Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin (7 page)

“Two. And a husband who got killed down in Guatemala. Fighting. For, I don’t know, Carlos Arana Osorio or someone. A fascist of some sort. She hated him, the husband—she got caught up in this marriage young—and still she’s got his picture on the bookcase. For the kids to know that he exists, existed, that they had a father. We just sit there and he’s looking out at us. She doesn’t talk about him. He’s got this hard stare. I sit in her kitchen and she cooks a little and I move the food around on the plate and we chat and then she rubs my shoulders while her kids are in the other room, watching cartoons. She knows I’m in the Order, knows the celibacy rules, everything. I told her. She says that if it doesn’t matter to me then it doesn’t matter to her. She’s the loveliest person I’ve ever known. I can’t stand it. I can’t deal with it. I sit there and it’s like these blades turning in my stomach. The voice I go home to is not the voice I ever heard before. I can’t lay a hand on the old one. He’s gone. I find myself stretching out at night, trying to grab a hold of it but He’s not there. All I get is sleeplessness and disgust. Call it what you like. Call it joy, even. How can I pray with this inside me? How can I do what I’m supposed to do? I don’t even judge myself by my actions. I judge myself by what’s in my heart. And it’s rotten because it wants to own things, but it’s not rotten because it’s the most content I’ve ever been, and it’s the most content she’s ever been too, sitting there, together. We’re happy. And I keep wondering if we’re supposed to be happy. I haven’t slept with her, brother. At least not . . . We’ve thought about it, yes, but, I mean . . .”
He faded off.
“You know my vows. You know what they mean. I used to think there was no other man in me, no other person, just me, the devoted one. That I was alone and strong, that my vows were everything, and I wasn’t tempted. And I’ve turned it over and over in my mind. What happens if this? What happens if that? And maybe it’s not even a matter of losing faith. I stand in the mess of myself. It’s against everything I’ve ever been, and suddenly just watching it all disappear, and then also lying to her, even about my treatment.”
“What’s this sickness mean? This TTP stuff?”
“It means I’ve just got to get better.”
“How?”
“I have to get treatment. Plasma replacement and that sort of thing. I will.”
“Painful?”
“Pain’s nothing. Pain’s what you give, not what you get.”
He took out the slim pack of rolling papers and sprinkled the tobacco along the curved edge of a paper.
“And her? Adelita? What’re you going to do?”
He worked the grains over, looked out the window.
“Her kids are out of school for the summer. They’re running around. Lots of time on their hands. Used to be that I went over with the excuse that I was helping them with their homework. But it’s summer, so there’s no more homework. Guess what. I’m still going over. And no real excuse except the truth—I want to see her. And we just sit there, Adelita and me. I have to come up with other excuses for myself. Oh, they need someone to help clean up the rubbish in front of the apartment. She really needs to get that toaster fixed. She needs time to study her medical books. Anything. Except I can’t pretend that I can give them a catechism lesson because they’re Lutheran, man, Lutherans! From Guatemala. Just my luck, man! I find the only non- Catholic woman in Central America. Brilliant. She’s a believer, though. She’s got a heart, huge and kind. She really does. She tells me these stories about where she grew up. I go to her house every chance I get. I want to. I need to. That’s where I’ve been disappearing all these afternoons. I guess I wanted to keep it hidden from everyone.
“And all the time I’m sitting there, in her house, thinking that this is the one place I shouldn’t be. And I wonder what’s going to be left over when I extricate myself from the mess. Then her kids come in from outside and jump on the sofa and watch TV and spill yogurt all over the cushions. Her youngest, Eliana, she’s five, she drifts in trailing a blanket along the floor and grabs my hand and brings me into the living room. I’m bouncing her up and down on my knee, and they’re beautiful kids, both of them. Jacobo’s just turned seven. I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life. At the end of
Tom and Jerry,
or
I Love Lucy,
or
The Brady Bunch,
whatever dose of irony you want, I say to myself, That’s okay—this is real, this is something I can handle, I’m just sitting here, I’m not doing anything bad. And then I leave because I can’t accept the brokenness.”
“So, leave the Order.”
He knitted his hands together.
“Or leave her.”
The whites of his knuckles.
“I can’t do either,” he said. “And I can’t do both.”
He studied the lit end of his cigarette.
“You know what’s funny?” he said. “On Sundays I still feel the old urges, the residual feelings. That’s when the guilt hits most. I walk along, the Our Father in my mind. Over and over again. To cut the edge off the guilt. Isn’t that ridiculous?”
A car pulled up slowly behind us and a sharp light shone through the back window. The red and blue lights flicked on, but no siren. We waited in silence for the cops to get out of the car, but they hit the megaphone: “Move on, faggots, move it!”
Corrigan gave a pinch of a smile as he pulled the gearshift down into drive.
“You know, I have a dream every night that I’m running my lips down along her spine, like a skiff down a river.”
He eased the van out into the street and said nothing more until he pulled in near the projects, where his hookers were. Instead of walking in among them, he waved them off and brought me across the street to where a yellow light pulsed on the corner. “What I need to do is get drunk.” He pushed open the door of a little bar, arm around my shoulder.
“Straight as a good fence the last ten years, now look at me.”
He sat at the counter, raised two fingers, ordered a couple of beers. There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water— it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slumber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening the door to the spray of sea.
“You ask me if I’m using heroin, man?” He was laughing, but looking out the bar window at the rafters of the highway. “It’s worse than that, brother, much worse.”

^{it was like all}
the clocks agreed and the fridge was humming and the sirens outside sounded out like flutes. He had talked her free. Just mentioning her was enough for him: he became new.

For the next couple of days they saw each other as much as they could—in the nursing home mainly, where she changed her shift just to be with him. But Adelita also came to the apartment, knocked on the door, uncorked a bottle of wine, and sat across the table. She wore a ring on her right hand, twirling it absently. There was a grace and a toughness about her, entwined. They needed me there. I was hardly allowed to stand up from the table. “Sit down, sit down.” I was still the safe border between them. They weren’t ready to fully let go. Some propriety held them back, but they looked as if they wanted to leave some of their good sense behind, at least for a while.

She was the sort of woman who became more beautiful the more you watched her: the dark hair, almost blue in the light, the curve of her neck, a mole by her left eye, a perfect blemish.

I suppose, as the nights wore on, my presence made them feel that they had to entertain someone, that they were in it together, that they were more properly alone by being together.

She spoke softly to Corrigan, as if to get him to lean closer. He would look at her as if it were quite possible he wasn’t ever going to see her again. Sometimes she just sat there with her head upon his shoulder. She gazed past me. Outside, the fires of the Bronx. To them it could have been sunlight through the girders. I dragged my chair across the floor.

A delitahadawildsidethatCorriganlikedbutcouldn’tbringhimselfto grin about. Onenight she wore awide white off- the- shoulder blouseand orange hot pants. The blouse was modest, but the pants were tight to her thighs. We drank a little cheap wine, and Adelita was whooped up a little. She gathered her shirt and knotted it at the front, showing the brown of her stomach, stretched slightly from children. The small dip of her belly button. Corrigan was embarrassed by the cling of the pants. “Look at you, Adie,” he said, his cheeks flushing. But instead of asking her to unknot the blouse and cover herself up, he made a theater of giving her one of his own shirts to wear over her outfit. As if it were the tender thing to do. He draped it around her shoulders, kissed her cheek. It was one of his old black collarless shirts, past her thighs, almost down to her knees. He hitched it on her shoulders, half afraid that he was being a prude, the other half rocked by the sheer immensity of what was happening to him.

Adelita paraded around the apartment, doing a slight hula- hoop movement.
“I’m ready now for heaven,” she said, tugging the shirt lower still.
“Take her, Lord,” said Corrigan.
They laughed, but there was something in that, like Corrigan wanted his life to make sense again, that he had fallen from grace, all he had now was his old recklessness and temptation, and he wasn’t sure he could handle it. He looked up as if the answer might be written on the ceiling. What might happen if she tumbled short of his dreams? How much might he hate his God if he left her behind? How might he detest himself if he stuck to his Lord?
He walked her home, holding hands in the dark. When he returned to the apartment, many hours later, he hung the shirt on the edge of the mirror. “Orange hot pants,” he said. “Can you believe it?”
We sat, hunched over the bottle.
“You know what you should do?” said Corrigan. “Come work at the nursing home.”
“Need a bodyguard, is that it?”
He smiled, but I knew what he was saying.
Come help me, I’m still that hopeless swimmer.
He wanted someone from the past around in order to make sure that it wasn’t all just a colossal illusion. He couldn’t just be an observer: he had to get some message through. It had to make sense, if even just for me. But I got a job in Queens instead, in one of the shamrock bars I dreaded. A low ceiling. Eight stools along the formica counter. Sawdust on the floor. Pouring pale draft beer and putting my own dimes in the jukebox so I wouldn’t have to hear the same old tunes over and over. Instead of Tommy Makem, the Clancy Brothers, and Donovan, I tried some Tom Waits instead. The single- minded drinkers groaned.
I figured I might write a play set in a bar, as if it had never been done before, as if it were some sort of revolutionary act, so I listened to my countrymen and wrote notes. Theirs was a loneliness pasted upon loneliness. It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from. We bring home with us when we leave. Sometimes it becomes more acute for the fact of having left. My accent deepened. I took on different rhythms. I pretended I was from Carlow. Most of the customers were from Kerry and Limerick. One was a lawyer, a tall, fat sandy- haired man. He lorded it over the others by buying them drinks. They clinked glasses with him and called him a “motherfucking ambulance chaser” when he went to the bathroom. It was not a series of words they would have used at home—motherfucking ambulance chasers weren’t big in the old country—but they said it as often as they could. With great hilarity they injected it into songs when the lawyer left. One of the songs had an ambulance chaser going over the Cork and Kerry mountains. Another had an ambulance chaser in the green fields of France.
The place grew busier as the night went on. I poured the drinks and emptied the tip jar.
I was still staying with Corrigan. He spent a few evenings at Adelita’s place, but he never told me a word about them. I wanted to know if he’d finally been with a woman but he simply shook his head, wouldn’t say, couldn’t say. He was still in the Order after all. His vows still shackled him.
There was a night in early August when I dragged myself back on the subway, but couldn’t find a cab on the Concourse. I didn’t like the idea of walking back to Corrigan’s place at that hour. There had been beatings and random murders in the Bronx. Being held up was close to ritual. And being white was a bad idea. It was time to get a room of my own somewhere else, maybe the Village or the East Side of Manhattan. I stuck my hands in my jeans, felt the rolled- up wad of money from the bar. I had just begun walking when a whistle sounded from the other side of the Concourse. Tillie was pulling up the strap on her swimsuit. She had been kicked out of a car and her knees were scraped raw.
“Sugarplum,” she shouted as she stumbled towards me with her handbag waving above her head. She had lost her parasol. She put her arm in the crook of mine. “Whosoever brought me here is going to have to take me home.”
It was, I knew, a line from Rumi. I stood, stunned. “What’s the big deal?” she shrugged. She dragged me on. Her husband, she said, had studied Persian poetry.
“Husband?”
I stopped on the street and gaped at her. Once, as a teenager, I had examined a piece of my skin on a glass slide, staring at it through a microscope: an amplitude of ridged canals striving beneath my eye, all pure surprise.
My intense disgust—so remarkable on other days—in that single moment turned into an awe for the fact that Tillie didn’t care at all. She jiggled her breasts and told me to get a grip. It was her ex- husband anyway. Yes, he had studied Persian poetry. Big fucking deal. He used to get a suite at the Sherry- Netherlands, she said. I assumed she was high. The world seemed to grow smaller around her, shrunken to the size of her eyes, painted purple and dark with eye shadow. I suddenly wanted to kiss her. My own wild, yea- saying overburst of American joy. I leaned towards her and she laughed, pushed me away.
A long pimped- up Ford Falcon pulled up at the curb and, without turning, Tillie said: “He already paid, man.”
We continued up the street, arm in arm. Under the Deegan she nestled her head against my chest. “Didn’t you, honey?” she said. “You already paid for the goodies?” She was rubbing her hand against me and it felt good. There’s no other way to say it. That’s how it felt. Good.
“Call me SweetCakes,” she said in an accent that loitered around her.
“You’re related to Jazzlyn, aren’t you?”
“What about it?”
“You’re her mother, right?”
“Shut up and pay me,” she said, touching the side of my face. Moments later there was the surprising condolence of her warm breath against my neck.