Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

I do not even hear the pounding at the door, but Corrigan stops and grins and kisses me, a rim of sweat at the top of his brow.

“That’ll be Elmo.”

“I think it’s Grouchy.”

I step out of bed and remove the shirt from the hanger in front of the spyhole, look down. I see the tops of their heads: their eyes look tiny and confused. I pull Corrigan’s shirt on and open the door. Bend down to eye level. Jacobo holds an old blanket in his hands. Eliana an empty plastic glass. They are hungry they say, first in English and then in Spanish.

“Just a minute,” I tell them. I am a terrible mother. I should not do this. I close the door again, but open it just as quickly, rush out into the kitchen, fill two bowls with cereal, two glasses of water.

“Quiet now, niños. Promise me.”

I step back to the bedroom, glance at my children through the spyhole, in front of the television, spilling cereal on the carpet. I cross the room and jump on the bed. I throw the sheet to the floor, and then I fall beside Corrigan, pull him close. He is laughing, his body at ease.

We rush, him and I. We make love again. Afterwards, he showers in my bathroom.

“Tell me something magnificent, Corrigan.”

“Like what?”

“Come on, it’s your turn.”

“Well, I just learned to play the piano.”

“There’s no piano.”

“Exactly. I just sat down at it and could immediately play every note.”

“Ha!”

It’s true. That is how it feels. I go into the bathroom where he is showering, pull back the curtain, kiss his wet lips, then pull on my robe and go out to look after the children. My bare feet on the curling linoleum floor. My painted toes. I’m vaguely aware that every fiber in me is still making love to Corrigan. Everything feels new, the tips of my fingers alive to every touch, a stove top.

He comes out of the room with his hair so wet that at first I think the gray at the side temples has disappeared. He is wearing his dark trousers and his black shirt since he has nothing else to change into. He has shaved. I want to tell him off for using my razor. His skin looks shiny and raw.

A week later — after the accident — I will come home and tap out his hairs at the side of my sink, arrange them in patterns, obsessively, over and over. I will count them out to reconstitute them. I will gather them against the side of the sink and try to create his portrait there.

I saw the X-rays in the hospital. The swollen heart-shadow from the blunt chest trauma. His heart muscle getting squeezed by the blood and fluid. The jugular veins, massively enlarged. His heart went in and out of gallop. The doctor stuck a needle into his chest. I knew the routine from my years as a nurse: drain the pericardium. The blood and fluid were taken out, but Corrigan’s heart kept on swelling. His brother was saying prayers, over and over. They took another X-ray. The jugular veins were massive, they were squeezing him shut. His whole body had gone cold.

But, for now, the children just look up and say: “Hi, Corrie,” as if it is the most natural thing in the world. Behind them, the television plays. Count to seven. Sing along with me. When the pie was opened the birds began to sing.

“niños, apaguen la tele.”

“Later, Mom.”

Corrigan sits at the small wooden table at the rear of the television set. He has his back to me. My heart shudders every time he sits near the portrait of my dead husband. He has never asked me to move the photo. He never will. He knows the reason it is there. No matter that my husband was a brute who died in the war in the mountains near Quezaltenango — it makes no difference — all children need a father. Besides, it is just a photo. It takes no precedence. It does not threaten Corrigan. He knows my story. It is contained within this moment.

And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt. Corrigan glances back at me, smiles. He fingers one of my medical textbooks. He even opens it to a random page and scans it, but I know he isn’t reading at all. Sketches of bodies, of bones, of cartilage.

He skips through the pages as if looking for more space.

“Really,” he says, “that’d be a good idea.”

“What?”

“To get a piano and learn how to play it.”

“Yes, and put it where?”

“On top of the television set. Right, Jacobo? Hey, Bo, that would work, wouldn’t it?”

“Nah,” says Jacobo.

Corrigan leans across the sofa and knuckles my son’s dark hair.

“Maybe we’ll get a piano with a television set inside it.”

“Nah.”

“Maybe we’ll get a piano and TV and a chocolate machine all in one.”

“Nah.”

“Television,” says Corrigan, smiling, “the perfect drug.”

For the first time in years I wish for a garden. We could go outside in the cool fresh air and sit away from the children, find our own space, shorten the nearby buildings into blades of grass, have the stonemasons carve flowers at our feet. I have often dreamed of bringing him back to Guatemala. There was a place my childhood friends and I used to go, a butterfly grove, down the dirt road towards Zacapa. The path dipped through the bushes. The trees opened into the grove, where the bushes grew low. The flowers were in the shape of a bell, red and plentiful. The girls sucked on the sweet flowers while the boys tore the butterflies apart to see how they were made. Some of the wings were so colorful they could only be poisonous. When I left my home and arrived in New York, I rented a small apartment in Queens, and, one day, distraught, I got a tattoo on my ankle, the wings spread wide. It is one of the stupidest things I have ever done. I hated myself for the cheapness I had become.

“You’re daydreaming,” Corrigan says to me.

“Am I?”

My head against his shoulder, he laughs as if the laughter wants to travel a good distance, down through my body also.

“Corrie?”

“Uh-huh?”

“You like my tattoo?”

He prods me playfully. “I can live with it,” he says.

“Tell me the truth.”

“No, I like it, I do.”

“Mentiroso,” I say. He creases his forehead. “Fibber.”

“I’m not fibbing. Kids! Kids, do you think I’m fibbing?”

Neither of them says a word.

“See?” says Corrigan. “I told you.”

My desire for him now is raw and sharp. I lean forward and kiss his lips. It is the first time we have kissed in front of the children, but they do not seem to notice. A sliver of cold at my neck.

There are times — though not often — when I wish that I didn’t have children at all. Just make them disappear, God, for an hour or so, no more, just an hour, that’s all. Just do it quickly and out of my sight, have them go up in a puff of smoke and be gone, then bring them back fully intact, as if they didn’t leave at all. But just let me be alone, with him, this man, Corrigan, for a tiny while, just me and him, together.

I leave my head on his shoulder. He touches the side of my face absently. What can be on his mind? There are so many things to pull him away from me. Sometimes, I feel he is made of a magnet. He bounces and spins in midair around me. I go to the kitchen and make him café. He likes it very strong and hot with three spoonfuls of sugar. He lifts the spoon out and licks it triumphantly, as if the spoon has gotten him through an ordeal. He breathes on the spoon and then hangs it off the end of his nose, so it dangles there, absurdly.

He turns to me. “What do you think, Adie?”

“Que payaso.”

“Gracias,” he says in his awful accent.

He walks over in front of the television set with the spoon still hanging off the end of his nose. It falls and he catches it and then he breathes on it once more, does his trick. The children explode in laughter. “Let me, let me, let me.”