He cursed and kicked his foot against the lower panels of the car: Let’s get that drink.
At a Park Avenue overpass a kid swung on a harness and ropes, spray-painting the bridge. I thought of Blaine’s paintings. They were a sort of graffiti too, nothing more.
We drove down the Upper East Side, along Lexington Avenue, and found a dumpy little joint around about Sixty-fourth Street. A young bartender in a giant white apron hardly looked us over as we strolled in. We blinked against the beer light. No jukebox. Peanut shells all over the floor. A few men with fewer teeth sat at the counter, listening to a baseball game on the radio. The mirrors were brown and freckled with age. The smell of stale fryer oil. A sign on the wall read: BEAUTY IS IN THE WALLET OF THE BEHOLDER.
We slid into a booth, against the red leather seats, and ordered two Bloody Marys. The back of my blouse was damp against the seat. A candle wavered between us, a small lambent glow. Flecks of dirt swam in the liquid wax. Ciaran tore his paper napkin into tiny pieces and told me all about his brother. He was going to bring him home the next day, after cremation, and sprinkle him in the water around Dublin Bay. To him, it didn’t seem nostalgic at all. It just seemed like the right thing to do. Bring him home. He’d walk along the waterfront and wait for the tide to come in, then scatter Corrigan in the wind. It wasn’t against his faith at all. Corrigan had never mentioned a funeral of any sort and Ciaran felt certain that he’d rather be a part of many things.
What he liked about his brother, he said, is that he made people become what they didn’t think they could become. He twisted something in their hearts. Gave them new places to go to. Even dead, he’d still do that. His brother believed that the space for God was one of the last great frontiers: men and women could do all sorts of things but the real mystery would always lie in a different beyond. He would just fling the ashes and let them settle where they wanted.
— What then?
— No idea. Maybe travel. Or stay in Dublin. Maybe come back here and make a go of it.
He didn’t like it all that much when he first came — all the rubbish and the rush — but it was growing on him, it wasn’t half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn’t matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.
— You never know, in a place like this, he said. You just never know.
— You’ll be back, then? Sometime?
— Maybe. Corrigan never thought he’d stay here. Then he met someone. I think he was going to stay here forever.
— He was in love?
— Yeah.
— Why d’you call him Corrigan?
— Just happened that way.
— Never John?
— John was too ordinary for him.
He let the pieces of the napkin flutter to the floor and said something strange about words being good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don’t function for what things aren’t. He looked away. The neon in the window brightened as the light went down outside.
His hand brushed against mine. That old human flaw of desire.
I stayed another hour. Silence most of the time. Ordinary language escaped me. I stood up, a hollowness to my legs, gooseflesh along my bare arms.
— I wasn’t driving, I said.
Ciaran folded his body all the way across the table, kissed me.
— I figured that.
He pointed to the wedding ring on my finger.
— What’s he like?
He smiled when I didn’t reply, but it was a smile with all the world of sadness in it. He turned toward the bartender, waved at him, ordered two more Bloody Marys.
— I have to go.
— I’ll just drink them both myself, he said.
One for his brother, I thought.
— You do that.
— I will, he said.
Outside, there were two tickets in the window of the Pontiac — a parking fine, and one for a smashed headlight. It was enough to almost knock me sideways. Before I drove home to the cabin, I went back to the window of the bar and shaded my eyes against the glass, looked in. Ciaran was at the counter, his arms folded and his chin on his wrist, talking to the bartender. He glanced up in my direction and I froze. Quickly I turned away. There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface.
There is, I think, a fear of love.
There is a fear of love.
LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN FOREVER DOWN
WHAT HE HAS SEEN OFTEN in the meadow: a nest of three red-tailed hawks, chicks, on the ledge of a tree branch, in a thick intertwine of twigs. The chicks could tell when the mother was returning, even from far away. They began to squawk, a happiness in advance. Their beaks scissored open, and a moment later she winged down toward them, a pigeon in one foot, held by the talons. She hovered and alighted, one wing still stretched out, shielding half the nest from view. She tore off red hunks of flesh and dropped them into the open mouths of the chicks. All of it done with the sort of ease that there was no vocabulary for. The balance of talon and wing. The perfect drop of red flesh into their mouths.
It was moments like this that kept his training on track. Six years in so many different places. The meadow just one of them. The grass stretched for the better part of a half mile, though the line ran only 250 feet along the middle of the meadow, where there was the most wind. The cable was guy-lined by a number of well-tightened cavallettis. Sometimes he loosened them so the cable would sway. It improved his balance. He went to the middle of the wire, where it was most difficult. He would try hopping from one foot to the other. He carried a balancing pole that was too heavy, just to instruct his body in change. If a friend was visiting he would get him to thump the high wire with a two-by-four so that the cable swung and he learned to sway side to side. He even got the friend to jump on the wire to see if he could knock him off.
His favorite moment was running along the wire without a balancing pole — it was the purest bodyflow he could get. What he understood, even when training, was this: he could not be at the top and bottom all at once. There was no such thing as an attempt. He could catch himself with his hands, or by wrapping his feet around the wire, but that was a failure. He hunted endlessly for new exercises: the full turn, the tiptoe, the pretend fall, the cartwheel, bouncing a soccer ball on his head, the bound walk, with his ankles tied together. But they were exercises, not moves he would contemplate on a walk.
Once, during a thunderstorm, he rode the wire as if it were a surfboard. He loosened the guy cables so the wire was more reckless than ever. The waves the sway created were three feet high, brutal, erratic, side to side, up and down. Wind and rain all around him. The balancing pole touched against the tip of the grass, but never the ground. He laughed into the teeth of the wind.
He thought only later, as he went back to the cabin, that the pole in his hand had been a lightning rod: he could have been lit up with the storm — a steel cable, a balancing pole, a wide-open meadow.
The wood cabin had been deserted for several years. A single room, three windows, and a door. He had to unscrew the shutters to get light. The wind came in wet. A rusted water pipe hung from the roof and once he forgot and knocked himself out on it. He watched the acrobatics of flies bouncing on cobwebs. He felt at ease, even with the rats scratching at the floorboards. He decided to climb out the windows instead of through the door: an odd habit — he didn’t know where it came from. He put the pole on his shoulder and walked out into the long grass toward the wire.