Ordinary Decent Criminals

  “You look beautiful.”

  Estrin felt a wild compulsion to comb her hair.

  As he took her jacket and asked for a back table, Farrell displayed that curiously grave quality which characterized all his minor moments; he attended forward neatly from the waist and ushered Estrin before him with precision, even delicacy. He was a formal man, deft and considerate in all the ways that didn’t really matter—he would hold your chair out, pick up your napkin when you dropped it, pour your wine, and next week fail to show up altogether.

  The gravity fell away as he began to chat about the assassination of George Seawright, when he became entirely light-hearted.

  “Creepface!” recognized the waitress. “And here’s another one! Don’t I see him every week with one more lovely lass in tears.”

  Farrell glared.

  “You’ll pardon, but Mr. O’Phelan must be seated on the wall, eyes on all the windows and doors, isn’t that right, love? Usually the lady’s seat, but none seems to mind. Sure, she gets a handsome view whichever way she’s facing!” She patted Farrell’s cheek and delivered their menus.

  “How lucky, Maire, we were seated in your section.”

  “Och, I asked, love, I switched! Like following Coronation Street and earning your keep at the same time.”

  She brought a bottle of Pouilly Fuissé without Farrell’s asking. “Sure we can skip the charade of having you taste it,” she announced, trickling Estrin’s glass halfway and glugging Farrell’s to the top. “Never known you to send a bottle back if it was turned enough to dress your salad. Now, should I bring the second right away, or would you like to wait and order it? A nice ceremony that, but as for the third, it’s just from the case in the icebox. You’ll have to hold your horses.”

  Estrin ordered seafood. She always ordered seafood. It was a rule; fish was light. Estrin ran courses like track. She followed precepts, and not because she wasn’t a sensualist, but because she was and therefore couldn’t be trusted. In Estrin’s personal mythology, should she ever be set loose in a stocked kitchen to do as she really pleased, you would find her an hour later packed incoherent with raw beef and rolling on the floor in a melee of ice cream and apple pie.

  As they had both ordered exactly the same thing, Estrin asked on an odd hunch, “Do you always order fish?”

  “Or chicken.”

  “Dessert?”

  “Never.”

  “Do you have a morbid fear of fried foods?”

  He laughed. “I’ve never put it quite that way, but I avoid them.”

  She inclined an inch more forward. “When do you get up in the morning?”

  “Seven. Exactly.”

  “Sundays, too,” she filled in. “And go to bed?”

  “When I am finished. Ideally before seven. Not always.”

  “When did you get up as a child? Say, twelve, thirteen?”

  It was wonderful. His eyes whetted. “Five.”

  She nodded victoriously. “But when did you go to school?”

  “Not until 7:30. Why?”

  “It was still dark,” said Estrin. “No one else was up. The house was yours. Most of the time you worked, read, wrote. But some mornings you got up only to think. For hours, watching the light gray out the windows. The birds here are exotic. And you still believed in God.”

  “Did you, at thirteen?”

  “No, by then I was a violent agnostic. But my father was a minister, so that speeded things up. My most remarkable precocity was early disaffection.”

  “I meant, get up at five?”

  “Naturally,” she dismissed. “But I’m not finished. Exercise?”

  His face clouded. “I don’t have time now. I used to run—”

  “All weather. All winter. Rain. In fact, you liked it when it rained. Other people were agog, when secretly the problem is keeping cool. The mizzle felt good on your face.”

  Farrell did look amused. “And how far did I go?”

  She licked her lips. “Ten miles. Every day.”

  He laughed. “Only eight, and every odd. Still, you’re very good!”

  “I’m very like you.”

  The eyes unexpectedly brambled. “You know,” he said, attacking his lettuce with no dressing at all, “I think it’s time we had an ordinary conversation.”

  So what are you doing here?”

  “You asked me to dinner.”

  He would not dignify her with a response.

  “All right.” She put her hands flat on the table. “I travel. For the last ten years, I must have been out of the States for eight. I used to go back between trips; not anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I was living a fairy tale: that my real life was in the U.S. Every time I flew into Philadelphia late afternoon, I knew better by nightfall. The best safeguard against the rude news that you can’t go home again is to stop trying.”

  “Don’t you miss your family?”

  “Not precisely, though I am frightened my parents will die. Or get old, for that matter. I travel with an illusion of reverse relativity. I move at the speed of light and I age while everyone back home stays the same. In my head Philadelphia remains an impeccable diorama I can enter at will. But you know how you can leave for two weeks and come back and the furniture’s re-arranged, the mailboxes are repainted on your street? Try leaving for two years. Or twenty.”

  “So now it’s twenty, is it?”

  “Why not? I haven’t been back for three. And my parents will die; I’ll be in Pakistan. I’ll have to decide whether to go to the funeral, and it will cost a lot of money.”

  “Would you? From Pakistan?”

  “Right away,” said Estrin, with a lack of hesitation that surprised her. “Burning my way though a dozen Glenfiddiches and staying horribly sober anyway and hating myself, continent after continent, coming back too late. Years too late, not just a few days. Because if I had any integrity I’d book Lufthansa tomorrow and throw myself into my mother’s arms while I still have the chance.”

  “You get along with your mother?”

  “I don’t anything with my mother; we never see each other, thanks to me. She writes much more than I do. Chatty stuff, though sometimes— Well, my parents are liberal, urban, educated, but lately I get the same feeling from my mother that I would if she came from Dunmurry, you know? She’s sad like any mother, in an ordinary way. I’m not married. I have no children. I don’t even have a career. I have stories. Mothers don’t care about stories. She feels sorry for me. And maybe she should.”

  “Meaning you feel sorry for yourself.”

  “Sometimes,” she said defiantly. “Why not? Who else is going to?”

  He tsk-tsked and leaned back. “Self-pity is indulgent.”

  “I can stand some indulgence. I’m a good enough little soldier. I’m hardly frolicking across the continents with Daddy’s Visa card. It hasn’t been easy.”

  Farrell gently flaked a forkful of sole and glanced up at her with a dance of a smile. “No, I’m sure it hasn’t been. How have you managed to support yourself now?”

  Estrin smoothed her napkin in her lap. “No, the work hasn’t been that hard, or that’s not what’s been hard … I just keep going and going and I’m getting—”

  “Tired.”

  “Yes,” she said gratefully.

  “I’d think you were beginning to run out of countries.”

  “There’s something else you run out of well before countries,” she warned. “Though it’s been a good life. I’ve picked grapes in Champagne, lemons in Greece. I’ve made plastic ashtrays in Amsterdam, done interior carpentry in Ylivieska. I’ve bused trays in the Philippines under Marcos, manufactured waterproof boots in Israel, and counseled in a German drug-abuse clinic in West Berlin. Now I’m at the Green Door, and that’s just a sampling— I swear I’m not off target and it could be the best of lives forever if I were perfect, but I’m not and something is going wrong …”

  As she drifted off, he touched her hand, an
d the question was intent: “How old are you?”

  “I’m sorry. I should have told you before. I’m thirty-two.”

  “That is—incredible.”

  “I know.”

  “Then you’re past thumbing around Europe in patched jeans. What are you doing?”

  “You mean, when am I going to settle down and do something? Product is slag. The only difference between my life and a foreign correspondent’s is I don’t write it down. Does that matter? Someone’s sure to cover the fall of Marcos without my help. I am my product.”

  “You don’t want to accomplish anything?”

  Estrin folded her arms. “I’m not convinced you believe in accomplishing anything yourself.”

  “I try to keep my work—”

  “Whatever that is.”

  “Safe from my nihilism.”

  “You mean you don’t allow what you believe to affect what you do.”

  “I believe a number of things,” he hedged. “They’re not all comfortable sitting next to each other is all … Like certain women.”

  “It’s called cognitive dissonance, and it’s dangerous as all fuck.”

  “Suits me, then.”

  She sighed. “I may be just making excuses. I always was a no-frills talent. I made ‘good grades,’ but at nothing in particular.”

  “Are you running away?”

  “From what? I didn’t leave my family behind in Pennsylvania sliced up with an electric carving knife. I don’t think I’m running away any more than I would in a Philadelphia condo with an answering machine and regular lunch dates. It doesn’t matter where I am, Farrell. So I might as well go as stay. And I like other countries. You—you’ve got a lot of spark, but you have this morose side. My autobiography doesn’t usually sound this depressing.”

  “I depress you?”

  “No, I must think torment will impress you.”

  “I thought you didn’t care if people liked you.”

  “I lied.” They toasted. The crystal sang.

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” she expanded. “I haven’t lived for ten years out of a backpack. Especially for the last five, I’ve stayed places—I move into houses and buy dustpans. Right now I have a dynamite house on Springfield Road. I buy flowers, I have a whisk! Because you have to put together something to leave before you go.”

  “Is that what you’re doing tonight?”

  She didn’t answer. She ordered brandy. Estrin had spilled out. This man had made her tense as no man had for months, but that was earlier, and now she felt herself break and spread over the restaurant like a neatly cracked egg, her eyes shining, double yolks. “So though I’m not ambitious, I do work hard, because I like the feeling. In Israel, I got up to pull boots at four, and it was loud and hot. I did overtime. Before I left Kiryat Shemona I ran the night shift, and was the only Gentile ever offered membership in that kibbutz. In Berlin, the clinic tried to send me to school in social work. In the Philippines, I was a hotel dishwasher, but when the head cook disappeared they put me in to pinch hit; found out I pickled a mean ceviche and kept me there. So I ran the kitchen for six months; while the busboys ambled in late afternoons the color of polished walnuts, I worked twelve, fourteen hours a day and turned the color of kiwi fruit.”

  “You’re not complaining.”

  “No,” she exhaled, remembering. “And today Kieran asked me to manage the Green Door.”

  “How did you pull that off?”

  “Damned if I know! It’s out of control! Everywhere I go I just want to be a schlemiel and somebody hands me a set of keys and the books, and before long I have employees and late hours and a lot of problems. It’s the curse of the crudest possible intelligence. The fact is, if you tell a hundred people, Put the chair in that corner, fully seventy-five of them will promptly hang it from the chandelier. Did you know that most of the world is made of fruitcakes?”

  He laughed. “You get more American when you drink.”

  “I can’t help it. I was born this way.”

  “You don’t like being American?”

  “I’ve learned to get by with it, like any handicap—harelip, paraplegia. Do you like being Irish?”

  “What do you think?”

  She eyed him. “That you abhor it. In short, Ireland suits you perfectly.”

  She was getting swacked. Her voice was louder and higher; people were looking over at their table. She used her hands when she talked, and as her motions got wider Farrell eyed their tall goblets warily, though she always missed. Then, she knew her way around a landscape with glasses, that was clear. She had reached a phase he knew himself, marked not by sloppiness but by inordinate precision—her pronunciation was getting more rather than less correct. Her phrasing grew considered, her gestures semaphoric, crisp as air traffic control. When she rose to find the loo, he recognized the careful placement of her hand on the table, the excessively smooth ascent from her chair, the purposeful step-by-step glide around other diners—too exact, too concentrated. She had crossed the point where all these ordinary matters could be executed without thinking, and now to negotiate finding the ladies’, asking Maire coherently, remembering the directions and being able to follow them, took the full application of her powers.

  Farrell enjoyed her absence. He kneaded his forehead. He had to admit he’d no idea what to make of her. The boasting had been a bit much; though if she really had washed dishes in the Philippines and made plastic boots in Galilee, he supposed she deserved a little airtime over dinner for work that had surely been excruciating after the first half hour. Farrell was tired. That was it, she was tiring. He wished she would just quiet down. He was sick of words. This whole island never shut up, and he wondered at how much people said was in such reliably inverse proportion to how much they had to say. If Farrell chose to lose any of his senses, he decided he’d go deaf.

  Yet when Estrin returned it was as if something had happened. She seemed sad. He felt sure he could make one mean remark and she would cry.

  “Are you married?” she asked straight up.

  “You know when I woke up at thirteen, but you can’t tell if I’m that much of a shite?”

  “That’s right,” she said calmly. “Only the incidentals of your life are apparent.”

  When the bill came and Farrell went for his wallet, Estrin crumpled into her pocket for a wad of pound notes. “No, no.” He put a hand over her fist of cash. He flicked a card to Maire, allowing Estrin to catch that it was platinum.

  Farrell gave her a hand up, pressed gently at her waist between tables; opening the door, he slipped his fingers under a shock of hair still beneath the jacket and pulled it free; she paused to let him finish, and a little longer still for the back of his hand to rest at her collar. As a result, by the time they were outside they had run through all the routine moves of the gambit like speed chess. Then, she was thirty-two, he forty-three; openings had become so easy. Perhaps the very definition of adulthood is a fascination with the middle parts of games.

  “I have my bike,” she said.

  “It’s safe?”

  “Locked, anyway. I suppose.”

  “Leave it, then. We haven’t far.”

  Estrin shot her motorcycle a mournful look. “Where to?” she asked, in tow.

  “My hotel.”

  “You live in a hotel?”

  “No.”

  “Then why—”

  “It’s safer.” To Estrin’s grunt of incomprehension, he simply replied, “Never mind.” He put his arm around her shoulders, though at Estrin’s height that was less like holding a person than resting on a banister.

  “The swallow,” he told her as if beginning a bedtime story, “takes off when it’s young and flies all around the world. For up to four years it never lands, sailing over South America, Africa, Australia—thousands of miles, the circumference of the earth several times.”

  “Does it mate in the air?”

  “No, after sowing wild oats in Tierra del Fuego, the swallow settle
s down to raise a family. Buys a station wagon and gets fat.”

  “Thanks,” said Estrin.

  While no longer rolled up by dark as it once was, central Belfast was deserted after the pubs closed; their heels rang down the walk.

  “Another parable,” said the American, whose voice, cowed by quiet, had gone soft. “A few years ago back in Philadelphia I decided I was sick of my ratty underwear—it was stained, the elastic shot. So I treated myself to, like, the best—in one store, silk, maroon, black lace; as my stack piled down the rack, other customers began to stare at me sidelong. I bought thirty pairs. When I got home I spread them out and not only felt insane, I felt deprived. All I could think about was going out and buying more.”

  “You’re obsessive.”

  “Not so simple. It’s greed. The same thing happens when I’m not halfway through a meal and I start thinking about a second helping. Or a cassette’s not nearly over and I decide to play it again. It’s a hunger like C. S. Lewis’s magic Turkish delight: the more you eat, the more you want, because you didn’t taste what you had before. When I decide in the middle to play a song again, I stop hearing it the first time. I have a problem with wanting what I’ve already got.

  “Anyway, that’s what happens with me and maps,” she explained. “I spread them on the floor like underwear. I no sooner get my butt to Belfast than I start frantic plans to fly to the Soviet Union.”

  “Still have the silk drawers?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “Nope. After the shopping binge I stopped wearing underwear altogether.”

  She couldn’t match his stride, and kept trying different rhythmic combinations, 3:2, 5:3, like solving an equation, and now tangibly hung back. “Listen,” she fumbled. “I don’t do this sort of thing much anymore.”

  He stopped and kissed her hair. “Now, what sort of thing might that be?”

  “I guess that’s my question.”

  “Always in such a rush. Don’t we need something to discuss before we can discuss it?”