“In which,” Zoe said to Catherine, “he teaches me everything a girl needs to know.”
And what would that be like? Catherine imagined it: the huge, wide bed. The space of it. To have all of that freedom. All of that acreage. And to have someone in a bed like that, looking at you, and to look at them, looking at you, looking all the length of you, the truth of you—
* * *
So wet, muttered James, one morning, and he sounded like someone stepping in out of the rain.
* * *
And well, was she stupid?
Was she so pathetic?
Because she knew his reasons for this were different from hers.
* * *
His reasons:
Touch
Forgetting
Fear
Convenience, now becoming Habit
The dark, unbearable cluster growing every day larger in his mind
Her reasons:
Him
* * *
So, yes, to Question 1, and yes to Question 2.
And no to Question 3, which was, Does knowing make any difference?
* * *
She tried to find it, the song that would be their song.
The one about the drifters, going to see the world?
No, that was not them. That was not their song, either.
None of the songs were for them.
And, well, did everyone need to have a song?
Not everybody needed to have a song.
* * *
Staring, one lunchtime, at Zoe’s lips. Zoe’s lips, as they smacked loudly on a yogurt spoon, getting at every last trace of the stuff, wiping the plastic clean. Because what did those lips do to Lucien? What did Lucien look like, when those small, pink lips closed around his big, English dick? Because what would it be like, to be with someone, to do that for someone, and to know that just the sight and the fact of you doing it for them was amazing, was blissful, was — what was the word?
Enough.
That was the word.
Was enough.
* * *
And later that week, in Jenny Vander’s, trying on a dress she was considering for the ball. James with her, of course — James had not been allowed not to come with her — standing, arms folded, by the mirror.
“It’s nice,” he said.
Was it nice?
An old woman, going through the rails, stopping what she was doing and coming closer for a look.
“Buy it for your girlfriend,” she said to James. “Buy it now. She has the height for it. She has the coloring. She has the mouth.”
* * *
It would become another of their phrases, Catherine knew. Another of their hilarious, ironic toys. She has the mouth.
* * *
And James would not hear of coming to the ball with her. James was not a Trinity student, he pointed out coolly and calmly; James was not going to spend fifty pounds on a ticket for a student ball.
But—
But—
But, colored lights, making all the familiar old buildings unfamiliar; but, the night-time sweep to Front Gate, surrounded by so many other people looking so well. James in a tux—I don’t think Armani does a navy-blue tuxedo, and they would laugh over that line again — and Catherine in the Jenny Vander’s dress, and they would walk in together, and they would dance together, and — yes, yes, boys, yes, boys, they would look at boys together, yes, of course, at all the beautiful, tuxed-up boys — but he would leave with her, that would be the important thing, and he would come home with her—
But no.
* * *
Emmet: “Reilly! Does the Longford County Council grant cover a ball ticket?”
And she looked at him, for a moment.
Quite lovely, actually, now; had that happened only recently, or had he always been that way?
The bright boy’s grin on him. The fresh, perfect clearness of his skin.
The blush, betraying him, the way a blush always did.
But he was impossible.
He was unthinkable.
He was an entirely different world.
* * *
Or, even an ordinary boy.
Nordie Liam—Liam—sitting on a bench with Lisa, just as Zoe had wanted it, smiling, laughing, chatting.
He was not someone Catherine would ever be attracted to. He was slightly short, and slightly shaggy — not in the Lucien way, in the Irish way — and he wore T-shirts with video game characters on them, and he was just the kind of boy you would not even see, really—
But he would see you, wouldn’t he?
And then you would see him.
And then you’d be off, the pair of you.
Off to see the world—
But no.
* * *
Because her day, now: wake, already drowning in him. Not that moment of precious oblivion; not for her that child’s empty instant before fully coming to. Her eyes opening, already fixed on the thought of him. Her mind bobbing up into morning, already logged and tangled with him. Her heart—
Fuck her heart.
She had a constant sensation of hunger, which only grew worse when she ate.
Even brushing her teeth, she was thinking of him.
Even locking the door of the flat, turning the key, feeling its clunky, stubborn resistance, its tiny attempt to refuse.
Even stairs made her think of him. Even stones under the soles of her shoes. Even rusted bicycles, propped up against wire fences; even the dour tones of a security guard, asking to see her ID card at the entrance to the library; even his dimpled, stubbled chin as he waved her through. The books on her desk, forget it:
It was May. How had it started? What
Had bared our edges?
* * *
That was from Hughes’s “The Rabbit Catcher,” that line.
Plath had a poem of the same name.
They were both about the same day, the day of a picnic in Cornwall. Walking on the cliff tops, Hughes had found a rabbit snare: ready, primed. Plath, furious, had tossed it useless into the trees; then had marched on ahead and done the same to another.
Then another.
Then another.
Hughes writing of her temper, of the rage in which she had simmered all morning; of his own forbearance in the face of it. And now, of how, as she destroyed the snares, the things he understood, the things people who were his people needed for food and for money, she was “weeping with a rage / That cared nothing for rabbits.”
Plath, in her poem from probably twenty or thirty years earlier, writing of the force of the wind, and of the blinding light from the sea, and of the gorse, its “black spikes,” and of how the snares “almost effaced themselves—/ Zeroes, shutting on nothing.”
And, we, too, had a relationship—
Tight wires between us,
Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring
Sliding shut on some quick thing,
The constriction killing me also.
* * *
And, “Catherine,” James said one night afterwards — said her name seriously, said it soberly, so that at first her heart leapt hopefully, at first her eyes thought they would meet, in his, something they wanted, something new—
But no.
“Catherine,” he said, and he looked at her, and seriously, soberly, he shook his head. “What are we doing? What are we messing at, at all?”
And Catherine: “No, no. Don’t ever say that. Don’t ever ask that. We can do whatever we want to do, James. We can do whatever we like. It’s us, James. We’re us.”
And his silence.
But his silence, by then, was as good as his loving word.
* * *
Because there was nobody like them. There was nobody else who had what they had.