“âstereotypes,” Kate was saying. “Two summers ago, in Northern Irelandâmy first and only time thereâand it was strange because I felt a pull from the place, given my family history and all, but I wondered how much I had talked myself into ⦠you know, tourism and prefab nostalgia ⦠and how much of my attraction was genuine? What did âgenuine' even mean?”
Bern watched her face and nodded as she spoke. He brought a spoonful of steaming soup to his mouth. “This is delicious,” he said.
“Could have used more salt. Anyway,” she said, rising, “what was I responding to? Some smell from the stones? The moss? The air? Were the genes stirring inside my body? Or was this feeling just bullshit, the magic of my Visa card?” She laughed, placing a new CD in her player. “Now for something
completely
different. Do you mind?” A computerized thudding imploded in her speakers.
“Not at all,” Bern said.
“Death Cab for Cutie,” Kate said, tapping the CD case. “I just discovered them. But Ireland. It was weird, Wally, because
my
family's experience wasn't the happy-go-lucky ⦠you know ⦠drunken revelry, storytelling, that sort of thing. The O'Dochertaighsâmy ancient relativesâwere the last of Donegal's seventeenth-century clan lords. The summer I visited, I'd drive my rental car into some village on the coast, stop and ask directions, talk to folks. When they found out I was an O'Dochertaigh, their faces crumpled. âAh God,' they'd say, ânot another one.' They'd squint at me: âYes, yes, you'd fit in any ditch around here.' I mean, four hundred years had passed, and
still
the O'Dochertaigh name was associated with brutality and war.”
“Pleasant group, your folks. Available for weddings, wakes, and plunder.”
“In a pub one night, a nice old gent even suggested to me, gently, politely, but
still
, that the O'Dochertaighs were just like the Israeli army, occupying Gaza. And this was
centuries
ago!”
“Well, but look what's happening now in Belfast,” Bern said. “Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley breaking bread together. Unthinkable, right, even a few years ago.”
“Yes, it's confusing,” Kate said. “Incredibly hopeful, on the one hand, and on the other ⦠you should have seen Derry, Wally. So moving. The âFree Derry' murals at the Bogside, commemorating the Bloody Sunday martyrs. But there again, someone had come along and spray-painted pro-Palestinian graffiti across several of the pictures. Like there was no difference between ⦠ah hell ⦔ She laughed. Her cheeks had flushed with excitement, the color of warm copper, a color Bern wanted to touch, the way he often felt compelled to run his hand along smooth staircase banisters in vintage buildingsâthe slow, comforting ascent, a retreat from the world outside.
“I'm one to talk,” Kate said. “One of my ancestors, a warlord named Cahir, sacked Derry in 1608âa deliberate provocation of the British. He burned the place to the ground. So that's
my
family's legacy. Great, right? I've got the death of a city on my conscience, and the people there won't let me forget it!” She laughed again.
“What if I designed a hut for you?” Bern said. “The Atonement Hut.' You could offer it to the Derry city council ⦔
Kate smiled but her mood had slipped. “Wally?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think we'll ever get over it?”
He searched her eyes.
“You know.”
He had splattered soup on his shirt. He dabbed the spot with his napkin. “Naturally, certain individuals will never get over it,” he said. “But it seems to me thatâexcept for the site itselfâthe city has moved on, for the most part. Doesn't it seem so to you?”
“Yes. I guess. Butâ
should
we move on? Maybe
that's
what I'm asking.”
“Ah.”
“I mean, I know we have to. Sort of. But your hutâisn't itâ”
Bern slid his hand toward hersâaware of the stain on his shirt, of the sweet smell of roses in the room. “Kate. By any chance, is this about New Orleans?”
“I don't know,” she said. “Iâ”
“Maybe you should go back and see it. You still have friends there, right? Places that meant a lot to you?”
“Yes.”
“I'm not a believer in âclosure,”â Bern said. “But I do trust reconnecting. Grounding oneself. When you told me you hadn't been back since the storm, I confess I was shocked.”
“First principles.”
“Yes.”
She removed her hand from his. “Well, this is awfully gloomy talk for such a lovely evening. I'm sorry. How did we get into all that? I was telling you about my family, my trip to Ireland ⦔ She refilled his wine glass.
“Will you join me?” Bern said. “I can't drink the whole bottle.”
“I shouldn't.” She wrinkled her nose. A little girl's face: an attempt to pass off as trivial something quite serious. Bern sensed this immediately. “It's annoying, and I can't believe myself,” Kate said rapidly, her eyes full of reflected candle flames. The room's low light and its shadows made her face fluid, her nose and lips like the tips of underwater reeds, now foreshortened, now elongated as the candles flickered. “This morning I realized ⦠I think I'm pregnant,” she said. “Pure carelessness. I haven't told Gary, not until I'm absolutely certain, and he's going to ⦠Wally? Wally, what is it?”
She stared at him as though she feared his heart had seized up. And his heartbeat
did
quicken, surprising him.
“It's nothing, really. Just a little morning sickness,” Kate said, responding to his question.
Bern wiped his mouth and stood. He walked over to the bookshelves. Dizzy. The wine. The roses. He studied the face of a saint on one of the tall glass candleholders: an androgynous, childlike figure in a blue-plumed hat, with brown curly hair, dark eyes, and a rose-petal mouth. The saint, seated on a wooden throne, held a basket and a golden staff. “The Holy Child of Arocha,” said a paper label on the glass. “Purify our hearts by the example of your meekness.”
He turned to Kate. Though she sat in shadow, he saw that she had registered what surely marked his face. Sexual jealousy. A man of his age! Yes, yes: he was a pathetic gag gift at someone else's party. A trick can of peanuts ⦠pop the lid ⦠the fake, ungainly snake.
“Oh shit,” Kate said.
Bern stared at his shoes: smeared with the dirt of the streets.
Kate carried the yellow soup bowls to her tiny kitchen sink. Death Cab shook the room. The flowers trembled. “I thought we ⦠I thought you understood,” Kate said.
“Yes,” Bern said.
“But?”
“But.”
She whirled to face him, her wet, soapy hands on her hips. “Can we get around this, Wally? I really enjoy our friendship.”
Her words sent heat through his arms. Kate glanced at his face, and he wanted to hide. “Do you,” he said. “Excuse me, “I need to tidy up this stain, where is you-your⦔
“Down the hall. To your left,” she said tersely.
She didn't have a hallway. He stood rooted, a disoriented clown. Then he remembered that, on each floor of this old building, three or four units shared a single bath. She meant the hallway outside her apartment.
Architecture.
He walked to the door.
Institutional green tiles lined the bathroom walls. A toilet and a shower missing its curtain filled the minuscule space. Someone had left a plastic bag stuffed with pink soap and a hair net hanging by a cord from the shower nozzle. The nozzle dripped black water. The toilet bowl was plugged with shit and enough paper to fill a Brooklyn phone book.
His vision blurred. His shirt stain seemed to spread, like the smell in the room. He tore off a piece of toilet paper and wiped his slick forehead. His stomach pitched. He took slow breaths until his pulse returned to normal.
By the time he got back to Kate's living room, rage coiled in the muscles of his arms, though he couldn't locate its source. She stood in the kitchen where he'd left her, drying her hands on a towel. A sting of pepper in the air. The gumbo. His eyes watered. A smell of smoke. One of the candles had guttered.
Kate wouldn't look at him. “I'm sorry, Wally. Maybe it's not possible to ⦠I mean, for a man, a man who's been lonely for a while, and a young womanâ”
“It's possible, Kate. We'll do it, okay?” He knew his words sounded harsh. He had no control. “It's just that, I didn't picture myself babysitting some young couple as they worked out their little soap opera ⦔
Mistake, he thought. Erase. Erase.
“Babysit?” Kate said.
“You're right. I'm feeling sorry for myself. I shouldn't ⦠“Act your age, old fool. Tighten the screws. “I apologize.”
Kate crossed her arms over her breasts. The dish towel hung from one of her hands and covered her torso, demurely. “I think you should go, Wally.”
He made a formal bow. A bobbing punch-clown. “I'm sorry, Kate.”
“I'm sorry, too.”
“Thank you for dinner.”
She nodded.
Only steps away from Kate's he felt his shoe crackâa slapstick flapping of the worn right heelâas he crossed Seventh where, apparently, the new St. Vincent's would be built. Bern went through shoes at an alarming rate: three pairs in the last six months. Shoddy craftsmanship, he thought. Then: Of course she doesn't want me. I'm just an old curmudgeon.
In the middle of the avenue, a crumpled Starbucks cup blew against his instep.
His heart beat fast again. His hands smelled of salt and cayenne, and faintly of the flower he'd cut for Kate.
The western sky was glass streaked violet with a smear of orange. From the shadows of the hospital a dirty, khaki-clad figure reeking of gin and onions lurched at a pair of girls. “Cigarette,” he said. “Fuckface. Fuckface.” The girls fell back against a wall. Bern thought of stepping in-but why? To do what? Assert himself? At his age? These girls were old enough to stroll around the city on their own, to cope with whatever the streets tossed up at them. One of the young ladies fished a cigarette from her purse.
Bern started to head up Seventh toward a subway station. On Kate's corner, a raucous party erupted out of a brownstone's doorway, down the building's concrete steps. Young people laughing and drinking beer from silver cans. Many of them appeared to be interns at St. Vincent's-they wore wrinkled green medical smocks. A basket of blue paper slippers, the kind doctors pull over their shoes for sanitary purposes, stood on the stoop. The revelers seemed to be using the slippers as party favors, wearing them on their heads or hands, or stuffing them into their pockets so they resembled boutonnieres. Inside, the crowd danced to laborious hip-hop, while dressed to treat gunshot wounds, burns, and lacerations.
Bern glanced back one last time at Kate's place. Would she let him in now if he showed up, hangdog? Probably she was in bed. He veered away and, thinking of her, missed the subway station. Well, it felt good to walk. It always felt good to walk. His shoe heel clattered on the street like the ceramic tiles hung on a chain-link fence, three or four blocks back, commemorating 9/11. The tiles came from New York well-wishers: “Ohio Is Thinking of You!” “Arizona Says God Bless NYC!” When wind blew and shook the fence, the tiles rattled like seed-filled gourds.
Tomorrow he would telephone Kate. Yes. He was the mature one here: it was up tu him to make things right. They
would
forge a friendship, by God-against all odds. Men and women: it could be done. Belfast, right?
Don't get carried away, Bern told himself immediately. After all, “making things right” meant taking small steps. Building a hut one mud brick, one pole, at a time. An apology. A design for a fire escape. A poster for a missing cat. He had learned his lessons from Lodoli, had
become
Lodoli, watching the great cities of his time wax and wane, and wax again. Live lightly on the earth, he thought, and leave all pages blank.
On a sidewalk grating Bern paused impulsively, then steadied his feet as a subway train thundered beneath him.
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