Let the Great World Spin (53 page)

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 . . . ?

His voice rises high on the question, unfinished, as if searching for McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 340

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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.

—

The day dawns winter bright. She finds out in the morning that breakfast is not included in her hotel bill. She can only smile. Four hundred and twenty-five dollars, breakfast not included.

Upstairs, she takes all the soaps from the bathroom, the lotion, the shoeshine cloth, but still leaves a tip for the housekeepers.

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She walks in the neighborhood for coffee, up north from Fifty- fifth Street.

The whole world a Starbucks, and she can’t find a single one.

She settles on a small deli. Cream in her coffee. A bagel with butter.

She circles back around to Claire’s apartment, stands outside, looks up. It is a beautiful building, brickworked and corniced. But it’s too early to stop by yet, she decides. She turns and walks east toward the subway, her small bag slung over her shoulder.

—

She loves the immediate energy of the Village. It is as if all the guitars have suddenly taken to the fire escapes. Sunlight on the brickwork. Flowerpots in high windows.

She is wearing an open blouse and tight jeans. She feels at ease, as if the streets are releasing her.

A man passes her with a dog inside his shirt. She smiles and watches them go. The dog crawls to the top of the man’s shoulder and looks back at her, its eyes large and tender. She waves, sees the dog disappear down the man’s shirt again.

She finds Pino in a coffee shop on Mercer Street. It is just as easy as she has imagined: she has no idea why, but she was convinced that it would be simple to find him. She could have called him on his cell phone but decided against it. Better to seek him out, find him, in this city of millions. He is alone and hunched over a coffee, reading a copy of
La Repubblica.
She has the sudden fear that there is a woman somewhere nearby, perhaps even one who is due to join him at any moment, but she doesn’t care.