Tender (41 page)

Authors: Belinda McKeon

BOOK: Tender

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Smoking, the next guy. Not young. Standing at what looked like a bus stop. A check shirt, the sleeves rolled up. Blond hair on his arms. His fingers were stubby; the nails were flecked with something: maybe paint. He did not look like someone waiting. His eyes looking out to the street. He looked like someone who had not decided whether, when the bus did come, he would be getting on.

Long-haired and weary-looking, the fourth one. Dark shadows under his eyes. This was another formal portrait, like the first one; there was nothing in the background, there was no everyday clutter, no everyday world. There were no props. The wall behind him bare. His shirt blue, his chin dimpled, his impatience seeming already to have propelled him out of the shot. He hugged himself. He wanted to be away.

Five looked Irish, she thought. Some kind of embarrassment in his gaze; some kind of awkwardness.
Ah, Jaysus, James,
the photo might have been called, she thought, laughing to herself; but he was handsome, the dark eyebrows, the high forehead, the shirt collars askew.

Six was black, stretched out on what looked like a beach towel, though fully clothed. She glanced around, seeing another black guy across the way, and felt immediately ashamed of herself—counting, as though it was something she should even be noticing, but the reaction was the whole point, she reminded herself, and anyway, nobody needed to know. Alice, for example, coming smiling towards her now, an iPad in her hands; Alice did not need to know that Catherine had looked around and had counted the black faces, and nor did anyone else.

“Superb, aren’t they?” Alice said. She looked around the walls and nodded, as if in agreement with herself. “I love the one of Christian,” she said, and she pointed towards the door.

“Oh,” Catherine said. “I hadn’t even noticed.”

“The pieces go from left to right, really,” Alice said, “but I guess it doesn’t matter which way you look at them.” She gave a short laugh. “As long as you look at them.”

Catherine said nothing. She was crossing to the photo of Christian, which had obviously been taken on the same day as the one she had already seen; he was wearing the same clothes, the same sleeveless T-shirt and cargo shorts, and there were his dark curls, and there were his full lips, and there was the light tan on his skin, the tan he had brought with him, surely, to Carrigfinn; you did not get a tan in a place like Carrigfinn. This photo had been taken outside, out in the greenness and the warmth which it had been possible only to glimpse over his shoulder in the other one; at his back were the rusted bars of a gate, a gate into a meadow, and in the meadow the grass was high, the sunshine was flooding it; it glowed like a field made of light.

“That must have been June,” Catherine said in a murmur. “They haven’t knocked that field.”

“Knocked the—?” Alice was saying from beside her now, sounding confused.

“It’s nothing,” Catherine said. “Just a detail I noticed. It’s a beautiful photo.”

“
So
beautiful,” Alice said. “I mean, the look on Christian’s face. The way you can tell he’s just about to smile. And the way he’s leaning back onto that railing—something about the, sort of, playfulness of that, I love it.”

“Yeah,” Catherine said. “I love it too.”

“And I
love
the one of you.”

Catherine stared. “The—?”

“You haven’t seen it yet?” Alice said, walking towards the second room, and beckoning Catherine to follow her.

“I’m sorry,” Catherine said, her voice closing on itself. “There’s a photo of me?”

“Oh yeah,” Alice said, glancing back. “James didn’t tell you?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Fuck!” Alice said, putting a hand to her mouth. She immediately looked horrified. “Oh my God, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just—I assumed you knew—I didn’t realize it was a—”

Catherine was already walking past her.

“It doesn’t even look like you, really,” Alice said weakly, as Catherine passed into the next room, as Catherine caught her breath.

It was a photo of a photo. A photo of a photo in a bright blue wooden frame, standing on a bookshelf, books behind it; you could read the spines, if you wanted to, which Catherine did not, just at this moment; Catherine did not know, just at this moment, what she wanted to do, whether it was to stare at this small square of what had once been herself, or to turn her back on it and run. The photo had been taken at the kitchen table in Baggot Street that first day; not the first day, not the day they had met, but the day after they had first been together, the day after everything had changed. She was slouching, and straggle-haired—she was hungover—wearing her old flannel shirt, the shirt she had loved, the shirt she had bought second-hand from a market stall near St. Stephen’s Green the summer she was sixteen. In her hands was the Gary Larson mug Ellen had given her one Christmas, the one with the joke about Moses parting the waters, and the table was a mess in front of her: milk cartons, and tea towels, and the yellow plastic bowl for which nobody ever remembered to get any fruit. Somebody’s empty Marlboro packet, crushed as though it had been stepped on. A newspaper; a newspaper, by then already ridiculously out of date.

She was staring right into the lens.

“1998,”
Alice read from her iPad. “Wow.” She cleared her throat. “I love the shirt you’re wearing.”

“Thanks,” Catherine managed.

“From which I did not know,”
Alice said. “Nice.”

“What?” Catherine said, turning sharply.

“That’s what it’s called,” Alice said, offering her the iPad. “From which—”

“Let me see that,” Catherine said, taking it, and Alice held up her hands, as though to protest that she had been giving it to Catherine anyway.

From which (I did not know), Catherine, 1998,
the description read. Catherine pinched it with thumb and index finger, enlarging it, as though to test it, as though to make it somehow more real. The words grew huge against the white background; they seemed to come closer to her, until there was space only for
know
on the screen. Catherine stared at it. She looked back to the photo, to the cheap wooden frame around the moment of which she had no memory. How could she not remember him taking that photograph? How had it slipped so completely from her store of things, when what it had been made of—James’s eyes fixed on her while she had her eyes fixed on him—had been what she had wanted so badly?

“It’s kind of strange, the way the brackets are,” Alice said, sounding a little nervous.

“I know what it means,” Catherine said.

Alice waited a moment but then, realizing that there would be no further explanation, she nodded and took a step back.

There were eight or ten other portraits in the gallery, Catherine saw now, looking around; Liam was there on the adjoining wall, the photo of him that James had taken in the hospital. She had seen it before; she forced herself now, to look at it, not to look away from it. She looked at the pillow on which his head rested, and she looked at the softness of his hair, and she looked at his skin, his young, perfect skin, and she looked at his eyes again, and she looked at the bandages on his neck and on his shoulders, and she looked at his hands. Her heart was pounding. Behind her, Alice was saying something, but Catherine did not know what it was. An adjective; it was always an adjective. As though an adjective could come close to this. As though an adjective could come close to any of them. Then she looked more closely, Catherine did, and she saw something she had not seen before, and she realized why the angle of the photograph seemed crooked somehow, seemed somehow haphazard; it was because the photographer was holding the camera only with his right hand, and because his left hand was covering Liam’s; it was because that was the photographer’s thumb, the photographer’s index finger, there, in the bottom corner of the photograph, laid over Liam’s hand. And that was why the frame was so tight. That was why the lens was so near. That was what explained that look in Liam’s eyes.

Catherine heard Alice clear her throat now, and say something, and as she glanced her way she saw how Alice’s expression jolted and then hesitated at the sight of Catherine’s tears.

“I’m sorry?” Catherine said, wiping them away. “I’m sorry, did you say something to me?”

Alice smiled apologetically. “I was just asking whether you had any questions.”

Catherine shook her head. “No questions,” she said, and she turned to look at the other faces in the room. “No questions at all.”

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Peter Straus, Anna Stein, Paul Baggaley, Kris Doyle and Lee Boudreaux.

Huge gratitude to my first readers John Butler, Michele Woods, Jamila-Khanom Allidina, Philip Coleman, Mark Doten and Kimberly King Parsons.

And to Aengus: thank you for this and all the rest.

Permissions Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following:

The epigraph on page
vii
is from
Light Years
by James Salter; it appears here with the author’s permission.

The phrase “Dreams fled away” is extracted from Thomas Kinsella’s poem “Another September” and appears here with his permission.

The extract from “The Planter’s Daughter” by Austin Clarke on page 52 is reproduced from his
Collected Poems
(Carcanet Press Limited, 2008).

Part of the exchange between Catherine and James on page 125 refers to a refrain in the animated TV show
Pinky and the Brain
.

“You’re terrible, Muriel” is a reference to the 1994 film
Muriel’s Wedding,
written by P. J. Hogan.

The 1998 Trinity College Dublin Department of English examination paper on Romance appears here with the permission of the copyright holder, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin.

Extracts from “Blue Moles,” “Morning Song,” “Nick and the Candlestick,” “The Rabbit Catcher” and “Tulips” are taken from
Collected Poems
© Estate of Sylvia Plath and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Extracts taken from “Child’s Park,” “18 Rugby Street,” “Epiphany,” “9 Willow Street,” “Robbing Myself,” “The Rabbit Catcher” and “Wuthering Heights” are taken from
Birthday Letters
© Estate of Ted Hughes and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Lyric excerpt of “Exit Music (For A Film)” by Radiohead. Written by Philip James Selway, Jonathan Richard Guy Greenwood, Edward John O’Brien, Thomas Edward Yorke and Colin Charles Greenwood. Copyright © 1997 Warner/Chappell Music Ltd. Reprinted by Permission of Alfred Music. All Rights Reserved.

Lyric excerpt of “Lucky” by Radiohead. Written by Mark P. Dombroski, Philip James Selway, Edward John O’Brien, Jonathan Richard Guy Greenwood, Thomas Edward Yorke, Colin Charles Greenwood. Copyright © 1997 Warner/Chappell Music Ltd. Reprinted by Permission of Alfred Music. All Rights Reserved.

About the Author

Belinda McKeon’s debut novel,
Solace,
won the 2012 Faber Prize, was voted Irish Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her essays and journalism have been published in
The Paris Review,
the
New York Times, The Guardian,
and elsewhere. She has had plays produced in Dublin and New York, and is under commission to the Abbey Theatre. McKeon was a nominee for the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction post. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Rutgers University.

Also by Belinda McKeon

Solace