Mary Costello - The China Factory

Best regards ,

E

She sat looking at the words on the screen, and then went downstairs to watch the evening news with Adam.

E ,

They’re remaindering Julius here. I’ve bought three to give away at Christmas. It will kill me to part with even one, but there you go. And beige is very underrated .

Dear A ,

A Christmas shopper in March, I’m impressed! And I loved Dublin but I got robbed the night before I left. Think of it… a few Dublin Jackeens getting the better of a tough Bronx boy. I felt so stupid .

Regards ,

E

She stared at the words, then shut down her laptop.

Dear A ,

I wanted to ask if you had read any of Donovan’s other books — I believe there are two? And my wife is a big fan of Irish writing — what other contemporary writers can you recommend?

And so it started. In his persistence she sensed a need. She slipped in a reference to Adam the second night. It was all about books and films and TV at the start. She had always had a need to talk about books. He quoted Beckett and Sartre from memory. He possessed an odd combination of bookish charm and boyish hyperactivity. His glittering intelligence, in those first weeks, terrified her. One day, she thought, my small seam of knowledge will be exhausted. He peppered his opinions with quotes from Swift and Goethe and she slipped further out of her depth. Sorry, she replied, I have never read Moral Purpose . Sorry, I’m not very well versed in German literature. Sorry, I’m not that up on philosophy. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Oh, I think you underestimate yourself , he wrote back. He sent her quotations, lines from songs; he sent her poems. Did he not know the effect such words, such lines, such poems might have on a woman?

Your erudition leaves me tongue-tied. I’ll soon need shades on this side of the astral plane to shield me from the glare of your knowledge .

His reply was slow in coming.

The Astral Plane… I like this… Celestial beings, you and I… There is a lonely spot near the South Pole — I read of this today — a US team of astronomers are setting up an observatory there. It’s the perfect site for stargazing… I thought of you when I read this. It’s so calm in this place that there’s almost no wind or weather there at all, and the sky is dark and dry. It is the calmest place on earth. I thought of you .

I have so little to say, to write. What I write must seem very trite to you .

Why do you do this, why do you put yourself down like this?

*

He wrote copy for an advertising agency. He worked from a home office and made occasional trips to the city or abroad. She imagined a suburban town, like White Plains or Scarsdale and men in suits parking at the train station and boarding silver bullet trains that raced through the countryside, leaving telephone wires zinging in their wake, into the heart of Manhattan. He looked out on treetops from his upstairs office, he told her. He had a view of the sky and another of birds and birdhouses. He went down and counted the trees in his garden one day, for her. Eighteen, he said. Big garden, she said. He did not mention children. He told her there were woodlands at the back and cardinals in the trees. She did not know what cardinals looked like so she lifted down Adam’s bird book from the bookcase. She began to imagine it all. She gave him the sound of running water close by and a lake a mile away and the silver train in the distance, and starlings wheeling in formation above his head, and she gave him a wide open sky as he crossed the fields, and a yellow sun, and a ready open heart.

There is this girl I meet. She works in my local mini-market. One day she was sitting on the wall in the parking lot, crying. She’s just a kid, eighteen or nineteen. She’s from a farm in Mississippi and her husband’s stationed up here with the army. She calls me ‘Mister’. The others bully her over her accent. She’s poor. I can tell the poor. I grew up poor, I married a poor girl. The poor have a code: they stay together, loyal, faithful too. She’s missing her mother, this girl. The poor always get to you .

I dreamt of you last night. I woke before dawn and heard your footsteps on the stairs. I felt you drawing near and I was frightened you’d be discovered. The moonlight streamed in through the skylight on the landing. I walked barefoot through the house. I knew you were just ahead of me. I opened the back door and there in the middle of the garden stood a deer. The moon was so bright. He stood and looked into my eyes with his own beautiful wet ones, and then he turned and I saw there was a stream at the end of the garden and, beyond that, a dark forest. He bounded off and disappeared into the forest. I fled upstairs and each step of the stairs fell away behind me .

One evening Adam came in and placed a kiss on her forehead and rubbed her back and then walked out onto the patio.

‘Will we eat out here?’ he called.

He helped her carry out the plates and glasses. Her hands trembled. Earlier, on the canal bridge, she had driven through a red light.

‘I ran into Kevin in town today,’ he said, when they were seated. ‘He looked a wreck.’

‘Things aren’t great at home,’ she said. ‘I told you.’

‘Yeah, I know. But it’s just the usual stuff with them, right?’

She shrugged. ‘Karen doesn’t think so. She wants out.’

‘She wants out? Why? What’s he done?’

‘Nothing. He hasn’t done anything. It’s — I don’t know… They’re incompatible, she says.’

‘Incompatible! Huh! New-fashioned love!’

She gave him a look.

‘What? It’s true, isn’t it? Incompatible . Christ, you’d think people were software programmes—“X is incompatible with your system, sir! You’ll need a whole new system, or, alternatively, you may change X.”’

‘It’s not funny.’

‘I know… Sorry… There’s no third party, is there? Jesus, has he met someone else?’

‘No. No. I don’t think so.’

‘And he’s not drinking or… violent, is he? Or gambling?’

‘No, no, nothing like that.’ She put on her sunglasses and looked at the sky. She longed to escape his presence.

‘What then? They’ve just grown tired of each other, is that it?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’ Suddenly she hated the sky. She wanted no reminder of blue or beauty or betrayal. She went inside and lifted a jug of water from the fridge and leaned on the door for a few moments.

‘That’s what people do now, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘They break up so easily.’ His voice had grown sad.

‘People don’t break up easily. They don’t.’ He seemed not to hear her.

‘No one is satisfied anymore. Everyone wants more. We all think we’re special, but we’re not.’

‘They’ve fallen out of love,’ she said, a little harshly.

She felt his eyes on her. After a few moments she pushed her chair back and got up.

‘You okay?’

She frowned and shrugged. ‘Of course.’

That night she lay in the bath and wept. She heard Adam move about downstairs. She had done him harm. As she had done the woman, the astral wife, harm. Each night that she ascended the stairs and sat at her desk she was stealing from his life, from his wife. Is this what she had become — a thief, a plunderer? She heard the signature tune of the ten o’clock news. She went into the bedroom and lay on the bed. This day, and every day, and her whole conscious life now, started and ended with the other man, with the yearning for him. Was she allowed to yearn like this? Was it permitted? She heard Adam’s step on the stairs. A tear rolled from the corner of her eye. He knelt at her side.