Ken Bruen - Dublin Noir

“This is real,” he said. “The hotel is real. I’m real. How much more Dublin do you need?”

“I’m worried there’s something I’m missing.”

“Don’t worry. You’re not.”

“Something authentic, I mean. Something the tourists never see.”

He rubbed his chin. “Like a pub?”

“That’s a start.”

So he took her to a pub, but she couldn’t see how it was different from any other pub she had visited on her own. And Rory didn’t seem to know anyone, although he tried to smoke and professed great surprise at the new anti-smoking laws. “I smoke here all the time,” he bellowed in more or less mock outrage, and she laughed, but no one else did. From the pub, they went to a rather depressing restaurant-sullen wait-staff, uninspired food-and when the check arrived, he was a bit slow to pick it up.

“I don’t have a credit card on me,” he said at last- sheepishly, winningly-and she let Barry pay. Luckily, they took American Express.

Back in bed, things were still fine. So they stayed there more and more, although the weather was perversely beautiful, so beautiful that the various hotel staffers who visited the room kept commenting on it.

“You’ve been cheated,” said the room-service waiter. “Ask for your money back. It’s supposed to rain every day, not pour down sunlight like this. It’s unnatural, that’s what it is.”

“And is there no place you’d like to go, then?” the chambermaid asked when they refused her services for the third day running, maintaining they didn’t need a change of sheets or towels.

Then the calls began, gentle but firm, running up the chain of command until they were all but ordered out of the room by the hotel’s manager so the staff could have a chance to clean. They went, blinking in the bright light, sniffing suspiciously at the air, so fresh and complex after the recirculated air of their room, which was now a bit thick with smoke. After a few blocks, they went into a department store, where Rory fingered the sleeves of soccer jerseys. Football , she corrected herself. Football jerseys. She was in love with an Irishman. She needed to learn the jargon.

“Where do you live?” she asked Rory, but only because it seemed that someone should be saying something.

“I have a room.”

“A bed-sit?” She had heard the phrase somewhere, perhaps from a London girl with whom she had worked at the film production office. Although, come to think of it, Ireland and England apparently were not the same, so the slang might not apply.

“What?”

“Never mind.” She must have used it wrong.

“I like this one.” He indicated a red-and-white top. She had the distinct impression that he expected her to buy it for him. Did he think she was rich? That was understandable, given the hotel room, her easy way with room service, not to mention the minibar over the past few days. They had practically emptied it. All on Barry, but Rory didn’t know that.

Still, it seemed a bit cheesy to hint like this, although she had played a similar game with Barry in various stores and her only regret was that she hadn’t taken him for more, especially when it came to jewelry. Trips and meals were ephemeral and only true high-fashion clothing-the classics, authentic couture-increased in value. She was thirty-one. (Or thirty, possibly thirty-two.) She had only a few years left in which to reap the benefits of her youth and her looks. Of course, she might marry well, but she was beginning to sense she might not, despite the proposals that had come her way here and there. Then again, it was when you didn’t care that men wanted to marry you. What would happen as thirty-five closed in? Would she regret not accepting the proposals made, usually when she was in a world-class sulk? Marriage to a man like Barry had once seemed a life sentence. But what would she do instead? She really hadn’t thought this out as much as she should.

“Let’s go back to the room,” she said abruptly. “They must have cleaned it by now.”

They hadn’t, not quite, so the two of them sat in the bar, drinking and waiting. It was early to drink, she realized, but only by American standards. In Rory’s company, she had been drinking at every meal except breakfast and she wasn’t sure she had been completely sober for days.

Back in the room, Rory headed for the television set, clicking around with the remote control, then throwing it down in disgust. “I can’t get any scores,” he said.

“But they have a crawl-”

“Not the ones I want, I mean.” He looked around the room, restless and bored, and seemed to settle on her only when he had rejected everything else-the minibar, the copy of that morning’s Irish Times, a glossy magazine. Even then, his concentration seemed to fade midway through, and he patted her flank. She pretended not to understand, so he patted her again, less gently, and she rolled over. Rory was silent during sex, almost grimly so, but once her back was to him, he began to grunt and mutter in a wholly new way, and when he finished, he breathed a name into the nape of her neck.

Trouble was, it wasn’t hers. She wasn’t sure whose it was, but she recognized the distinct lack of her syllables-no “Bluh” to begin, no gentle hiss at the end.

“What?” she asked. It was one thing to be a stand-in for Barry when he was footing the bills, to play the ghost of Moira. But she would be damned before she would allow a freeloader such as Rory the same privilege.

“What?” he echoed, clearly having no idea what she meant.

“Whose name are you saying?”

“Why, Millie. Like in the novel, Ulysses . I was pretending you were Millie and I was Bloom.”

“It’s Molly, you idiot. Even I know that.” Again, a product of a quick skim of the cards on the museum’s wall. But Millie ? How could he think it was Millie?

“Molly. That’s what I said. A bit of play-acting. No harm in that.”

“Bullshit. I’m not even convinced that it was a woman’s name you were saying.”

“Fuck you. I don’t do guys.”

His accent had changed-flattened, broadened. He now sounded as American as she did.

“Where are you from?”

He didn’t answer.

“Do you live in Dublin?”

“Of course I do. You met me here, didn’t you?”

“Where do you live? What do you do?”

“Why, here. And this.” He tried to shove a hand beneath her, but she felt sore and unsettled, and she pushed him away.

“Look,” he said, his voice edging into a whine. “I’ve made you happy, haven’t I? Okay, so I’m not Irish -Irish. But my, like, ancestors were. And we’ve had fun, haven’t we? I’ve treated you well. I’ve earned my keep.”

Bliss glanced in the mirror opposite the bed. She thought she knew what men saw when they looked at her. She had to know; it was her business, more or less. She had always paid careful attention to every aspect of her appearance-her skin, her hair, her body, her clothes. It was her only capital and she had lived off the interest, careful never to deplete the principle. She exercised, ate right, avoided drugs, and, until recently, drank only sparingly-enough to be fun, but not enough to wreck her complexion. She was someone worth having, a woman who could captivate desirable men-economically desirable men, that is-while passing hot hors d’oeuvres, or answering a phone behind the desk at an art gallery.

But this was not the woman Rory had seen, she was realizing. Rory had not seen a woman at all. He had seen clothes. He had seen her shoes, high-heeled Christian Lacroix that were hell on the cobblestones. And her bag, a Marc Jacobs slung casually over the shoulder of a woman who could afford to be casual about an $1,800 bag because she had far more expensive ones back home. Only “home” was Barry’s apartment, she realized, and lord knows what he had done with her things. Perhaps that was why he hadn’t yet alerted the credit card company-he was back in New York, destroying all her possessions. He would be pissed about the T-shirts, she realized somewhat belatedly. They were vintage ones, not like the fakes everyone else was wearing now, purchased at Fred Segal’s last January.