Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

He faded off.

“You know my vows. You know what they mean. I used to think there was no other man in me, no other person, just me, the devoted one. That I was alone and strong, that my vows were everything, and I wasn’t tempted. And I’ve turned it over and over in my mind. What happens if this? What happens if that? And maybe it’s not even a matter of losing faith. I stand in the mess of myself. It’s against everything I’ve ever been, and suddenly just watching it all disappear, and then also lying to her, even about my treatment.”

“What’s this sickness mean? This TTP stuff?”

“It means I’ve just got to get better.”

“How?”

“I have to get treatment. Plasma replacement and that sort of thing. I will.”

“Painful?”

“Pain’s nothing. Pain’s what you give, not what you get.”

He took out the slim pack of rolling papers and sprinkled the tobacco along the curved edge of a paper.

“And her? Adelita? What’re you going to do?”

He worked the grains over, looked out the window.

“Her kids are out of school for the summer. They’re running around. Lots of time on their hands. Used to be that I went over with the excuse that I was helping them with their homework. But it’s summer, so there’s no more homework. Guess what. I’m still going over. And no real excuse except the truth — I want to see her. And we just sit there, Adelita and me. I have to come up with other excuses for myself. Oh, they need someone to help clean up the rubbish in front of the apartment. She really needs to get that toaster fixed. She needs time to study her medical books. Anything. Except I can’t pretend that I can give them a catechism lesson because they’re Lutheran, man, Lutherans! From Guatemala. Just my luck, man! I find the only non-Catholic woman in Central America. Brilliant. She’s a believer, though. She’s got a heart, huge and kind. She really does. She tells me these stories about where she grew up. I go to her house every chance I get. I want to. I need to. That’s where I’ve been disappearing all these afternoons. I guess I wanted to keep it hidden from everyone.

“And all the time I’m sitting there, in her house, thinking that this is the one place I shouldn’t be. And I wonder what’s going to be left over when I extricate myself from the mess. Then her kids come in from outside and jump on the sofa and watch TV and spill yogurt all over the cushions. Her youngest, Eliana, she’s five, she drifts in trailing a blanket along the floor and grabs my hand and brings me into the living room. I’m bouncing her up and down on my knee, and they’re beautiful kids, both of them. Jacobo’s just turned seven. I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life. At the end of Tom and Jerry , or I Love Lucy , or The Brady Bunch , whatever dose of irony you want, I say to myself, That’s okay — this is real, this is something I can handle, I’m just sitting here, I’m not doing anything bad. And then I leave because I can’t accept the brokenness.”

“So, leave the Order.”

He knitted his hands together.

“Or leave her.”

The whites of his knuckles.

“I can’t do either,” he said. “And I can’t do both.”

He studied the lit end of his cigarette.

“You know what’s funny?” he said. “On Sundays I still feel the old urges, the residual feelings. That’s when the guilt hits most. I walk along, the Our Father in my mind. Over and over again. To cut the edge off the guilt. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

A car pulled up slowly behind us and a sharp light shone through the back window. The red and blue lights flicked on, but no siren. We waited in silence for the cops to get out of the car, but they hit the megaphone: “Move on, faggots, move it!”

Corrigan gave a pinch of a smile as he pulled the gearshift down into drive.

“You know, I have a dream every night that I’m running my lips down along her spine, like a skiff down a river.”

He eased the van out into the street and said nothing more until he pulled in near the projects, where his hookers were. Instead of walking in among them, he waved them off and brought me across the street to where a yellow light pulsed on the corner. “What I need to do is get drunk.” He pushed open the door of a little bar, arm around my shoulder.

“Straight as a good fence the last ten years, now look at me.”

He sat at the counter, raised two fingers, ordered a couple of beers.

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water — it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slumber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening the door to the spray of sea.

“You ask me if I’m using heroin, man?” He was laughing, but looking out the bar window at the rafters of the highway. “It’s worse than that, brother, much worse.”

IT WAS LIKE ALL the clocks agreed and the fridge was humming and the sirens outside sounded out like flutes. He had talked her free. Just mentioning her was enough for him: he became new.

For the next couple of days they saw each other as much as they could — in the nursing home mainly, where she changed her shift just to be with him. But Adelita also came to the apartment, knocked on the door, uncorked a bottle of wine, and sat across the table. She wore a ring on her right hand, twirling it absently. There was a grace and a toughness about her, entwined. They needed me there. I was hardly allowed to stand up from the table. “Sit down, sit down.” I was still the safe border between them. They weren’t ready to fully let go. Some propriety held them back, but they looked as if they wanted to leave some of their good sense behind, at least for a while.

She was the sort of woman who became more beautiful the more you watched her: the dark hair, almost blue in the light, the curve of her neck, a mole by her left eye, a perfect blemish.

I suppose, as the nights wore on, my presence made them feel that they had to entertain someone, that they were in it together, that they were more properly alone by being together.

She spoke softly to Corrigan, as if to get him to lean closer. He would look at her as if it were quite possible he wasn’t ever going to see her again. Sometimes she just sat there with her head upon his shoulder. She gazed past me. Outside, the fires of the Bronx. To them it could have been sunlight through the girders. I dragged my chair across the floor.

“Sit down, sit down.”

Adelita had a wild side that Corrigan liked but couldn’t bring himself to grin about. One night she wore a wide white off-the-shoulder blouse and orange hot pants. The blouse was modest, but the pants were tight to her thighs. We drank a little cheap wine, and Adelita was whooped up a little. She gathered her shirt and knotted it at the front, showing the brown of her stomach, stretched slightly from children. The small dip of her belly button. Corrigan was embarrassed by the cling of the pants. “Look at you, Adie,” he said, his cheeks flushing. But instead of asking her to unknot the blouse and cover herself up, he made a theater of giving her one of his own shirts to wear over her outfit. As if it were the tender thing to do. He draped it around her shoulders, kissed her cheek. It was one of his old black collarless shirts, past her thighs, almost down to her knees. He hitched it on her shoulders, half afraid that he was being a prude, the other half rocked by the sheer immensity of what was happening to him.

Adelita paraded around the apartment, doing a slight hula-hoop movement.

“I’m ready now for heaven,” she said, tugging the shirt lower still.