Let the Great World Spin

  She touches them with her fingers, as if she can hold the memory of it there.

  —Hi, I’m Jaslyn, she says with a wave.

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  An idiotic wave. Presidential, almost.

  —Hi, says a tall brunette.

  She feels as if she has been nailed to the floor, but one of the nephews strides across the room. He has something of the petulant college boy about him, chubby face, a white shirt, a blue blazer, a red handkerchief in the breast pocket.

  —Tom, he says. Lovely to meet you, Jaslyn, finally.

  He says her name like something he wants to flick off his shoe, and the word finally stretches into rebuke. So he knows about her. He has heard. He probably thinks she’s here to dig. So be it. Gold digger. The truth is, she couldn’t care less about the will; if she got anything she would probably give it away.

  —A drink?

  —I’m fine, thanks.

  —We figured that Auntie would’ve wanted us to enjoy ourselves even in the worst of times. He lowers his voice: We’re making Manhattans.

  —How is she?

  —She’s sleeping.

  —It’s late—I’m terribly sorry.

  —We have soda too, if you want.

  —Is she . . . ?

  She cannot finish the sentence. The words hang in the air between her and Tom.

  —She’s not well, he says.

  That word again. A hollow echo all the way down to the ground. No splash. A constant free fall. Well well.

  She dislikes them for drinking, but then she knows she should join them, that she should not be apart. Bring Pino back, let him slide some charm among them, let him take her off into the evening upon his arm, nestled up against his leather jacket.

  —Maybe I’ll take a drink, she says.

  —And so, says Tom, what exactly brings you here?

  —Excuse me?

  —I mean, what exactly do you do now? Weren’t you working for the Democrats or something?

  She hears a slight giggle from across the room. They are facing her, all of them, watching, as if she has, at last, made it to the stage.

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  —

  She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse. They arrange their lives in front of her, a few sheets of paper, a pay stub, a welfare check, all they have left. She adds up the figures. She knows the tax credits, the loopholes, the exits and entrances, the phone calls that must be made.

  She tries to nullify mortgage payments on a house that has floated down to the sea. She gets around insurance demands on cars that are at the bottom of the bayou. She tries to stop bills for very small white coffins.

  She has seen others from the Little Rock foundation cleave people open immediately, but she has never been able to get to them so quickly.

  At first they are stilted with her, but she has learned how to listen all the same. After a half hour or so she gets to them.

  It’s as if they’re talking to themselves, as if she is a mirror in front of them, giving them another history of themselves.

  She is attracted to their darkness, but she likes the moment when they turn again and find some meaning that sideswipes them: I really loved her. I loosened his shirt before he drifted through the floodgates. My husband put the stove on a layaway plan.

  And before they know it, their taxes are done, the insurance claim is laid out, the mortgage companies have been noted, the paper is slid across the table for them to sign. Sometimes it takes them an age just to sign, since they have something else to say—they are off and chatting about the cars they bought, the loves they loved. They have a deep need just to talk, just to tell a story, however small or reckless.

  Listening to these people is like listening to trees—sooner or later the tree is sliced open and the watermarks reveal their age.

  —

  There was an old woman about nine months ago—she sat in a Little Rock hotel room, her dress spread out. Jaslyn was trying to figure out payments that the woman wasn’t getting from her pension fund.

  —My boy was the mailman, the woman said. Right there in the Ninth.

  He was a good boy. Twenty- two years old. Used to work late if he had to.

  And he worked, I ain’t lying. People loved getting his letters. They waited for him. They liked him coming knocking on the door. You lis tenin’?

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  —Yes, ma’am.

  —And then the storm blowed in. And he didn’t come back. I was waiting. I had his dinner ready. I was living on the third floor then. Waiting. Except nothing happened. So I waited and waited. I went out after two days looking for him, went downstairs. All those helicopters were flying over, ignoring us. I waded out into the street, I was up to my neck, near drowning. I couldn’t find no sign, nothing, ’til I was down there by the check- cashing store and I found the sack of mail floating and I pulled it in. And I thought, Holy.

  The woman’s fingers clamped down, gripping Jasyln’s hand.

  —I was sure he’d come floating around the next corner, alive. I looked and looked. But I never did see my boy. I wish I woulda drowned right there and then. I found out two weeks later that he was caught up high in a treetop just rotting in the heat. In his mailman uniform. Imagine that, caught in the tree.

  The woman got to her feet, and went across the hotel room, went to a cheap dresser, yanked a drawer open.

  —I still got his mail here, see? You can take it if you want it.

  Jaslyn held the sack in her hands. None of the envelopes had been touched.

  —Take it, please, the woman said. I can’t stand it no more.

  —

  She took the sack of letters out to the lake near Natural Steps at the outskirts of Little Rock. The last light of day, she walked on the bank, her shoes sinking in the loam. Birds rose by pairs, bursting upward and wheeling overhead with the sun red on their cupped underwings. She wasn’t sure what she should do with the mail. She sat down on the grass and sorted them out, magazines, flyers, personal letters to be returned with a note: This got lost some time ago. I hope it’s okay to send it on again now.

  She burned the bills, all of them. Verizon. Con Ed. The Internal Rev-enue Service. That grief wouldn’t be needed now, no, not anymore.

  —

  She stands by the window, the dark down. A chatter in the room. She is reminded of white birds, flapping. The cocktail glass she holds feels frag-ile. If she holds it too tight, she thinks, it might shatter.

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  She has come to stay, to be with Claire for a day or two. To sleep in the spare room. To accompany her dying, the same way she accompanied Gloria’s dying six years ago. The slow car journey back to Missouri. The smile on Gloria’s face. Her sister, Janice, in the front seat, driving. Playing games with the rearview mirror. Both of them pushing Gloria in a wheelchair along the banks of the river. Up a lazy river where the robin’s song wakes a brand- new morning as we roll along. It was a celebration, that day. They had dug their feet down into happiness and weren’t prepared to let go. They threw sticks into an eddy and watched them circle. Put a blanket down, ate Wonder Bread sandwiches. Later in the afternoon, her sister began crying, like a change in the weather, for no reason except the popping of a wine cork. Jaslyn handed her a wadded tissue. Gloria laughed at them and said that she’d overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die.

  The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there
was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

  Gloria left with a smile on her face. They closed her eyes with the glare of the sun still on them, rolled the wheelchair up the hill, stayed a little while looking out over the land until the insects of evening gathered.

  They buried her two days later in a plot near the back of her old house.

  She had told Jaslyn once that everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried. A quiet ceremony, just the girls and a preacher. They put Gloria in the ground with one of her father’s old hand- painted signs and a sewing tin she’d kept from her own mother. If there was any good way to go, it was a good way to go.

  Yes, she thinks, she would like to stay and be with Claire also, spend a few moments, find some silence, let the moments crawl. She has even brought her pajamas, her toothbrush, her comb. But it is clear to her now that she is not welcome.

  She had forgotten that there might be others too, that a life is lived in many ways—so many unopened envelopes.

  —May I see her?

  —I don’t think she should be disturbed.

  —I’ll just pop my head around the door.

  —It’s a little late. She’s sleeping. Would you like another drink . . . ?

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  her name. But he knows her name. Idiot. A crass, lumbering fool. He wants to own the grief and throw a party for it.

  —Jaslyn, she says and smiles thinly.

  —Another drink, Jaslyn?

  —Thank you, no, she says, I have a room at the Regis.

  —The Regis, awesome.

  It’s the fanciest hotel she can think of, the most expensive place. She has no idea even where it is, just somewhere nearby, but the name changes Tom’s face—he smiles and shows his very white teeth.

  She wraps a napkin around the bottom of her drink, places it down on the glass coffee table.

  —Well, I should say good night. It’s been a pleasure.

  —Please, I’ll show you down.

  —It’s okay, really.

  —No, no, I insist.

  He touches her elbow and she cringes. She resists the urge to ask him if he has ever been president of a frat house.

  —Really, she says at the elevator, I can let myself out.

  He leans forward to kiss her cheek. She allows him her shoulder and she gives a slight nudge against his chin.

  — Good- bye, she says with a singsong finality.

  Downstairs, Melvyn hails her a cab and soon she is alone again, as if none of the evening has happened at all. She checks in her pocket for the card from Pino. Turns it over in her fingers. It’s as if she can feel the phone already ringing itself out in his pocket.

  —

  The only room at the St. Regis costs four hundred and twenty-five dollars for the night. She thinks about trying to find another hotel, even thinks about a phone call to Pino, but then slides her credit card across the counter. Her hands shake: it is almost a month and a half’s rent in Little Rock. The girl behind the desk asks for I.D. Not a moment worth arguing over, though the couple in front of her were not asked for theirs.

  The room is tiny. The television sits high on the wall. She clicks on the remote. The end of the storm. No hurricanes this year. Baseball scores, football scores, another six dead in Iraq.

  She flops down on the bed, arms behind her head.

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  —

  She went to Ireland shortly after the attacks on Afghanistan. It was supposed to be a vacation. Her sister was part of the team coordinating the U.S. flights into Shannon Airport. They were spat on in the streets of Galway when they were leaving a restaurant. Fucken Yanks go home. It wasn’t as bad as being called a nigger, which happened when they rented a car and ended up on the wrong side of the road.

  Ireland surprised her. She had expected backroads of green and high hedges, men with locks of dark hair, isolated white cottages on the hills.

  Instead she got flyovers and ramps and lectures from heavy- faced drunks on just exactly what world policy meant. She found herself pulling into a shell, unable to listen. She’d heard bits and pieces about the man, Corrigan, who had died alongside her mother. She wanted to know more. Her sister was the opposite—Janice wanted nothing to do with the past. The past embarrassed her. The past was a jet that was coming in with dead bodies from the Middle East.

  So she drove to Dublin without her sister. She did not know why but slow tears caught in her eyelashes: she had to squeeze them out to restore her vision of the road. She drew in deep, silent breaths as the roads grew bigger.

  It was easy enough to find Corrigan’s brother. He was the CEO of an Internet company in the high glass towers along the Liffey.

  —Come and see me, he said on the phone.

  Dublin was a boomtown. Neon along the river. The seagulls embroi-dered it. Ciaran was in his early sixties with a small peninsula of hair on his forehead. Half an American accent—his other office, he said, was in Silicon Valley. He was impeccably dressed in a suit and expensive open-necked shirt. Gray chest hair peeking out. They sat in his office and he talked her through a life of his late brother, Corrigan, a life that seemed rare and radical to her.

  Outside the window, cranes swung on the skyline. The Irish light seemed lengthy. He took her across the river, to a pub, tucked down an alleyway, a genuine pub, all hardwood and beerscent. A row of silver kegs outside. She ordered a pint of Guinness.

  —Was my mother in love with him?

  He laughed. Oh, I don’t think so, no.

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  —Are you sure?

  —That day, he was just giving her a lift home, that’s all.

  —I see.

  —He was in love with another woman. From South America—I can’t remember where, Colombia, I think, or Nicaragua.

  —Oh.

  She recognized the need for her mother to have been in love at least once.

  —That’s a pity, she said, her eyes moistening.

  She scoured her sleeve across her eyes. She hated the sight of tears, anytime. Showy and sentimental, the last thing she wanted.

  Ciaran had no idea what to do with her. He went outside and called his wife on his cell phone. Jaslyn stayed at the bar and drank another beer, felt warm but light- headed. Maybe Corrigan had secretly loved her mother, maybe they were on their way to a rendezvous, perhaps a deep love had struck them both at the last instant. It occurred to her that her mother would only be forty- five or forty- six years old if she were still alive.

  They might have been friends. They could have talked about these things, could have sat in a bar together, spent some time, shared a beer.

  But it was ridiculous, really. How could her mother have crawled away from that life and started anew? How could she have walked away intact?

  With what, sweeping brooms, dust pans? Here we go, honey, grab my high- heeled boots, put them in the wagon, westward we go. Stupid, she knew. Still. Just one evening. To sit with her mother and watch the way she painted her nails, maybe, or see the way she put coffee in a cup, or watch her kick her shoes off, a single moment of the ordinary. Running the bath. Humming out of tune. Cutting the toast. Anything at all. Up a lazy river, how happy we could be.

  Ciaran breezed back into the pub and said to her in a distinctly American accent: Guess who’s coming to dinner?

  He drove a brand- new silver Audi. The house was just off the seafront, whitewashed, with roses out front and a dark ironwork fence. It was the same place the brothers had grown up. He had sold it once and had to buy it back for over a million dollars.

 
—Can you believe it? he said. A million plus.

  His wife, Lara, was working in the garden, snipping roses with prun-ing shears. She was kind, slim, gentle, her gray hair pulled back into a McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 343

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  bun. She had the bluest eyes, they looked like small drops of September sky. She pulled her gardening gloves off. There were spatters of color on her hands. She drew Jaslyn close, held her for a moment longer than expected: she smelled of paint.

  Inside, there was a lot of artwork on the walls. They wandered around, a glass of crisp white wine for each of them.

  She liked the paintings: radical Dublin landscapes, translated as line, shadow, color. Lara had published an art book and managed to sell some in the outdoor art shows in Merrion Square, but she had lost, she said, her American touch.

  There was something of the beautiful failure about her.

  They ended up in the back garden again, sitting at the patio, a bone of white light in the sky. Ciaran talked of the Dublin real estate market: but really, Jaslyn felt, they were talking about hidden losses, not profits, all the things they had passed by over the years.

  After dinner, all three walked along the seafront together, past the Martello Tower and back around. The stars over Dublin sat like paint marks in the sky. The tide was long gone. An enormous stretch of sand disappeared into black.

  —That way’s England, said Ciaran, for no reason she could discern.

  He put his jacket around her and Lara took her elbow, walked along, wedged between them. She broke free as delicately as she could, drove back to Limerick first thing the next morning. Her sister’s face was glowing. Janice had just met a man. He was on his third tour, she said—

  imagine that. He wore size- fourteen boots, she added with a wink.

  —

  Her sister got shipped to the embassy in Baghdad two years ago. Every now and then she still gets a postcard from her. One of them is a picture of a woman in a burka: Fun in the sun.