Martin Sloane (18 page)

The door opened and his mother came out into the air.

It’s getting cold out here, she said.

I don’t mind.

It’ll soon be dark, and then it’ll be even colder. He didn’t answer her, but he let her fold his fingers into her palm. Just the touch of her hand could induce him to cry, and he looked down at his feet. Even at the age of nine, he knew the warmth of her hand, the smooth, dry surface of her palm would be something he would long for when he got older.

He turned to her, and she saw he was about to cry. She loved his face like this, and sometimes, seeing his emotion, she would want to break into a smile.

Nobody asked me if I wanted to leave, but it’s still my fault.

It’s no one’s fault, Martin. It’s this nasty great cloud of air we have in Dublin. It’s Dublin’s fault. We’d have to leave here one day anyhow. It’s expensive to live in a big city.

We’d stay longer if I were well.

She brought him close to her, and she smelled of her good soap. He buried his face in her neck and let his tears come, but quietly, and she held him.

Do you know that there is going to be a coronation the day before we leave? May twelfth and a new king, King George the Sixth. They’re going to broadcast the ceremony around the world, so Buby and Zaida Mosher can listen in Montreal. He’ll have the same name as the king on the horse in St. Stephen’s, did you know that?

He sobbed quietly that he knew. The equestrian statue in the green was called George the Second. It was his favourite.

They’re going to have a parade of white horses and there’ll be bishops and princes lining the streets outside the palace. Do you know that I stood in those very streets in 1910 when I was nine years old? And watched beside my brother King George the Fifth crowned? This king’s grandfather? That was a day in London! And my brother and I fought because my brother had a larger piece of salt-taffy. It made Buby Mosher very sad to see us fighting.

Did you see the king?

I did. He waved to me.

Martin laughed and wiped his face on his mother’s chest. He liked that they were talking of England. It was a subject his mother couldn’t talk to just anyone about, even though it was her whole childhood and life up until she met their father. When she talked about the streets of London, or her family’s house in Holland Park, her voice became slow, as if the words and names were coming out of the past and gradually taking shape in front of her. She felt about those places in her life the way he felt about his own streets and rivers and greens. He wanted to be the only person she would tell these stories to.

So, she said. Do you think we can keep the peace in Buckingham? We have one king, one queen, one prince, and one princess. Will we manage?

He said a quiet yes, because it was true he wanted there to be peace. The yelling and fighting was wearing him out. He wished for things to be the same as they had been before, when he and Theresa would pitch quoits on the back lawn, and sometimes, when he was lonely in the night, he could knock on her door and she would move over so he could sleep in her bed, and she would be as kind to him as Nuala had been in the hospital. Recently, he had felt very lonely at night, when it was so dark outside his window, but he knew his sister would not give him any comfort, not now, when he was taking her home and her friends away.

Is he sick again? called William’s mother, coming up her walk. She had shopping bags hanging from her arms up to her elbows.

No, Phil. He’s just a little tired.

I’ll bring over some of my soup in the morning. Does he want to visit with William after supper?

We’ll see, said Martin’s mother.

Mrs. Beaton went into her house and Martin took his tear-streaked face off his mother’s shirt. When I’m better, we’ll come back here, all right? he said. And everything will be the same.

For now, you look around and keep everything in your head, so we can make sure things are the right way round when we do come back. Every tree, every lamp, and every window. You can keep it all in here, she said, touching his forehead. It’ll be safe here.

When,
she’d said. His heart had thrilled at the word.

VII.

LINWOOD FLATS. 15" X 17" X 3" BOX CONSTRUCTION. WOOD AND GLASS WITH FOUND OBJECTS, DOLL PARTS, FABRIC, PAINT. BELIEVED DESTROYED. THROUGH A WINDOW IN THE SIDE OF A HOUSE, A CHILD’S ROOM CAN BE SEEN. BEYOND THE DOORWAY TO THE ROOM, SOMEONE SITS AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS.

THREE WEEKS AFTER I MET DANIEL, I WAS WALKING
around the wood-floored living room of his one-bedroom flat and listening to the streetcar grind the tracks on Dundas below. It was the middle of the night and the lights of Chinatown flashed yellow and green against the back of the room, bands of greeny light warping along my stomach. Somehow night windows make you feel invisible to the outside world, although you know from looking out of those very same windows that you’re not. Still, your nakedness at two in the morning feels like a natural state, like men crying in the silence of darkened rooms. Animals we tend by day stalk and kill other animals in that kind of dark.

I moved around his space, taking in the things he filled his life with, or that other people, trying to reflect him back at himself, had given him. A row of antique pearl buttons fixed to a card and framed. An ex-lover, I assumed, either complimenting him on something she liked or criticizing him after the fact. And the books, always tell-tale, and the coffee-table tomes by photographers, the good ones, and the painters too that one has to know, if not like.

On a high shelf, there were the books assigned in my classes. I’d believed him when he told me but still, it was nice to be reassured, and I opened up the
Collected Donne
and read his marginalia. My scholarly tics were reflected there: Donne’s apparent rejection of the sensual scrawled beside the sermons; underlinings of my favourite words in “The Compass.” A few pages later, “diadem” defined in tight script, “royal headband” — had I explained why Donne used it? The wonder of feeling the poet’s blood and mind moving through those places …

In the fridge, the bachelor’s comestibles. Carrots shrunk to yellow-stained old-man fingers. A six-count carton of eggs with two eggs in it, both stuck to the sides. Fresh milk, fresh butter. Nondescript styrofoam containers, one with rice in it, the other with vegetables and beef sticking up out of a congealed brown sauce like stumps in a dead pond. Little plastic ramekins filled with hot sauce teetering in the egg-cups in the door. It filled my heart with something like love for him, for the hopelessness you encounter in men who somehow go forth in the world. I took out the veggies and beef (a black-bean thing that smelled still edible) and stood full frontal in the window eating it, warming the cold broccoli and carrot disks in my mouth before chewing them. More knick-knacks and keepsakes on tabletops: a Betty Boop Pez dispenser (no one likes their women with jowls anymore), a raku bowl full of pennies, a picture frame with the factory photo still in it: a soft-focus shot of a blonde with a straw hat on. I took the back of the frame out and removed her, crumpled her up. Then set the frame standing empty, like an elevator waiting for a passenger. I chewed stringy beef. Below, another streetcar went past completely empty and the driver craned his neck to take me in. The lonely people in a city are all joined together at night.

I rinsed my mouth out in the kitchen sink and then went and drew the blinds in the front room. I crept into his bedroom again and slid into the covers without drawing them back. It was the first time I had gotten back into bed with this man. His back was hot and he was breathing deep soughing exhalations, the sound of the body safe but unguarded, and I raised myself up and bent over him to look at his sleeping face. Eyes closed, lips parted, glistening. There resides the real and perfect beauty of human beings, I thought. That killers and babies alike look peaceful in their sleep, you know someone will love them no matter their sins. I kissed the mouth and lay back down beside him. He took a sharp breath in and turned on his back. His eyes were closed. “You okay?”

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” I said.

“I sleep light.”

I waited for him to drift off again. But I saw his eyes had opened and he was looking at the ceiling. I turned and closed him in my hand. “You’re warm.” He looked at me and his eyes were dark, like the eyes of an animal encountered in a cave. An iron scent from the wine we’d had floated around him. “I should keep you in a little box under my bed.”

He sighed deeply. “I was having a dream just now, where I was walking down the street with my childhood self.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s strange, isn’t it? To think by the time we get old, no one will know what were were like when we were little.”

I quickly moved closer to him, and kissed his mouth. “Don’t talk about that right now.” I felt the pulse in my hand and he lay there and then after a moment, he closed his eyes again. Another streetcar went by on the road below. I shifted a leg and pulled myself on top of him, flattening my body against his like a page closed beside another in a book. I drew my knees up beside his chest and lay my mouth down next to his ear. “Don’t say anything about that stuff,” I said, and I rose and fell on his body.

I came back to the hotel around seven, having walked the angled streets through midtown in a daze. Molly had left a half-dozen messages for me, and there was one from Daniel too, whom she’d called in a panic at four o’clock, to report me missing. I phoned him from the hotel lobby and reassured him it was all a misunderstanding, that everything was okay, was being worked out. He sounded skeptical; he wanted to be sure I knew what I was doing, so I murmured some bright thing to get him off the phone. I couldn’t explain to him there and then exactly what was going on, nor show him how badly I wanted to talk to him. And I returned to my room understanding what Molly had meant by “work” the night before.

I splashed some water on my face and sat on the bed, immobilized by my misgivings. Light from streetlamps spilled over the floor. There was nothing familiar to me here, no touchstone, nothing to guide me. The desire to quietly pack and take a taxi to the airport had a kind of intelligence to it — after all, discovering nothing more would leave me in much the same state I had been in before Molly’s call — but I also knew it was wrong. I broke the seal on the frigo-bar and poured a minibottle of Glenlivet into me and while it still burned, I took the stairs to Molly’s room.

The eyehole darkened before she opened the door. She stood silently aside and let me in, completely calm it seemed, and then she closed the door and went to sit on the edge of one of the two single beds, waiting for me to enter without speaking. I stood beside the desk where there were a pair of room-service trays — a salad for lunch; a meat pie for supper, neither more than picked at. Her overcoat lay folded over a closed suitcase beside her.

From the bed, she regarded me with such cool-eyed tranquility that I thought somehow I’d forgotten a discussion from yesterday in which we’d agreed that I would go to Mrs. Bryce’s without her. But the packed suitcase implied that whatever turmoil she’d suffered had been eased by a decision. She saw me looking at it.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m going to go home.”

“Is that what you want?” I spoke without inflection.

“I can’t blame you for not trusting me, Jolene. I can’t force you to accept my company. So I should probably go.”

“You called Daniel,” I said.

“I thought he’d know if you’d just stolen off in the night.” I felt a flutter of guilt. “He sounds like a nice man.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I didn’t blow your cover,” she said. “Something about mixed signals and if he heard from you to say I was in the hotel.”

“You told him I was
missing
.”

She nodded just a little, a faint smile at the edges of her mouth. “I might have been a bit upset. Obviously, you reassured him you weren’t. Missing.”

“That and a couple of big fat lies seemed to take care of his confusion.”

“Well anyway, he told me to make sure you come home soon.”

“I will be going home soon. I don’t think there’s anything for me here either.”

Her expression darkened, a flash of anger. “If I’m going, the least you can do is be straight with me. I know you went to see Mrs. Bryce. And that’s fine – I haven’t done anything to earn your trust. But you don’t have to lie flat out to me.”

“Okay,” I said. “I went.” I had my hands behind my back, bracing me against the front of the desk; it felt right to keep them out of view. “She’s elderly. She lives with her sister. They’re two old, scared ladies, and they live in a house full of junk. The sister was so panicked she almost threw me down the stairs.”

“What did Mrs. Bryce tell you?”

“That she’s married to Martin.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is. But he’s not around. He doesn’t live with her.”

“So where is he?”

“We didn’t get to that.” She nodded, and sat back a little. She knew where I’d gone, but at the same time, having it confirmed hurt her, I could see that. She rubbed the tops of her legs. At times, it had felt as if Molly had taken a simple gamble in contacting me. Perhaps, she’d thought, it would turn out that enough time had passed. The well-water would be clear again. This optimistic face, which she’d strenously worn more or less since I’d first arrived in Dublin, gave the impression that what ever came of this gamble suited her. But sitting on the bed before me, a look that shuddered into place and quickly passed spoke of something deeper. The pain of witnessing that look reminded me that I had once loved this person. It wasn’t so clear any more how I should behave.

“They really are married?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Are you planning to go back?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why is she putting on these shows for him?”

“She said she was doing what she’s been told to do.”

“He wants to see people again,” she said quietly. “Maybe he’s gotten to the point in his life where he wants to do something about this feeling that he ruined the happiness of the people he loved.”