Tender (6 page)

“Oh my God,” Catherine said.

“Dirty fucker.”

“Jesus.”

He glanced at her. “I hope I’m not shocking you.”

“No!”

“Talking to you about Italian prostitutes and you trying to eat your toast.”

“I’ve finished my toast,” she said, a little too brightly; she sounded like a toddler, she realized.

“Well, then,” James said, stretching his arms high. “Let’s retire to the parlor, shall we?”

The sitting room was huge and high-ceilinged, with cornices and corner moldings and a big front window; it was the flat’s only remnant of the grandness which must have once been in evidence through the whole house, a Georgian three-story over a basement, with stone steps sweeping up to the front door. Now the girls rented the ground floor, and two other flats upstairs held what seemed, from the noise levels, a combined population of about twenty people, and downstairs in the basement lived a couple in their thirties, who complained whenever the girls played music too loudly and who acted like martyrs if, on a Monday morning, they had to wheel the other bins out for collection as well as their own.

Duffy, the landlord, was a thin, bald man from somewhere in Westmeath; he drove a black Mercedes and always wore a suit under a shabby raincoat. The rent was due on the first of the month, but he called for it whenever he pleased, and he expected it to be waiting for him, sitting in cash in a little wooden box on the mantelpiece. When he came, he looked around the rooms to make sure that everything was in order, checking the oven, checking the shower, checking in the bedrooms with an air of long-suffering forbearance.

“You’d want to keep that tidier, now,” he’d say, pointing to some corner of a room, some mountain of clothes or tower of dishes. “It’s not nice, now, to see girls not looking after a place like that.”

Catherine had been nervous around him at first, but had taken her cue from Amy and Lorraine, and now she talked to him the same way they did, in bored-sounding monosyllables that provided only the barest minimum of information. Duffy had been pleased to see Catherine move into the room which had been occupied by James; he had not, he had told them, liked to see a “young fella” living in among girls, and he had not, anyway, liked the look of this particular young fella.

“And he couldn’t find work in Dublin?” he had said, when Amy and Lorraine told him that James had gone to Berlin. “Well, and I suppose he couldn’t. The getup of him. I doubt one like him will get on any better out there, either.”

“Prick,” Amy had mouthed to Catherine across the room.

Now James was checking the rent box for cigarettes; he found none there but came across a packet of Marlboro on the bookshelf. He lit up and took the armchair, kicking his Docs off.

“It’s good to be back here, I have to say.”

Catherine, settling on the couch opposite him, nodded. “I know the girls will be glad to have you home.”

“Can’t wait to see them.”

It surprised her, the little twinge of jealousy she felt hearing him talk about Amy and Lorraine this way; she had only just met him, for Christ’s sake. And yet she knew what it was, why it made her feel somehow wistful, hearing him talk that way: she herself had drifted away from her schoolfriends, the girls who had been her closest confidantes not even a year ago, and she often envied Amy and Lorraine the way they had remained so close. And now here was James, someone else they had remained close with, and beside the three of them—even though Amy and Lorraine were not yet here, even though it was just her and James—she felt her outsider status very keenly.

“Berlin must have been cool, was it?” she said, wanting to change the subject.

“Cool,”
he said, imitating her. “Yeah, it was grand.”

“And did you like your job?”

He smirked. “You sound like one of my aunts.”

“Very funny.”

James gestured over to Catherine for the ashtray, which was on the floor under the couch. “Ah, no,” he said, as she passed it over to him. “I did. Old Malachy is as odd as bejaysus. But the work is interesting. Certainly a lot more interesting than anything I’d have a chance of getting here.”

“How did you get the job?”

He shrugged. “I wrote to him.”

“Wow.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Well.”

“And what do you do?”

“I assist, Catherine,” he said, arching an eyebrow. “Which means I do everything. Well, Malachy presses the shutter. Most of the time.”

“Amy says he’s pretty famous. I haven’t—”

He glanced at her. “You haven’t heard of Malachy?”

She shook her head, the blush pricking her cheeks again. Why had she said that? She should have kept her mouth shut and just let him talk; there had been no need to expose her own ignorance like that. But James looked delighted; he was laughing to himself.

“Poor ol’ Malachy would take to his bed for a week if he heard that. He thinks he’s on every college curriculum going.” He took a drag of his cigarette and exhaled a thin plume. “There was a piece of his in a group show at IMMA this year, with Wolfgang Tillmans. You didn’t see that?”

She shook her head. “I’m always meaning to go to more stuff at IMMA.”

“Oh, well. And he had a thing at MoMA too, though I presume you didn’t see that?”

Catherine opened her mouth to reply, but he talked over her.

“And in September we start getting ready for a big show in Madrid, at the Museo Nacional, and then I think Rome, then Tokyo.” He frowned. “No. Tokyo first. Tokyo in February. That’ll be a fucking nightmare.”

“Do you get to go to all these places?”

“Oh, no. I’m just a studio assistant. He has special slaves to go traveling with him.”

“That’d be
amazing
.”

James winced. “I’d take being on the road with yer man in the lorry over Malachy any day, to be honest with you.”

“Oh, right,” Catherine said, with a laugh that quickly slid into nervousness, because James was regarding her very closely now. He was stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray, and staring over at her, and he was smirking slightly, and he was looking her up and down. He nodded to himself.

“Hmm,” he said.

Catherine twitched; her left leg shot out in front of her as though a doctor had tapped her on the knee. “What?”

“No, no,” James said, as though she was mistaken about something. “Just thinking.”

“Thinking about what?” she said, sounding breathless.

“I’m just trying to think how our Malachy would do you.”

She lurched sideways, as though he had made a grab at her, and he burst out laughing.

“Oh, I love seeing what people’s self-consciousness looks like,” he said, grinning. “Everyone reacts differently when you point a camera at them. All I had to do with you was mention the idea, and you nearly went through the wall.”

“I did
not
.”

He squinted. “Still. I can see how he’d do it. Dead on.” He framed Catherine with his hands. “And very close up. Close enough to see your pores.”

She shook her head vigorously. “I don’t like—”

He waved a hand. “Nothing to do with it, what you like or don’t like.”

“I hate close-ups,” Catherine said. “I always have spots, or blackheads, or something. And my teeth.” She clamped her mouth shut.

“What’s wrong with your teeth?”

She shook her head.

“They work, don’t they?”

She shrugged.

“You can chew things?”

“Obviously I can
chew
things.”

“Anyway. He’s not interested in people being beautiful. That’s not what old Malachy is about. So you can rest easy.”

“Thanks very much,” she said, almost sullenly; she did not like the way this conversation was going. Had he just insulted her? Had he just implied that she was ugly?

“You’re welcome,” he said, flashing her a smile. His own teeth were not that great, actually; a bit crooked, and quite yellow. She was suddenly very tired, looking at him; she found herself wishing that Amy or Lorraine would come home now and take over with him; that one of them would come back to relieve her. He filled her with curiosity, but at the same time, there was only so much of this kind of conversation that she could handle with anyone she didn’t know well, especially with a boy. She was getting better at it after a year of college, but it was still so difficult for her, having to come up with things to say and then having to come up, immediately, with ways to answer; she felt it like a physical weight. Now, for example, as he sat there, lighting up another of Amy’s cigarettes, what was she supposed to say to him? Ask him some more about Malachy’s photographs, what they looked like, probably, but she did not trust herself to do this properly: she could not be sure of having the right words. He’d said portraiture. He’d said abstract. There had been some photography in her Twentieth Century course, but she had clearly not paid close enough attention. Are they sad, or are they serious? she thought about asking, but that sounded so simplistic; she imagined James giving her some lecture about the irrelevance of emotion. Were the people Malachy photographed naked? That seemed like something she could ask, maybe, but then that was probably a question that would be asked only by someone who did not understand art at all, someone who was, basically, perving on the idea of naked people.

James pushed out a long sigh. “So, Catherine.”

She swallowed. “So,” she said, making a last, desperate grab at a possible topic with which to divert him from whatever it was he was going to say to her. But nothing came. She nodded, as though accepting her fate.

“So,” he said again, winking at her. “Any fella?”

A sort of dull queasiness washed over her, like a trace of the hangover she had just about shaken off, but it was nothing to do with booze, this feeling. It was to do with something else, and there could be no denying that she had walked herself right into it. This guy, this guy she did not even know, except from a photograph, except from some drawings which were, come to think of it, still under the mattress of her bed; she had let this guy in—or, more precisely, she had let this guy let himself in—and she had got up to talk to him, and she had drunk tea with him, and she was sitting here, now, watching him smoke, and she was wearing these ridiculous shorts that she never wore, that exposed far too much of her legs, and her shirt was not even properly buttoned, and so of course he thought she was up for it; of course he did. She cursed herself. How was she supposed to talk herself out of this corner? She stared out the window, to the oblivious blue sky. From the armchair came a pointed throat-clearing. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him wave.

“Hello?”

“Sorry,” she said, glancing back to him. “Sorry, I heard you.”

“So that’s a no?”

She swallowed. “It’s just not something I really have time for at the moment, being in a relationship.”

He blew out another plume. “Ah, sure, who’d have you? The state of your teeth.”

She stared at him in disbelief. “Oh my God!”

“Ah, sure, you’re as bad as Shane McGowan, Catherine, let’s face it. Worse again. Half of them broken. The other half rotten.”

“
Fuck
you,” she said, sitting bolt upright. Her heart was thumping. “Fuck you, you fucking redhead!”

He threw his head back and laughed in huge, heavy peals, his throat long and exposed, his mouth open as though he had turned his face up to the sky to drink in the rain. He roared with laughter. He thumped the floor with the heels of his hands. He inhaled hard, and he dropped his chin, his eyes tightly closed, looking as though he was trying to steady himself, and then he was off again. He could almost have been crying. As soon as that thought struck her, Catherine could not stop seeing what he would look like if he actually was crying; could not but see him in the grip of a sobbing fit. It was so strange. She had never seen a man cry. She was not seeing one cry now, either, she had to remind herself, but still. She felt a weird thrill at the sight of him; a squeamish sense of staring where she was not supposed to stare. When he finally stopped, gasping for breath, sort of moaning, as though it had all been too much for him, this torture she had put him through, she had forgotten what it was they had even been talking about.

But James had not. “Oh, Catherine,” he said, shaking his head. “Catherine, Catherine. Your teeth are lovely.” He was picking up his cigarette; he gestured, now, with it up and down the length of her. “The whole lot of you is lovely. Sure the fellas must be queuing up for you.”

“No,” she said vehemently, and then instantly worried that this was the wrong answer. “I mean…”

“Oh, come on.”

She decided to take a different tack. To sound less available.

“Well,” she said, feigning hesitancy, “I suppose I have spent the year messing around with someone, but it’s nothing, really. Nothing worth talking about.”

“Messing around is good. We like messing.”

“No, really, I don’t even mean that kind of messing around. I don’t know what I mean, really. I don’t mean anything.”

“O-K,”
James said slowly.

“No. I mean, it’s just someone. It’s nothing. Nothing happened. It’s no one.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think you should say any more without the presence of a lawyer.”

“Fuck’s
sake,
” said Catherine now; why had she even needed to bring Conor up? She was such an idiot. She was not to talk about Conor. She was not to make an embarrassing situation even worse.

“What’s his name?” said James, tipping his ash.

“Conor.”

He shook his head. “Not a good name.”

“No,” she said, still cringing.

“Forget him.”

“Good idea.”

“We can’t have Conors going about the place. Conors are barred from this establishment now. Conors are now the outcasts of society.”

“I feel better already,” she said, laughing, and strangely enough, she realized, it was true.

“Very glad to hear it,” James said with a solemn nod.

“And you?” Her voice jumped high on the question, worrying about the territory into which it might be pulling her, but she had to ask; it was only polite to ask, after he had shown an interest in her love life, her whatever it was.