Thomas Murphy (16 page)

PS. There never were any snakes in Ireland in the first place. Patrick was full of shit. Maybe my dark memories are fiction, too. You never know.

PPS. Tonight I plan to go out in the courtyard and sing
“What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” I've done it before. Lovely tune. Do you know it?

PPPS. I'm giving a reading at the 92nd Street Y next Wednesday night. Want to go? With me, I mean.

YOU NEVER CRASH
if you go full tilt. Sure. But one morning you look around, and you're the only driver on the road. You can say that has nothing to do with your attitude. You are Mario Andretti at any age, and you go go go whether others are there or not. And there are no more cigarette butts in the ashtrays, no more ashtrays, or big laughs and not a drop taken where once it was taken, and you thought you heard a cough but it was a dead limb cracking and falling, well then, all you have left is the books to stave off the obvious. That, and a few ripe berries.

Through the Christmas season, TCM shows a montage of the people in movies who have died during the year. Why do I weep at the sight of Greer Garson, Ronald Colman, Lana Turner, Elisha Cook Jr., Van Heflin, Butterfly McQueen, and Burgess Meredith? I knew them not. Yet they were part of my life, of all our lives. They made an impression. Burgess Meredith, not croaking and creaking in
Rocky,
but rather Burgess Meredith in
Winterset,
under the Brooklyn Bridge, young and yearning, with an old, crackling-cellophane voice way back then. But it's not just the movies we saw these people in. They went full tilt,
you see. People in movies have to go full tilt, because their lives are compressed into 90 minutes or 120. And you realize that they too, the gone, surveyed the scene at some point in their lives and saw all the others gone. They left the theater alone, and hunted for a cab.

What I love about being a poet is that I see the world as a poem—a thing that lives between the lines, between the nodes, as Sarah puts it. Trouble is, those spaces increase as life increases. Mystery compounds mystery. And then one afternoon you want to say to someone, Look at this. Will you? And as you say that, you glance to your right, and Oona's gone. And you glance to your left and Greenberg has gone too. And Máire and William soon gone. Not dead, thank goodness. But gone. They become part of the space. They add to the invisible mass. Do I want to be the last man driving, only to assess the empty world as existing between the lines?

There's much to say for space, much to say for my da's gone leg, except when there's nothing to contrast it with. Burgess Meredith. Whenever they invoke
The Twilight Zone
's greatest hits, they trot out old Burgess, wandering the wasteland city in search of peace and quiet and something to read. When he crushes his eyeglasses underfoot by mistake, that's supposed to be the tragedy of the tale. But the tragedy comes before that, when he wanders around and no one is there. It wasn't a small tragedy—poor Burgess not being able to go into seclusion with his
beloved books. It was the greater tragedy. He could not see other readers. Maybe I ought to join AARP after all, and enjoy the many benefits of membership.

My hands loosen their grip on the wheel, and I shoot forward into the empty supermarket, and out again into the empty stadium, and out again. I drive to Bethlehem, Paris, Akron. Not a soul anywhere. I drive to Tinian, whence the
Enola Gay
took off for sleeping Hiroshima. I drive the runway, now weeds and midges, built extra-long for the weight of the bomber. Nothing there. Nothing in the hospitals in Galway. Nothing in the swimming pools in Mamaroneck, or in the Belnord courtyards, either one. Nothing in the New York Public Library, not even Burgess Meredith. I blast through the stacks, going a hundred, maybe two. Look. No hands. Go Oona. Go Greenberg. Go William. Go Máire. From here you look like berries.

In memoriam, everyone. Much love.

AFTER THE READING,
we go to a bar on Third Avenue, with photographs of dogs covering the walls. I describe some of the dogs to her. She asks how they are dressed. We chat about this and that, but not about Jack. I'm relieved. I think she is, too. She says she liked the reading, but thought the Q&A afterward was a waste of time. Always is, I tell her. A novelist friend of mine deliberately times his readings to end within ten seconds of the hour allotted, so
as to eliminate room for the Q&A. Even so, I went to one of his readings where a guy got his question in within those ten seconds. He asked my friend how to get an agent. Some of the greatest Q&A moments occur at the 92nd Street Y, I tell her, because Jews are so crazy. They're Irishmen, I'm certain of it. Ireland, a lost tribe of Israel. Same gloom, same jokes, same fight in 'em. Same fixation on one point of view. I tell her of the time I finished a reading of poems at the Y that I, for one, thought moving and heartbreaking. A bearded guy in the front row raises his hand, and says, I saw you on TV. Not knowing how to answer that question, I scanned the room in search of another. From the back, a woman calls out, I saw you on TV, too. Then the first guy pipes up again. On TV, he says. I saw you on TV.

Crazy kikes, I say. Crazy micks. I love those words, says Sarah. I know you're not supposed to say them. But they have such life. Coons. Wops. Yes, I say. And most are one syllable, giving them a special kick. Gook. Hebe. Slope. Jap. Chink. We go on like that, trying to come up with all the delicious slurs and verbal no-no's forbidden in polite company, all one syllable. Cunt. Fuck. Cock. Tits. Which reminds me, she says. Why are you men so taken with our tits? It goes back to our babyhood, I tell her. We long to suckle. Bullshit, she says. It's because you're such an uninteresting gender. Even blind as a bat, I can tell when a man is staring at my tits. Am I staring at them now? I ask. (I am.) Of course you are, she says. If I wanted to make
all men happy, I'd wallpaper their houses with pictures of tits, the way these walls have dogs. Bitch, I say. Dick, she says.

DEAR MURPH,
I've been involving you in a plan about light this morning. Most blind people are able to make out light from dark. I cannot. The condition is called NLP, no light perception. Been this way from birth, which means that all I know of light comes from what others tell me, or what I read. You could say, I've been in the dark about light. This may exaggerate the importance of light in my mind. You know? The thing one cannot attain? Not that I have a quarrel with darkness. Sometimes I'm bored with it, the way anyone might be bored with one's hometown, from which he may never travel. But the mere suspicion of light, the mention of it, is enthralling to me. I picture sailors in a black storm at sea, suddenly spotting the beam from a lighthouse. Or the proverbial tunnel with the light at the end of it. I've listened to movies in which a blind person has his sight restored by an operation. The bandages are removed, and oh my! Someday, Mr. Poet, I'd like you to tell me what light is like, so that at last I might see it in my darkness. Think you could do that? As ever, Sarah.

RIDING FAST
in
the darkness, past a rotted bole, I came to a rock wall. It stood no higher than three feet, an easy jump for me and the horse. We had taken jumps higher than that lots of times, higher and deeper, without hesitation. But on that tarnished-silver afternoon, with the sun in hiding and the sky turned black, the horse refused. At the approach, instead of gearing up the way horses do, it veered off to the side of the wall, and we swung away.

Which one of us refused to take that jump, do you think? In his book, Professor Dodds uses this very situation as an example of the unconscious at work. But long before I read Dodds, I lived the riddle. Who faltered? The horse or the rider? If I say it was I who refused to take the jump, the explanation is rational. At that particular moment on that particular afternoon on the island of Inishmaan, I made a conscious judgment that whatever past experience may have told me to the contrary, we were not going to clear that wall.

But if it was the horse that decided to veer to the side, then something wholly irrational may have been at work in that field. The animal had become the instrument of my subconscious, and for no discernible reason—no premonition of danger, nothing like that—it decided to go its own way. The horse had refused to take the wall not out of fear, but in rebellion to something hidden from us both, and never to be understood by either of us. From such impulses madmen murder, poets write, and old fools fall in love.

GO AHEAD,
he
said. Plant one on me. Standing next to me at the bar in At Swim-Two-Birds is Jack, out of nowhere, with his hat in his hand, and his face a sea of gloom. Do it, Murph. I deserve it. Give me a shot to the kisser. And he juts out his big jaw. What do you want, Jack? I turn away. To apologize, he says. It's not me you need to apologize to, boyo. I know, I know, he says. I tried to tell her how sorry I am in a voice mail, but . . . Sarah quoted it to me, I tell him. It could not have been more pathetic. Ya see? he says. Ya see? Pathetic. I don't even know when I'm being pathetic. But it's always the same with Sarah, Murph. I can't tell her about important things, the things I feel, 'cause I don't know how to relate to her. She's better than I am. Smarter, educated. No matter what, I screw up. He sits beside me, uninvited. Why don't you have me apologize for you? I ask. That way she'll be sure to know it's bullshit. How's your colon cancer, by the way, Jack? Acting up, is it? Look, he says. I know I did the wrong thing. But I wasn't really lying to you. I've never had the nerve to talk to Sarah. And Christ, I couldn't tell her about Peggy Ann. I mutter, Peggy Ann. So I came up with this harebrained scheme involving you. All wrong, I do know that. But the reason I did it, Murph, that was the truth. I don't have the words.

Boyo, you may have made a career spouting this kind of horseshit, I tell him. But don't expect me to go along, and clap you on the back. Let me be clear, Jack. I don't
accept your apology. Not because you hoodwinked me. I can handle myself. But you hurt a wonderful woman, who has it hard enough without being saddled with a lying, cheating fuck-off who thinks he can talk his way out of any jam he makes. Jesus, Jack. Look at yourself. You say you don't have the words. Fuck, man. Words is all you have. What you lack is a sense of basic decency. He turns away.

Give me a break, Murph? A little slack? There are two sides to every story, you know. I roll my eyes. It's no picnic living with Sarah, he says. I mean, she's wonderful, like you say. But she's hard, too. There's no give to her. And what sort of give are you looking for, Jack? Permission to butt-fuck every Peggy Ann who winks and hikes up her skirt? Now, that's not fair, Murph, he says. You don't know Peggy Ann. No, boyo. But I know Sarah, a little at least. And what I know is that all she asks of life is a straight shooter. She cannot see what's going on around her. She's vulnerable to every drunk driver, every careless kid on roller skates or a bike, every pickpocket and exuberant joker who gesticulates as he babbles along the street and bumps into her and says, Hey lady, why don't you look where you're going! That is what the world is like for Sarah, Jack, which you, more than anyone, ought to know. So, it isn't too much to ask of the man who's married to her, who has promised her his love and protection, to treat her as if she exists.

Jesus, Murph. You sound as if you know her better than I do. I signal Jimmy for another. Let me ask you something, Jack. What sort of woman did you think you were getting in Sarah, when you married her eight years ago? You must have recognized how smart she is, how plain damn good she is. How kind, he says, I saw how kind she was, is. I guess I needed kindness. You don't know anything about me, Murph. Actually, Sarah knows very little herself, because I'm ashamed. Ashamed of my folks who were blackout drunks, and the Quonset hut we lived in near the Navy Yard. And the screaming all the time. And the banging on the walls. And the filth that never washed off. And Mr. Porty next door, with the greasy hands, who gave me a dollar for every blow job. The only thing I could do well as a kid was swim. In the summers I escaped to Riis Park, and when I got big enough they trained me as a lifeguard. That's how I got out of the Quonset hut. I swam out. The lifeguard board located me in East Hampton. I had enough dough for a room of my own over Starbucks, where I could smell through the floorboards the coffee I couldn't afford. But at least I was out. And then, early one morning, there was Sarah, walking down the beach like a visiting angel. And I knew soon as I saw her, soon as she knocked me on my ass, that if I could be with a girl like that, I might be saved. And what about Sarah? I say. What did you think you were going to give to your angel? What were
you going to do for
her
? He shrugs and looks down at the floor.

Oh Christ. What am I here? The Grand Inquisitor? I could grill this dumb slob from here to Sunday, and nothing would come of it. Why am I bullying this jackass? I should know by now, people are not to be explained or reformed. We are what we are, what we'll always be. I never saw a change worth warm spit in anyone past the age of three. And the truth is, Jack isn't a bad guy. He's a battered guy, who never received love. And I'm telling you, if you don't receive love, if you've never received love as a child, you're a goner. Half the kids I grew up with on Inishmaan were Jack—not necessarily brutalized like Jack, but treated as surplus furniture, as junk, just as their ma and da had been treated before them. In their case, it wasn't parents who didn't love them. It was life itself.

A writer I know was working on a memoir that, he told me, surprised him the deeper he got into it. He had always resented the killing coldness of his parents. For all his life, he'd hated them. They should not have had children, he said. But you know, Murph? he told me at this very bar. The more I wrote about my folks, this sin and that, I realized that all they were is people, just people. Flawed, sure. Destructive, unconsciously cruel. All that. But in the end, just people. That was Jack—flawed, destructive, unconsciously cruel, yet human. As a poet, I am supposed to understand such things. As a
man, it's more difficult. In the silence between us I find myself resisting the impulse to give Jack a comforting pat on the shoulder.