I peered awhile, as through the keyhole
Into my darkened, hushed, safe casket
From which (I did not know)
I had already lost the treasure.
Emmet exhaled long and deeply after he had finished.
“Fuck,” he said. “That’s fairly depressing.”
She laughed. “Yeah.”
“So she wasn’t dead yet?”
“Well, she was when he wrote this.”
“Fuck.” He closed the book again, looked at it in his hand. “Well, nice cover, at least,” he said, and she burst out laughing. He was laughing too, as he looked at her, but she could see that he was confused too, or hurt, even, by her laughter.
“His daughter did that painting,” Catherine said, pointing to the splodges of color, the rusty reds and yellows.
“Did she?” Emmet said. “When she was little?”
Catherine laughed again. “No,” she said, and Emmet looked at her, disbelieving. “When she was an adult. She’s an artist.”
“Fair enough,” Emmet said, puffing out a breath.
“Here,” Catherine said. “Give it to me.”
But it was too late: he had already seen the inscription.
“Oh,” Emmet said. “That’s nice. He has nice handwriting, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah.”
“Mine’s a fucking disaster.”
“I know,” she said. “And so does my mother.”
He looked at her, bewildered for a moment, and then he got her meaning, and he laughed. “So, em,” he said, rocking back on his heels, “is James seeing anyone these days?”
“James?”
He nodded.
“No.” Catherine shook her head firmly. “No. For James it’s not that simple.”
“Oh?”
“No. Not that straightforward.”
“Well,” Emmet said, seeming to cast about for a response. “It’s not straightforward for a lot of people, I suppose.”
Catherine gave a little laugh, a laugh which might suggest that this was a cute idea. “Yeah. But slightly more so for James.”
Emmet nodded. The book was in his hands again, turning and turning. He swallowed. “Yeah. I can imagine.”
“Can you?”
He looked at her as though this was a test. “I think so.”
“I don’t know if anyone can imagine it, really,” Catherine said, feeling her throat swell with the importance of the statement. “He’s had some terrible things said to him.”
Emmet frowned. “By who? Not people in college?” He looked almost angry.
“Just people,” she said, shaking her head as though it was something she could not possibly go into. “You know.”
He shook his head now too. “That’s fucking appalling,” he said. “Poor James.” He looked at her. “You’re such a good friend to him,” he said then. “He’s lucky to have you.”
There it was again: the openness, the plainspokenness. Few people she knew would speak like that. Aidan, maybe, but with him it was somehow harsher. It was, with Emmet, the blush that made the difference, but it was also the way he said things. Like he meant them. When he was not joking, he was utterly serious. Was that true of everybody? She tried to think. Maybe. Probably. But no, she did not think it was. She glanced at him. He was not even looking at her, did not even seem interested in, or heedful of, her reaction. He was looking at the Hughes book again. He opened it at random, and quite astonishingly — or maybe it was just the way the spine was now, from her own use of the book — it fell open at “9 Willow Street” again. But he did not look at that poem — which reminded Catherine so much of Baggot Street, so much of the flat, the coziness in which they all lived — but across the page, to the end of another poem. It was “Child’s Park,” she saw; Plath in the park, going nuts at the girls who were pulling up the azalea flowers. Yet more than that. Always more than that.
“‘What happens in the heart simply happens,’” Emmet read. “That’s all right, as poetry goes. That’s at least not as dreary as fuck.”
“Don’t read the rest of it, then,” Catherine said, with a laugh that, she saw, came as a relief to him.
“Here you go,” he said, handing her back the book, and as he did so, his hand touched hers, and he let it stay there for a moment — for just long enough for her to know that he meant something by it. He glanced at her, like a child in trouble, his eyes cautious, the mischief only around the corner, the blush high on his cheeks again. “Right, I have to head off,” he said then, and he stood. “I’ve already missed a meeting with my Politics lecturer, talking to you.”
“Don’t be blaming me, Doyle,” Catherine said.
“I will if I want to,” he grinned, and he walked away.
“What on earth was that about in the library with poor little Emmet Doyle earlier?” Zoe said. They were having lunch outside one of the lecture halls; Catherine had been having a sandwich by herself when Zoe had come up to her.
“Nothing,” Catherine said, shrugging.
“And thanks for letting me know you were going out for lunch. I was waiting for you to come over to me for the last half an hour.” She ripped open her sandwich: chicken and stuffing, the same thing they had every day. “I’m bleedin’ starving.”
“Sorry,” Catherine said again.
“Well?” Zoe said, her mouth full. “I mean, you say you’re not going out with him, but to me it looked like the two of you were in the process of breaking up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it looked very serious. Did Emmet get his mid-twentieth-century poets mixed up or something?”
“Emmet Doyle doesn’t know mid-any-century poets,” Catherine snorted, feeling immediately guilty, remembering how Emmet had looked so closely at the Hughes poems.
“I was talking to Conor earlier, by the way.” Zoe fixed her with a look. “And he was telling me that you two aren’t talking at the moment. He told me you had an argument in the Buttery a couple of weeks ago. Over James. I thought I was hearing things.”
“Did he tell you what he said about James? Did he tell you what he called him?”
“Camp, I think.”
“Yeah,” Catherine said hotly.
“Which,” Zoe said, raising her eyebrows, “James kind of is. I mean, I think James would admit that.”
“Oh, fuck, don’t you start.”
“Start what?” Zoe said. “You’re the one who took it upon yourself to tell Conor and me about James. And others, for all I know.”
“I didn’t tell others,” Catherine lied.
“Well, fine. But my point still stands.”
“What point?” Catherine almost spat.
Zoe did not flinch. She rarely did. She regarded Catherine steadily, and sipped from her coffee, and put the cup down. “You can’t protect him, Catherine.”
“Protect who?”
Zoe actually laughed, though it was not really a laugh. “Oh, please. You know who I’m talking about. You’re too involved, Cath. Aidan and I have been meaning to bring this up with you for a while now.”
“Aidan and you?” Catherine spluttered. “What are you, a crack team of fucking meddlers now, or something? Or, wait, are you sleeping together?”
“No, Catherine,” Zoe said in a warning tone. “Look, I don’t want to have a fight with you. I’m just saying. You need to give James some credit. You need to stop trying to protect him all the time.”