Excerpt

IT
WAS A LIE THAT BROUGHT MARTIN SLOANE TO A picture house on
O'Connell Street one night in the fall of 1936. (This was how I
began, finding my way into his story, trying its doors.) He was
eight, and it was the first time he'd ever gone anywhere by
himself. It was a twenty-minute walk from his house and by the time
he reached O'Connell, night had fallen and the wide boulevards were
blazing with electric light. The hotel-lined street was busy with
horse-taxis, news-hawks, chestnut carts; its caf? storefronts full
of customers. Martin imagined that back at home the windows of his
house were glowing orange with safe nighttime light.

He walked toward the cinema, the heavy coins in his pockets enough
for the movie and a bag of steamed nuts. No one noticed him:
although only a child, he was simply a part of what he walked
through. A city dweller. Head up, cap clenched in one hand, he went
down the middle of the thoroughfare, on the grassy strip that
separated the two avenues. At that moment he thought his happiness
complete, thought that it must have been like the happiness of
being older, the way he imagined anyone might have felt, walking to
the Grand Central Cinema at six o'clock at night to see the early
show of The Informer.

In this he was in league with his father, who the previous week had
walked over the river, in the middle of the workday, to see the
picture. He'd come home red-faced with excitement. You Irish with
your bogeymen, Martin's mother had said.

They must see it, said his father.

Not these children, Colin. She is too impressionable, and he is too
young.

The papers had argued back and forth over the film's merits, some
saying it was scandalous and a temptation, others that it told a
sore truth. It was the story of an Irishman, the drunkard Gypo
Nolan, who'd sold out his friends to the British. Now it was as if
the Mail and the Herald were arguing in the
Sloane kitchen over dinner and it soon became a forbidden topic of
conversation. But his father had certain conversational gifts. He
convinced Martin's mother that her objections were about picture
houses in general.

No, Colin, she said, it is about this film. You mean to say, said
his father, that you don't object in principle to the
viewing of motion pictures? If they are wholesome, then no.

I don't believe it, Martin's father said, staring at her in
disbelief. I thought for certain you were against the pictures in
general. Not at all, said Martin's mother, happy for common ground.
Send him to see O'Shaughnessy's Boy, down at the Grand
Central. It has that nice Mr. Beery in it.

And so, the following Sunday night, Martin's father gave him
directions to the Grand Central Cinema, at the bottom of O'Connell
beside the river, and there, Martin paid his halfshilling. And,
following his father's instructions, he went in to the parlour
beside the one showing O'Shaughnessy's Boy where people
were gathering for the six-o'clock showing of The
Informer.

When the lights went down, rain began to fall in the street. Martin
sat in the darkness, the voices of the actors intermingled with the
quiet pattering hiss outside the thin cinema walls, and he was
transported by it all, by his illicit visit to the movie hall, by
the sensuality of Gypo Nolan's drunken sin. The movie ended in
heartbreak, the big man trying to outrun his fate, and when Martin
went outside, the city had been transformed into mirrors of light.
In the Liffey, the centre of town shone upside down in a cold
radiance. He could see the buildings in the slickened car windows,
on the street, against glistening rainjackets passing along the
sidewalks, as if the whole place had sunk under the sea.

Martin's father was waiting in the car with the motor running in
front of the cinema. He waved through his window, swiping it with
his forearm so he could see out. In the car, his father handed him
a towel. So? he asked.

It was good, Martin said. His father pulled out into the
slow-moving traffic. The horses drove down through the streets with
their heads lowered. Were you frightened?

No. But I think we shouldn't have lied. I suppose we could leave
the country now, said his father, and he laughed to himself. This
was one of the things Martin did not understand about adults, this
laugh he sometimes heard. Let's not call it a lie, though, his
father said. Let's call it a secret. Now they were driving up
Berkeley Street. His father's favourite sweet shop was here, and as
they drove past it they could see the windows were fogged and there
were people inside. We could both use a cup of chocolate, his
father said. To warm up.

Donnellan's was popular with everyone, and Martin's father kept his
face averted from the other customers. He ordered two mugs of
chocolate and a fruit bun for them to share, and when he came away
from the register, a table was open in the window. They sat, and
his father asked Martin to tell him the whole story of the
film.

But you've seen it, Martin said. You already know how it goes. I
have seen it, said his father. But I want you to tell it
me, the way you remember it.

Martin thought back to the beginning of the story and began telling
it, and as he told it, it was as if he were seeing the film all
over again, except that the Grand Central was in his mind, his mind
was the cinema. He told of Gypo Nolan's betrayal of his old friend,
turning him in to the British for twenty pounds. The shock of
watching the betrayer spend the money on drinks, and fish and
chips. The way he teetered back and forth between remorse and
pride. Then the trial, the lies Gypo told to cover himself,
endangering even a neighbour, and afterwards, the mad run from
justice. How it had electrified Martin to watch it, even the horror
of Gypo, dying in the church at the feet of his victim's mother.
Frankie, your mother forgives me! Certainly, in the end,
Gypo had regretted his actions, but regret is not enough for the
people around you, Martin had thought, people have to see that
crime is paid for. In this way, life was not like religion, in
which, as far as he understood, sorrow in your heart came
first.

That was it, his father said when Martin was finished. He nodded
and fingered his chin. That was very good. Now, tell me what it was
about.

About? Martin thought for a moment, not sure of what to
say. It was about not lying.

Stop worrying about that, said his father. If I say something's
okay, it's okay. Now what was it about? Martin chewed on a
piece of candied peel, rolled the bittersweet scrap around in his
mouth. It was about being kind to others, he said.

It was, a little. Something else, though. He could come up with
nothing. He felt his face begin to burn and he tried to think what
Theresa, who was quicker of mind than he was, would have said. He
knew she would be thinking of what their father might have wanted
to hear, and after another moment, Martin said: It was about you
shouldn't drink when you're flush.

No, Martin. His father looked disappointed. He tipped back the end
of his chocolate and picked his hat off the table. He left a
coin.

The two of them walked back to the car in silence, and Martin
searched his mind for the hidden meaning of the film, but he was so
distracted by the anxiety of disappointing his father that he
couldn't think. Finally, driving up past the canal, his father
spoke quietly.

Would you say it was about having a home? A home, said Martin,
agreeing gratefully. Gypo doesn't merely turn in a friend, Martin.
He gives up the only thing he belongs to, thinking he will go to
America with his blood money. But instead, he remains, and he is
lost in the only place he has ever belonged. That is as good as
dying. But he does die.

Yes, said his father, mercifully, he dies. They turned down to
where they lived. For his whole life he had passed these houses,
walked over the stones in these streets. Every night, the lights in
the distance would appear between these same houses, slanting down
alleys. He had never known any other place than this. His father
had always said that every star had its place in the sky, every
person theirs on Earth. Except you could not take a star out of the
sky. People, though, he'd said. People vanish from the places they
should be, people go to darkness all the time. Outrunning their
fates. And that had been Gypo Nolan's lot.

Molly was still holding the box called Grand Central in her hands,
staring at it as if the movie were playing deep inside it. How was
that? I asked Martin.

Just about perfect. Except the candy store was called Goldman's.
She reads me like a book, he said to Molly. She laughed. I can't
see you as a book.

He turned back to me. And the Grand Central had little pinlights
stuck into their ceiling, so that when the room went dark, you
could see above you a little pretend night sky. He raised his hands
above his head and waved his fingers toward the ceiling.

Just like the one you'd see on a clear night over Dublin, I said.
Yes, said Martin. Just as if the roof had been lifted off. Molly
put the box back down on Martin's workbench. She laid it down so
gently it didn't make a sound. Did your mother ever discover he'd
let you go?

He got away with it, he said. It wasn't the worst thing. What
was?

Martin raised his eyebrows at her, surprised that someone who'd
known him only eight hours would ask such a question. Molly leaned
against the bench, waiting him out. In the years I'd known her,
she'd always been the kind of person who could expect answers to
her questions, no matter how brazen. That was her effect on people;
resistance was futile. But after a few moments of the two of them
pointing their mandarin smiles at each other, she lowered her head
and her black hair fell over her eyes.

It's been a great day, she said. But maybe I should let you both
go.

Martin moved around her and started collecting the boxes she'd
pulled down from his shelves. Maybe Jolene can run you to the bus
station, he said.

She watched him slide the artworks back into their cubbyholes
—Pond, Linwood Flats, The Swan. Did your father ever see
these? she asked.

He pushed Crossing into place. It was a box that put the viewer in
the sky over a ship crossing the ocean. A woman's face was painted
on the deck, and where the smoke from the stacks washed across the
glass front of the box, a man's face seemed to hover. I wish he
had, he said. Well, at least he's in them. It's not a bad place for
a person's soul to end up.

No, said Martin, pushing the last box flush against the others. I
suppose it's a good place to be.

CHAPTER I.

THE SWAN, 1950. 6" X 14" COLLAGE. PAPER, SEQUINS, FOUND IMAGES.
PRIVATE COLLECTION. DEEP IN A FOREST THE SNOW IS FALLING. BEHIND
THE BARE TREES, A SWAN DRIFTS ACROSS A FROZEN POND.

SOME PEOPLE BELIEVE IN A CONNECTED WORLD IN which every one thing
is cognate with every other thing, the bell tolling for you, for
me. In this kind of world, orders are revealed within our own
order, our beginnings woven with other beginnings, endings with
endings. In this way, life is seen to rhyme with itself. For a long
time this was my own religion.

But now, if I go all the way back to my own birth, I find only
disconnected memories. A dusty shag carpet, a writing pad by a
phone, an orange wall. I think I can recall an early dream: bedroom
curtains opening on a carousel? Later, my mother in gardening
gloves, smelling like soil, or my father undoing her shoes for her
when my brother was in her stomach. A bananaseat bicycle, a bumpy
road between two towns, jackdaws creaking in the air over
gravestones. Some time later, a piano brought down from Syracuse,
the one my mother played as a girl.

But this childhood narration doesn't rhyme with anything. Not even
with itself, for what could a dusty carpet have to do with
gardening gloves, or a piano with gravestones? So many times in
thirty-five years, I've known the feeling of that little girl I
once was being erased. The girl followed by the young woman who was
then given the hook for another, later, woman. I feel only a rough
kinship with them, like they are co-conspirators in what has become
of me. A lifetime of versions. But the little girl? She's gone. I
don't have her. It's only when you're old enough to understand that
the past is gone forever that you begin to store your own life, and
like most children, at least as I recall, I thought I would be
eight forever. Or eight and taller, eight with hips, eight with
boyfriends. Never anything but eight.

I probably didn't start keeping track of my own life until I left
my childhood home. Then I'd lie awake in my dorm bed testing to see
if I could remember how all the doors in the house I no longer
lived in opened. Which ones swung easily on their hinges, which had
a sticking point you had to tug it through. Which doorknobs were
loose, which stiff. The folding closet door in my bedroom that slid
open on a track and then came off the track and swung free. I
thought to myself, once I'd forgotten the doors of my childhood
home, my childhood would truly be over.

Martin Sloane was fifty-four when I started writing to him,
fifty-six when we became lovers, now that's the thing that seems
shocking, the raw fact of that. Before then, I had a clear vision,
so I thought, of the kind of person I would eventually love. It
would be someone a little like me. Like me, but with improvements.
Someone more open, someone a little smarter, a little stronger
emotionally. But someone who'd fit in back at home, should I have
ever wanted to return. After meeting Martin, I went down my list.
He seemed more open, but I couldn't really tell. He was smarter,
but emotionally stronger? Did I really want that tested? Did I want
to lose that test?

The problem of what other people would think was more serious (I
dreaded the gossip) but in the end it was more easy to deal with.
By the time I couldn't live without Martin, it didn't matter what
anyone thought.

The first time we met in person his face surprised me. Although he
was thirty-five years my senior, his face was smooth, his short
mussed hair jet black with only flecks of silver. (I was to have
more grey in my hair by the time I turned thirty.) His nose was too
big for his face, and his eyes were as dark as his hair. His face
made me think of the busts of dead men, the illusion of living eyes
made by holes in the stone. So that from one angle, they would seem
pitiless, and from another, they'd spring to life.

He'd just walked off the bus in Annandale, where Bard College was.
I was waiting with a car I'd gotten from Rent-a- Duck, a rusted-out
VW bug with a pipe for a gearshift and a steel plate over a hole in
the floor. He was lugging his artworks in a plain old garbage bag,
and I rushed over to him and forced him to put the bag down and let
me stack the artworks, so they could be carried, tower-like.

Just dump them in the back, he said. Let me be in charge of them.
You're a guest now. If anything breaks, I'll fix it. We'd gotten to
the bug. This is a great little car, he said.

They were out of Jaguars. I put down the boxes gingerly to unlock
the trunk. The lid had to be propped up with a stick. Then he began
plunking them in, like they were groceries. He put the last one in
and took the stick out, and the lid slammed shut. I'd watched him
with paralyzed wonder.

You can't treat them like they're permanent. He went around to the
passenger side. They'll get ideas. He tried to put the seatbelt on,
but the business end of it had been melted into a glob in some
previous disaster. This is going to be an adventure, he said
happily.

I started down the country road that wound between towns, one side
a river, the other a forest. Can I work the shift? he asked. What
do you mean? You say shift, I change gears. Do you know how to
drive? No. But when I was just a kid, my dad had a Saloon car and
once we drove it from Dublin to Galway and part of the way I sat on
his lap and shifted the car. So I have that part down good. Did you
travel a lot with your family? Just that once. So, you tell me
when, all right? You're not sitting on my lap. I can do it from
over here.

Shift, I said. And so we drove the eight miles back to Bard, me
calling the shifts over the labouring engine, and Martin trying to
get the gear into the right position, until we were on campus and
he jammed it in reverse as I was trying to get him to gear down. I
heard something big and metallic drop down and smack the road and
the car leap-frogged over it and we both flew out of our seats and
hit our heads on the roof. The car came to rest in some grass. We
sat there panting as people I knew gathered around.

Well, this is Martin Sloane, I told them, getting out. He's going
to have a show at the Blithewood. Martin was still sitting in the
passenger seat, looking at his palms, dazed. My friends helped him
out, introduced themselves; some of them knew he was coming, knew
how hard I'd worked to get him to town. Then everyone took a box
and we all crossed the field to the gallery, the glass fronts
catching and reflecting the light at odd angles so the little crowd
looked like a broken mirror spreading across the green. Martin
glanced back at me and laughed.

You having fun now? I said. You think we'll see any of those again?
You obviously don't care. He made an Oliver Hardy face and
shrugged, then got in step with me and linked his arm in mine. I
like your friends, he said.

I tightened my arm, my heart whacking against my ribs, and I pulled
him against my side. I like you. But I crashed your car. That you
did.

Bard College was close enough to my hometown of Ovid but far enough
away that no one from there could walk to it in half a day. The
campus was a pastoral green hidden in the woods. Grassy patches,
whitewashed buildings, a chapel in the trees. Towering maples
clenched in brilliant vermilion down the main drives. The big
athletic field with its unmown edges reeking of springtime through
the summer and fall.

I'd been assigned one of the smaller dorms at the edge of the
playing field, more a cabin than a dorm, with an angled rooftop and
a jumble of windows, called Obreshkove House. I was on the second
floor, with a window pointing out to the forest, where I sometimes
saw deer in the gloaming. Molly Hudson was my suitemate; she'd
arrived on the first day of school while I was out registering for
classes. She liked me, she later explained, on the evidence of my
bookshelf, and alphabetized her own books in with mine, a gesture
that touched me.

She was well prepared for college, and determined from the start to
run our social lives with ruthless efficiency. I've bought us a
little fridge, she announced on the day we met, in case we want to
have cocktails with the friends we're going to make. She opened the
door to the fridge to reveal four cocktail glasses frosting
underneath the ice-element, and beneath them a loaf of bread, a
small bottle of mayonnaise, and a single packet of corned beef. For
anyone who comes over peckish, she said.

I stood in the doorway, looking suspiciously on her good sheets and
her fabric-wrapped clothes hangers. How old are you, Molly?

Nineteen, she said. Today. Just squeaked into the class of '88. She
had no doubt that she was already the centre of a coterie that
didn't exist yet. Coming from a grief-darkened house (since the
death of my mother, almost ten years earlier, my father had
remained in a state of evergreen loss), I suddenly realized that a
bright room on the edge of a forest was the perfect coming-out for
me — a gradual emergence from sadness into a new life,
fronted by one of the daughters of Syracuse. Molly was enrolled in
a general arts program, but her father — an important
attorney in that city — had made her promise to declare law
as her major by the end of her sophomore year. They'd shaken on it,
a "gentleperson's agreement," she put it, and one she was to
keep.

I stood back in a kind of awe as I watched Molly adapt to the
rituals of freshman life. She joined clubs, started petitions, put
graffiti forward as an important grassroots expression of
discontent. (She reversed this position when she entered an
ecofeminist phase for three months in second year, declaring that
spraypaint was an ejaculatory rape of the environment.) Naturally,
she also began blazing sexual trails, ones I couldn't follow due to
an inborn shyness, and a rational bent of mind that was still
working over the mechanics of sex. While Molly was mapping
sensation, I worried where my eventual caring, expressive, gentle
partner would put his knees. A parade of paramours began tramping
through our suite as Molly (so I believed) methodically made love
to our freshman year in alphabetical order. The sounds of sex
— quiet, musical, desperate, or exquisite as they were
— became the general music of those rooms. She never seemed
to settle on anyone, which I took as a sign of incredible
impartiality, but she surprised me late one night with the sound of
her weeping. Moments before, I'd heard another of her lovers
quietly close the door on his way out. I crept into her room, my
housecoat cinched around my waist.

What did he do? He left, she said.

I went to sit on the end of the bed. The air in her room smelled
bearish. They all leave, I said. I thought you didn't like them
staying over.

I don't. She was holding a pillow tightly over her belly. But I
want them to come back. And with that, she lowered her face into
the pillow and started crying again. I waited, bewildered,
unaccustomed as I'd always been to giving comfort. I don't think I
was a cold person then, only that grief undid me. After a moment,
she raised her red-streaked face and gamely smiled. Men like to
leave me, she said.

At least they like you. I can't get anyone to look at me. Looking's
the problem, said Molly. They don't care about anything they can't
see.

I moved closer, tentative, and put my hand on hers. Then they're
really blind, I said.

I suppose that's the moment we became friends, rather than
roommates; the moment the future started to get written.

The first-year classes at Bard were like panning in a river: they
sifted people into groups, and before long it was easy to see the
aggregates forming: the athletics groups, the drama people (with
their little moustaches), the ghostly druggies, the frat boys. In
the ranks of the English majors, I wasn't sure where I fit in. I
was neither welcome nor spurned by my classmates, but this was only
because the rigours of reading left little time to develop social
graces, and many of us were lonely. Relationships of a kind sprang
up when you discovered someone in class held your opinion, although
you might only discover this in the form of a well-rehearsed answer
to one of the prof's questions in a room of two hundred other
English majors. "I liked what you said about The Faerie
Queen" would be a safe opening gambit, but on the whole, the
first-year English students were a raccoon- eyed, oily-haired
group, whose interests (at least through to December) were
restricted to epic poems declaiming the rewards of clean living.
Without Molly at cocktail ground-zero, I wouldn't have made any
friends that first fall.

I took up racquet sports in the hope of meeting people on my own,
and learned that panting and sweating was not the way to do it.
Then Molly decided to sign us up for sculpture in our second
semester. Mrs. Borovin, our teacher, arranged for the class to see
a sculpture expo in Toronto that March. I'd never been to Toronto,
even though it was only five hours north of Ovid, and I'd hardly
even had a sense of it or Canada. The country above us always
struck me as storage space, like an attic, so the revelation that
there was art there was interesting, although odd. I have no memory
of crossing the border in our old school bus, nor of coming into
the city. I don't remember the March weather, nor the look of the
people, or even what the buildings looked like.

The art was boring. Blotchy clay sculptures of men in motion, or
women with breasts so heavy the statues had to be braced to the
gallery wall with strips of metal. Mrs. Borovin stood us in front
of one dull bronze or miasmic fabric draped over steel mesh after
another, and talked the class through the basics of three
dimensions. I drifted away, and eventually into the street. There
was another gallery beside, smaller, with only a couple of what
appeared to be display cases on the walls. I was surprised to find
that the cases themselves were the artworks. Wood-framed boxes with
glass fronts behind which some antic arrangement of things gave off
a feeling of intense nostalgia. I had never felt anything from art
(so I realized then): I was more interested in the brush stroke,
the way the canvas was stapled to the frame, or the evidence of a
pencil line erased. But here, I was distracted toward another
place. The boxes contained bereft little worlds — a
sand-filled teacup, a broken clay doll. One (it appeared empty) had
a little drawer at the bottom with a jewelled handle, which, when
you opened it, revealed a handwritten story pasted to the bottom.
For the rest of time, it said, it was as if the little place
was getting smaller and smaller, although they could still see it,
a dot on the horizon. I closed the drawer and looked again
into the space above it, and finally saw, against a backdrop of
greyish blue, an almost infinitesimally small pebble with an even
smaller pine tree — carved out of the broad base of a single
pine needle — standing on it. Another box, embedded right
into the wall, featured a front made out of wooden slats, and
peering past them, I could see the backs of four birds — two
large, two small — in a miniature living room. It took me a
moment to realize I was looking down onto them from above, like a
god in their ceiling, their smooth brown forms among the furniture
a family settling down after supper. Another had a blue curtain
drawn shut over the contents, with handles coming out of the top of
the box to open them, but I was afraid to touch it.

The one I found hardest to turn from was a box on a pedestal, made
of glass on all sides, which was filled with a viscous blue fibre
draping down from the top. It was difficult to see what was
suspended in the middle of the space, and I had to stand for a
while on each of the four sides, collecting the visual information,
until it resolved into something identifiable. It was a mermaid.
Her body hung limply curved, her hair draped on each side of her
face, loosely falling into the depths, and her tail curving on the
other. I startled when I realized what it was. It was called
"Sleep" and I was overcome with greed. I wanted it like nothing I
had ever wanted before. It was like the way a lover hungers for the
body of the one desired: I wanted no one else to ever see it again
except for me.

I crept over to the man at the desk, palms sweating, heart racing,
and I told him I wanted to buy it. He folded his newspaper and
looked at me over it. I don't think you can afford it. How old are
you, anyway? What does that have to do with it? You can't just go
buying artwork like it's candy. If I can afford it, it doesn't
matter why I'm buying it. Tell me how old you are. Twenty, I
lied.

Well, come back when you're forty, and we'll talk. He returned to
his newspaper. I got out my purse and unzipped the billfold. I had
ninety dollars. I took the money out and went over to his desk,
slapping it down under my palm. That's all I have. You tell me what
I have to do. I already told you. Not for sale. I'm leaving a
deposit. Look, honey, you're not even old enough to vote where you
come from—

Excuse me, I said, but the voting age is eighteen where I come
from, and I very much plan on voting in the next election,
thank you very much.

Why don't you just take a program and vamoose, he said. I'll sign
it for you if it makes you feel any better. Why? Are you the
artist? No, I'm the gallery owner. It's as close as you'll get. He
shoved the money back across the desk.

I took one of the programs, then saw the show's manifest tacked to
the wall beside the door and took it down. There were a couple of
red dots beside some of the pieces, but "Sleep" was still unsold.
This says "Sleep" is $180. Ninety's enough to hold it, isn't it?
That's a typo. It's $1,800.

I stood in the doorway staring at him, then took the money out
again, folded it, and wedged it into a space between the doorjamb
and the wall. That's my deposit. I'll come back with the rest. And
I'm taking this. I waved the manifest at him as proof.

Daringly, so I thought, I wrote to the artist when I returned to
Bard. I told him about my experience looking at his art, plying my
adjectives, and I asked him to wrest, if he could, the thing I
loved from Mr. Sullivan. I suggested perhaps he needed someone not
quite so allergic to money representing his work. But Martin
surprised me by writing back and returning my deposit, saying it
was he, not Sullivan, who'd asked the gallery not to allow any
sales to individuals. He was skittish about private persons owning
his work; he wanted to be able to visit it.

This admission lit a fire under me, and I wrote him to say I still
wanted "Sleep," and he could come any time and see it. He didn't
bend, but he continued to write me, and over the period of a year
or so, I gradually forgot about the artwork that had so moved me
and began to want to see him. So I began to machinate a way for him
to come to Bard. I asked him to send some slides of his artworks,
and I approached a pliable curator at one of the campus galleries
with them, a wraithlike woman named Mrs. Vankoughnet. It was as
easy as that.

Done, I wrote back to him in October of 1985, You're due next
April. Now we should talk about where you'll stay. There are a
couple little hotels just outside campus, but since you'll probably
only come for the opening, why don't you stay in my dorm?
Obreshkove's an open easygoing place and you have a nice view of
the field and some big metal sculptures. My roommate says she'll
probably go visit her parents that weekend, anyway. You'd like
Molly, but she's quite a boy magnet. I showed her the slides, by
the way, and she likes your work too, so I'm sure she'd jump at the
chance of having a great Canadian artist sleep in her
bed.

Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm single. I just want you
to know in case your wife is anxious. What I mean is, I don't want
anyone to be uncomfortable with the fact that it's a single college
junior setting all this up. Anyway, I think people should be up
front. Is this too personal? So far, I should say, you've been very
adept at appearing quite personal in your letters but upon
rereading them, I can see you've actually told me nothing about
yourself. Is there anything to tell? I remember reading Flaubert
somewhere saying that you had to be orderly in your life so you
could be violently original in your work. If he's right, you must
be as interesting as sawmill gravy in person. Still, why don't you
tell me the basics? The name of your wife and children, for
starters? (If you have any...)

My uncle says I am being a mover and a shaker by getting you
down to Bard. Is that how you see it? Are Canadians like the
English? If so, I've been pretty pushy in terms of how you guys
are.

God I really like you. I was just realizing this. Your letters
get better when I reread them. I hope you will let me take you to
my favourite cake and tea joint when you get to Bard (although this
place is in Rhinebeck — a little hole-in-the-wall of a town
near here) and we will talk about all kinds of things. Last time
you wrote you said that you thought collage was a nostalgic
impulse. I think you're wrong. Can we argue about this? Kurt
Schwitters would laugh up his sleeve at you for saying that. His
collages are like writing letters. Letters are collages, aren't
they? Educations are collages, too. That's why they call it college
har har. The café I'm taking you to is called the Blue Chair.
They have chocolate chip cookies as thick as your fist. Write me
soon.

After crossing the field in a small army of hands, the boxes made
it safely to the gallery. Mrs. Vankoughnet seemed impressed with
Martin and shook his hand as if he were already important. She gave
him some documents describing the gallery's obligations to him, and
vice versa, but he wasn't interested in them, and two days later,
when it turned out he was to have signed them, they'd
vanished.

Bringing Martin to campus gave me a kind of celebrity that had
previously been Molly's, and I basked in it. For the rest of the
first afternoon, fellow students from the fine arts programs
followed us around like trained geese, asking Martin questions in
little embarrassed voices. No one knew how famous or unknown he was
(the truth was closer to the latter), but the fact of his being
from another country made him authentic in the eyes of students
who'd grown up in cow-towns all around the state. They formed a
semicircle around him, drifting back as we walked through
them.

Where do you get your ideas? I don't think I have ideas, Martin
said, and everyone laughed, as if he were joking. I don't, he
repeated. But, said one of the girls, there are ideas in your art.
I don't do it on purpose, said Martin. Are you a surrealist? said a
tall printmaker with a shaved head. No. Would a surrealist admit he
was a surrealist? Yes.

You idiot, said someone else. It was the Dadaists who went around
saying they weren't anything. The little crowd started buzzing. No,
said someone else, they admitted they were Dadaists! They all
pretended they didn't care about the art world, but they were soooo
big on making sure everyone spelled "Dada" right. Go ahead, spell
"Dada" wrong for me.

I pulled Martin away from them. Let's have supper somewhere else, I
said. I want one of those cookies you've talked about. We left the
freshmen behind, waving their arms.

I made him wait outside the dorm while I changed, then got into a
borrowed car in an agonized-over dress that rode up every time I
clutched. Keep your hands off, I said, then pointed to the
gearshift to clear up any confusion. I'd borrowed a car from a
friend who hadn't witnessed the fate of the other one. Martin sat
quietly in the passenger seat, his hands folded over his legs. For
the first time since he'd arrived, there was an uncomfortable
silence, an appropriate silence for two people who hardly knew each
other, and the feeling that I was out of my element briefly took
hold. Then I nervously started rambling, shooting in the dark for
subject matter that he might want to add his two cents to: the
benefits of small schools over large ones; the problems of teenage
pregnancy; some thoughts on the differences between Americans and
Canadians in which some ideas of the colour of currencies were
forwarded, and finally, a short tractate on cows and weather.

Finally he said, I'm not actually Canadian, as you know. I still
think of myself as Irish. You don't sound Irish, though. I mean you
don't have an accent.

I was convinced of the importance of not having one when I was
growing up in Montreal. But hiding it made me feel all the more
Irish. Like a man who gets home from work and puts on a dress. Huh?
I said. I just mean I wanted to fit in. Did you speak French?
Seulement un peu. I've always wanted to.

Funny, he said. That's what they say up there too. I took the turn
for Rhinebeck, and we drove down the town's little main street,
with its churches and gas stations. This looks just like where I
grew up, I said. A little blot with people living on either side.
He looked through his window and nodded. How long ago did you leave
Ireland?

Forty-five years, six months, fourteen days, and seven hours, he
said, then turned to look at me. I must have been trying to keep a
straight, sensitive composure and failing, because he laughed. It
was around forty-five years ago. I was eleven, he said.

We went into Bella Notte and the waiter brought us a wine menu
without carding me, so we ordered a bottle and toasted each other.
The scent of the wine filled my head like a sound, and after a
glass, my courage returned. Let's go back to this no-ideas idea, I
said. You really think your work doesn't mean anything? Well, it
must mean something, it's just that I don't think about it. I mean,
it doesn't matter to me. But aren't you interested in what people
see in it? No.

I tilted my head at him and narrowed my eyes. Okay, I challenge.
What?

It's what you say in Scrabble when you think someone's made up a
word. That made him laugh, and he covered his mouth, muffling the
sound. It was strange how he seemed at one moment completely open
and the next was concealing everything. The laugh had the effect of
looking like he'd been caught in a lie and I pointed an accusatory
finger at him. Aha! So you just don't want to talk about it. Not
so, he said. It's just that if I was any good with words, I'd put
it into words. But I'm not. So the way I feel is the way my work
looks, and that's its meaning, or as close as I can express it. And
what other people think about it is, again, a step away from what
it "means" because they're describing something, and— You're
no good with words.

Yes. He finally exhaled and looked down, smiling, and stared into
his soup. He looked fantastic to me, sitting there as real as
anything, with his almost-messy hair, his dark blue shirt open at
the neck. Sometimes, if he turned just right, I'd see a flash of
grey hair within his shirt. I felt like someone who'd suddenly come
into more money than she knew what to do with, except it's not easy
to find a place to stash excess feeling. I was also acutely aware
that many hours had now passed and I had yet to say the kind of
stupid, uninformed thing that was probably inevitable. The wait was
killing me. I said, I just want to let you know that I'm setting
some kind of record here for not acting like an idiot. And you
should probably, you know, make some allowance for me to put my
foot in my mouth, or something. You mean, you haven't yet.

That's right. It's been clear sailing, so far, believe it or not.
We laughed. I actually forget what we talked about after that. It
disturbs me that I could have lost even five minutes of that first
evening, that there is no witness to it. That's the marrow of all
our stories: the forgotten moments that could make everything clear
to our future selves (who are also busily losing the present). But
I do remember that at one point — I see empty plates in front
of us — he said, You'll understand what I mean one day.

You mean, when I'm all grown up? He held up a hand in surrender.
No, no, I didn't mean it like that. Are you actually worried you
could offend me? Well, I don't want to end up sleeping outside.
That could turn out to be good luck for you, I said and turned
scarlet, reaching for my wine.

After that, I can see his face, warmed from the heat of the wine,
can hear the music filtering through the little room from speakers
at the front. The way the room thinned out as the night went on. He
was just fine with words. He talked of old packaging and cartoons
and how people made early photographs; he talked about automata and
magic apparatuses, the old belief of the sphere-within-sphere
universe, which was the model of the cosmos that still appealed to
him most.

Concentric worlds, he said. Easier to keep track of everything. I
pictured those glassy spheres in the palm of his hand, and me in
the smallest one at the very centre. Curled up in the warmth
generated throughout the celestial realms by his hands.

It was late when I got us back to Obreshkove House, and the roads
between towns had been so dark that we were driving through the
stars. Martin hadn't seen a sky like that since before he'd moved
to Toronto and he opened his window and leaned his head against the
bottom of it to watch them.

I carried his bags into Molly's room and left them on the floor. We
stood in the space between the two bedrooms. Do you need anything?
I asked. No. I'm fine. He cruised along the bookshelves, stopping
and tilting his head here and there. You read a lot of poetry. You
don't? He searched my face. Why does it feel there's a right answer
to that question? Someone like you would appreciate poetry. It's
one of those things that seems to have made it out of the past. You
know what I mean? His face brightened. Did you hear that someone
caught a coelacanth in Lake Ontario?

A what? It's a fish, he said. An extinct fish. Someone caught one
and now they're not extinct anymore. I'm sorry, I said, but I think
I fell asleep for the half-hour there when we made the transition
from poetry to fish. You said poetry feels like it shouldn't have
survived, and yet it has. Mmm, I said. Something hidden in the
deep. Yes. A fossil record.

We stood there smiling at each other. An old language dusted off
for use among people again. He turned back to the shelves, browsing
the thin collections. Then glanced sidelong at me. Did you want to
go to bed?

My stomach flipped. Uh, god, I said, flustered. I leaned forward to
try to catch his expression, but he was squinting at something. I
don't know, Martin... That's fine, it's—

No, no, I said. It's just... I squeezed my eyes shut and
clenched my fists. Yes, I said calmly, I do. I took the book he was
holding out of his hand, tossing it onto a chair, and drew him away
from the shelf. My face was pulsing with heat, a delicious fear
flooding my stomach. I smiled at him, filled with anticipation.
Come on then, I said.

He just looked at me, smiling vacantly. I led him into the hall,
reaching blindly for the light switch as I passed it, flicking it
and dropping the apartment into darkness and then I pushed forward
into him, tilting my mouth up toward him, and brushed my lips
across his. My heart in my throat as I fumbled for the door to the
bedroom. We stood there in the threshhold of it, me pressing my
mouth to his, his face cupped in my hand, and feeling him... what?
You can kiss me, I said quietly, but he remained immobile, as if
the touch of my mouth had turned him to stone. What's the
matter?

It's just ... Oh god! I stepped away from him in horror.
You meant did I want to sleep. It's late, do I want to go to bed, I
must be tired. Oh fuck! Jolene, he said, his voice tight. Please
don't be laughing. I'm not. Turn on a light. No, he said. Just,
let's... Oh god, oh god, oh god—

We stood there in the dark, the sound of my heart hammering against
my shirt the only disturbance. I was certain we could both hear it,
like Poe's murderer hearing the heart under the floor. I'd had more
than my share of exquisite humiliations before, but never with
someone I'd actually liked. I imagined myself hurtling through a
window. I'm a complete idiot, I murmured.

No, no. It's okay. I knew it was just a matter of time before I
said something dumb. I would never have just come out and asked you
like that. I'm not that kind of person. I know. You're decent. I
tried to say it like it was an appalling thing to discover about a
person, especially at a time like this. I heard him laugh softly. I
don't want you to think that I—

It's okay, Martin. I probably should go to bed. Before I
accept an erroneous marriage proposal or something. Now he laughed
out loud and surprised me by gathering me into him and holding me.
Come on, he said. Why don't we stay up awhile and talk? I don't
want you to think—

We'll talk in the morning, I said, pushing away. It's fine. Honest.
I felt for the doorknob again, and turned it and slipped into the
room. Then stood there on the other side of the door, my face
burning, my hair burning, and stayed utterly still. It took me a
moment longer to realize I hadn't even shut myself up in the right
room: Martin's bags were at my feet. Stupid girl! Stupid stupid
girl! I felt nauseous with embarrassment, knowing I'd have to show
my face again, to go to the door beside this one. I could hear he
hadn't moved either. Martin...I whispered, what are you
doing?

I'm standing here. Uh-huh. I feel bad. You feel bad. You
just took me by surprise, Jolene. It doesn't mean.... He didn't
finish the sentence. What? What?

He didn't know how to put it. I would never have just come out
and said it like that. How would he have put it? I
put my mouth to the door and spoke quietly. Is this a
no-good-with-words moment, Martin? Mm, he said.

I opened the door and stood square in front of him. I don't want to
have a fling. That would be disgusting and I don't want people to
talk. I already like you a lot. Me too.

I stood there for a moment more shaking my head. My eyes had
adjusted to the dark, and I could see his face in the faint
greyness of the apartment, like something being reeled in from the
depths. I didn't want to risk a change of venue. I went and lit a
candle at Molly's bedside. She was one for candles, said it gave a
tinge of intimacy to one-night stands. I hoped it wouldn't be bad
luck for me. I sat on her bed, and watched Martin slowly come over
in the yellowy glow of the candle's light, his face planes of
shadow. He sat beside me and I felt his fingers touch down on mine.
We sat there and held hands. Is this more your speed? I stared out
into one of the darkened corners of the room, already tired
out.

Yes, thank you. Don't be embarrassed, Jolene. Me? Embarrassed? It's
nice to know when someone wants to be with you, he said. It stops a
person from worrying. And you were worrying. I would have. It
hadn't occurred to me yet. Thanks.

I do like you, Jolene. I liked you from your letters. I didn't know
if it was going to be okay to tell you that. Martin, my head's
exploding. I wanted to feel a certain way when I came here. How?
Welcome.

I pulled his hand up to my mouth and kissed it. Thank you, I said.
That's a good way to put it. You are. I held his hand against my
chest. And I'm glad we finally made it through that door. But I
have to tell you, I said, I'm feeling way unsexy right now. That's
only because an old fool almost ruined your evening. Not because
you're not sexy. He leaned down and kissed me underneath the ear.
Okay?

Okay, I said, but I don't think I actually made a sound.

We lay under the covers, drowsing. I pressed my face against his
neck and breathed him in. He didn't really have a scent, at least
not a scent I expected, the pleasantly sour smell of men, with its
salt and flesh. He smelled like rain, like clean laundry. Even
after lovemaking he gave off nothing, left no path in the air. I
closed my eyes against his cool skin and almost fell asleep, but he
began to hum. Turned to me and opened his mouth and began singing
quietly in a croaky voice. When day is done and shadows fall, I
dream of you, Da da da da, da da da da, the joys we
knew.

I'm sure that's not how it goes, I said.

He caught the loose end of the song trailing past and started
singing louder. That yearning returning to hold you in my arms,
Won't go love, I know love, Without you night has lost its
charms!

I reached up from under the covers and gently pinched his mouth.
Most people just smoke, I said. I released his lips. You can tell
me what that was, though. "When Day is Done." The story is, at
night, he misses her. We don't know the same songs, do we? The
barbershop quartets don't come to town that often. He grinned and
shut one eye, pained. We'll have to crosspollinate.
Really.

I took him back to the bus station when the weekend was over, and
we stood outside in a light drizzle, and were mute. I hadn't told
him yet that I'd lost my virginity to him; I felt embarrassed that
I had even considered it important, but it seemed the kind of thing
you should tell a person. In the end, I didn't know how to put it,
and said nothing. (When I did tell him, more than a year later, he
was aghast that I hadn't warned him beforehand. What would you have
done, I asked him. I don't know, he said, I would have wanted to
mark it somehow. You mean an ad in the paper? No, he said, serious.
It's just sad when something important goes by and no one
notices...)

The bus pulled in and he took my hands. You haven't asked if
there's anyone in my life. I didn't want to know. Is there? I'm
hopeful. I smiled and kissed him. I guess I'm sealing my fate, I
said. When I got home, Molly was pulling the sheets off her bed,
and we stood staring at each other through her doorway. Sorry, I
said, looking at the bedclothes. Sorry? I'm having them
framed!

Martin and I spent most of our early weekends meeting in other
spots around the state. I taught him to drive. I showed him how my
father liked to hold the steering wheel, with his hands at the
bottom, the wheel lying in his palms. Driving in a relaxed pose
like that induced my father to make a sound I used to find
strangely soothing: it was the sound of his ring tapping against
the steering wheel. Just an occasional, light tick. It was
sometimes the only sound on the way home from a dinner somewhere,
driving back through Ithaca, or Letchworth, or Albany. A reassuring
sound that there was someone awake in the car, watching over
you.

Click your ring against the wheel, I said. Martin looked over at
me, confused. Why? I like the way it sounds. Tick. And
again, tick.

I thought I'd want to share him with my friends, but we instead
retreated to privacy, opening our stories over suppers and walks,
incubating an intimacy I began to guard like someone with knowledge
of a diamond trove. He'd gone some time without a woman in his
life, a result of having his nose in his work. And also a general
confusion about what women his age wanted (he said, as a group,
they seemed worried). As a result, he hadn't gone on a date in over
a decade, and his last dates were convincing disasters.

On these first weekends, on our travels, we'd stop in little towns,
read the grave markers for the revolutionary soldiers. Martin would
go into the Woolworths or the dusty little corner stores and come
out with his triumphant purchases: a book of cut-out animals, a
pack of soap-bubble pipes, a die-cast milkmaid carrying her pails,
an old velvet ring box with a stain of tarnish on the inside and no
ring. Or else a paper bag filled with lemoncream snacking cakes
(which he could live on), a fragrant peach at the bottom for me.
He'd make me things from what he found. The milkmaid ended up in
the ring box: you lifted the lid to find her lying on a bed of hay,
the pails and the iron bar removed, so she lay there, succulent,
her arms outstretched as she awaited her lover. The animals from
the mobile were pasted on the inside edges of the box: lion, otter,
viper, elephant.

Strange assortment of beasts for a barn, I said. They're
code.

I stared at it until I figured it out. Then dragged him to the
floor, out of view of the windows. Maybe this was in Albany. Maybe
that beautiful inn we found at Allen's Hill. I look back now and
that life seems like pins in the map I was making. We spent the
rest of the summer and into the fall living like this. And I'd come
back to campus full of the stories of an increasingly exotic life,
pulling out a new artwork made for me, or increasingly, as time
went on, keeping it to myself. To our friends, Molly and I started
to seem like different people, like we'd moved up with the juniors.
We stayed in Obreshkove over the summer, and in the fall, with many
of our sophomore year moved on to other dorms, or even other
universities, we became the grand dames of the house, treated with
a kind of distant fear or respect. I'd leave on Friday and she'd
have the place to herself for whatever recent conquest was going to
take up her weekend. (To her credit, some lasted longer than a
weekend, but rarely did they go as long as three or four.) Our
Sunday nights were spent decoding our weekends, flopped on the sofa
in our gowns, smoking cigarettes and eating the sandwiches no one
ever requested. So we'd sit, sometimes with a glass of wine, going
over what had been said, what it meant, new revelations, sensual
progress. My stories were of going down one road, and hers were of
detours. Mine, constancy; hers, change.

Don't you get bored? she'd say, and I'd tell her not at all. In
fact, the more time I spent with Martin, the more it seemed as if
nothing could be more complicated than being with just one
person.

Don't you get tired, I asked her, talking about favourite bands and
favourite movies? You don't get much past that, I imagine. She
laughed slyly. I get far past that. It's when they shut up that the
fun begins. I'm just playing the field, baby. I'm taste-testing.
But once in a while, that hurt she'd showed the night she cried in
her room crept in.

Maybe there's something missing from me that you've got, she said
one night. Your guy sticks around for it. You push yours away, I
said. You let them all know you're not serious. Her eyes went dark.
I don't tell them. They just know, Jolene. They sense that thing
that I don't have. What is it, then?

If I knew..., she said, and I started trying to move the
conversation off the thin ice. I didn't know how to help her. How
can you help someone name an absence? The truth was, though, I felt
it as well and didn't know what it was, or what to call it. It just
made me cautious. So I took care not to harm my friend with my own
happiness. This was why I made certain that Martin and I spent our
weekends away from the dorm. While at Bard, he and Molly never met,
although his gifts to me — found things, little boxes, tokens
— filled our house.

I thought what I had with Martin inoculated me against disaster, or
at least the kind of unfathomable loneliness Molly seemed to suffer
from. Martin had already addressed our age difference, dismissing
it, as I had, as an inescapable detail. I'm not giving up a chance
at happiness because it looks strange to some people, he'd said,
sensibly. (He was not always sensible. It was not the topnote of
his personality. If I had to say what was, I'd say it was a quality
of attentiveness. Attentiveness and its corollaries of daydreaming,
a hatred of disorder, wariness.) Sometimes in the silences between
talking, a solemnness would enter between us, and I'd be tempted to
ask what was wrong, but I wouldn't. It was part of this vigilance I
understood, obscurely, to be how he liked to be in the world. Plus,
I didn't want my peace disturbed, and I knew averting my attention
from such formless auguries was how to maintain it. I was learning
about who he was, bit by bit, taking it in and settling it among
the other details until a picture of a man who had overcome sad
beginnings emerged. His first ten years had been years of
incremental losses; he'd been sick, his mother had moved away, then
they'd been forced to leave home and go overseas to keep the family
together. Many of the middle years I knew nothing about, thirty or
so years in which he might have been married, divorced, been
crushed by love, escaped death, considered other lives. That would
come later, I thought, I would fill in those spots later.

My own beginnings, meanwhile, surrounded me still, and this
disparity between us (I had no missing years) sometimes crept up on
me and made me feel that I was falling in love with a pair of
book-ends. But I loved him. I loved him, and I knew the edge of
happiness in his life was unfamiliar to him, and I wanted to
protect it. He would lie in my bed on the last nights of his visits
(he came twice a month for long weekends by the beginning of my
senior year) and tell me he wished we already had years of shared
life behind us. He longed for a common past. So someone else has a
copy of it, he said.

An emotional archive with me as curator. And me as yours.

I like that, I said. And we continued to learn the other like
explorers expanding their maps of the known world. I didn't know,
at that age, that those kind of maps have no north, no true
north.

Martin Sloane
by by [5]

Genres: Fiction [11]
paperback: 282 pages
Publisher: Back Bay Books
ISBN-10: 0316739367
ISBN-13: 9780316739368