Authors: Doreen Finn
CHAPTER 12
I
meet up with Adam again. He’d cornered me after school, driving alongside me in his vegetable-oil car. A late autumn mist had settled upon the afternoon, blunting the last threads of daylight, quashing the crunch of leaves underfoot.
‘So, will I see you again some evening?’
I shifted my bag higher on my shoulder. A car blared its horn, angry at the battered Merc for crawling so slowly along the main road.
‘Your call, okay? Dinner, the cinema, I don’t mind.’
I wanted to tell him not to bother wasting his time, to find someone more worthy of his attention. Instead, I heard myself say that Saturday was good, and now I’m sitting here, waiting for him. This is my first Saturday night in town since I was in my twenties. I feel like someone’s maiden aunt among the in-crowd, the teetotaller at the party. The bar Adam picked is nothing like the smoky corners of Manhattan I frequent. This is a cavern of noise, this place in the centre of Dublin. I stay near the door, my coat in my hands, my bag clutched tightly. Around me, everyone is young. Too young. They should be at home, doing homework and going to bed early. It’s November, and cold, but the girls are mostly wearing tiny skirts, with bare, tanned legs and teetering heels. Hair is almost uniformly streaked blonde, and straight. Make-up is anything but subtle.
I touch my own hair, always just a step away from disaster. My top is Erdem, a present from Isaac, and it feels wrong. My jeans are too tight. My new boots should be inches higher than they are. Sweat coats my palms. I can pretend it’s the tension of meeting an attractive man on a Saturday night in town, but really it’s being in the presence of so much alcohol that is making me nervous.
This is a mistake. What was I thinking of, agreeing to a night out with Adam? I’m too old for dating. It is ridiculous, going out on a Saturday night. I would have been better off slipping down to Maude and watching something on television with her.
I feel guilty for not spending much time with Maude. I know she’s on her own and she misses my mother, and I try to see her a few times a week, but she always steers our conversations around to my mother, and I prefer to avoid talking about her. There is nothing to say, and I’m not a good enough actress to pretend that everything was fine.
Adam billows into the bar on a gust of glacial air. He spots me immediately.
‘Eva! You’re here. Sorry I’m late.’ He leans towards me as though to kiss me. He is jostled by a crowd of women in feathers and L-plates and he falls into me. ‘Sorry!’ He says something else, but the words are swallowed in a sudden wash of thumping, frenzied music. He brings his mouth to my ear, but the effort of conversing that way for more than two words is futile.
I point to the door. ‘Let’s find somewhere quieter.’
The air outside freezes my face, but brings the relief of being able to move my limbs and hear my own voice.
Adam steers me along the footpath, his hand cradling my elbow. His apologies for the bar are profuse and sincere. ‘It wasn’t my choice. A friend said it was a good place.’ He pushes his glasses up his nose. ‘You can see I’m not the man about town that I once was. I’m surprised we didn’t run into half of sixth year!’
I nudge him. ‘Doesn’t matter.’ The footpaths are an ocean of people, a bizarre fusion of tourists, more girls in feathers and fake bridal wear, drunken teenagers and hordes of others out seeking love and oblivion. I tighten the belt on my coat and wrap my scarf twice around my neck. The wind funnels down the wide city street. Taxis idle at ranks. A siren splits the night.
Down a narrow cobbled side street the noise suddenly halves, then halves again. Adam keeps his hand on my arm.
The pub is small and narrow. The smell of beer and spilled liquor makes me want to weep. My sponsor always said I should avoid bars. Too much temptation, too high a risk of offending. I’ve been good these past couple of weeks. There’s no booze left in the house, and I have not replenished what I’ve consumed. No emergency bottles, nothing to lean on. If there’s something to fall back on, I’ll fall. Every time.
I order mineral water. Adam has one of his wheat beers, all cloudy foam in a spindly glass. He glances at my bottle.
‘On the dry?’
The bottle fizzes as I crack it open. ‘More or less.’ Water bubbles onto my fingers.
‘For now?’
I wipe my hand on my thigh. ‘For good, if I can ever get there.’ Three men squeeze by. The barman takes their order with a nod. Three pints of Guinness stand idly, the foam rising slowly to the top. Fantasies about grabbing those darkening glasses and downing them in one go distract me from the man beside me. This isn’t good. Pubs are not places I should ever be. The music of booze plays its overture around me, all those ice cubes clinking, the bottles popping, the glug of glasses filling. Even the dull thud of an empty glass on the wooden bar has its own particular sound, discordant, and in a lower key.
‘How long have you been off it?’
‘Nearly ten years.’ Give or take, with many incidences of falling along the way.
‘Right.’ He pauses. ‘Sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘Because this is the second time I’ve drunk in front of you.’ He regards the glass in his hand.
‘It’s fine.’ I suck on an ice cube. It numbs my tongue. I can see Adam wants to take the discussion further. ‘Really, it’s fine.’ The last thing I want is some earnest conversation about addiction.
My name is Eva and I’m an alcoholic.
Adam is an intelligent man. No crash course in substance abuse needed there. I’m curious about him, and maybe I’d like to take it further. Let the darkness stay out of the equation for now. Plenty of time for revelation at some distant point further down the road.
We push away from the bar and squash ourselves into a corner. Adam’s jaunty confidence seems quiet all of a sudden. I rip a beer mat, piling the pieces in an untidy heap beside my glass.
I hate when the hint of dependence causes a rift in any exchange. It embarrasses me, talk of my addiction, as though it were something I should control but can’t. Isaac never let it bother him. I’d been in and out of drinking for a couple of years when we began seeing each other, but my job was too important to lose it over a bottle of booze, so I stopped. It was every bit as hard as it should have been, with no poetry to write that would keep my brain from meandering into all those pockets of darkness, but I was able to do it. I’ve always been able to; wanting to is another story.
Where is Isaac tonight? It’s late afternoon in New York now, daylight already extinguished, a cold mist rising off the Hudson. The street lamps are probably switched on, the dark mass of Central Park swelling in the half light. The park is visible from Isaac’s apartment, that gargantuan dwelling on Central Park West, between 81
st
and 82
nd
that he shares with his heiress wife. The importance of those street numbers was unknown to me before I fell in love with him. A professor’s salary, even at our highly regarded university, would not cover anything in that zip code. From my tiny corner of the Lower East Side, the Upper West was a place I barely thought of. The ballroom-sized dining room, five bedrooms for a childless couple, an incredible kitchen that was never cooked in.
Damn him. Isaac. Do I enter his thoughts? My nameplate is off my office door now, another’s title stuck in its place. Does he consider me, ponder our final moments together, regret what could so easily have been? I regret it, can’t stop myself thinking that it was all a terrible mistake. What I wouldn’t give to be back there, back to last spring, heavy of limb under the weight of an unexpected heatwave, slippery with anticipation, and not stuck here, empty and alone. I miss him.
‘So? What do you think?’
Shit. Adam. ‘Sorry.’
‘You’re miles away.’ He digs his wallet out of his inside pocket. ‘Another water?’
My glass of water effervesces quietly, barely touched. Suddenly I’m exhausted by it all, the being here, the smells, the presence of so much booze. I can’t do this. I like to think it’s possible, sitting here in a bar, drowning in an atmosphere of alcohol, but it isn’t, not really. Overwhelmed. I am overwhelmed. I want to go home, find a bottle of something strong and negate all the thoughts that keep tumbling into my head. The tiredness weighs me down and makes me feel slow. Pretence exhausts me, and it’s too hard to keep up with it. My coat is wedged between Adam and me. I retrieve it.
‘Listen, I should go.’
The disappointment on his face is almost flattering. ‘Really?’
‘Sorry, I’m just wrecked. I think I’m getting a cold or something.’
Adam stands too quickly, and the table wobbles, slopping his wheat beer. ‘Look, it’s my fault. We should’ve gone to the cinema.’
I shake my head. How kind he is. A good man. ‘It’s not your fault. I just need to go home.’
He pulls his jacket on. An older couple ask us if our seats are free. They put their drinks down on the table, a pint of Guinness and something mixed with orange. My water remains there, barely touched, the green label curling where I pulled at it.
We share a taxi. It’s early still, and the queues for cabs have yet to begin. Town is packed. Lines have formed outside clubs, and hordes of drunken people lurch along the streets, shouting across the road at each other, stepping out in front of cars. The taxi driver swears, blares the horn and complains about girls puking in the back of his car. It’s no life, he says, driving a cab on a Saturday night in Dublin. You’d want to be mad to do it. We murmur assent. The driver shakes his head. Mad, he repeats. I must be mad to do this.
Adam lives in Sandymount, but we’re going by my place first. He leans back, pushes his glasses up on his head. What would it be to kiss him, to smoothe the planes of his face with the palms of my hands? His hair curls slightly, dark auburn and thick. A day’s growth stipples his jaw.
The traffic is heavy leaving town. By the time we reach the Triangle, we are stuck again.
Away from the city centre, and the flow of alcohol, it’s easier to be calm. I don’t want Adam to see me withdrawn, sullen. There’s still time to salvage the evening. I lean forward, tap the driver on the shoulder.
‘Let us out here, will you?’
Adam pays; he will not accept my share of the fare.
‘Which one’s yours?’ he asks, looking around at the terrace of houses where we stand.
‘I’m farther up the road. I just thought it’d be nice to walk for a bit.’
‘It’s very nice to walk for a bit,’ Adam says. His breath swirls on the cold air. ‘So I’m not in the bad books then?’
‘Don’t be silly.’
Opposite, diners sit on patios under gas heaters. The doors of a pub swing open, allowing a roar of sound to gush out before being sealed off again. This is better; this is easier. No drunken hordes of tourists and hen parties, no one vomiting on the streets. It’s a neighbourhood, in the way the East Village is.
‘I’m getting old,’ I remark.
Adam reaches out, twists a lock of my hair around his index finger. ‘You’re looking good on it.’
‘I mean it. This is much more my style.’ I gesture at the scene across the road. ‘I don’t like town when it’s packed. Not sure I ever have.’
‘I’m with you. The only time I go in is if I’m going to a play, or to meet someone.’
‘Is this what they call middle age then?’
He drapes his arm on my shoulders. ‘I’m afraid it is. Next up, pipe and slippers.’
‘And bridge.’
‘Oh, that’s very adventurous.’
‘And Velcro. On everything. Oh, and leaving notes to remind yourself to do things and then forgetting where you put them.’
His laugh is loud, and I feel suddenly proud of myself. It’s been an age since I made anyone laugh.
‘You’re a funny chick, Doctor Perry.’
The weight of his arm is not a burden. His hand grazes my upper arm. Should I take it? I feel as though I should, but what does it say if I do? In the end I leave it, but I walk leaning in to him, his navy wool coat soft against me.
The sky is clear and shaken out with stars. A curve of moon hangs idly over the houses. It’s grown colder. A glitter of frost sugars the cars parked on the street.
As we walk I point out pieces of the old Ranelagh, places that were around long before new money moved in and took over.
‘A friend of mine used to live above the shop here.’ We are outside a gallery, its window lit by a single spotlight. Inside, the walls are hung with paintings of varying sizes. An event had been taking place earlier, when I walked past on my way into town, a launch of some kind. Suited men checked invitations, consulted a list. Caterers unloaded trays from a van. ‘Her family ran the shop, and they all lived upstairs. Seven kids. I don’t know how they all fitted.’
‘Did you like growing up here? Here as in Ranelagh, I mean?’ Adam’s face is in profile. We walk on.
‘It was fine, I suppose.’ But it wasn’t fine, not really. Place is important only up to a certain point, and beyond that what matters is how you are at home, your family life. As a child, I was on the edge of things. I’d learned to be watchful from an early age, mindful of angering my mother over the slightest thing. Spilled milk, extra laundry, books scattered around. It was invariably the small things, because I was too fearful to do anything really bad.
‘Are your family still living here?’
We’ve reached my house. Maude’s bedroom lamp is lit. Light seeps around the edges of the window frame.
‘No, there’s just my great-aunt left.’ I gesture at the garden flat. ‘She lives downstairs.’
Adam faces me. ‘My family are all over the place. My parents are still at home, but my two sisters are away, both married, neither of them coming back any time soon. My daughter lives in Sweden, with her mother.’
‘You have a daughter?’ Surprise shades my voice a tone or two higher than normal. This shouldn’t be shocking, but it is. Adam has a child.
He smiles, a proud, proprietorial grin that can’t help itself. ‘I have the greatest child ever born. Annalie. She’s 10, and amazing.’
‘You lucky man.’ The words are out, hanging between us. I want to take them back, but I can’t.