ABOUT A MONTH after the funeral, Tom comes home as usual and he slings his coat into the sofa and sets his briefcase down, then he comes over to the dining area, working his tie loose, taking off his jacket, hanging it on the back of a hardback chair; he mooches over to the island to pick a piece of fruit from the bowl, and I think, It never happened, Liam never died, it is all the same as it ever was. Instead of which, I say, ‘You’d fuck anything.’
‘What?’ he says.
I say, ‘I don’t know where it starts and where it ends, that’s all. You’d fuck the nineteen-year-old waitress, or the fifteen-year-old who looks nineteen.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I don’t know where the edges are, that’s all. I don’t know where you draw the line. Puberty, is that a line? It happens to girls at nine, now.’
‘What are you talking about?’ he says.
‘Or not to your actual fucking. Of course. But just, you know, to your desire. To what you want. Is there a limit to what you want to fuck, out there?’
I have gone mad.
‘Jesus Christ,’ says Tom.
He plucks his jacket from the chair and heads for the front door, but I’ve got my bag and I’m there before him, scrabbling for the latch.
‘You’re not leaving,’ I say.
‘Get out of the way.’
‘You’re not leaving. I’m leaving. I am the one who is going to the fucking pub.’
I have the door open now, so there is a pathetic piece of push and shove in the porch-Hello, Booterstown! Tom, realising he is about to hit me otherwise, lifts his hands in the air. And there’s my answer, I suppose, to the question of his impulses and his actions, and the gap between the two. If I wanted to see it. Which I do not.
‘You can get the girls out in the morning,’ I say.
Because this is where all our grand emotions end up, at who does the pick-ups and who does the porridge-at least it used to, until I gave in and tried to save my marriage by doing the lot. Christ, I could get bitter.
‘What do you mean, “the morning”?’
I look at him, very hard. He lifts his hand to his lip, as though there might be something stuck there, which gives me the half a second I need to get over the threshold and back away from him down the drive.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
And I go to the Shelbourne, on my credit card.
This is a mistake.
The place is full of people having a good time. They sit and drink and talk and laugh. They all seem bursting with it-whatever it is. With the whole business of being themselves. That guy Dickie Kennedy is drinking in a corner, and I remember the story about how he got his wife for ‘deserting the family home’. And he also got the home.
I should be wearing my light green tweed skirt, tight across the thighs-that would show them. I should be sitting here in one of those posh wrap dresses. This is what I think about, on the brink of my marriage (or is it my sanity) in the Shelbourne bar-I think clothes would make a difference.
I sit and sip a gin and tonic from a heavy glass, and I realise that there are a limited number of ways for a woman like me to go.
Two years ago, I had a letter from Ernest. He was writing to tell me that he was leaving the priesthood, though he had decided to stay with his little school in the high mountains. And his bishop might have a few things to say about this, so he had decided not to tell his bishop-he was, in fact, telling no one except friends and family (but don’t tell Mammy!) that it was no longer ‘Father Ernest’, but just plain old ‘Ernest’ again. Once a priest always a priest, of course-so he wasn’t exactly telling lies by keeping his mouth shut. ‘I have no place left to live but in my own heart,’ he wrote, meaning he would conduct his life as before, but on privately different terms.
And I thought this was the stupidest stuff I had ever heard until, sitting on a stool in the Shelbourne bar, I wondered what might happen if I just carried on as usual, told no one, changed nothing, and decided not to be married after all.
And I wondered how many people around me are living with and sleeping with and laughing with their spouses on just this basis, and I wondered how sad they were. Not very, by the looks of it. Not sad at all.
The last time I saw Dickie Kennedy was out in his amazing house in Glenageary. It must have been after Rebecca was born. And God he was a savage. ‘I see Brian’s got his hands full,’ he says, after some poor woman smoothes her skirt over a plump backside, because there seems to be no way she can reverse out of the room. We sit and listen to this stuff, and we eat mushroom risotto, followed by hake in a bright green sauce. The food is very good. Emer, the woman who made it all, has skin thickened to a hide by too much sun and too much cream. I am drawn to the V of her top as she shrugs, to see the whole business move and crease. She asks me some questions, and they are good questions, and I answer, and so the dinner proceeds to everyone’s satisfaction. She is really quite witty. She gets a bit drunk. She tells a story about a woman we all know who took off her top in Dickie’s office-the ugliness of her, you have no idea, the underwear-he came home shaking. And we all laugh. And then we go home.
Even Tom, in the car afterwards, gives himself a little shake, like he can not believe the contract that was being offered to us, just there.
‘What was all that about?’ When I get back from dropping off the babysitter he is sitting in the living room, making his way through a bottle of whiskey, in the dark.
Or maybe this was another night. For a while, all those nights were the same.
‘Do you want the light on?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Are you coming to bed?’
Here we go, again. Always after a few drinks, but sometimes even sober, we play the unhappiness game; endlessly round and round. Ding dong. Tighter and tighter. On and on.
‘No, I’ll just sit up a while.’
‘It’s up to you.’
‘Yes.’
Push me pull you. Come here and I’ll tell you how much I hate you. Hang on a minute while I leave you. All the while we know we are missing the point, whatever the point used to be. I know what it is now, though, because upstairs the baby shouts in her sleep. I move to go.
‘Thanks,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Thanks for staying with me.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
‘No. Really.’
Or some version of the above-we rarely shout, myself and Tom, we just hate.
‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ I say.
And one night-it might even have been this night, after the hake in green sauce, and Brian’s plump wife, and the ugly woman in the bad underwear, and all the winning and the losing-Tom takes the cigarette out of his mouth. He holds it up, high under my chin, and he scrunches it in his fist. The smell, when he opens his hand, is small and terrible.
It clears my head.
The thing is, if I go up to Rebecca and kiss her, she will be happy. If I sit on the arm of the chair and kiss Tom, he will not be happy. So I stay with him for just a moment more, in the singed smell of his self-disgust. I hold his skull against my breast. I do this until Rebecca’s wailing grows to the exact pitch that pulls me to my feet, every time. Then I go.
It was the children that did for us, at least for a while. I think he stopped hating me after I left work. Of course, Tom would say he never hated me, that he loved me all along. But I know hating when I see it. I know it, because there is a part of me that wants to be hated, too.
There must be.
Anyway.
It did get easier over the years, but it never really did get fixed.
I thought about this, as I sat in the Shelbourne bar-that I was living my life in inverted commas. I could pick up my keys and go ‘home’ where I could ‘have sex’ with my ‘husband’ just like lots of other people did. This is what I had been doing for years. And I didn’t seem to mind the inverted commas, or even notice that I was living in them, until my brother died.