open forever after, and an extra place be laid at the table. And so the extra place was always laid.

“It’s always a girl abducting the poor young boys,” Jonathan said.

“I promise not to abduct you,” I said.

“You’ve already abducted me.”

We walked back to the village holding hands. I liked Jonathan’s cool, dry hand in mine, and the solidness of his body next to me, and his lovely eyes and ready laugh. But that does not mean I was not on the lookout for Patrick. I had not mentioned Patrick again to Jonathan. I had not told him Patrick lived in Howth.

We wandered around the village. It had once been a small fishing outpost, but now it was a thriving Dublin suburb set down between ocean and wild hillside. There was a steady stream of cars driving up and down the main road. I dragged Jonathan in and out of shops. I lingered longer than I needed to. I couldn’t help myself.

“Enough shopping,” he finally said. “It’s time for food.”

There were taverns and pubs and inns all up and down the main street. Whose idea was it to return to the train station and eat at the Bloody Stream? Mine.

We ate clams, then oysters, because Jonathan insisted I expand my seafood repertoire, and there was no better place to do that than in a seaside village. I watched for Patrick. I thought of Malcolm. I studied Jonathan’s face and compared him to the two other men who had captured some piece of my heart. He was nothing like Patrick, in appearance or demeanor. He was not like Malcolm, either; he had none of the deference or hesitation, but they shared a cheerfulness, and the sturdiness of thick-boned men.

There was a fire in the stone fireplace in the corner and a band setting up to play. I wanted to stay and listen to the band. I was not quite ready to give up yet. But Jonathan wanted to go back to Dublin and “experience my bodily parts.” Those were the exact words he used, the ones he always used. It became a joke, over the years, a catchphrase that could pull us into the bedroom together.

Jonathan paid the check. We finally stood up to leave.

Then the door pushed open, and Patrick entered the pub. A girl followed him. She stood in the doorway, framed by the pearly light of early evening. It was the girl from Montmartre—Mary McShane.

They didn’t see us. They sat at the bar. I pulled Jonathan by the hand and sat him down again at our table.

“That’s Patrick,” I hissed.

“Patrick?”

“The one who was sleeping with my boss’s wife. The one who came with us to Paris.”

“Oh,” he said. “Would you like to say hello?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“Funny all of us ending up here.”

“He lives here. In Howth.”

“Ah, the plot thickens. Why didn’t you say so earlier?”

“I don’t know. It was kind of an awkward situation, I guess.”

From behind, Mary’s hair seemed even shorter and blacker than before, and Patrick seemed taller, probably because I’d already gotten used to Jonathan’s height. Taller and flashier, a man people noticed. He was wearing polished black boots, jeans, a gray wool sweater and his black peacoat. Time had been taken to achieve this look of thrown-together elegance. Effort had been expended, effort Jonathan would have considered wasted. He’d said as much in a shop in Dublin when I’d tried on a dress I liked. He’d said that when you really thought about it, style was a completely arbitrary manifestation of culture. He said he preferred to be savage about the whole thing and wear whatever happened to be at the top of the pile.

Patrick shrugged off his coat. He lifted Mary’s raincoat from her shoulders and laid it over the back of her chair. Blood rose to my face, not from the jealousy itself but from the shame of acknowledging its existence. Jonathan was the bedrock upon which to construct a life. Patrick was not. Why, then, was I still under Patrick’s spell?

“Let’s leave,” I said to Jonathan.

He looked at me. He looked at Patrick. Patrick turned and saw us and his face opened in surprise.

“Annie,” he called out. He came right toward us. “We’ve been trying to find you. Where did you go? And why are you here?”

“I … we’re touring.”

“Never mind. It doesn’t matter now. I’m only happy you’re finally found.”

“This is Jonathan,” I said to Patrick. And to Jonathan, “This is Patrick.”

Patrick did not introduce Mary McShane, who was hanging back, standing awkwardly by the bar. Patrick was looking at me closely. He took my hand and squeezed it. He searched my face. I thought he was about to make a declaration of some kind—a declaration of love, perhaps.

“You don’t know, do you?” Patrick said.

“Know what?”

“The news,” he said. “The terrible news.”

He moved a step closer. He squeezed my hand more tightly. “I’m afraid we’ve lost Malcolm.”

“We’ve lost him?”

“He had a massive stroke,” Patrick said. “He died Christmas Eve morning. In a hospital in Paris.”