Academy Street Read online

  All day long, they came and went, swimming and eating and talking. She stayed close to Oliver. She looked at the others, wondering at their lives now, their mothers and fathers back home. All the time the sea, the wing-flash of gulls, him on the edge of her vision. She had to pass him to get to the water and she half ran, shy, feeling the pull, the oscillation in him: in a glance, an invitation, in the next, a rejection. Admit it, she wanted to cry. Only the truth matters. Tense, febrile, she threw herself on her towel and watched him through half-closed eyes in a swirl of sun and cigarette smoke. A birthday card was passed around and he took the pen in his left hand and tilted his head and half twisted his torso and hooked his wrist at an awkward painful angle, and scratched out the words. She was rooted to the spot. In his hooked hand, his twisted body, she saw a striving, something that rendered him vulnerable. Misshapen hand, she thought, misshapen words. Misshapen man. The effort implied something fragile, broken, a wound far greater than any visible deformity.

  The sun beat down. From the promenade, the cries of carousel riders carried in the air. She got up, walked into the water, pushed her legs against the weight of the sea. She had learned to swim in Dublin, the one thing in her life that she had ever mastered. Chest-high in the waves she lowered her head, raised her legs, let her body float, the ocean under her. She lay on the shimmering surface. The swell of each wave lifted her, then gently lowered her again. She was almost dreaming, the sun on her back.

  And then he was there, gliding silently under her. Hair flowing back from his temples, his head pushing on. All sound muted by water. She glided, opened her arms and legs, swam parallel above him. They were beyond the reach of others, moving in perfect unison, two sea creatures, cold, radiant, luminous. They swam further, deeper, through sudden patches of cold. She had an urge to wrap her legs around him, ride on his back down into the dark.

  And then he banked and they were before each other in the underwater silence. His eyes blinked, searched hers. He brought a hand to her face, stroked it. Air bubbles rose from his mouth. A faint frown, and then a smile. She was elated. And then he was gone, surging upwards, breaking the surface into sunlight. In his after-tow she lost her tread and floundered for a second and lunged back towards the shore, desperate for the touch of the sea floor.

  In the evening they gathered up their belongings and piled onto the boardwalk, to the hot dog and drinks stands. Oliver and the others drifted off. They found themselves together again, a sphere of uncalm surrounding them. His silence was overbearing, a force field, sucking everything out of her. He raised his head and looked from him, as if nothing had happened. There was an eerie depth to him, an inwardness that was infinite. She thought he was not in command of it.

  That night they all met up again at City Center ballroom on West 55th Street. She was fevered, agitated, consumed by the day’s events. The ballroom was heaving, dancers jiving to the Irish show band. Oliver found a raven-haired girl and never left her side. Anne and Tim danced and then, pitying her, Anne went to the bathroom and Tim took her onto the floor. The crowd swelled and swayed and she searched for the head of David among the throng.

  He appeared at her side. She had gone outside for air, sat on a window sill. Under the streetlight he smiled at her. He was very tall. His smile drew her to him and she felt herself in the presence of something good.

  ‘Hello, stranger,’ she said. She knew she would remember this day for the rest of her life.

  ‘How’re all the patients? Any more falls?’ She had told him, before, of patients—men mostly—fainting when blood was drawn, at the sight of the syringe even. She suspected him a faller himself.

  ‘Every day, without fail,’ she said, smiling. She wanted to dance, but not just yet. He sat down beside her, their arms almost touching.

  Minutes passed and nothing happened. She felt him retreat into the depths again. He could not help it. She gazed at his hand resting on his thigh and longed to hold it, make something of it. She sensed a longing in him too. She closed her eyes. She remembered something she had read—that the more desperately a man is in love, the greater the violence he must do his feelings to risk offending the woman he loves by taking her hand.

  They began to walk. The night was warm, the streets alive. She told him again about the place she came from, the family left behind, the father. She wanted desperately to get him back.

  ‘I never knew my father,’ he said. ‘My mother reared me and my brother. When I was eight my cousin told me my father was a bus driver. I’d stare at all the buses going by, at the drivers. Wondering…is it you? When I got on a bus, I thought he’d surely know me, he would just know me.’ He threw away his cigarette. ‘One day when I was walking home from school a bus passed and the driver waved at me, and smiled. I thought it was him—I was certain. For a long time I searched. Now, well, I think…he probably wasn’t a bus driver at all.’

  She felt him grow remote once more. She searched her mind for things to say. It was all she could do not to touch him.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said.

  She was stricken. She caught something in his eyes—confusion, anger—as if hijacked by feelings he did not understand. She watched him walk away.

  ‘Will you be here next week?’ she asked his back, almost whispering. It took all the courage she could muster.

  He turned and walked back to her. She felt herself in the lap of the gods. He brought his face to hers and kissed her. She could taste the cigarette.

  And then he was gone.

  8

  MUSIC DRIFTED THROUGH open church doors onto the sunny street where she was walking and stopped her in her tracks. She entered the vestibule and read a notice for a lunchtime recital. She listened. First, she discerned piano, then cello. She stepped into the dim interior and stood by the baptismal font at the back. A small audience sat in the front pews, the musicians to the side. The notes changed, grew loud and discordant, then softened again and ascended in a pure harmony. Alone, the piano played slow and sombre. And then, from the cello, rose the most mournful sound she had ever heard. Beautiful, melancholy, reaching every remote cell. She closed her eyes. With his kiss he had claimed her. He had awoken her soul.

  Days passed, each an eternity. She remembered every word, and was by turn exalted, desolate. She had never lived so intensely. At night she sat at her dressing-table mirror. She felt his approach, felt him steal into her, leaving a cold shivery fear at her centre, and afterwards a waning numbness. The only cure would be the sight of him. She crawled into bed. In the dark her mouth shaped itself to kiss, re-kiss, grasping at the air in little fish gulps. She bit back the reflex, the trembling mouth. The things that had seemed indecent to think were no longer so: his limbs, his skin, his hand pressed flat on her belly. Please come back to me.

  She looked out of windows. She drifted, distant and composed, through each working day, the routes and rhythms of trains and subways, streets and corridors, already set into her neural grid. Days off she spent in the library, vaguely dreaming, vaguely sick, or in the park, staring at men walking home from work. In the apartment the fan whirred and she looked out and examined the day.

  One evening, alone, at twilight she rose from the table and left her hand on the refrigerator door and felt its faint vibrations. She leaned against it and closed her eyes. The rad
io was on, low. After what seemed a long time she walked to the window and saw a man on the street below, smoking a cigarette. She thought it was him. She had a vision of herself, dressed in his skin, her arms inside his, her head in his. He raised his face but it was not him. She remained calm, felt herself possessed of infinite patience. The man threw his cigarette on the pavement and turned and walked away.

  She moved from the window. She stood in the middle of the room. So this is love, she thought.

  She went down to the drugstore, desperate to be among people. Returning, she was accosted on the street by a bag lady, a face thrust in hers, crazed eyes, wild hair. A mad mouth screaming obscenities at her, shouting out Tess’s own thoughts. Shameful thoughts. She froze, trapped under the woman’s spell, cursed. Then someone passed and knocked against her and she came to her senses and ran, stumbling, into her building.

  The incident shook her to the core. How had that woman known her thoughts—the carnal thoughts that she, Tess, had harboured? This man, this love had become a disturbance, an interruption in her life. She needed to put an end to it. The following Sunday she visited Molly and Fritz. Oliver was there—she had not seen him in a while. He sat red-eyed, hungover, depressed. Alone for a minute after dinner, she asked good-humouredly about the raven-haired girl. He raised his listless eyes and shrugged.

  Molly sat down. ‘Have you heard from Claire? I wonder if her arm is any better.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her arm?’ Tess asked.

  ‘I don’t think it’s much…She has it ever since Elizabeth was born. It could be arthritis—this family is riddled with arthritis.’

  She was ashamed. Wrapped in her own selfish fantasies.

  That night she called Claire. She could hardly speak.

  ‘How are you, Tess? When are you coming to visit us?’ The voice was far away and lonely.

  ‘I’ll come soon, I will. In October. I promise. How’s your arm?’

  ‘It’s much better. It’s nothing—just numb from carrying Elizabeth around. But now she’s walking.’

  ‘And Peter?’

  ‘He’s good. He’s busy, always busy—the company’s expanding. It’s all…great. They have these family days—I meet the other wives. They’re all so pally with each other. We go to parties. Oh, Tess…you wouldn’t believe what some people get up to.’ Her voice trailed off.

  ‘Is everything okay, Claire?’

  A hesitation. ‘Yes, of course. Everything’s good, Tess…Do come out. You promised! I think of you every day.’

  Anne Beckett’s wedding drew near. They had grown close, and Tess longed to pour out her feelings for Anne’s cousin, but the dread, and the prospect of shame, if she had misread the signs and imagined it all, prevented her. She contrived to steer conversation towards topics in which his name might arise, but was struck dumb when it did. One night in August, Anne was writing her wedding invitations at the kitchen table, stacking them into a neat pile for posting. Checking names off her list.

  ‘Donal Brennan, my cousin, can’t come, but David is definitely coming—he was afraid he mightn’t make it. He thinks he’ll be shipping out in October.’

  Her heart took fright. ‘Has he been drafted?’ She had thought the draft applied only to American citizens.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think he just signed up for the Air Force. He’s being sent to a base in New Jersey in the next few weeks…’ She thought for a second. ‘I doubt he’ll be flying planes. Maybe paperwork or something.’

  A while later, after Anne had gone to bed, she found his invitation in the pile and memorised the address.

  He was not in the church for the ceremony, or outside on the sunny street where the guests overflowed afterwards. The reception was held in a hotel forty minutes out of the city. When she saw him at the table, seated three places from her in a suit and shirt and tie, and when he looked up and their eyes met, she knew that, for all the times she had remembered him, he had remembered her too. She watched his hands bringing the fork, the glass, to his lips. She saw his wrists and the fine hairs under the cuff of his sleeve and thought of his skin, warm and smooth under the shirt, and she had to look away. She ate little and genteelly, a new refinement arriving of its own accord, as if every limb and organ and nerve was in obeisance, moved to honour the beloved.

  ‘I thought you were a lawyer. Why are you joining the Air Force?’ They were on the terrace. She was flushed from the wine. The light was fading and night-lights were coming up on the lawn. She took the cigarette he offered and bent to his lighter’s flame.

  ‘I am a lawyer. Anyone can enlist if they’re under twenty-five—which I am, just about—so long as they pass the medical.’ She frowned. ‘So you’re not being drafted. It’s your own choice to go.’

  He did not answer immediately. She thought of the TV images, helicopters, a burning monk, the words Saigon, Viet Cong.

  ‘Yes, it’s my own choice.’

  He looked out across the lawn, into the twilight. In the silence that ensued she arrived at a complete understanding of him. Recalling this moment later she could not say how she had come to this understanding, only that she had, she had fathomed something deep in him. It was more than fellow feeling. It was as if she had perceived all the joy and fear and pain that had ever entered his heart, and he had let her. For an instant he had let her love him. Her eyes began to fill with tears. It was not with sorrow for his going that she wept, but with a new and gentle longing, a wish that he would get all he had ever wanted. She had an urge to take his tender feeble hand and cover it with her own. She saw him, a small boy again, at the burning tree, standing on a street gazing after buses.

  All evening they moved in and out of each other’s orbit. She was a little drunk. When the tables were cleared and the band started up, he did not seek her out but waited an hour, until she had grown almost distraught. Finally, she was in his arms, being wafted across the floor. She looked up at his face, inhaled the sweetness of whiskey on his breath. A line from a poem dangled just beyond her consciousness, but she could not pluck down the first word.

  ‘I dreamt about you,’ he said.

  At the bar they could not peel their eyes from each other. Around them, the beat of the music, people dancing. Ice cubes tinkled and sparkled in their glasses. She sipped the amber liquid, felt its heat spread through her. She put a hand on his arm to steady herself and his eyes smiled. They moved to a dim corner, sat on plush red velvet, touching shoulders, arms, thighs. This certain love is melting me, she thought, and leaned into him.

  He was carrying her shoes. Her hand was inside his as they climbed stairs. A corridor of crimson carpet, deep, under bare feet, and then the sinking softness of his bed and his face swimming into view. His chest, the glow of uncovered skin. She left a hand on his sternum, his collar bone. She thought of the word clavicle, how beautiful it was. Her eyes opened and closed and opened again and she was gone, drifting, lightheaded.

  And then, woozy, half dreaming, she gasped at the first hot stab and cried out in pain. She pushed at his chest, tried to pull herself from under him. Frightened, he looked into her eyes, and rolled off. He stroked her cheek tenderly. Shh, I’m sorry. A look of sorrow came upon him. She began to crumble. A tear rolled
from the corner of her eye. He kissed her eyelids, whispered something she did not hear.

  They lay in each other’s arms. She did not want to lose him. She pressed herself to him, felt herself yield again. He searched her face, kissed her. He began to move, slowly, gently, his hands caressing her until she felt the swell and ache of her body, the longing to fuse, to be subsumed. She turned her head to the side, repositioned herself under his weight. He seemed to forget himself then, and her. She did not care. She closed her eyes against the pain, both shocking and stirring. She was offering herself to him, and to something larger. She felt herself topple and a point of light, of bright sensation, opened and spread, spacious within her, and pushed her perilously close to a precipice. She had the feeling that he might after all save her, save them both, but then he gasped and shuddered and collapsed on top of her.

  She lay there like a stone. She heard footsteps, voices on the corridor. From somewhere far off came the sound of music, as if reaching her through water. She hauled herself from the undertow and staggered to the bathroom and knelt at the toilet bowl. Strands of her hair fell into the vomit. She sat on the floor, trembling, the walls spinning. She ran hot water and sat into the bath, scalding herself.

  When she went back to bed he was deeply asleep. She began to shiver. After a time she drifted off. When she woke he was gone, and everything was silent.

  9

  SHE TRIED TO make good what was terrible. She tried in her mind to tenderise it, beautify it. More than anything she wanted to cast off shame. She sat in the dark of her apartment and covered her head with her hands. She did not know how to reassemble herself.