Novelists, of course, had gotten in on the feed for years, until Northern Ireland could take credit for a whole rather cheerless genre, “Troubles fiction,” shelved down one wall: Tears of the Shamrock, Burning Your Own, Suffer! Little Children, The Armalite Maiden; The Begrudgers, The Pact, The Contract, The Committee, The Extremists; Blood Sister, Bigotry and Blood, Ties of Blood, Fields of Blood … In front of these on the floor, paging limply through Dreams of Revenge, was a small mousy woman with thin, uncombed hair and dirty jeans. Robin whispered that she was a writer from New York City. She had evidently grown so terrified of suggesting Chichester Street became Wellington Place without being sure to mention that for a block it was Donegall Square North, or not writing a conversation that would fill the full forty-minute bus ride to the airport—inaccuracies in fiction that locals mocked over a pint—that she was now completely blocked, and spent her whole day in the library combing Victims or The Provo Link for mistakes to avoid. She cried a lot, said Robin, steering them away. Sometimes late in the day he’d feed her sips from his hip flask, like administering spoonfuls of cough syrup to a congested child, and one afternoon he’d gone so far as to suggest to her that once upon a time, long, long ago, there were novelists who made things up.
Estrin flipped through The Irish Information Partnership: Agenda. The Agenda was not a single publication but a yearly subscription. Hardbound, oversized, with good-quality paper. It cost six hundred pounds a year. Inside, every injury and murder was neatly categorized by religion and agent. Estrin stopped at “Fatal Casualties by Type of Incident,” with columns labeled Riot, Specific Explosion, Anti-Personnel Explosion, Gunbattle/Crossfire, Sniper Activity, Ambush, Assassination at Place of Work, Assassination at Home of Victim, Assassination at Place of Leisure … It was cross-indexed. It had bar graphs. And it would prove whatever theory your little heart desired.
“Clive,” said Estrin, “why not study the studies?”
“Come again?”
“I mean it. I’ve never seen a smudge on a map so examined to death in my life. You realize that even the deadweight at the Green Door have been on TV three or four times? I’ve got neighbors, housewives and unemployed plumbers, who have announced they will no longer give interviews. Study that.”
Clive looked skeptical. “I don’t get it.”
“Clive, why are we here? Last week there was a German film crew up my street. They paid off a group of kids on either side of the Peace Line to start a riot. The crew helped collect bottles. A friend of Malcolm’s ended up in the hospital because he was turning to mug for the cameras and a brick smacked him upside of the head.”
Robin liked the idea. It was cynical.
Estrin weaseled out of lunch with Clive and remained to talk with Robin, in whom the Troubles inspired only malicious disinterest—the black carnival had worn thin. Rapidly he deserted politics to enthuse over the new Hot House Flowers and the Traveling Wilburys. He collected 1930s sheet music. He showed Estrin the prized curlew skull he had recently found on Ballycastle beach. Amazing, he led a perfectly festive existence without the help of one car bomb or SLR. Estrin hadn’t found anyone like him since she’d arrived: Robin was the gem of his own collection. He reminded her of her best friend in Philadelphia, of her best friend in Israel, of her best friend in Berlin. It was a rare business now in Estrin’s life that anyone got to be simply himself.
For Estrin knew she was getting older when everyone she met reminded her of someone else. Strangers promptly factored into primes—with the smile of some German’s brother, the strident voice of a rival from ten years ago. For Estrin this was loss of innocence: people were no longer fresh. Memory tainted even stray passengers in black taxis—spectacles on the bumper seat clouded with a fellow counselor’s lenses in Berlin. At bus stops a man would blur not into the person standing next to him but into the person who had been standing in exactly this relation to her five years before. Every new profile reiterated the past like elms down long French boulevards. Earlier conversations interfered with the current one, distant radio stations broadcasting on the same call number—metaphor as illness. When Estrin reached for analogy, there were too many choices.
Not only people but places bloated with recall. As Estrin churned the Mournes on her Guzzi, Kilimanjaro poked unbidden between the breasts of Hare’s Gap. Even a distinctive landscape would remind her of terrain just like this—Irish heath recalled Scottish heath recalled that rugged purple country between Barcelona and Madrid …
Memory as contamination. While this cornucopic tumble of mountains gave her life an opulence, it wasn’t clean. Anyone who liked to leave so much had a taste for a wiped slate. Yet lately, no matter where Estrin flew to, no city was new. Consequently, Estrin’s geography was now a matter of mood. When she felt wondrous, light, strange, she was in the Middle East; wound up, festering, Belfast; quiet, the Philippines; bereft, Berlin. States were of mind. The most illusive of these was Home—again, a feeling rather than a place, and a sensation she felt least often in Philadelphia. Home was a name for moments that had struck and fled her all over the world, hit and run.
Plenty of people might be pleased to have collected such a formidable stack of conversational trumps—Why, I’m reminded of the time I was stuck in the Egged station in Eilat sleeping on my backpack and I met this gorgeous Palestinian … Tasty, but still can’t compare with the paella in Spain … But Estrin had met such people and hardly admired them.
As whole countries had fallen to emotion, it was hard to resist the solipsistic notion that characters she located everywhere—Man with Hopeless Crush Who Is Sometimes Useful But Who Will Eventually Become a Problem, Close Male Confidant Who Never Makes a Move But with Whom There Is a Palpable Sexual Tension, Attractive and Intelligent Female Friend Who Is Also Jealous and Will Eventually Become a Problem, Object of Unbelievably Fucked-up But Intriguing Romance Who Provides Final Inspiration for Leaving Town—were simply parts of herself or her family, and she continually reenacted her core drama on the stage of different continents. She’d have to kick herself to note: no, Malcolm existed, Robin existed, Farrell existed, even Clive. They were not her actors or her relatives but separate people with their own dramas, their own families. Robin might remind her of Yossi in Tel Aviv, but he did not remind himself of Yossi, and it wasn’t his fault if Estrin’s vision was corrupt.
Sometimes Estrin envied amnesiacs. In fact, she wondered if eventually she would become one, because didn’t you finally run out of space? By now the number of people she’d met over her lifetime would populate Rhode Island. Any time now she would convert overnight from transient extrovert to agoraphobic shut-in, having groceries delivered, terrified of answering the door lest she see a new face and it squeeze its way into her tightly packed head and replace an old friend.
Maybe the idea of a limit was fanciful, but that she might lose a taste for strangers was not. Estrin was in awe of the elderly, how they managed the overcrowding. Alzheimer’s must be a relief: cleaning the closets, taking out the trash. At the very least, surely there came a time when what you had lived so radically outweighed what you had left to add that memory tipped you into the past, logically and mechanically, like a scale. For Estrin was disturbed not merely by the clutter of recollection but by its eidetic power. She could easily see herself wheelchaired in a hallway transfixed by the TODAY IS THURSDAY sign, denied so much as a personal bottle of aspirin but overdosing on her own life.
Estrin may have known too many people, but more to the point, she had already known too many men. Facing the grisly statistics, Estrin was disconcerted. She thought of herself as passionate rather than promiscuous. Yet take, say, one weekend fling or one-night stand, the utter preclusion of which intolerably deadened the world; one consuming death-grip, all-out Relationship—obligatory; and, as a relief from the latter, or possibly just to buoy an otherwise ascetic desert of a time that quickly threatened to become what your life was like, one Incredibly Nice Man, with whom sex is warm and personal and enjoyabl
e and dinners are humorous and interesting, who sometimes shows up with flowers for no reason and is always prompt, who adores you and in no way deserves what he will get, which is to be destroyed by his own flowers, his own punctuality, his—we will not even call it blandness, but mildness anyway—softness, gentleness that you do not really want, and be headed off at the pass by the next death-grip clutching up the driveway who never brings flowers and cancels at the last minute and with whom dinners are often quite bitter. Now, if we conservatively average one such variety pack per year for a normal American reproductive lifetime, we are well beyond counting fingers and toes if you’re single at thirty-two. For all that intrusive memory, she’d forgotten some of them, their fondness for corn muffins at breakfast, their preoccupations with whales, their names. Why didn’t someone warn you it was only giving in to chocolate or sitting or wild boredom that saved you over the years from seeming a total whore?
As a result, too, Estrin was left less with specific characters than with archetypes, the oversized roles of Father, Big Brother, Nemesis, which, suits tried on by too many different builds of men, had been stretched and misshapen until they no longer fit anyone in particular—even most real Nemeses disappointed.
Except one.
Constance dreams she is on a bus. The girl in the next seat is chatty. They stop at a station, where the girl buys her Kit Kats and cigarettes, though Constance doesn’t smoke. The girl rattles off detailed chapters of her personal life, encouraging Constance to eat and have a fag. The stranger isn’t exactly pretty, heavily made up, dressed 1969, with beads and one of those loose-weave sweater vests once so inexplicably popular. She seems thin in more than figure; Constance doesn’t always pay attention. When the girl announces she’s getting married, Constance only bobs out the window at the Irish countryside, full of fog and wrecked, rusting cars. “To Farrell O’Phelan.”
Constance feels the candy bitter in her stomach; the Kit Kat promises to persist for hours as chocolate can. She turns to the girl and stares. Her seatmate is still gabbling, with no evident idea Constance knows Farrell; Constance is hardly going to say. She would have liked to wake up then, but the dream goes on and on—maybe that’s what made it a nightmare, the way the trip seemed to continue for as long as it actually would have taken to ride to Armagh, the girl nattering away, until by the time Constance did wake up she’d hardly started from the dream in alarm but had overslept. The bedroom was steeped in the smell of disinfectant and tobacco; her windows tinged brown. When she lurched out of bed she could barely manage weak tea. Bus rides always made Constance sick.
These scenes splayed beyond her sleep. Farrell’s abrupt announcement that he was getting married so insisted itself into the blandest of afternoons that Constance could only interpret the pictures as presentiment. His resolve to remain single only made the prospect of a change of heart the more grotesque. She thought of having to be congratulatory, interested, what did the girl do—, how long ago did they—, will he still— But in these holograms her inquiry never went very far; she could ask only two or three questions, and crazy ones, What color is her hair? Then it was right back to the start, over and over: Constance—She would know what was coming next just from the way he said her name, as he had never quite said it before, with an overkind warning in it, a trying to gentle what cannot be softened in any way, so that by the time the rest of the sentence was out, her grip would already have tightened around her gin-and-tonic, skin squeaking on condensed glass: I’m getting married—
With the main course, a sweet, and coffee yet to go—
Constance, I’d like a divorce.
So. That was why she always pictured the event at a small two-person table. Ten years before, she and her husband, Martin, had gone to Dr. Wong’s Welcome Chinese to order Peking Duck. They had never eaten Peking Duck. Martin introduced his proposition right after the Tsing Tao arrived, in much the tone of voice he might have suggested they go somewhere else besides the cottage in Ardara on holiday this year. Constance said nothing. The soup came. Globes of oil floated aimlessly across the dumplings, boats of scallion. She thought, Spoon. She looked down at the spoon. So far nothing had changed. She looked at her hand and tried to feel it, being its fingers. I said, Pick up the spoon. But they were not her fingers. She looked at her husband, Martin. He was not her husband.
“The soup is not good? You like something else?”
The waitress was distraught. Martin explained, nicely. No, they weren’t feeling well. She didn’t seem to understand his Tyrone accent. They were off form, he said again. Please cancel the duck. They would pay for the soup. Or even the duck if it was too late, but please bring the bill.
Constance only sat. She felt relaxed. Her fingers and mouth didn’t work, but the rest of her seemed to, and they walked out.
The silence and profound inability to lift silverware had lasted for three days. The divorce had lasted forever. Constance had still never eaten Peking Duck.
chapter thirteen
Checked Luggage, or The Long Fuck
Constance had two fears, and this was the second.
The phone is ringing. Though terrifying, that is pretty much the nightmare, and a recurrent one. Except she doesn’t want to answer. What is on the other end is unformed. If she picks up the receiver the news will become true. So long as she refrains, the event to which the call refers has not occurred. Gradually the ringing grows louder and more intolerable. She knows that the caller will never hang up. Holding out becomes a torture, but she will not pick up as a sacrifice, for every second she keeps from the phone is one more second the thing has not yet happened. When she claps her hands over her ears, the bell trembles through the cracks in her fingers. The whole room begins to vibrate; teacups chatter toward table edges. She knows if she leaves the house the phone will still be ringing when she returns, and that the sound will follow her down the road. In one variation, she does leave, and when she turns on her car radio, every station plays a ringing telephone. While the dream never goes this far, she realizes that eventually, from weakness, exhaustion, or resignation, she will pick up that receiver.
For whenever Farrell walked through a door ordinary as you please, she felt the same relief as seeing her suitcase conveyed through the rubber flaps at Aldergrove. Though the shuttle had never lost her luggage, there was always that experience, however brief—the belt a-churn with misshapen leather strangers—of that life in which it was swallowed up. Whenever she let Farrell out of her sight, it was with the faith and fatalism of air travel, for anyone who has ever checked baggage knows well that, once you have relinquished its handle and watched the grip wheeled away into the enormous, anonymous, thoughtless world, even on its return your relationship with the object is altered—forever tinged with gratitude, reprieve, the blessing of that rare confluence of mystical forces by which Things Work As They Ought: luck.
So each time the planet coughed him back up, rolled him through the flaps of his office on the Lisburn Road, she was glad to see him. The pleasure was literal—that, with all his annoying fastidiousness and secrecy and unpredictable lashing out, he was still walking and talking, and the rest was trivial; Farrell O’Phelan was alive. Why, some nights she worked herself into such a sweat that she couldn’t wait for that rush of cool air as he opened the office door, and she would ring him at 4 a.m., hanging up as soon as the irate voice grumbled lusciously in her ear.
The appointment was in Newry, one of the few towns in the Province that beat Belfast hands down for sheer ugliness. In the same way that praise didn’t faze him but criticism could cut him to the quick, beautiful landscape never lifted his spirits, but blemishes like Newry could ruin his day. Happily it was dark, and Farrell would miss the stairways of pebble-dashed row houses the color of dirty bathwater, scribbled with UP THE PROVOS or INLA—even the graffiti there were drab. At the mouth of the Bann and the foot of Slieve Gullion, Newry was an achievement, triumphing over its comely location with such profound dowdiness. Then, this was the town
that complained Catholics were never let houses on the sunny side of the street. Amazing, his people believed the Prods could even take away the sun.
Farrell leaned back in the taxi and returned to the metaphor he’d been working on all day. Who had given him the idea? Some woman, recently. Whoever, he’d been relieved to discover that he wasn’t a single flagging asthmatic in a world otherwise peopled by tireless sexual enthusiasts. And for once he’d found a political model that could keep him entertained all the way to Newry, and probably back.
The Troubles were a long fuck. Not the languorous kind, but those protracted disasters the woman had admitted to, when you could have or should have come after ten minutes, had your splendid or inconsequential catharsis, and dressed; to grab a bite of lunch, read, draft a lecture—but you hadn’t—you’d held back out of greed or drifted from the peak like straying the towpath, and there you were, still banging away when you could be at the newsstand or, hell, halfway across the Atlantic Ocean in the time it’s taken you to wear another layer of skin off your prick. Now, to pursue the analogy, how did one of those interminable afternoons finish?