He smiled at her as she opened the door. His name was Patrick. They ordered eggs and toast and drank cup after cup of coffee as he smoked and talked. He’d been in the States for six months, working for the cousin of a friend who ran a messenger service. He drove nights and sent earnings home to his two-year-old daughter, Clare. He sent the money orders to his mother, though. Not to Elizabeth, the girlfriend. He spit out her name like a curse.
Patrick had grown up outside of Dublin, dropped out of high school but got a night school diploma. He wanted to go to university to study geography. “Geography?” Joyce asked.
“Yeh. And poetry.” He reeled off a list of his favorite modern Irish poets, with names that sounded like a sonnet of beautiful nonsense syllables: Padriac, Ciaran, Donagh, Nuala. She watched as the words dropped from his mismatched lips — the lower more generous than the top.
He offered her a Marlboro and she took it. She hadn’t smoked since college, but it was an excuse to touch his hand as he lit her cigarette. Her arm warmed from the contact. His eyes were almost indigo blue.
Patrick threw a crumpled $20 onto the counter as they left. Outside, Joyce stood against the cab of his panel truck, letting the cool damp of the metal seep through to her back. Patrick leaned over her, propped on a hand he placed beside her cheek. Five foot ten, she guessed. His breath smelled of tobacco.
“Why did you drop out of school?” Joyce asked.
“That’s a story.” Softly, almost whispering, he told about how he’d gone, one Saturday morning, to fix a window in his math teacher’s room. She was waiting for him, a woman in her first year on the job. Young, black hair, brown eyes. “A tall girl. Tall as me. Pretty.” They thought they were alone in the building, but they got caught in the cloakroom and he never went back.
Joyce stared at his mouth. He leaned down and kissed her gently.
“Can I see you again?”
Joyce nodded.
“Meet me for lunch here, tomorrow?”
She nodded again and he took her phone number.
He walked her to her car and kissed her hand. Joyce realized that she wouldn’t be telling Kathleen about her morning at Halibut Point, after all.
KATHLEEN PUT ON her seat belt and sat, distracted, her fingers on the unturned key. Buddy came over to the driver’s side. “You all right?”
“I’m fine.” She started the car and pulled out of the driveway. Kathleen drove down the block slowly and waited for the traffic to break. Why are there so many cars today? Why are they all going so fast? Why won’t anyone let me in? She gripped the wheel.
Finally there was a gap in the traffic and she eased out into the road. A trucker blasted his horn and set her heart racing. Riding the brake, Kathleen edged into the rotary, merged right toward the bridge, and realized she was panting. Climbing over the river, she noticed a long line of passing cars. She looked down at the speedometer. I’m not really going twenty miles an hour, am I? As another car passed, she turned to see the driver mouthing curses at her.
She fixed her eyes on the bumper of the car ahead of her and tried to keep up. Oh, my God, she thought. Oh, my God.
Once she got off the bridge, Kathleen pulled over to the side of the road, crawled over to the passenger’s seat, opened the door, and vomited onto the sandy shoulder.
What on earth had she eaten last night? Or was this some form of radiation sickness?
She counted to one hundred and felt her pulse slow down a bit. It wasn’t food poisoning or radiation sickness, she thought. It was all in her head. And if she didn’t pull herself together, they would drag her to a psychiatrist.
She found a breath mint, brushed her hair, and started the car again, forcing her right foot down until the speedometer registered forty-five, which was as fast as she could bear to go. “I can do this,” she said, glancing at her panicked eyes in the rearview mirror. “I have to do this.”
Kathleen arrived at the office ten minutes late, but no one commented or seemed to notice her agitation. I must be a better actress than I thought. Or maybe they just weren’t interested.
Actually, the whole office was a bit out of kilter. Dr. Singh was at a conference in Boston. His replacement, a heavyset woman with a Russian accent, came in to check on the settings and barely looked at Kathleen. Rachel had called in sick and Terry was on vacation. The substitutes called her “honey” and took too long getting her positioned.
On her back, arm raised, breast bare, she tried not to think about driving home. She closed her eyes against the red laser line, but it remained on the backs of her eyelids, vibrating and fading, a crimson tightrope.
After her treatment, Kathleen drank a cup of tepid tea in the too bright hospital cafeteria and then walked around the small gift shop for as long as she could. At least there won’t be much traffic now, she thought. She could drive like a little old lady and they could all pass her. I can do it, she told herself. I’ve done it a million times.
She had done it with children screaming in the backseat. She had done it with brushfires smoking in the woods on both sides of the road. She’d driven this stretch of road after the unveiling of Danny’s headstone, Buddy sobbing beside her.
I can do it, she thought. But as she approached the bridge, she started to shake. “What is this?” she wailed, and pulled off the road again.
“Okay, okay,” she said in the tone she used with the kindergartners. “You don’t have to take the bridge. You can go around.”
But that would add so many more miles to the trip. Which was worse? She stared at her knuckles and realized her hands ached from grasping the steering wheel so tightly. All she wanted was to be home.
“Let’s go home,” she said to herself firmly in the rearview mirror. She turned off the highway and took the longer route, forcing herself to breathe slowly: in two-three-four, out two-three-four.
That evening, she asked Buddy if he would mind driving her tomorrow. “It would be nice to have the company.”
“Only if you let me take you to breakfast after.”
With Buddy at the wheel the next morning Kathleen wasn’t quite as terrified, but the trip over the bridge still made her pulse speed up and her hands clammy. She kept her eyes on the guardrail and counted. Buddy didn’t notice.
No one seemed to notice. One of Marcy’s daughters had chicken pox, so she was out of the office. When Joyce called, Kathleen said she was feeling a little unsteady on her feet, but even Joyce didn’t seem concerned. She’d thought Joyce might guess that something was wrong.
Kathleen sat under the awning on the deck and tried to read but couldn’t concentrate. She ended up in the cool of the den, dozing in front of the television. She didn’t answer the phone unless she heard Buddy on the answering machine. She listened to a message from Rabbi Hertz, and one from that young woman, Brigid.
She stayed out of the car. Buddy ran the errands and did the grocery shopping. He came home after work to find her asleep on the couch. He sat on the chair beside her, leaned his head on his hand, and worried. Hal and Jack had called him at the store to find out what was wrong with their mother: she sounded weird when they spoke to her on the phone. Buddy told them that Kathleen was just tired. That’s what she kept telling him.
She woke up and saw the look on Buddy’s face and said it again. “I’ll be okay. It’s the radiation. They all say I’ll be fine.” Then she made up another story about walking at Good Harbor with Joyce.
JOYCE FELT ELECTRIFIED and breathless. She woke before six and walked to the end of Rocky Neck in the wispy stillness. Back home, she turned on the computer, wrote a poem about the sunrise, and deleted it. When Frank called, she was sitting on the kitchen floor, staring at the purple swatch she’d painted.
“I’m trying that eggplant color,” she told him, coughing to clear her throat.
“Are you okay?”
“I think it’s just the fumes getting to me. But I think I’m almost ready to get serious about the book now that the painting is nearly done.”
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“Great.”
Joyce said nothing.
“Well, then, I won’t keep you.”
“You’re not,” said Joyce, instantly annoyed at him for ending the conversation so abruptly. “Things okay at work?”
“Yeah, crazy.” She could imagine him shrugging.
“Well, I have to get going. I should call Kathleen.”
“You’re a good friend,” said Frank. “Talk to you later.”
As soon as she hung up, Joyce got into the shower. Washing away my lies, she thought. Not that I’ve lied to anyone. Yet.
In the car, she switched the radio from NPR to a heavy metal rock station and turned up the volume. It was noise but it drowned out her misgivings and it seemed to sharpen her senses.
Patrick kissed her absently when she sat down at the counter for lunch. He wasn’t nearly as talkative as he’d been the day before. He hadn’t shaved either. “I had a long night,” he explained. “Double shift. I didn’t get off till just now.” He smoked one cigarette after another and only smiled as Joyce tried to make conversation, which wasn’t easy. She couldn’t very well talk about her family, so she told him the story of the statue in her yard, from Ricky’s near-fatal accident to Theresa’s recent devotions.
After the waitress delivered their sandwiches, they chewed in silence, and Joyce began to think that this would be their last meeting. But Patrick asked her if she had time for a quick walk at Plum Cove before he went home and crashed. They walked silently past chatting mothers and playing children on the small, rocky beach.
Patrick leaned against Joyce on the way back to the cars, brushing his hand against hers. “I’ve been so lonesome here,” he said. “You’re a good egg to put up with me, Joycey.”
She squeezed his hand and lifted her mouth to be kissed. He obliged. He got into her car and took her face between his hands, kissing her. For ten minutes, he kissed her, then moved his lips to her ear and said, “Tomorrow, Joycey, would you come visit me in my poor little room?”
“Yes.”
“Noon again?”
“Yes.”
He wrote down the address.
Joyce turned up the volume on her radio even louder and kept it there, turning it down only for her daily phone call to Kathleen, who said no again. When Frank called, she let the machine pick up. “Looks like a great beach day,” he said. “I hope you’re having a good one.”
It was a long one, which she filled with ceilings, her least favorite job.
In the morning, she took a bath instead of a shower. She filed her nails and finally left the house early, arriving in Rockport an hour before she was supposed to be there, which turned out to be a good thing since she couldn’t find Patrick’s apartment. She located the sub shop he mentioned, but there was no door at the address he’d given her. Finally, she walked around to the parking lot behind the storefront, where he was waiting, on the wooden stoop, smoking.
Joyce followed him up a flight of stairs that opened into a dim kitchen with empty spaces where there should have been a refrigerator and a stove. They walked past a line of hollow-core doors, each of them padlocked from the outside. “Who lives here?” she asked.
“Workingmen,” Patrick said, leading the way. “Mostly Irish. Working two jobs, a lot of them. Sending money back home.”
Patrick’s room was at the end of the hall. The two windows, hung with old floral bedsheets, overlooked the street. Five oversize wrestling posters were taped to the walls. “Not mine,” he said, pointing to the lurid masks and rippling muscles. “The kid before me had ’em up, and they cover the cracks.” He lit another cigarette.
Jeans and work shirts were folded neatly and stored in blue milk crates that also held a half dozen books, a carton of Marlboros, an ashtray, and a gooseneck lamp. The king-size mattress took up most of the floor space, a worn, green acrylic blanket tucked into hospital corners. It looked, oddly, like a monk’s cell. Or an odd monk’s cell.
He took her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. She could barely breathe.
When he closed the door, Joyce panicked. Was she out of her mind? No one knew where she was.
“Are you all right?” he asked, stepping back and holding an open palm out to her, as though she were a wary dog. He let her make the first move.
She paused, then put her mouth to his. They kissed, standing. He was in no rush. They held each other, and he ran his arms up and down her back. He held her head and tangled his hands in her hair. His attentions — deliberate, almost chaste — made Joyce feel light-headed.
She had to sit, to lie down. But he held her standing, kissing, running his hands down to the small of her back, her midriff, her ears, her ass, everywhere but her breasts and her crotch.
She moaned. Patrick pulled back a little and smiled at her, as though he had won some kind of victory. “You can go now if you like.”
Joyce pulled away, feeling as if she’d been slapped. “What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s hardly a palace where I live, is it now?”
“What difference would that make?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Americans are, can be . . .”
Joyce imagined a string of women coming here, turning up their noses at the squalor. Though it wasn’t really squalid. It was shabby, but clean enough.
She put her hands on his hips and pushed herself up against him.
He laughed. “All right then.”
He drew her to the mattress and they necked like a couple of high school kids until Joyce thought she would pass out. Patrick got up and excused himself to go to the bathroom.
He’s getting a condom, thought Joyce, who took off her shoes.
The lock clicked shut behind him when he returned. Patrick lay down and started kissing her. He unbuttoned her jeans and slipped his hand under her T-shirt, kissing her. He stripped her slowly. With his tongue and with his fingers, he caressed her slowly, head to foot.
He held her head between his hands and whispered in Celtic — sibilant, purring nonsense warming the inside of her willing ear. He ran the silky insides of his forearms on her thighs in a way that nearly brought her to orgasm, then paused for long, aching moments, before taking her the rest of the way with his hand.
He put her toes in his mouth, and she nearly laughed at the intensity of that pleasure. He reached up her thighs, and up inside her. Fingers and tongue, turning her inside out. He was practiced, and generous. He took his time and seemed to know just when to apply a little more pressure. He cooed as she climaxed, “Ooh, Joycey.”
Joyce grinned at herself in the mirror on the way home. Her skin glowed. Her lips glowed. She looked young. Was it really the most intense, satisfying orgasm she’d ever had, or was it just new?
She painted three closets that afternoon. She finally lied outright to Frank when he asked about her day. “Antique shopping,” she said. She slept for twelve hours and woke up at eight-thirty, to Frank’s phone call.
Then Patrick called, as he said he would, at ten. “Give me a couple of hours to sleep. I’m done in.”
He was waiting outside for her and kissed the back of her hand as he took the sack of coffee and muffins from her. She sat on the folding chair in his room, watching him eat.
He ate in big bites and drained the cup. Joyce watched him wipe his mouth with the napkin. “You’re the cure for loneliness,” Patrick said, putting the cup back into the bag.
He leaned against the wall, stretching his legs on the bed, and pulled a book from his shelf, a big, dog-eared collection of contemporary Irish poems. “Come sit by me, Joycey.” He patted the space beside him. “Let me read you something.” He read three poems full of longing for a lover and for a green piece of land, which turned out to be the same thing.
When he finished, he kissed her on the cheek and jumped up. “Back in a sec.”
He took off her clothes, standing up this time. Nuzzling her breasts, stroking her thighs, kneeling before her, he steadied her with his hands when she sw
ayed. There was a moment when Joyce grew fearful that he would stop, or that he would do something cruel. But that never happened.
Three days running, Joyce left his room high as a kite, but more and more perplexed. As she drove back to Gloucester, she fretted over the way he never took off his clothes, never let her touch him below the waist. He even stopped her from running her hands under the shirt he never removed, holding her wrists, gently but emphatically, until she stopped trying.
Joyce longed to give him what he gave her, but he refused. He shifted his weight when she tried to lean against him. When she reached down for him, he shook his head no.
“Why?” she asked, panting, wanting him inside her.
“Your pleasure is my pleasure,” he said, removing his face from between her hands, kissing a path down between her breasts, down to her toes and up to her clitoris, where he stayed until she stopped him.
And he stopped only when she stopped him, when she was drenched, weak, sore with pleasure. When she said, “Enough.” Or when it got to be two-thirty.
The lobster shift, he called it, three in the afternoon until eleven at night, though often there was overtime until early in the morning. His regular route took him all over the North Shore, though he’d been as far as Maine and New York City.
He told her that sometimes, too wound up to sleep after a long night, he would find a spot and watch the sun rise over the ocean. Like the morning they had met at Halibut Point. “I won’t go back there without you now,” Patrick said as they lay on top of the threadbare sheets. “It’ll be our own piece of sky. On the edge of the morning, the off-chance meeting of lonely hearts.”
Joyce shivered.
“You enjoy hearing me go on a bit, don’t ya?” he whispered, lips to her ear.
As she drove home, she plotted ways to pry off his shirt. She practiced asking him why he wouldn’t get naked with her. Was he impotent? Did he have AIDS? Was he a priest? Was there a camera in the room? Was he a psychopath setting her up for a brutal murder?