Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.

One arm of Corrigan’s shirt is on, one arm off. In our haste we have not even undressed properly. Everything is forgiven. I lift the weight of his arm and unbutton the shirt. Wooden buttons that slip through a cloth loop. I pull the shirt along the length of his arm and off. His skin is very white, the color of newly sliced apple, beneath his brown neck. I kiss his shoulder. The religious chain around his throat has left a tan mark, but not the cross, since it sits underneath his shirt, and it looks like he wears a necklace of white skin that finishes in midair. Some bruises on his skin still: his blood disorder.

He opens his eyes and blinks a moment, makes a sound that is somewhere between pain and awe. He pushes his feet out from under the sheets, looks around the room.

“Oh,” he says, “it’s morning.”

“It is.”

“How did my trousers get over there?”

“You drank too much vino.”

“¿De veras?” he says. “And I became what — an acrobat?”

From upstairs, the sound of footsteps, our neighbors awakening. He waits out the sounds, the eventual thump of their feet into shoes.

“The children?”

“They’re watching Sesame Street.”

“We drank a lot.”

“We did.”

“I’m not used to it anymore.” He runs his hands over the sheets, comes to the curve of my hip, draws away.

More sounds from above, a shower, the fall of something heavy, the click of a woman’s high heels across the floor. Mine is the apartment that receives all noises, even from the basement below. For one hundred and ten dollars a month, I feel as if I live inside a radio.

“Are they always this loud?”

“Just wait until their teenagers wake.”

He groans and looks up at the ceiling. I wonder what it is Corrigan is thinking: up there, his God, but first my neighbors.

“Doctor, help me,” he says. “Tell me something magnificent.”

He knows that I have always wanted to be a doctor, that I have come all the way from Guatemala with this intention, that I was not able to finish medical school at home, and he knows too that I have failed here, I never even got to the steps of a university, that there was probably never a chance in the first place, and yet still he calls me “Doctor.”

“Well, I woke up this morning and diagnosed a very early case of happiness.”

“Never heard of it,” he says.

“It’s a rare disease. I caught it just before the neighbors woke.”

“Is it contagious?”

“Don’t you have it yet?”

He kisses my lips, but then turns away from me. The unbearable weight of the complications he carries, his guilt, his joy. He lies on his left shoulder, his legs tuck into a bend, and he puts his back to me — he looks as if he wants to crouch and protect himself.

The first time I saw Corrigan, I was looking out the window of the nursing home. He was there, through the dirty panes, loading up Sheila and Paolo and Albee and the others. He had been in a fight. There were cuts and bruises on his face and he looked at first glance like exactly the sort of man I should stay away from. And yet there was something about him that was loyal — that’s the only word I knew, fidelidad —he seemed to be loyal to them because maybe he knew what their lives were. He used wooden planks to roll the wheelchairs up into the van and he strapped them in. He had pasted his van with peace and justice stickers: I thought maybe he had a sense of humor to go along with his violence. I found out later that the cuts and the bruises were from the pimps — he took their worst punches and never hit back. He was loyal to the girls too, and to his God, but even he knew that the loyalty had to break somewhere.

After a moment he turns to me, runs his finger along my lips, then out of the blue he says: “Sorry.”

We were hasty last night. He fell asleep before I did. A woman might think it thrilling to make love to a man who had never in his life made love before, and it was, the thought of it, the movement towards it, but it was as if I was making love to a number of lost years, and the truth is that he cried, he put his head on my shoulder, and he could not keep hold of my gaze, couldn’t bear it.

A man who holds a vow that long is entitled to anything he wants.

I told him that I loved him and that I’d always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it. He replied that I was not to worry, that the penny could come out of the fountain again and again and again.

He wanted to repeat the attempt at lovemaking. Each time another surprise and doubt, as if he did not trust himself, what was happening.

But there is a moment when he wakes now — on this day that I will remember over and over again — when he turns to me and there’s still a hint of wine on his breath.

“So,” he says, “you took my shirt off too.”

“It’s a trick.”

“A good one,” he says.

My hand travels across the sheet to meet him.

“We have to cover the mirilla,” I say.

“The what?”

“The mirilla, the peephole, the spy thing, whatever it is called.”

There is a spyhole in every door of my apartment. The landlord, it seems, once got a good deal on these doors, and hung them all around. You can look from one room to the other and the curved glass makes it either narrow or wide, depending on what side you happen to be on. If you look into my kitchen, the world is tiny. If you look out, it stretches. The bedroom spyhole faces inwards, where Jacobo and Eliana can look in upon me while I am sleeping. They call it the carnival door. It seems to them, through the distortion, as if I lie in the biggest bed in the world. I puff myself up on the world’s largest pillows. The walls curve around me. The first day we moved in I stuck my toes out from under the covers. Mama, your feet are bigger than your head! M’ijo said that the world inside my bedroom seemed stretchy. M’ija said it was made of chewing gum.

Corrigan shifts sideways out of bed. His thin, bare back, his long legs. He steps to the closet. He puts his black shirt on a hanger, wedges the metal end of the hanger in the gap between door and frame. The dangling black shirt covers the spyhole in the door. From outside, the sound of the television.

“We should lock it too,” I say.

“¿Estás segura?”

These small Spanish phrases he uses sound like stones in his mouth, his accent so terrible it makes me laugh.

“Won’t they worry?”

“Not if we don’t.”

He returns to the bed, naked, embarrassed, covering himself. He slips beneath the covers, nudges against my shoulder. Singing. Off-key. “Can you tell me how-to-get, how-to-get to Sesame Street?”

I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it. Feel the rush of sweetness: we make love.