Tender (13 page)

“Are you asleep?” James said, nudging her with his leg.

“No,” Catherine said, the word all in a drowse.

“Don’t go to sleep,” he said, and she heard him turn a page.

H
alf of each can was a curving block of red, the familiar font of the brand name swooping over it, and at the bottom, in yellow-piped block capitals, the word SOUP.

ONION MADE WITH BEEF STOCK sounded vile. PEPPER POT; what, even,
was
pepper pot soup? And barley was some kind of crop, wasn’t it? A crop grown in places where the land was good enough to hold it.

These were the
actual
soup cans; that was the thing to understand. That gold circular canvas over there was an actual Marilyn, and in another room were the actual Jackie O paintings, the canvases washed over with an eerie blue. And somewhere else in the gallery was the actual Mao, smug and bleary and bloated. Or, one of the actuals, actually. One of the Maos, six of the Jackies, one of the Marilyns, her lipstick glossy even in monochrome, her beauty spot like a sharp bud of dirt in the paint. Not
the
actual. That was the point. That was the—

“Let me guess, Citóg,” said a voice from behind her. “You’re mulling over the layers of irony. You’re thinking of how they’re themselves and yet at the same time not themselves. You’re thinking, what am I looking at, actually? What am I—”

“Why am I looking at you, Moran, is the question?” Catherine said, turning to face him. “What are you doing here?”

“On a date,” he shrugged. “What do you think of this stuff?”

“I think he was at his best in the mid-sixties, really, wasn’t he?” she said evenly.

“Oh, no doubt,” Conor said. “Sixty-five to sixty-six, I’d say, to be even more precise about it.”

“Pretty downhill after that.”

“Mmm,” Conor said, nodding vigorously, and together, they drifted on to the huge silkscreen of the dollar sign.

In truth, Catherine didn’t have a clue when Andy Warhol had been at his best, but the mid-sixties seemed a likely possibility, and it seemed like the kind of thing that would be said about Warhol; so she had put it out there, as she often did now, and as often happened now, it had worked. She had got away with it. She was still not quite able to believe that this happened, but it did. You said something, sounding confident as you said it, keeping your voice level, and people nodded, and people agreed with you, and people looked at you as a person who apparently knew their stuff. That was it. It was so easy.

This was what she had discovered this year at college: that when you gave the world the impression that you were up to it, ready for whatever it wanted to throw at you, the stuff the world threw at you turned out to be not that big of a deal after all. It turned out, actually, to be kind of comically manageable. Essays. Reading lists. Meetings with her lecturers. Writing articles for
Trinity News;
she was doing loads for the books pages of
TN
now, and getting on nicely. Also, boys, there had been lots of boys, once she had copped herself on and stopped mooning over Conor, who was just a mate now, and actually not a bad one; one among many. This was one of the things of which she was proudest about this second year at college: that she had so many friends now. Maybe too many. Or maybe they were acquaintances, rather than friends, but she didn’t think about the distinction. She just liked it. She liked the way that it was no longer possible, when she walked through Front Arch in the morning, on the way to her class or to the library, to get to where she was going without bumping into at least a couple of people she knew, and maybe more, depending on the time of day; sometimes, if she was not in a rush, not on her way to a lecture or a tutorial, it could take her a full hour to get where she was going, such was the volume of people she would bump into, such were the chats to be had. It gave her a buzz, the feeling that her days were teeming, that there were never enough hours to talk to all the people she wanted to talk to, let alone for all the books she wanted to read, all the poems she wanted to write, all the things she wanted to know about, and talk about, and add to her store.

“Anyway,” she said now, joining up with Conor again. “Who’s the lucky lady?”

“Alice from Modern Theatre,” he said. “Great girl.”

“Aren’t they always?”

“Don’t be jealous,” Conor said. “You here with Rafey?”

“I’m meeting Zoe. Rafe and I broke up.”

“What?” Conor said, looking shocked. “But you were together on Valentine’s night!”

“Yeah. And I decided that was that.”

“Ah, Citóg. After all the trouble I went to, introducing you to him?”

She shrugged. She was enjoying this, she realized: Conor looking crestfallen because she’d dumped the guy he’d set her up with. She should do this kind of thing more often.

“Jesus, you’re hard pleased,” Conor said, shaking his head. But then he grinned, and Catherine rolled her eyes; she knew that something lewd was coming.

“Don’t, Moran,” she warned.

“I’d say it was a good experience, though, all the same?”

“Moran!”

“Clitóg no more, I’d say. Made a woman out of you at long last, did he, Rafey?”

“Oh, would you ever just
fuck
off,” Catherine said, but she was laughing; she could not help laughing when Conor slagged her off.

“The Doyle’s having a party in his rooms later,” he said, leaning against the wall. “You coming?”

The Doyle was the nickname which had been bestowed this year on Emmet Doyle, the boy who had the previous summer so earnestly—so sweetly, really—counseled Catherine on how to bluff her way into a summer job. He was no longer, though, that same shy boy; over the last year, he had transformed himself into a fully fledged House Six hack.
Muck,
his satirical column for
TN,
was a nod to the generations of American journalists he had learned about in his History of the Media class, and it framed itself as an exposé of hypocrisy, pomposity and dishonesty on campus—but it was more muck-slinging than mud-raking, chiefly an exercise in ridicule and mischief, and it frequently got things appallingly wrong. In November, for instance, Emmet’s gleeful account of a senior lecturer’s very public night on the tiles at the History Ball had turned out to be a blow-by-blow account of the man’s very public fall from the wagon after seven years of sobriety. A diatribe against the college’s practice of awarding honorary doctorates to “lazy and irrelevant wasters,” meanwhile, which called for students to picket the next conferring ceremony, had run in February, on the very day that Nelson Mandela was announced as that year’s chief honoree. Mostly, though,
Muck
took aim at various college societies and at the students’ union, as well as at various other local targets: the tutors, the security guards, the chaplains, the American tourists who lined up to see the
Book of Kells,
the Freshman girl who had dyed her hair blue. He had a nickname for everyone; “Poetess” was what he called Catherine, having filched two of her poems from the slush pile for
Icarus,
the college literary magazine. Catherine tended, as a result, to avoid him when she saw him coming, and she was not in the mood for one of his notoriously chaotic parties tonight.

“I can’t,” she told Conor. “James is coming home tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? I thought he wasn’t coming home until the summer.”

“Well,” Catherine shrugged. “He changed his mind. He’s home tomorrow. And so I don’t want to be wrecked in the morning. I’m meeting him early at the airport.”

This was not true; James was once again getting a lift home from Berlin in the cab of a lorry, and he had written to Catherine and the girls saying that he would make his own way to Baggot Street when he arrived, probably sometime in the early afternoon. It shocked her a little that she had told this lie so easily just now, and so readily, without having in any way planned it or decided that it was necessary; she blinked at Conor, feeling a little breathless, worrying that he would pull her up on it, that he would expose her dishonesty and, worse still, the motive behind it. Which was—because Catherine did not know—which was what, exactly? Why had she felt the need to make up a story? Why had she felt the need to disguise the extent of her excitement about James’s homecoming, to throw Conor off the scent of the preparations she wanted to go home and make? Because he would laugh at her? But Conor always laughed at her, and she liked it—but no, she realized, this time she did not want Conor to have the opportunity to laugh at her. This time there was something that she really did not want Conor to know. This time was different, she realized, watching him; this time was something somehow truly private.

“I just can’t come,” she said apologetically. “I’ll go to the next one.”

“Go to whatever parties you like, Citóg,” Conor said, shrugging. Then something seemed to occur to him. He frowned. “Here. This doesn’t have anything to do with you and Rafe breaking up, does it? This guy James coming home?”

“Rafe and I broke up because we’d run our course. We had nothing in common. And anyway, you know James is gay. I told you that.”

“Yeah, I know, I know, your precious gay friend. You’ve mentioned that. Once or twice.”

“Shut up,” Catherine said, laughing, but she could not suppress a wave of unease; James was unaware that Catherine had, over the course of the last term and a half, outed him to several of her college friends, none of whom he had actually met. It had just happened; it had just come out, so to speak, when she had been telling people about her friend the photographer in Berlin, and about how brilliant he was. Drink had usually been involved, and she had always felt bad the next morning; but then, it was not as though James was
not
out. He was out to Catherine, out to Amy and Lorraine, out to his mother—but still. It was something she had yet to tell him, the fact that people like Conor and Zoe knew. It was something which would have to be almost immediately addressed, given that she was so much looking forward to bringing him onto campus this week and introducing him to everyone. It was a bit of a problem, probably. It was not something, for instance, that she had mentioned in her letters to him. She felt her stomach twist with anxiety, and she must have winced, because Conor looked at her more closely.

“What’s up?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Not having regrets about old Rafey?”

“Jesus!” she burst out. “Why don’t
you
shag Rafe, if you’re so obsessed with him?”

“Now, hang on,” Conor said, holding up his hands. “I mean, I’m glad you’re getting your own Private Idaho back again, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to be lumped in with him.” He jerked his head towards the girl he had come with, who was now lingering in front of the Marilyn piece. “I’m laying my pipe the way any man with eyes in his head would.”

“You can’t say that!” Catherine spluttered, her heart slamming in her chest. He laughed, and she stared at him, feeling confused.
Could
he say that? Was that an insult to James? She thought so, but she could not be sure—much of what Conor said to her, to anyone, could be perceived as an insult, if you decided to see it that way; but surely it was not just about
deciding?
She felt she should know; she felt she should, on this question, be so much clearer, so much more solid. It was not as though Conor had a problem with gay people; he had nodded almost respectfully when Catherine had told him, one night early the previous term, about James. He knew gay people himself, he had said; there was a guy he had been to school with who he was pretty sure about, and obviously a few people in his theatre class.
Obviously,
Catherine had said in response, feeling the surge of pride she so often felt when she talked or thought about James, about how close she was to him. But now, here, in this moment, should she be standing up for him? Should she be angry on his behalf? She was glaring at Conor, trying to get a handle on him, and he was grinning back.

“You know it makes sense, Citóg.”

“Oh, fuck off, would you, Moran,” she shot at him, turning pointedly back to the soup cans, and he laughed again, and he walked away.

“Give him a kiss from me,” he said, as he went.

James was coming home early. He had planned to stay in Berlin until June again this year, and possibly even over the summer, but he had not made it that far. He had made it up to Christmas, and he had made it through January, but a week ago Catherine had had a letter from him, telling her that he had had enough. He had had enough of Berlin, and he had had enough of working for Malachy, and he missed Dublin, and said that he wanted to take photographs there again, and because he missed the flat on Baggot Street, and missed Amy and Lorraine, and because he missed Catherine. He missed Catherine most of all, and most of all he was coming home because he missed Catherine. Catherine knew that. James told her that in his letters; he had told her that in every letter since the end of August.
I miss you. I miss you so fucking much. I miss you all the time. I miss your voice. I miss your company. I miss your God-awful jokes. I miss your obsessions with ridiculous men. I miss talking to you and listening to you and sitting with you and bursting like the Milk Tray man into your room like I did that very first morning. I miss you. I mean it. I miss you. I miss you all the time.

And Catherine said the same to him.
All the time,
she wrote in her letters,
every single day
—and that was not lying, because every single day, Catherine thought about James, and every single day there was at least one moment when she wished he was with her, and almost every single day, she added to her latest letter to him. There were weeks when she sent him more than one letter, and there was one week, soon after Christmas, when she got three letters from him, each as long and detailed as the next, but it was still not the same as actually having him with her, and she told him that; she told him that all the time. Email was more immediate, but James did not have much access to Malachy’s computer, so they did not tend to correspond that way—and anyway, with email you did not have the heft of the pages, the life of the ink woven tight into the paper, rushing across it, a thing that had come directly from the other person’s own hand. Or from the pen in their hand, which was almost the same; which was almost like touching them for yourself.