Academy Street (15 page)

She relayed the tales back to Willa—each week returning with books, reading aloud
passages that told of the antics of Zeus and Apollo and Aphrodite, so that Willa
too was drawn in, playfully taking sides, expressing faux outrage and delight, bringing
a new way of seeing to Tess.

‘He’s a piece of work, that Zeus!’ Willa said. ‘Now Hera—she’s my kind of woman.
If my Zeus ever,
ever
strayed, I tell
you, hon, Hera’s got nothing on me in the jealousy
department! My Darius—you know he’s named for a king?’ She paused. ‘
Darius, King
of Persia
.’ She smiled, as if a gentle memory had surfaced. ‘But, king or no king…’
She sighed, shook her head. ‘Oh, Tess, it ain’t love if it ain’t jealous.’

How odd they must look, two women in their forties, one black, one white, sitting
in the park, or walking home along the streets, sharing mythological aches, trying
to outwit each other with priapic puns.

‘So, which crazy god has put a stamp on you, Miss Lohan?’ They were sitting in Willa’s
apartment, by the open window, drinking iced tea. Willa’s sons were grown up now
too, and working; one a policeman, already married.

Tess thought. ‘Mmm…Probably Persephone.’ The sun was streaming in. She remembered
a picture of Hades in his chariot, and the ground cleaving open as the chariot and
team of horses dived underground with the captive girl, crying. ‘Or maybe Orpheus.’

‘No, you’ve got to pick a girl.’

‘Eurydice then.’ She remembered Orpheus’s grief, ascending from the Underworld without
his beloved.

Willa shook her head. ‘You’re
obsessed
with the Underworld!’

Her voice trailed off. She turned towards the light and Tess was caught by her sudden
calm and poise, the tilt of her face, and her eyes, in that instant, a little melancholy.
A small tendril of hair curled in on her temple. The smooth curve of her neck gleaming
with the heat, her small wrists, her
slender fingers—all of her familiar and beautiful,
and now unexpectedly sensual. Tess’s heart pounded. She looked away. The lace curtain
lifted in the breeze. In the distance the city hummed. A silence fell and Tess looked
at her friend again and something stirred in her and she could not tear her eyes
away. The white collarless blouse, almost see-through, rested on her collar bone.
Underneath, her skin, her breasts. There was something infinitely tender, infinitely
delicate, about the small mound of each breast, the thin filmy cloth like a veil
over them. She had a sudden longing to reach out, move aside the fabric, touch a
breast, lay her head there, her mouth, ease her terrible ache for human touch, human
love. The room was flooded with light and she was blinded, mesmerised. Scarcely breathing,
she raised her eyes to Willa’s face, and they held each other’s look. Then Willa
stood and moved away. Tess placed her hands flat on her lap and closed her eyes and
came to her senses. She had almost lost her mind. She had almost lost the run of
herself.

The evenings of that first winter alone, and of the winters following, had a denser
darkness. In the streets she was assailed by glances, light strobes, flashing neon
lights. Her working days grounded her. She was grateful for the comfort of routine,
the rhythm of each day with its journey, its duties, the small news and gossip of
other nurses’ lives.

Occasionally she thought about retiring, moving house, taking a trip back to Ireland,
but she did none of these things. There was, in her nature, a certain passivity,
an acquiescence
that was ill-suited to change or transformation, as if she feared
ruffling fate or rousing to anger some capricious creature that lay sleeping at the
bottom of her soul.

Theo had long since separated from her, and when his college education was complete
he pulled up the drawbridge to his inner life, locked his heart against her. He had
been a fatherless boy and now he was a man and she accepted this, and understood.
He went to work for a firm in the city, and year after year advanced in his field.
A gambler of sorts, he explained, trading commodities, buying and selling gold, silver,
rice, soya beans. ‘Coffee beans, too,’ he said, picking up the coffee can in her
kitchen one day. An image of Africa formed—of Kenya, and Isak Dinesen, and Robert
Redford washing Meryl Streep’s hair in a film she’d seen, Meryl’s head back, the
water falling from the jug onto her hair, sparkling in the sun. That night they danced
outside the tent. She remembered the music clearly. Lately she’d been doing this,
slipping into reverie or something that resembled reverie.

She looked up at Theo. ‘How tall are you?’ She herself was growing down. He half
smiled. ‘Six foot two. You know that. Why?’ She had known. Since he was a teenager
and had played basketball, she had known. She did not know why she asked. She remembered
buying razors when she saw the first tufts of facial hair, leaving them in the bathroom
for him to find.

When he was twenty-eight he became engaged to a tall Jewish girl named Jennifer,
a lawyer, who sometimes accompanied him now on his visits to Tess. A perfect couple,
both blond,
both beautiful. They bought an apartment on Riverside Drive. He was closer
now to the girl than to anyone, ever, in his whole life. Before the wedding they
took Tess to meet her parents and friends at a country club in Westchester County.
Out on the lawn she watched Theo moving among them. She saw his ease, the way they
embraced him, appropriated him. She could no longer hug him or kiss his head. To
touch an arm was the extent of what she could do. All evening long she smiled and
mingled, but she felt remote. It seemed at times that she was marooned on an island,
a moat of water, wide and black, separating her from all human love. She thought
of Claire, years ago, and her house and garden in New Jersey, and how all things
change or end or disappear, and this would too, this day, this moment. She looked
around.
And you too, you will all disappear.

She returned home after midnight. She stepped inside and stood still, alone again.
She had left the radio on all day. Others had people waiting. She took off her shoes
and poured herself a glass of wine and sat at the kitchen table. He had been long
gone but now the going was complete. She had sent him out of her house into his fate
and he had grown and succeeded and become unknowable to her. She wanted to cry out,
roll on the floor. She had loved him wrongly. She had become too attached. She should
not have grafted herself onto him. She made a fist of her hand and bit on her knuckles.
There was nothing before her now. He belonged to someone else. She remembered the
couples at a party years ago, the looks, the trust, the secret signs, and a rage—an
unbearable
pain—pierced her and she let out a howl and flung her glass across the
kitchen, hard against the wall and cried as the wine ran down, sudden and fast, in
thin purple rivulets until it reached the skirting board and then parted and flowed
right and left and over the top onto the floor.

She walked out into the night. The streets were warm, quiet, almost tropical. Under
the sky there was nothing, no one to cling to. The paucity of her life made her unspeakably
sad. She tried to put her finger on what had marred her, what had excluded her from
life. Again she began to cry. What she had longed for was to be of one mind with
someone. Of one mind and one body.
Love.
She walked along the edge of the park. Ahead
of her, nothing but this longing, this sickness, this time.

She walked along Sherman Avenue, Broadway. She felt calmer. There was something about
walking, steps unwinding out of the body, that brought comfort and clarity. Was
there not something in her that secretly savoured this state of longing? Waiting
with constant hope and everything before her, all to play for? Was not the ache sweeter,
in a way, more enticing, more seductive, than the sating? Like waiting for the afterlife,
she thought, but never truly wanting it to arrive. Because then, what would be left?
It would spell the death of hope in the everyday, like love born dead.

She stopped outside the church, its great wooden doors locked. Its stone walls hinted
at further silence and sympathy within. And then the night stood still and she looked
up at the stars.
A serene peace entered her, and her heart lifted and it came to
her with the clarity of a vision: Theo had love. He was in love, and loved, and beloved.
He was understood. And in the better part of herself she knew this was all that mattered.

In the better part of herself.
Had she not glimpsed beauty? Had she not, at times,
felt blessed? Had she not felt the surge and soar of love, the glint of grace and,
once, had not the planets collided, and had she not burned with passion? Love
had
existed, she had felt its throb, its inner vibration. Even if, on that night, their
carnal bodies had not bestowed beauty on the act itself. But it had existed. Had
not a child come out of it and been delivered fully fledged to the world? Images
from the past returned to her: entering Willa’s apartment in the evenings, the child
running into her arms, making her heart leap in her breast. To give joy like that.
To see him sitting in his bath, eyes closed, laughing, as she rinsed his hair and
the warm water trickled down his face. Or lying on the floor drawing men on the moon,
animals marching in pairs onto Noah’s Ark, asking her to spell a word, and she, she,
in the wash of him, feeling the truth of him deep in her soul.

She walked on home. She moved with divine calm, as if all the world were sleeping.
She remembered a line from a book:
For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed
,
and felt vast, deep, complete.

PART THREE

I4

OVER THE YEARS, over long winter nights and summer afternoons, Tess found a new life
in books. As if possessed of a homing instinct she would often leave her hand on
a title on a library shelf or in a book bin outside a bookstore that somehow magically
fitted her at that moment. The mere sighting of a book on her hall table or night
stand as she walked by, the author’s name or title on the spine, the remembrance
of the character—his trials, his adversity—took her out of ordinary time and induced
in her an intensity of feeling, a sense of union with that writer. Another vocation,
then, reading, akin, even, to falling in love, she thought, stirring, as it did,
the kind of strong emotions and extreme feelings she desired, feelings of innocence
and longing that returned her to those vaguely perfect states she had experienced
as a child. She was of the mind now that this evocation, this kind
of dream-living
was sufficient, and perhaps, in its perfection, preferable to the feeble hopes embedded
in reality.

The things she had hankered after—encounters with beauty, love, sometimes the numinous—she
found in books. She flinched from the ugly, the vulgar, but never from suffering
or the pain of shame, discerning in the author’s soul a striving to transcend these
states, to draw out of injury or anguish some revelation, some insight, that would
deliver both character and reader into a new state of grace. She suffered for the
characters, for the authors too. She lived in a divided world, the inner at a remove
from the outer other. It was this inner alter-life that rendered her outer life significant
and in which she felt most exquisitely contained. She became herself, her most true
self, in those hours among books. I am made for this, she thought. In the shade of
a tree a bird would call and she would lift her head from her novel, arrested, heart-weakened.
Then she would remove her glasses and come to, up out of a trance and into the world
where joggers and school children and old couples linking arms drifted in shade and
mottled light, a world that newly bedazzled her.

It was not that she found in novels answers or consolations but a degree of fellow-feeling
that she had not encountered elsewhere, one which left her feeling less alone. Or
more strongly alone, as if something of herself—her solitary self—was at hand, waiting
to be incarnated. The thought that once, someone—a stranger writing at a desk—had
known what she knew, and had felt what she felt in her living heart, affirmed and
fortified her. He is like me, she thought. He shares my sensations.

There did not seem to be enough hours or days or years left in her life to read all
she wanted to read. She moved about the world with gratitude, porous to beauty and
truth. At Mass she felt a new appreciation for the Scriptures, the Gospels, the sounds
of the Psalms. She went to certain Masses, certain churches, for the music alone,
to be exalted. She attended recitals, listened to radio concerts. It was as if she
had undergone a tenderising of the heart, a refinement of the soul, with everything
reaching her at a pure and distinct register.

She went to dinner occasionally, and to concerts, with Willa or Priscilla. Theo and
Jennifer took her out for her birthday and at other random times. Two years into
their marriage Jennifer gave birth to a son, Alex, and a year later to a daughter,
Rachel. At the first sight of each grandchild she had been profoundly moved. Her
very flesh and blood were there before her. It was miraculous. She had a new sense
of her place in the world, of a continuum. She thought that Theo, if he had not already
done so, might now seek out his own father, and was torn between curiosity and mild
dread at the prospect of such news.

When she was sixty-two she retired from her job at the hospital and moved from her
apartment on Academy Street into a building with an elevator, thirty blocks south.
Before she left, she received from Willa a farewell gift, a kitten. At the last minute
in her old kitchen the two women embraced. She thought of how something in Willa
always helped
constellate Tess’s better self. She remembered the moment of overpowering
sensuality she’d felt in Willa’s kitchen years before. There had been that moment,
and no more, the instinct never awoken again. And no fear, no struggle, no shame.
This was, Tess knew, in part to do with Willa, with her ease, her serene understanding
of all human matters. The love was implicit. And she knew, if she had ever broached
the subject, what Willa would have said.
Oh, honey, when it comes to the heart, it
ain’t about men or women, but people.