Under My Skin (30 page)

‘We’ve done everything we can,’ he said. ‘It’s over to you and your body now.’

So Glassman did not need to think about it. Not any more. He went to the basement and took down two fishing rods. Two sweaters. One that was old and grey to work in and the burgundy with its two rows of cable stitch. He did not take the black cashmere – the warmest one he had – because it was a Christmas present from Matilda last year – and he felt just the thought of this leave a small mark on him. But he told himself to get busy now and he left those old thoughts folded with the sweater in his bureau drawer.

He packed jeans. Fawn-coloured corduroys. One pair of old green Converse sneakers and then he looked at his two crates, one full of books and the other full of broken glass. He had packed them the last night he found her inside his apartment, the same night she had threatened to kill herself.

He walked through his rooms and he was careful to leave his toaster plugged in and not switched on. He left his bed slightly tossed. He put some laundry into the dryer and turned it on. He made it all look as if he was a normal living working person going out to work on September 11th and with every intention of coming home. He even left his kitchen window open an inch and he put some music on and left with it playing on a loop – the way he often did when he ran to the deli on the corner or walked for some air to the Park.

He called his dealer and organized some pot and this went into plastic bubble wrapping with the broken glass. He pasted the ‘Fragile’ sticker on the yellow splintered wood and smiled at the joke in it.

As he packed each item he decided that he would be well again. That he had been saved and that it was for a reason.
He would go to the cottage and be well and happy and just…
be
.

The boy who died had not felt pain.

On the morning of September 11th Glassman had finished a shift at St Vincent’s and then without knowing what had happened he worked on one of the first bodies to come in. There was an elderly woman first and then a handsome young man. Only one had died. The boy – but there was no pain. Glassman could not explain the medical reasons for that. His face was grey with dust and the first thing Glassman did was wipe his eyes. He could tell that he was good-looking. His eyes were a beautiful dark shape and he had long dark lashes and black eyebrows slanting back. His face was not bruised and even though he was breathing, Glassman knew he was going to die. He had been crushed by something, inside and out, everywhere except his left arm and his face. But there was no pain and no fear. There was no look of it in his eyes and when he began to lose him, for the first time, and he knew now, for the last time, Glassman gave his own version of the last rites.

He held the boy’s hand and whispered into his ear, ‘I’m sorry for any hurt that I have caused,’ and then after a moment as he felt the boy really slip from him, the boy’s eyes opened for a second and then slid gently sideways and his eyebrows seemed to lift, and Glassman wondered if he was laughing at him or if the boy had even heard. Then there was no breath. No pulse. No heartbeat. He left this life and dragged Glassman’s face and words with him like smudged ink on the page. He was just another dead boy but Glassman felt as if he had known him and that he had been a good son, a good husband, and that because of the faint white circle around
his third finger he had, until recently, worn a wedding band.

He could not feel sadness or any sense of mourning but he did feel that the world had lost someone good. And that this city, this place, this planet would not be the same without this young face. He blessed the boy’s forehead with his thumb and then closed his arms around his chest and wiped his face and tried to imagine a smile. And around him the news began to come through and the volunteer doctors began to pour in. They stood and waited in the sunshine for the ambulances and in the eerie waiting quiet they began to wonder if the silence was because there were no survivors, no one left alive, no one left to save.

In the end everything Glassman needed fitted into one small bag. He pressed the delete button on his answering machine and deleted away the last unheard messages from Matilda and then he lifted the phone gently and left it off the hook. He opened his mailbox and he put her latest love words, in a handful of cream and gold envelopes, straight into the trash. He turned the keys twice and listened to the sound of his double locks, checked his pocket again for his keys and his wallet. And then Glassman picked up his one suitcase and walked down the two flights of stairs.

On the street he turned and looked up at his own windows and he could remember taking her there that first afternoon, and now, in his current state of illness and fear, he marvelled at that. How he had been attracted to her and how he had, so willingly then and with such innocence, allowed a lunatic into his home. He stood for a moment and looked at the devastation that surrounded him and the veil of grey dust that seemed to disguise his old life. He lifted his suitcase and turned to look over his shoulder – and in that instant as he felt his neck click he told himself to get moving. He told himself that
it was time to stop living his life through his own rear-view mirror and this time, he forced himself to look straight ahead and to walk on.

Hope n. – 1. (sometimes plural) A feeling or desire for something and confidence in the possibility of its fulfilment: his hope for peace was justified; their hopes were dashed. 2. A reasonable ground for this feeling: there is still hope.

The barman can’t find the bottle of Bombay Sapphire. ‘Not much call for that here,’ he says. So I stand up and then up again on the low counter foot rail and point it out to him and the men from Brooklyn join in and help.

‘Right – right – right – right,’ they say and when they speak they nod under faded baseball caps. The bar is called The Blue Haven, a long tired stretch of mahogany on Berry Street where men smoke a lot and then lean into their drinks. The gin and tonic arrives, big and overflowing and no slice of lemon, but I am afraid to ask. Yesterday I arrived in New York. I emailed Matilda and I telephoned Jack and I told no one where I was going, not even Doreen.

The barman has been in New York for eighteen years and he has the strongest Kerry accent I have ever heard. He has no citizenship and ‘I don’t want to go there,’ he says. ‘Afraid of what they might find.’ His green card is good until 2011 and he tells us that by then he will be dead.

Jack drinks his beer by the neck and we listen while the barman talks. He stands and drinks with us and now and then he gives a reluctant service at the bar. He tells us that The Blue Haven has been sold and he smokes Dunhill cigarettes and blows their blue smoke at us.

‘I don’t know where I stand with the new owner,’ he says and he is talking to me like we’ve always been friends. ‘All I know is that I still come into work every night. I don’t give a fuck. Do I give a fuck? I don’t. They could just get rid of me. I see it all. I know everything about this place. I don’t want to leave here. It’s home. But do I look like I’m panicking? Do I fuck? My wife has a great job. She’s making a thousand dollars a week. Do you see tears in my eyes? Am I panicking? I don’t give a fuck.’

He is fifty-five and terrified he will lose this job. He buys the
Irish Independent
every morning. His wife listens to Radio One on the Internet when she works. She is his second wife and he’s been with her now for twenty-five years. Last week she rang him at work to tell him about something she had heard on the Marian Finucane show. ‘There’s a lot of VD in Kerry,’ she said, and he watches us and waits for a response and really we just want to have a drink and a quiet talk.

‘Stay out of Kerry,’ Jack offers and then someone else calls for a drink. He tells me that you would need a stick of dynamite to blow the barman and his wife apart but the barman comes back again and he is still talking at us from behind his bar.

Jack looks at me and grins.

‘Or maybe just a stick of dynamite,’ he says.

In a while the barman is drunker than we are and he comes back carrying the Bombay Sapphire again.

‘It’s funny but when you’re drinking you see everything behind the bar; you’ve got a better chance of finding the Jack Daniel’s or the Kentucky Bourbon or the Jim Beam than me.’ He pours another beer for himself and serves another round we have not asked for. I am not sure which side of the bar we are on now. There are no sides in here.

He serves another customer. A lonely-looking man with a
cowboy hat and grey hair and I’m watching my Kerry man and this is my question for and about him just… why is he here?

Jack explains that when he came to America he came with 100,000 other Irish people.

‘A lot of them don’t make it,’ he says. And here there is silence.

‘He didn’t make it,’ he says simply. The words are awful as they are, dropped now from a height.

‘He can’t go home.’

The barman lives in a two-room apartment on 59th Street. There are no Irish left in the area. It’s almost empty. Only Chinese and Lebanese.

‘So they go home for three weeks in the summer,’ Jack continues. ‘Throw their money around Kerry and hire a good car and then come back. His wife works in New Jersey and he spends every night in here.’

The Kerry man is getting busier now. He serves two new lonesome soldiers and there are now five customers at the bar. The music comes on and everyone’s spirits are lifted for a moment and then they seem to fall back down. But the barman is back and talking about how great his wife is now.

‘She plays poker better than any man. She’s entering the “Bet’em or Lose’em” in Vegas next week.’ He tells us that her name is Elizabeth and the sound of her name seems out of place in here. She’s known as ‘No Face’ by the other players and she can talk just like the poker-playing men.

‘Fold is it? Listen, dude. I’ll fucking fold when I fucking feel like it.’ He pretends to be her and we glance at each other and laugh. Then he talks about the Christmas hamper she got and how at the end of the working year this is her reward.

‘There was marmalade,’ he says and he takes another drink.

And for the first time tonight I feel for him. ‘Apples, pears, bananas, every kind of fruit.’

‘Keep it healthy,’ Jack says and he looks at me, grinning.

‘She walked down to get it and had to get a taxi back.’

I can see the barman opening the hamper in their apartment now and passing his hands over all those glistening jars.

‘Chocolates. Caviar. You fucking name it,’ says the Kerry man who knows better than anyone that he didn’t make it in New York.

‘She walked down to get it and had to get a fucking taxi back.’

Jack is as I remember him. Brown-armed from the sun with bright questioning eyes. He is the same boy who became friends with my brother Daniel. And after Daniel he became friends with me. He tells me about the landlady in Brooklyn who took him in.

‘She was forty-eight,’ he says. ‘She was my best friend in the world.’ In the winter the snow banked up and he shovelled it away and took out the trash.

‘I helped her,’ he says. ‘She needed help.’ He makes a life in New York sound simple, and hard. How they laid the markers down, how a friendship grew over trash cans and shovels of snow. He spent most evenings in her kitchen talking to her husband and they were all tired out from work. She gave him his dinner and he gave her rent whenever he could. He says if you can count your friends on one hand then you’ve been lucky in your life. Now Jack is rich. There are two hundred men who hammer down floors for him.

‘All over Manhattan,’ he says, ‘Staten Island. Chinatown.’ He sips his beer and turns the bottle in his hands.

‘Doing up two brownstones for a guy in Chinatown right now.’

Then the woman died. He holds up one big hand. Five fingers and now – after Daniel and his old landlady – two friends are already gone.

‘She got cancer and it took her,’ he says simply.

‘They handled it well. She never complained. Then one night I went down to the basement and I found her husband down there, he was really quiet and the room was almost dark and he was working his way through the laundry and just crying there.’

Behind us a hen party walks in. ‘Here comes the bride,’ Jack says. He always frowns a little as if to think before he smiles.

‘I’ll never forget that night I found him there,’ he says and he takes us, easily, back to a basement in Brooklyn, New York.

‘What they had,’ he says slowly, ‘that was love.’

He holds up one big hand again in front of me.

‘Five real friends and you’re lucky,’ he says and he grins. ‘Talk to the hand.’

The last train passes under us and we all wait for a second as if in respect.

‘There goes the subway,’ Jack says and we listen, not to it, but how it makes the bottles rattle gently behind the bar.