Tender (39 page)

“Have they been over?”

“Oh, yeah. A few times. For the”—he nodded backwards, as though at something they had just walked past—“wedding, and then a few other times besides that.”

“That’s lovely. Congratulations, by the way.”

“Thanks.”

“On everything, really,” she said, feeling a sudden impulse to shove a great many things together into a hole. “I meant to write—”

“I was sorry to hear about you and Lucien,” he said, talking over her. “I’m still in touch with Zoe on Facebook. She mentioned it.”

“Oh, thanks,” Catherine said with a shrug. “It’s for the best, probably.”

“Still, it’s hard,” he said, and he pointed to the path down by the water, to indicate that they should go that way. “I don’t remember Lucien very well, I have to admit.”

“Well, he was with Zoe when you would have known him. It was years later when I met him again in London. He’s with
The Guardian.
”

“Yeah, I’ve read a few things. He’s good.”

“He’s brilliant.” She nodded. “We’re still friends, you know, it’s just…”

“Yeah,” he said, unevenly, and that hung between them, the brokenness of it, the awkwardness. How had she steered them, so quickly, into that water? Because she had kept talking, she told herself. Because she had obeyed, as always, the temptation to elaborate.

“My mother loved him,” she forged on then, immediately, without any idea of where she was going with this—this anecdote, she realized, this completely unnecessary and not even entirely true anecdote. “The two of them used to sit in the conservatory, when we were over visiting, and watch the tennis.”

“Tennis!”

“On the TV, obviously. As opposed to out in the garden. The Celtic Tiger wasn’t
that
good to them at home.”

“Still, though, a conservatory. Mammy Reilly at least got something nice under the tree.”

“She’d rather her nice English son-in-law, I think, and no conservatory.”

“Ah, well,” James said, raising his eyebrows. “Sure you can get her another one.”

“I don’t think so,” Catherine said, more darkly than she had intended.

“And how’s your father doing?”

“Oh, great,” Catherine said, shrugging. “He voted for David Norris in the presidential election last year. He was raging he didn’t win.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Oh, yeah. All change.”

James said nothing, but gave a short nod. They passed fishermen waiting by the water’s edge; were passed by cyclists, dog walkers, a woman on rollerblades, a child on a narrow red scooter. The gravel crunched as they walked. The grass on either side of the path was patchy, humiliated-looking; with borders of daffodils and other plantings, attempts had been made to make this into a pleasant municipal space, but the ground seemed unhealthy, exhausted; polluted, probably, by the river. It looked like the ground at the edge of one of the abandoned housing estates she had seen at home: scraggy, brownish, littered with stones. Those were dandelions underfoot now, and beer caps. To their right, the drop to the water was marked with large square boulders set into the earth. The river was gray. On the other side, she could make out some of the brand names emblazoned on a building: Costco, Target. The next building looked like a courthouse, and beyond that more of the high-rise brown blocks that must have been apartments;
projects,
the word came to her suddenly. It could have been any city. It looked to her nothing like New York; there was none of the familiar glint and soar of the skyline, none of its narcotic, cinematic glow.

“Zoe’s kids are cute, aren’t they?” she said then, reaching for an easy, airy tone. “I love the photo she put up last week.”

James made a noise of agreement, a fond sort of grunt, and took another slug of his coffee. Seeing this, Catherine did the same, although the sharp coldness of the liquid baffled her; it was so aggressive, somehow.

“Why do Americans drink this stuff?” she said, shaking her cup in front of her. “I never understand it.”

“Are you still in touch with any of the rest of them?” James said, not seeming to have heard her; he was frowning at his straw, fiddling with it; the friction of plastic on plastic made a dull clicking sound. He looked at her.

Catherine felt the need to swallow. “Not really,” she said, afterwards. “Facebook, a few people. I hear from Conor now and then. He’s a big-shot playwright now, you know?”

“Oh, yeah,” James said, raising his eyebrows. “I read about the Tony nomination. Didn’t win though, did he?”

Catherine shrugged. “He’ll win yet.”

“And Robert Emmet?”

“He’s in the Dáil, believe it or not.”

“What?!”

“Not as a politician, obviously. But working for one. He’s a speechwriter for the Minister for Justice.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Are you joking me?”

“No. I suppose someone has to do it.”

“I suppose a satirist is better qualified than anyone else.”

She laughed. “Yeah. But I’m not in touch with him. And anyway, I transferred to Goldsmiths in my last year, so I fell out of contact with most people. I’d sort of fallen out of contact with most of them anyway. Afterwards. You know.”

And there it was. “Afterwards.” Bringing with it the “before.” Surrounding them, now, in their very breathing, as though it were a cloud they had walked into, a cloud of chemicals or a cloud of tiny things that were alive. The low hum of it. The oscillation; a disturbance. Catherine inhaled slowly, deeply, almost warily, as though she could protect herself from its poison, but she could not; she had, after all, been the one to exhale it. A sightseeing boat plowed the river’s center; from this distance, the crowd packed onto the top deck seemed unmoving, resigned, like refugees, and it occurred to her to point this out to James, to make a joke of it, but James, she thought then, might very well not see the humor in it. Wherever the humor was.

“You know, I wasn’t completely honest with Meghan and Veronica back there, Catherine,” James said now. “About my reasons for coming here, I mean.”

“Well, it’s Christian’s birthday,” Catherine said, hurriedly.

“No, no,” James said, shaking his head as though explaining something to a child. “Christian’s birthday is why I came home last night from Italy. But here, I’m talking about.” He gestured behind him in the general direction of the exhibition tent. “The fair, I mean.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t give a fuck about what they sell and what they don’t sell. Well, I do, but there’s no need for me to be in there checking up on them. They’re right, a fair is no place for an artist. They’re just bloody rackets.” He glanced at her. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Catherine said, a little too eagerly.

“Yeah. Well, anyway, I was saying. It wasn’t the booth. Jonathan had a program for this on the plane last night, and I saw you were giving a talk.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve read lots of your articles, you know. Obviously. They’re good.”

“Thanks,” Catherine said, feeling awkward.

“No poetry anymore then? All journalism?”

She shook her head. “Oh, no. The poetry was just, you know. A teenage thing.”

“You were good at it, as I remember.”

“Not really.”

“Anyway. I mean, I’m sure this isn’t the first time work has brought you to New York,” he said, more briskly. “And obviously I’m in London a good bit.”

“Oh, yes,” Catherine blurted, “I saw your show at the Frith.”

“Arrah, that,” James said, shaking his head. “That was a rushed show. I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Oh, no, I thought—”

“I was going through some stuff then, I wasn’t right in the head, I don’t think. I was still drinking.”

“Right, right,” said Catherine, as though she was well acquainted with the fact of his sobriety, or indeed the fact of its opposite having been an issue, a problem, for some past version of James, who was at the same time somehow still—to her—a future version of James, since he was the James he had become in the time afterwards, in the time after she had stopped knowing him, been forced to stop knowing him, and she had never had the chance, in those years, to know him, and now that version of him, those years, was utterly gone. And the drinking must have been bad, then, if he had had to give it up. And had she done that to him as well?

“Anyway, you probably heard about all the stuff with Nate, and then Ed Dunne had to go and die of a heart attack in his bathtub, and ‘dead in the bath’ was all anyone wanted to hear, and that was—well. You can imagine how that was.”

“Yes,” Catherine lied.

“I mean, it was madness. Absolute madness. Some journalist rang my mother in Carrigfinn. Can you imagine?”

“Oh my God.”

“Frightened the fucking life out of her. She thought
I
was after dying in the bath.” He made a face. “Or worse, I’d say. I’d say she thought worse.”

“Oh, James.”

“And Nate.” He looked at her. “Have you crossed paths with Nate through the magazine?”

“No, actually.”

“Well, you remember him?”

She nodded, not quite able to get the word out.

“And he became even more full of himself once he started up his own gallery.”

“I’m sure,” Catherine said, not having to work hard at all to call up an image of Nate Lewis, a composite made from all the photographs she had seen of him online: the suits, the tan, the carnivore’s smile. Gone the boyish head of brown curls; he kept his head shaved, presumably to hide the places where the hair had refused to stick around. If he had been in the booth earlier today, what would she have said to him? She had gone in there feeling blasé about the possibility, feeling that the years could not hurt her, that the years, the traces of what they had brought with them, meant nothing, meant less than nothing, even, but if Nate had been in the Lewis booth that morning, what would she have said to him? Ridiculous, to feel herself almost panicking now, almost shuddering, at the thought of the thing that had not happened, and about the prospect of which she had not even been worried in the first place, but the sight, the fact, of James had changed everything. James here, and James walking with her, and James telling her, now, that he had come here to see her, and “afterwards,” and “before,” and this coffee in her hand, so cold and heavy and pointless, and these joggers, these strollers, these art crowds in their Acne and their Watanabe and their Demeulemeester, and this New York heat beating down, through this overcast sky—

“Didn’t stop me being in a relationship with him for nearly two years, though,” James was saying now, and he shook his head.

“Well,” Catherine began, “Everyone—”

He looked at her. “Everyone has to start somewhere, is that what you were going to say?”

“No, I meant—” she said, and stopped; this was, in fact, pretty much what she had been going to say. She chewed on her straw.

“Because I didn’t start with Nate, did I?”

“No,” she said, into the straw.

“Did I, Catherine?” he said, his voice more urgent.

She lifted her chin. “No.”

“I’ve wanted—” He sighed. “I’ve wanted to be in touch with you. For a while now.”

“Oh,” she said, and her heart seemed to be trying to elbow its way out through her chest. They were nearing a park bench; if she suggested that they sit down, would that make things better or worse? Was it better to be moving? Better for your legs to be out from under you?

“I shouldn’t have cut off contact the way I did, Catherine,” he said, his voice jumping. “That was the wrong way to go about it. Whatever ‘it’ was.”

“Well,” Catherine said. “‘It’ was Liam. What happened with Liam. What happened
to
Liam, because of what I did.”

James nodded slowly. “I’m still in touch with him, you know. Facebook, needless to say.”

“Oh,” Catherine said, more brightly than felt appropriate. “How is he?”

He nodded again. “He’s good. He teaches in Belfast now. He has a partner.”

“That’s nice.”

James said nothing.

“And is he—” She stopped. What had she even been going to ask? “What does he teach up there?”

“History,” James said, with what could have been a beat of irony in his tone, but the word had come and gone too quickly for Catherine to tell.

“That’s nice,” she said, and immediately winced. “He was always so smart.”

“The scarring is not really visible anymore,” James said then, as briskly as though he was delivering test results. “At least I don’t think so from the photographs he puts up now. A bit”—he put his hand up to his jawline—“a bit of something around here still, maybe, where it was bad, but nothing major. The doctors up there, you know.” He nodded. “He looks good. He looks much the same, actually.”

“Good, good,” said Catherine, in the same tone of absurd brightness.
Tell him I was asking after him,
she almost said, so efficiently had she whipped herself up, now, into this state, into this welter of refusal and pretending. This was not happening. This was not real. She was not on a scrap of scrubland off the coast of East Harlem, gripping a ridiculous plastic beaker, sweating into her fancy clothes, being pulled by the quiet, serious voice of James Flynn into the summer of fourteen years before.

“Catherine,” James was saying now. “You know, what happened was terrible.”

“Yes,” she said faintly.

“I don’t just mean Liam. I don’t just mean”—he cleared his throat—“that day. I mean the whole thing.”

“Your photos, the photos you took that day, were unbelievable,” she said. “They were so moving.”

He shook his head. “What was I doing, taking fucking photographs?”

“James.”

“No. What was I
doing?
Taking photographs in a
hospital,
for fuck’s sake?”

“They were important. They were very powerful. They still are.”

“I don’t know. I can’t look at them. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at them.”

“You should be proud of them.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m proud of them for you,” she said, and she reached out to him, and she touched his arm, but it all seemed to happen in slow motion, and it all seemed stilted, stunted; it all seemed strange. James drew back a little at her touch—she did not think she was imagining this—and so the sentence that she was already rolling out to follow the first one, the one in which she said it to him, the one in which she told him, seemed ill-judged now, seemed like an ugly, distasteful flare. But, “I’m proud of
you,
” she said it anyway, had said it, before she could stop herself, and in response to that, James actually stopped in his tracks; James froze, and James looked at her.