The Music Lesson (9 page)

Sometimes I bring carrots in my jacket pocket for the three shaggy donkeys that are always standing together in the top field no matter what the weather. I don’t know whose they are or what purpose they serve. Sometimes all three are stoically and stupidly facing into a raw wind
that’s spitting ice pellets. Those ice pellets really hurt. And there I am, up there with them, not knowing any better, either.

I’m not supposed to leave the cottage for more than a couple of hours at a time, nor should I just hang around all day long. Mickey has been very specific about this. I would get restless to the point of distraction in this transcendent landscape, and, more to the point, lurking indoors exclusively could itself attract some attention and speculation about my motives for showing up out of the blue and renting the O’Driscoll cottage.

So tramping around the countryside a bit seems true to form as an activity for your basic oddball single woman having a tame adventure. I play the part perfectly. As I make my rounds, dogs bark at me, some unseen person in the farmyard or kitchen speaks sharply and commands the dog to stop its racket, and the dog wags his tail and follows me for a bit; in that way, I have come to learn the name of nearly every dog this side of the village.

While the dogs have names—many collies seem to be called Lassie, for instance, and there are numerous working dogs called Shep and Pup; there’s a Bruce, and a Joker, and a Beauty, and there’s Benson, a fat old black Lab named after an American television program that starred a black actor some years ago—the cats rarely do.

Mary’s cats are an exception. They all have names out of Shakespeare, though it gets confusing when a kitten called Hamlet has Goneril for a mother and Othello for a father. It’s all mixed up now, but originally, years ago, the Lears started out orange, while the Macbeths are the original black and whites. (Tiggy’s mother was a pretty gray tiger called Juliet; Mary thinks his father was the old black one-eared tom she calls Shylock. She doesn’t care for the name Tiggy, but she couldn’t persuade Denis to call him Falstaff.)

I’ve not gotten beyond ordinary discussions of weather with any of my other neighbors. Sometimes when I meet a cat on my walks, I stop and have a conversation with it, and sometimes this leads to a friendly chat with the farmer’s wife, who has been attracted by the unfamiliar sound of my voice—or by the barking dog. When I ask for the name of a cat, more often than not, the farmer’s wife will reply, “Oh it has no name—it doesn’t come into the house.”

The roads have no names, either. If everybody on the road already knows where he is and where he’s going, then I suppose in this thrifty country there’s not much point in wasting effort on signposts. I have no idea if people call these roads anything, even informally, if the roads have the equivalent of nicknames. God only knows how the fire truck finds a burning cottage. God only knows if there is a fire truck.

On this boreen without a name, there was a Telecom Eireann van parked at the side of the road, with a Telecom guy up a pole, fiddling with something, a fairly ordinary sight. Especially in the winter winds, there are always problems with telephone and electric lines. The electricity was off for several hours at midday yesterday, which I didn’t notice until I heard a generator humming in the distance at the Hayes farm on the other side of the cove. I have no idea if telephone service was affected as well, because, like most of the people this side of Ballyroe, I’m not “on the phone.”

So I thought nothing about the Telecom van, nothing at all. The air was very still, for a change; it was an unusually bright morning, though the sky was white with high clouds, and I could see him a good distance away, across several fields, as the lane winds around—so he was intermittently in my view and then hidden by dips and rises and then in sight again. I had been out walking perhaps forty minutes. There was no one else in evidence, though the sound of a distant tractor engine sometimes can echo as if strangely near, bouncing off the water in the cove from across the fields.

The landscape is so open here, scraped bare of the forests that grew hundreds of years ago. The eye accepts these contours as what the west coast of Ireland looks
like, but I am reminded of Pete’s quoting a British lord of the eighteenth century: “The Irish will never be subdued so long as there are leaves on the trees.”

What was meant by that was simply that the native population of Ireland couldn’t be controlled so long as there were forests to hide in, that destroying the trees was part of a strategy for keeping the Irish from finding protective cover in which to organize themselves. But it occurs to me now that a completely contradictory interpretation of that remark would be this: There will always be leaves on trees and the Irish will never be subdued.

I was walking. The perpetual delicate morning mist that threads together with the thin smoke of peat fires lay across the low spots, concealing and softening everything ever so slightly under its gauze.

As I got nearer to the Telecom man, perhaps half an hour after first having him in my view, he came down the pole and stood by the open back door of his van, rummaging in a parts bin. Just as I was passing by, he said in a low voice, without turning or looking up at me, “Mickey says to tell ya that he’ll be down to ya next week. Say nothin’. Keep walkin’, for feck’s sake. And next time ya go out, do a better job lockin’ up the windows. The upstairs bedroom on the west wasn’t closed a’tall.”

He had what I have come to recognize as a Northern accent—almost like Mary’s Scots buzz, but clipped, without
the heathery edges, and all his sentences went up at the ends in a flattened, rhetorical tone.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, I suppose, but I was deeply startled. Again. Each contact with Mickey’s people is surprising. This was the third communication that has come at me out of the blue. It makes me feel both protected and vulnerable.

On my eighth day here, there was a grizzled pensioner outside O’Sullivan’s Pub who dropped a note into my pocket as I passed by on my way to O’Mahoney’s. The note was an unsigned instruction to wait for a telephone call in the one telephone booth—call box—outside Nolan’s Pub in Ballyroe at noon the following day.

And two days ago, I was walking in the cove at low tide and thought nothing much about a woman picking mussels off the rocks. She had a dirty-looking long skirt, patterned like drapery material, black farmer’s wellies, and a shapeless coat, and her head was wrapped in some sort of snood against the wind. She looked to me like a tinker, or “traveler,” as they are properly called, one of the gypsyish people, perhaps from the controversial encampment on the Bandon road. (The local newspaper is full of articles about the county council’s plans to erect housing for them. Then they would become something actually called “settled travelers.”)

After perhaps twenty minutes of my sitting on a rock in the sun while the woman moved slowly in my direction,
she worked her way closer to me, until she was beside me, and then she slipped me a Ziploc bag with an unsigned note from Mickey from the bottom of her bucket of mussels. The note said, “Contact made. We’ve got them by the mebs now.”

What I want to know is this: How could the Telecom man—this whatever, this operative, who may or may not actually be employed by the telephone company—have known that I would walk that way just then, when I didn’t know it myself until I set out? He probably knew how many carrots I had in my pocket. I must ask Mickey about this. No, I mustn’t. I wonder what day next week?

Mebs are balls.

I
MYSELF HAVE
been in a fog for weeks. From mid-November to Christmas, I think I drifted around the library at the Frick in a dreamy postcoital stupor most of the time, somehow managing to do my work.

I’ve been adrift on a sea of sex. I’ve been awash in a flow of feelings. I’ve been ahum like a tuning fork next to a crashing grand piano. I’ve been a glorious wreck.

It isn’t Mickey’s fault. How could it be his fault that something about the place on his right clavicle where there is a faint spray of freckles makes me feel a harsh thump of excitement? Each time I see it. Or think about it. It isn’t his fault that the sight of his slightly blunted thumbs makes me flush when I think about the way they know me. And how could it be his fault that his penis—
his “willy,” such a friendly, gentle term—feels as good as it does when he enters me, especially that first slow thrust as my wet flesh gladly yields to receive him yet again?

I had never seen a foreskin before. No, that’s not true—Max from the play group was uncircumcised. I was quite startled the first time I changed his diaper and encountered his little carrot. Mickey’s foreskin is my first adult one. It’s fascinating, watching the swell of blood and the emerging glans like a blossom unfurling in daylight. It’s touching, inspiring.

I, who have been unfazed and uncharmed by most of what life has arranged for me in the way of company, found myself moistening when we lingered over espresso in the café two blocks from my apartment on that second night, when we knew we were going to be together. On the walk back after dinner, I registered such engorgement, such desire-swell, that I remember marveling at the discreet design of a woman’s body.

Perhaps it showed on my face? I wondered, stopping to peer into a shop window at my reflection. I saw only the face I knew, and beside it the face of the man whose clavicle, thumbs, and soon-to-be-met parts would render in me this apocalyptic effect on a continous basis.

Glazed with desire, that’s what I have been, like some erotic pastry. I’m all at sea; can this be love?

My intention has been to tell this story the way it happened, but I haven’t exactly begun at the beginning. Perhaps the real beginning was on a particular night in late December, after weeks spent mostly in bed together (not that it matters, but, for the record, we didn’t actually go to bed until after dinner on the second night—though I am embarrassed but not ashamed to admit that I think I had maintained a state of continuous sexual arousal from that first touch across the table at E.A.T.). Mickey said one evening that he hoped I could give him some advice about paintings.

“What about paintings?” I said dreamily, the tip of my tongue twirling the tiny golden hairs that surround his left nipple. He took my chin gently in both his hands and lifted my mouth away from his chest. It was three days after Christmas, our first night back in New York. Mickey and I had taken the train up to Boston to spend Christmas with Pete. We dragged in a too-large tree for him, and when we ran out of ornaments from the box Pete still keeps from my childhood, we decorated the rest with popcorn and cranberry strings. Mickey was incredibly nimble at stringing the popcorn without breaking it, his deftness like that of a surgeon, though he swore he’d never done it before.

Awkward and wary at first, Pete and Mickey had rapidly become so delighted with each other that I had begun to feel superfluous. Mickey has a kind of easy grace that often makes me forget that he is only twenty-five. He has an old soul.