“I’m depressed,” said Estrin.
“Have you made any plans?”
“Only vaguely … You know, the Program. But I told you back in January: I’m almost thirty-three and I’ve been on the road ten years and I’m tired.”
“Do you ever think of staying here?”
“I’d need a reason to. I don’t have one, do I?”
He said nothing.
“I don’t actually have the money for a plane ticket. I’ll have trouble if I can’t sell the house.”
“I’d gladly buy your ticket if you’re tight.”
“Thanks. That’s generous. I’ll let you know.”
They walked on, not touching. It was dead quiet.
“… My Russian is coming slowly. I wouldn’t go until after Christmas, maybe not till spring …”
“Good,” he said genuinely, and in a rare moment of public affection he put his arm around her in front of Whitewells security staff and kissed her hair.
Upstairs, Farrell broke records. His face turned the ominous plum of summer thunderstorms. His breath rasped with the rapidity of a marathon runner on his twenty-sixth mile who would not quite make it. Over her, he gradually routed Estrin from one side of the king-size mattress to the other, until she was half off the edge, arched, with her hair brushing the carpet. She reached down and gripped the iron frame to keep from falling on the floor altogether. After all this frantic whipping in and out, Estrin herself had stopped feeling anything, and as a result saw the two of them with uncomfortable sobriety. She felt lost. She was not sure she was the cause of his excitement at all. She was not sure this was excitement. She felt left out, and she couldn’t help but wonder if Farrell did also. In which case, who was conducting this elaborate tryst without them. And she worried about his heart.
But they didn’t stop. Whoever was doing this, they had been going at it for at least a full half hour. Estrin, while doing little of the work, was now slicker than in the weight room; between them, there was almost no friction, not from excretions so much as from sweat, and besides, for all his howling, he was not quite erect. Perspiration ran down Farrell’s temples, dripped to the tip of his nose, and splashed in Estrin’s eyes; the salt stung. Clutching the bed frame was like doing a prolonged set of tricep curls; at last her grip slipped and her neck flattened on the floor, chin smashed to her breastbone. Farrell gurgled, a milk steamer, his nozzle choking in her froth. He was out of control, or perhaps in the end he wasn’t, and that was the problem.
For far overhead, Farrell floated. I am Ireland, divided. I am no longer the bomb, I am the North. I cannot explode.
“Sir?” The door pounded. “Are you all right in there? Sir? Is everything all right?”
Farrell stopped, wheezing. “Fuck.”
“Sir, should we call a doctor?” piped from the hallway.
Estrin giggled.
“Sh-sh!”
They both lay still until the girl seemed to go away.
Farrell pulled Estrin off the floor and collapsed back on the pillow. “You own the entire hotel and they still won’t leave you alone.”
The bedding, long since a casualty of their Olympics, was strewn all over the carpet, so there was not so much as bedspread fringe to reach for when a key sounded at the door and a maid burst in, leading the man from the front desk. Estrin bolted upright; Farrell gasped.
“Sorry, sir,” the girl stuttered, paralyzed by the expanse of naked flesh. “We thought—”
Farrell hurled a pillow at the maid. “Sod off or you’re bleeding fired!”
The clerk dragged at the wide-eyed maid and slammed the door.
“Well, that was a climax all right.”
Farrell flicked on the TV. “Sorry if that embarrassed you. New staff.”
“The old ones are used to this? You do know how to make a girl feel special.”
Farrell turned from the screen. “I don’t like it when you’re hard like that.”
“Farrell,” said Estrin dryly, collecting a sheet, “I can’t cry all day.”
He flipped channels impatiently. If he was searching for Neighbours, she could find him rude. But he was certainly scrounging for news, in the O’Phelan mythology sanctified, relating as it did to both Interest in the World and His Work. Left to his own devices with a TV, Farrell would catch Newsroom at 5:00, Inside Ulster at 5:40, the Six o’Clock News and Inside Ulster Update, switch to Six Tonight, which would piece him through to the hour-long in-depth Channel Four News, to pace the room till the Nine o’Clock News, take a break for the bog at 9:30, and swill a glass of wine before News at Ten, Ulster Newstime, Newsnight at 11:00, and would stay up just to watch the five-minute Ulster Newstime at 12:50, after which he would gaze blankly at “God Save the Queen,” feeling cheated, poorly informed. Estrin had watched him: he would scrutinize the same footage repeatedly, even the weather. During breaks he’d flap papers, and on maximum overdrive he could get through the Irish Times, the Newsletter, and The Guardian at the same time he listened to BBC 1 and still tell you at the end of it word for word what Nicholas Witchell reported from Tunisia. While Estrin knew better than to complain or compete, she could not help but suspect that all these updates on the Middle East were a substitute for information considerably more at hand.
In the wasteland of nonevent between Ulster Newstime and Newsnight, Farrell paused at a documentary about American evangelists, now replaying the service where Jimmy Swaggart confessed to visiting a prostitute and begged his parishioners’ forgiveness: I am a sinner! Tears streamed down the preacher’s face much the way sweat had dripped down Farrell’s with Estrin half off the bed.
“The question is,” said Estrin, “does Swaggart actually feel penitent? Or not?”
“He well regrets being found out.”
“No, all that blubbering. Is it real? Or is it a performance?”
“He has no idea,” said Farrell readily.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you not find when you tell a class lie you believe it yourself?”
“A little, maybe. But I still know when I’m lying and when I’m telling the truth.”
“Then you have only lied badly. And that statement shows a simplemindedness I wouldn’t expect from you. Most people consider themselves truthful. When they lie, say, about what has happened, they are presented with a contradiction. Somehow the circle must be squared. It is unpleasant to change your concept of yourself from paragon to liar. It is easier to change what happened.”
“That sounds like a kind of insanity.”
“Who’s not insane?” he asked tersely.
They watched women ascend the platform and weep along with Swaggart, blessing him with their hands.
“But what does he feel?” insisted Estrin.
“Nothing. Or exactly what you see. Don’t you understand?” he asked impatiently. “Right, it’s dicey to tinker with events, though not impossible—look at the Gibraltar Inquest; those witnesses haven’t a clue what happened in that shooting anymore. But emotions aren’t facts. They can be controlled, even concocted. Surely you’ve noticed that you can make yourself feel?”
Estrin stared at him, and let the sheet fall to her lap. “No.”
“Well, then.” Farrell turned gruffly back to Swaggart. “We are profoundly different people.”
“Yes. I’m beginning to think so.”
“—Now you want to know what’s real.” Farrell jabbed the broadcast as the throng gushed around its fallen evangelist. “That is real. Swaggart’s congregation genuinely forgives him. It’s a masterful piece of manipulation. What’s interesting is that it works. Not whether he’s sincere.”
“Nope,” said Estrin, sagging on the bedstead. “I don’t care if it works. I care if he can slobber like that and really be thinking, Heh-heh, I am pulling this out of the fire, aren’t I brilliant? I care if that’s possible.”
“Have we been living on the same planet? Of course it’s possible. But Swaggart is more sophisticated than the way you d
escribe it. He’s not secretly snickering; your man is ‘slobbering’ inside and out. But he made himself slobber. Haven’t you watched newsreels of Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, for that matter? Or Paisley. Great manipulators first and foremost manipulate themselves. Once you can work your own jacks, the rest of the world is a regular switchboard.”
“Once you can ‘manipulate yourself’ you’ve lost your grip, haven’t you?” asked Estrin, sure he was no longer listening, for he’d found the news. “What does that mean? If you’re just one more jack, who’s left working the board? That’s like getting down off the podium and sitting in the congregation. There’s no one to give the sermon anymore. Besides, once you’re that far gone, don’t you begin to forget what all that manipulation is toward?”
She was right; he ignored her for another murder in the UDR. She shut up. After the news, Farrell pulled on his shirt.
“What are you doing?”
“I have an appointment.”
“It’s after eleven!”
“You’re welcome to stay here. But don’t wait up. I’m not likely to be back tonight. Order yourself a drink, have some coffee in the morning. On me.”
Once more he stood before her in his shirt and socks, his collar raised, exactly the same vision that had sung so back in February, though now the image was reversed: he was fastening rather than loosening the top button, and whatever luminosity shuddered from the man, the hue was opposite—then gold, now violet; the points of his collar perked wickedly under his chin. It angered her he was so handsome.
“Not a chance,” said Estrin, swinging out of bed and shaking through the spread for underwear.
“There’s no call for you to be upset. You know my work demands odd hours. It was hard enough to carve time to see you at all.”
“Who said I was upset?” She jerked on her crumpled dress.
“Can I call you a taxi?”
“I’ll walk.”
They adjusted their clothing in silence.
“You’re glad I’ll leave for Leningrad, aren’t you?” said Estrin, tearing snarls into the teeth of her comb. “It makes all this groping possible.”
“You’re being bloody unfair.”
Garrisoned in her leather jacket, Estrin waited as Farrell put on his shoes.
“Farrell O’Phelan.” She stopped him when he reached for the doorknob. “Do you feel anything for me at all?”
“Estrin Lancaster,” he sighed, sweeping the hair, sticky with static, behind her ear, the sound of her name in his voice odd; it seems Farrell referred to Estrin almost entirely now as a bird. “I love you.”
It was an assertion he would need to make twice that evening.
She was right; it was the bits again (he had been listening): what did it mean to “manipulate yourself”? He wished she would resume the casual brutality of when they first met: Oh, Farrell, that’s bullshit And the shatter was worse than ever. He talked to himself, interrupted himself, contradicted himself, until sitting alone in the back of a taxi was a veritable session of the Belfast City Council.
Funnily enough, despite all that deceit palaver, he had lied to the Swallow rarely. Farrell preferred to put a napkin over the truth to mashing it into something else altogether. He thought of himself as duplicitous, when maybe he was merely discreet. He remembered, for example, the fudge about exercise their very first night. Sure, once upon a time during the big survivalist turnabout after the Brown Thomas bag he did try a fierce running regimen, from four to eight miles in three weeks, promptly checking into City Hospital. She was right, he had the temperament; just not the lungs. At a distance, however, he found athletics an astounding misappropriation of energy and regretted the lie. Besides, it was more Farrell’s style to hide something he had done than claim something he hadn’t.
However, there were two whoppers now, if running was one: for no, he had never felt jealous of anyone in the American’s life. When he looked at photos of Germans and Arabs on her bookcase he felt bland. And the flap of buffoons at the Green Door merely amused him. Frankly, he was beginning to see all the familiar signs: the way her voice shook when she asked about other women—why, she’d obviously worked herself up to that for a week; the ease with which he’d derailed her; and even tonight, crisp sentences, a clip-clip-clip down the hall, but not so much as a where-are-you-going. This whole caper was getting so flipping easy, it was almost less fun. His most impressive achievement so far was some nights forcing down two dinners.
In the shadow of the Boots marquee, he confirmed he was rather sore. Now, the pneumonia had been beautiful, but there were forms of exhaustion with which women were less sympathetic. Fortuitous he hadn’t come.
A job, another job. He realized he did not meet women and bombs much differently: keyed up, concentrated, a little empty. After all, they were both sensitive, volatile; but while you had to maintain respect for what they could do to you, they could both be disposed of.
The incoming memory was unsolicited and slowed the wide, professional stride toward one more device to dismantle; Farrell stopped tugging at his cuffs, smoothing his jacket. He was twenty-two years old. Germaine had been only a year older herself, but she had a precocious drowsiness—she blinked slowly. Every movement she made seemed effortful; he wondered why that was attractive. She’d lie back on the bed, her hands dripping from their wrists, as if even a look at the clock was too much trouble—then, why would she look at the clock? Germaine had all the time in the world. That first afternoon, she’d made him read the listings, though the last thing he wanted was to watch TV, and lay ignoring him, gnawing on bits of dulse, to which she proved addicted. She wasn’t wearing much, an old shirt, and gradually her thigh slipped next to Farrell’s as he sat at rigid attention on the next pillow, scowling intensely at the set. He’d been far more terrified of Germaine than any basementful of Ampho years later. Eventually Farrell would wing it with HME in the spirit of blind immortality, but with Germaine he was mortal, all right, and his legs embarrassed him, so calfless and thin; he was sure his asthma would start up and she would laugh. But even when his lungs did close at first, the familiar strangle shrieking over the telly, she seemed to think that was normal enough and told him, with sensual boredom, to turn off the program. Back then, he had been so grateful! His admissions, too, had none of the proud edge that Estrin detested, just, “I’m ugly,” he said, remembering his Y-fronts had a hole and hoping there was no brown smudge in the back.
“No, no,” said Germaine, unbuckling his belt more efficiently than he ever unfastened it himself.
“I’m too skinny,” he said. “I have spots.”
“You’re lovely,” said Germaine. “Here”—she stroked his concave chest—“your skin is smooth. And here,” she said, her hand further down, “is smooth as well.”
He had shaken the way he always should have around Semtex and never had the sense to, the way he could no longer tremble around women far more trim, experienced, and poised than Germaine Ormsby. He looked down at himself and saw only one big elbow. From the dulse, her kiss was salty, oceanic. “Shouldn’t we—do something?” he fumbled.
“Of course,” she laughed. “I had something in mind.”
“No, I mean to—”
“Oh, that.” She slid down. “Must you always have everything all chalked out?”
Wouldn’t Mother be pleased to know how promptly Farrell had been punished, like a good Catholic? Didn’t Germaine get pregnant that very first time.
But he never regretted it. Even in that awful London clinic he’d sat on the grotty couch pulling the memory tightly around him like an anorak, and though it no longer fit him so well as he strode from his hotel at forty-three, Farrell tried it on once more, the way every subtle shift of position had been like opening a door. He’d made sure not to doze off in case he missed something: the pad of her finger nested in the depression behind his earlobe; his thigh between hers, comfortable precisely for being so thin.
And now he would rather sleep. That was th
e grisly truth. Sex was exhausting, and had even officially joined His Work, though it had been work even before this last bit; one reason Farrell slaved so hard was that he experienced every part of his life as work, so he might as well get credit for the effort. Dinners were work, casual conversations on the street positively overtime, and now this last sanctum—what should serve as the very definition of not-work, if there was such a thing—had become as laborious as drafting a lecture for the Trinity department of poli sci. How fondly he remembered recovering from pneumonia at 133, if only that for once a woman let him climb into bed and just lie there.
So now he reached for the satisfaction he had learned to savor in place of Germaine, for if we are all in essence a particular age (Estrin was ten), Farrell at his inmost was not twenty-two or forty-three but thirteen, wrists dangling out of his unstylish navy coat, bare ankles glaring below the too-short trousers, class oddball, whom girls would only kiss on a dare, to run down a playground, laughing. While the trace of a polished nail down his ribs may have worn thin, his telephone still rang in these deeper caverns, the tears of pretty women trickling through the ancient cracks: however after the fact, Farrell O’Phelan was having his day. There was a name for this emotion, and of course it wasn’t love at all, it was spite.
However, just tonight, balls aching, suit incriminatingly wrinkled, an envious eye turned to the drunks in doorways who at least got to sleep, Farrell Finger on the Pulse did not feel smug but curiously used.
chapter eighteen
Form over Weight
You know, you do have a lisp!”