Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

“You were fine.”

“I wasn’t silly?”

“You were fine, Claire.”

“I hate making a fool of myself.”

“You didn’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

“The truth’s not foolish,” she said.

She was swiveling her glass and watching the gin swirl in circles, a cyclone she wanted to drown herself in.

“I mean, about Joshua. Not the other stuff. I mean, I felt very silly when I said I’d pay you to stay. I just wanted someone to hang around. With, you know, with me. Selfish, really, and I feel awful.”

“It happens.”

“I didn’t mean it.” She looked away. “And then when you left, I called your name. I wanted to run after you.”

“I needed to walk, Claire. That’s all.”

“The others were laughing at me.”

“I’m sure they weren’t.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever see them again.”

“Of course we will.”

She let out a long sigh and threw back the drink, poured herself another, but mostly tonic this time, not gin.

“Why did you come back, Gloria?”

“To get paid, of course.”

“Excuse me?”

“A joke, Claire, joke.”

I could feel the gin working under my tongue.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m a little slow this afternoon.”

“I’ve no idea, really,” I said.

“I’m glad you did.”

“Nothing better to do.”

“You’re funny.”

“That’s not funny.”

“It’s not?”

“It’s the truth.”

“Oh!” she said. “Your choir. I forgot.”

“My what?”

“Your choir. You said you had choir.”

“I don’t have choir, Claire. Never did. Never will. Sorry. No such thing.”

She seemed to chew on the thought for a moment and then broke out in a grin.

“You’ll stay awhile, though? Rest your feet. Stay for dinner. My husband should be home around six or so. You’ll stay?”

“Oh, I don’t think I should.”

“Twenty dollars an hour?” she said with a grin.

“You’ve got me,” I laughed.

We sat in happy quiet and she ran her fingers over the rim of her glass, but then she perked up and said suddenly: “Tell me about your boys again.”

Her question rankled. I didn’t want to think about my boys anymore. In a strange way, all I wanted was to be surrounded by another, to be a part of somebody else’s room. I took a piece of lemon and slid it between my teeth and gums. The acid jarred me. I guess I wanted another sort of question altogether.

“Can I ask you something, Claire?”

“Of course.”

“Could we put on some music?”

“What?”

“I mean, I suppose I’m just still in a little bit of shock.”

“What sort of music?”

“Whatever you have. It makes me feel, I don’t know, it calms me down. I like having an orchestra around. Do you have opera?”

“Afraid not. You like opera?”

“All my savings. I go to the Met every chance I get. Way up in the gods. Slip off my shoes and away I go.”

She rose and went to the record player. I couldn’t see the sleeve of the record she took out. She cleaned the vinyl with a soft yellow cloth and then she lifted the needle. She did everything small as if it was extraordinary and necessary. The music filled the room. A deep, hard piano: the hammers rippling across the strings.

“He’s Russian,” she said. “He can stretch his fingers to thirteen keys.”

I WAS HAPPY ENOUGH the day my second husband found himself a younger version of the train he was riding towards oblivion. His hat had always been a helping too large on his head anyway. He upped and left me with three boys and a view of the Deegan. I didn’t mind. My last thought of him was that nobody ought to be as lonely as him, walking away. But it didn’t break my heart to close the door on him, or even to suck up the pride of a monthly check.

The Bronx was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. My boys wore brown hunting caps with earflaps. Later they threw the caps away and grew up into Afros. They hid pencils in their hair. We had our good days. I recall one summer afternoon when all four of us went to Foodland and raced up and down the frozen-food aisles with our shopping cart, keeping ourselves cool.

It was Vietnam that brought me to my knees. In she came and took all three of my boys from right under my nose. She picked them up out of their beds, shook the sheets, and said, These ones are mine.

I asked Clarence one day why he was going and he said one or two things about liberty, but mostly he was doing it because he was bored. Brandon and Jason said about the same thing too when their draft cards were dropped in our mailbox. It was the only mail that didn’t get stolen in the houses. The mailman carried around huge bags of gloom. There was heroin all over the projects in those years and I thought maybe my boys were right, they were getting themselves free. I’d seen far too many children slouched down in the corners with needles in their arms, little spoons sticking out of their shirt pockets.

I as much as opened the windows and told them to be on their merry way. They flew off. Not one of them came back.

Every time a branch of mine got to being a decent size, that wind just came along and broke it.

I sat in my chair in my living room, watching afternoon soap operas.

I guess I ate. I suppose that’s what I did. I ate whatever I could. Alone. Surrounded by packets of Velveeta and saltines, trying hard not to remember, switching channels and crackers and cheeses so the memories didn’t get me. I watched my ankles swell. Every woman with her own curse, and I suppose mine was not much worse than a whole lot of them.

Everything falls into the hands of music eventually. The only thing that ever rescued me was listening to a big voice. There are years accumulated in a sound. I took to listening on the radio every Sunday and spent whatever extra grief money the government gave me on tickets to the Metropolitan. I felt like I had a room full of voices. The music pouring out over the Bronx. I sometimes turned the stereo so loud the neighbors complained. I bought earphones. Huge ones that covered half my head. I wouldn’t even look at myself in the mirror. But there was a medicine in it.

That afternoon, too, I sat in Claire’s living room and let the music float over me: it wasn’t opera, it was piano, but it was a new pleasure — it thrilled me.

We went through three or four records. In the late afternoon or early evening, I wasn’t quite sure, but I opened my eyes and she was putting a light blanket on my knees. She sat back against the white of the couch, the glass held at her lips.

“You know what I’d like to do?” said Claire.

“What’s that?”

“I’d love to have a cigarette, right here, right now, in this room.”

She fumbled around on the table for a package.

“My husband hates it when I smoke indoors.”

She fished out a single cigarette. It was turned the wrong way around in her mouth and for a moment I thought she was going to light it that way, but she laughed and flipped it. The matches were wet and they dissolved at the touch.

I sat up and picked another book of matches off the table. She touched my hand.

“I think I’m a little tipsy,” she said, but her voice was elegant.

I had the horrific feeling then — right then — that she might lean across and try to kiss me, or make some strange approach, like you read about in magazines. We lose ourselves sometimes. I felt hollow inside and there seemed to be a cool wind moving along my body like a breeze down a street, but it was nothing of the sort — all she did was sit back and blow the smoke to the ceiling and allow the music to wash over us.

A short while later she set the table for three and heated up a chicken pot pie. The phone rang a few times but she didn’t answer. “I guess he’s going to be late,” she said.