Tender (22 page)

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Emmet. Of
course
I wasn’t going to sleep with him. Thanks very fucking much.”

“I’m not
saying
you were. I’m just saying, it could have been worse. And it sounds like he was an arsehole to you.”

“No, not really,” Catherine said. “
I
was—I mean,
Whitman,
for Christ’s sake.” She let out a low wail. “Oh my
God
.”

“You’ve lost me now, Reilly, just for your information,” Emmet said, glancing back to his screen.

“Why did I have to open my mouth?”

“Ah, relax, Reilly. I’m sure you’ll listen to the tape and it’ll be grand.”

She looked at the Dictaphone as though it was an active grenade. “I’m not fucking listening to that,” she said. “I can’t even look at it.”

He grinned. “I’ll gladly listen to it, if you want me to.”

“You must be joking,” she said, clamping a hand on it. Then something occurred to her. “Here, you better not write about this in your column.”

“I’ve better things to be writing about,” Emmet scoffed.

“I doubt it,” Catherine said miserably. “I doubt you could come up with anything better than me sitting on a couch beside Michael Doonan and saying ‘So! Sex! Do you like it, do you?’” She shook her head. “Basically.”

“Well, when you put it like that.”

“Anyway,” Catherine shuddered. “I’m going home for the weekend. I’ll see you next week sometime. If I ever come back to this city.”

He looked at her, surprised. “Oh. You’re going down home?”

She nodded. “Yeah. It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday. Don’t you know that?”

“Well, make sure to tell your mother all about your affair with whatshisname. That’ll make a nice present.”

“I hate you.”

“Here,” he said, leaning over his desk for a sheet of A4 paper; he folded it, before scribbling something on each side. He handed it to her. “That’s for your mother.”

In blue biro on one half of the page, Emmet had drawn a vague squiggle, and on the inside, in block capitals, he had written
HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY, MRS. REILLY. YOURS, EMMET DOYLE
.

“It’s a card,” Emmet said.

“You are actually insane.”

“Did
you
get your mother a card?”

“I’m getting her one at the train station.”

He clicked his tongue scornfully. “Shop-bought. You’re a great daughter.”

“You’re nuts!”

“At least I don’t go around propositioning sixty-year-old men,” he said, turning back to his computer.

“You shouldn’t proposition anybody, Doyle,” she said, trying for wryness, and she waited for his retort, but to her discomfort, nothing came; he kept looking at his screen, clicking now a couple of times on his mouse. Maybe he hadn’t heard her.

She thought about him as she walked to the train station. She had thought about him plenty; she had thought about him for weeks. She had not gone out with him since the night of the Stag’s, not that the night of the Stag’s had been a night of going out with him, in any real sense; it had just been a drink, no matter how excitedly Zoe might insist otherwise. And yet, it had not been just a drink. The way he had looked at her today when she had walked into the office; the way he had looked at her every time they had seen one another since that night. Something was different. He blushed, but then again it seemed to her that he always blushed; that his blush was just something he had not been able to get rid of, and that it dogged him all the time, not just when he was talking to her. It was not the blush; it was the way he sort of…wavered. A waver that, when they saw one another, came into his eyes. That same hesitation that she had noticed that night. As though the entire space around him was somehow taking a breath; and, in truth, she felt it in herself too, felt herself taking a breath more deeply when she saw him, felt that she had, now, always to get something settled in herself, put aside in herself, before she could actually talk to him.

And when she had said that she was going down home for the weekend, had she imagined it, or had he reacted to that? Had he sort of blinked more quickly, or done, anyway, something rapid and distracted with his eyes? And was she going
mad,
counting and parsing the blinks and the eye movements of Emmet Doyle? Had she lost it completely?

Oh, Catherine, Catherine,
James responded in Catherine’s mind now, because of course it was James she was addressing, James to whom she was writing an imaginary, long juicy letter, as she went through all of this, as she turned it all inside out and back again. It was James she was moaning to, James to whom she was presenting the ever-more-convoluted elements of her case, and James who was absorbing it all, and James whom she was causing to frown thoughtfully, and James whom she was causing, now, to crease up with laughter, delighted with her latest drama, full of attention for this, the latest fine mess she had got herself into.

Except, of course.

Except.

And at Connolly station, as she walked towards the platform, she passed the bench where on another Friday evening, she had sat pressed up against James, listening to
OK Computer
. But it wasn’t “Exit Music” she was hearing now, as she went through the gates; it wasn’t the mumbling, monotone Yorke singing of escape, singing of a chill. It was the jangled nerve endings of “Lucky,” its wary promises, its leaden warnings:
I feel my luck could change.

J
ames’s new flat was on Thomas Street, near O’Brien’s, and also near the art college, which explained why the flat had been laid out as a studio by the previous tenant; what little furniture there was in the big sitting room had been pushed back against the walls, and the floorboards were speckled with paint drops. James’s landlady had not wanted to rent it to another artist, but he had persuaded her, promising that there would be no paint, and no smell of turpentine, and no smell of hash, either, and no loud music.

“My God, James, you’ve signed up to a very boring existence,” Aidan said, laughing. James had invited a few people around for a housewarming dinner; Amy and Lorraine and Cillian were there, and Zoe, and Lisa, the girl Catherine had met in the PhotoSoc office, and Aidan’s friend Liam was due to call in on his way home from work in the Buttery. James had cooked a huge Bolognese, and they had eaten it sitting around the room, James and Aidan and Cillian on the floor, the girls on the kitchen chairs and the couch. It was James’s second week in the flat now, and he had made it his own; his books were on a low shelf in the corner, and on the walls he had tacked up dozens of postcards and magazine images of artworks he loved. Warhol’s blue-toned Jackie O was up there, and a shot of Vito Acconci panned out under the platform in
Seedbed,
and one of Walker Evans’s pinched-faced sharecroppers, though James had explained to Catherine that that image was not actually Evans, that it was a piece that another artist, an American artist, had made by taking a photograph of the Evans. There was a postcard of a Matisse nude, a woman, one leg slightly bent, her hands clasped in front of her crotch, the space behind her seeming to explode with dark browns and blues. There was a whole row of Wolfgang Tillmans photographs, all of beautiful, thin people staring at the camera, their expressions as hard, in their way, as that of the Evans sharecropper; in the largest of these images, which was in black and white, a guy with a shaved head stood in front of a wall from which graffiti seemed to have been ineffectually scrubbed. He wore ripped camouflage trousers, and Doc boots, and a shiny bomber jacket of the type that Catherine could remember boys on the school bus having worn a few years ago; his arms were folded and in one hand he had a cigarette, and in the other what looked like a small stack of magazines for sale. His cheekbones were sharp, one of them marked by a mole. His eyes were two dark, unreadable dots.

Also there was one of the William Scott still lifes of pans and bowls—Catherine had told James about Scott’s work in one of her letters—and a postcard of a piece by a Japanese artist—she had forgotten his name—which consisted just of a date,
April 12 1975,
painted in white on a black background, and a photo of a photographer making a daguerreotype, and a Cartier-Bresson portrait of Samuel Beckett, his face a clutch of long, deep wrinkles, his mouth pursed, his eyes sharp and fixed on something out of frame. Also, a postcard of three young black boys, naked, running, kicking and splashing into the sea. Their thin arms were outstretched; the soles of their feet were lifted to the camera, smooth and calm. Catherine was staring at them, her mug of red wine in one hand, when James came up behind her, putting his arms around her waist and resting his chin on her shoulder. She jumped at his touch, but in the next moment settled back against him. She felt the same flood of guilt that she felt every time he hugged her now, every time he cuddled her and nuzzled her in the way it came so naturally to him to do; she felt the wretchedness of wanting him not to stop doing it, not to detach from her again and open back out to a space which was shared with other people. The others, chatting and laughing on the other side of the room, were paying them no heed, but Catherine felt as conscious of their presence, and as bothered by it, as though they had been standing here at James’s wall of pictures as well, pulling at him, pulling him away from her. She closed her eyes, willing the feeling to pass, to lift off her, like an insect or a virus, and decide on somebody else instead; she felt exhausted from the turmoil and shame of carrying it with her everywhere, at every moment.

“Hello,” James said softly, sweetly, and he tightened his grip around her. “Why are you loitering over here like you’re up to no good?”

Her heart pounded. She picked an image at random and pointed to it. “What’s the story with this one?” she said, the sentence not even sounding like a question, her words sounding limp and uninterested and tired.

But James did not notice. He responded happily and eagerly, telling her everything he knew.

Later, Lisa from PhotoSoc persuaded James to show them some of the photographs he had been taking himself over the last couple of weeks, and some of the photographs he had taken in Berlin, and he resisted for a few minutes, but then caved, grinning and shaking his head, going to the drawer where he kept his folders. Cillian, who had had more wine than anyone else, cheered loudly, and Amy and Zoe cleared a space in the middle of the floor so that James could lay the photos out for everyone, crouched and kneeling around him, to see.

The first few were from Berlin, and as James started to leaf through them, Catherine hung back a little, because she had seen them before; they had been taken in Malachy’s studio, of Malachy, potbellied and bearded, at work, standing behind a huge camera on a tripod, and of the people who were posing for him; several of them were naked, which caused Cillian to cheer again, and to elbow past Aidan for a look at the women. James’s angle on Malachy’s subjects was, by necessity, not the angle for which the subjects, gazing towards Malachy’s lens, were prepared, and the effect was disorienting; often, the faces were hidden, the limbs jutting out at odd angles. In a photo which Catherine particularly liked, a woman had, while twisting herself in a pose for Malachy, spotted James with his own camera, standing well off to the side; he had captured perfectly the moment of surprise and self-consciousness on her face. James did not comment on the photograph this time, but turned to the next, which was of another naked subject of Malachy’s, this time a young man, dark-haired and striking, one arm raised high over his head. His legs were long and muscular, his buttocks high; from the side angle, his dick was a small, protruding blob high on one thigh. Like the woman’s, his gaze was to the side, latched on to that of James’s camera—but, unlike the woman, he did not look shocked or embarrassed. He stared.

Catherine stared too. She had not seen this photograph before. James must have added it to the folder only recently; it had not been there when he had shown her his Berlin photographs in Baggot Street.

“Who’s that?” she said, crawling forward, but at the same moment Cillian, who was on his hunkers beside her, let out another cheer.

“Wahoo, Jimbo,” he said, clapping James on the back. “You were fucking
well in
there, what?!”

James smirked. “I don’t think so, Cillian,” he said, going to turn the page, but Zoe put out a hand to stop him.

“He’s bloody
gorgeous,
” she squealed, craning her neck to look at the photograph more closely.

“Who is he?” Catherine said again, a jump of urgency in her voice now, which James seemed to catch; he glanced at her cautiously.

“That’s Florian. A young friend of Malachy’s.”

The way he had said
book
that afternoon looking at the guy in Hodges Figgis was the same way in which he had now said
young friend
—as though it was something despicable, something laughable, something the very taste of which he wanted to wash out of his mouth. As Cillian and Zoe and the girls made further comments on Florian and James’s photographing of him, James went again to turn to the next sheet, but now something came to Catherine, the realization of it hitting her like a wall of sound, and this time she was the one to reach out and stop him.

“Wait a minute,” she said, her fingers tight around his wrist. “You mentioned Florian to me in a letter, didn’t you? Wasn’t Florian the guy who asked you out to the pub?”

The reaction to this from the others was loud and delighted; Cillian roared as wildly as though he was at a football match, and Zoe and the girls made noises like police sirens, and Lisa laughed, and Aidan sat back on his heels and watched James, grinning, seeming almost proud. But James shook his head hurriedly, irritably, and swatted Catherine’s hand away.

“No, no,” he said, moving to the next image. “That wasn’t Florian. You must be mistaken. You must be mixing up the names.”

“I’m
not
mixing up the names,” Catherine said, offended. “I wrote to you about Florian. I told you that you should have gone with him. I told you that you—”

She stopped, feeling suddenly almost dizzy with confusion. Was this the same Florian? How many guys with that kind of name, after all, could there have been? Had James said anything more about him in that letter? Could he have told her about taking his photograph, taking his
naked
photograph, for Christ’s sake, and could she have missed it, skimmed over it, ignored it? She had, the uneasy truth was, skimmed over plenty in his letters, looking for the funny parts, the parts that were responses to her own life, the parts she had preferred to read; but could she possibly have missed such a detail? No, she did not think so, did not believe so; which meant that James was lying to her. And what did that mean? How much else, then, did that mean James was concealing? And yet, all that he was denying was what Catherine knew to be the case, which was that this guy—this gorgeous, naked guy, his skin glistening, his muscles taut—had asked James to come for a drink, and James, in James’s nervous, frightened way, had stupidly declined. And Catherine had chided him for that. So what was she feeling so awful about? What was this panic, this—it felt almost like anger—rushing through her? As James moved to another folder now, seeming to have decided not to risk showing any more of the photographs from Berlin, as he started to show the new Dublin photographs, the strangers from Grafton Street, the familiar faces from college, what Catherine was reeling with felt absurdly like a sense of betrayal. What was wrong with her? She got to her feet, stumbling across Aidan as the others turned to him, laughing and exclaiming, in reaction to James’s sullen, sharp-eyed portrait of him; standing, frowning, against the gray stone of the Campanile, his hands thrust into the pockets of his army jacket, Aidan looked like the guy in the Wolfgang Tillmans photograph.

“Brilliant shot,” Lisa was saying, nodding approvingly at James.

“Smokin’,”
Zoe was saying, poking Aidan in the ribs.

“Oh, now, he was a right handful in front of the camera, I can tell you,” James was saying, which of course just made Cillian whoop and cheer all over again, and it occurred to Catherine that for her own sake, for her own sanity, she should really call it a night and go home to Baggot Street, to bed, and that maybe everything would be clearer in the morning, that maybe in the morning, everything would be OK; but no, the last thing she could do, the last thing she was able to do, was to go out of here and leave everyone else with James. What she wanted, rather, was for all of them to go, and for the two of them to be left alone together, and then maybe she could stay over, snuggled up warm and cozy beside him. Guilt and dismay accosted her again at the thought of this, or rather at the realization that she had, once again, allowed herself to be so sucked in, rendered so wistful and so hopeful and pathetic, by that thought; but it was there. It was in her. What was she supposed to do with it? she thought, watching as the door to the hall opened and Liam walked in, guitar case on his shoulder, six-pack of beer in his hand. What was she supposed to do with it, when it was not even something she could understand? From the middle of the room, James was coming, smiling, to greet Liam, hand out for a shake, then arms around him for a hug, and the horrible bird of jealousy thrashed against the walls of Catherine’s chest again, and she poured herself another mug of awful, bitter wine.

And it was later that Catherine understood.

It was after several other conversations that had made her feel rattled, and baffled, and dreadful; a dreadful, horrible friend. Lisa, for example, telling James that there was a new exhibition by Ed Dunne coming up at the Gallery of Photography, and that she could get him an invitation to the opening, and James saying that they could go together, and happening, at that moment, to catch what must have been an injured look in Catherine’s eye, and saying, abruptly,
We’ll all go!
And everyone had agreed, and Zoe had said that they’d make a night of it, but that had not made Catherine feel any better—that had only made Catherine feel worse, because she wanted it to be only her and James who were going, her and James, glossy and sophisticated at an art opening—she would wear her black wool Oasis dress, the one she had worn to the English Ball—and she did not want any of the others there to get in the way of that, to diffuse that glow. And then Liam, talking for a long while about Dunne’s photography and what he thought of it, because of course Liam, being from the North, had an opinion, because Dunne was from Belfast originally and his work was always in some way about the Troubles; Liam had plenty of opinions, and they were smart and they were reasonable and they were, at moments, quite angry—he did not think that Dunne, who had lived in America for years, had a right to pontificate, as he put it, about things he did not have to live with, or to worry about personally, or to experience. Liam’s uncle, it turned out, had been killed early in the Troubles, shot at a checkpoint close to his home in Tyrone—and surely there was no worse feeling than the feeling Catherine had at that moment, of hating Liam for having a story which made him so interesting, so much the object of James’s fascinated, sympathetic attention. What was wrong with her?

“Do you think the talks up there at the moment will come to anything?” Zoe asked him, and Catherine hated her, too, for being so earnest and worried about things that affected other people, not them, and for the way that James, in response to this, frowned, and looked, also, worried, and launched into a long exchange with Liam about whether the deadline just imposed on the peace talks at Stormont could really bring anything about. Catherine watched him as he spoke, and she thought about how, when she had watched him working earlier that week, taking photographs of Zoe on the lawn outside the Pav, she had felt jealous not just of Zoe but—this was insane, this was intolerable—almost of his camera; of the deep care it was getting from him, of the locked, intense focus. She could not understand herself. She could not
believe
—