Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

“Well, when you believe in something,” Moira said.

“Yes. Oh, that’s right,” said Eileen Waters. “Absolutely right.”

“You don’t like to just give up on it.” Moira let the phrase linger a moment and, there in the bank, collected another of the small victories that were becoming common for her. Was it her imagination that made the November street seem brighter, livelier, that morning? was there dazzlement falling? was there an all but imperceptible lift in the air that made men seem to move more lightly from their tractors or salute across the erratic hotchpotch of parked cars in Bank Place with a broader sweep of their arms? Were the twin babies of the Kellys ever laughing like that before? Moira wondered, sauntering along the footpath. Was it always like this, and she had failed to notice? As if enlightenment was a condition of Miltown Malbay that noontime, harmony seemed everywhere. People had their best day. They were illumined with an inexplicable sense of things being right in the world. Their own ordinariness seemed majestic, and in all the coming and going of their everyday shopping and conversation, from the market to the post office, from Galvin’s to Hynes’s, they were like the townspeople in paintings of towns and villages of long ago, when time was slower and everything more innocent.

And it was the concert. Somehow it was, Moira Fitzgibbon told the dashboard of her car, and drove to Stephen Griffin’s house, where she had seen the yellow car earlier and knew that he could not be working.

She heard Vivaldi playing when she opened her car door and stood, allowing her heart to understand the situation before moving up to knock. She knocked four times to no answer and looked up at the clear sky without discouragement, as if it were the next white page of the story only just coming to her; then she walked around the back and let herself in.

“Autumn” was playing, that slow collapse of notes that made the air itself seem to fall as Moira stepped inside the back kitchen. Once she arrived in it she knew she had trespassed some intimacy, that the simplest sights and smells of the domestic disorder were private revelations, and that the stack of unwashed dishes in the sink, the opened cartons of sour milk left by the windowsill, the grey smudge that was an ancient sponge, the dusty cobwebs like netting across the corner of the ceiling, these were each as vulnerable and naked expressions of the heart as rough, raw, first-draft poems. She knew more about Stephen Griffin with each step, and held herself briefly in the kitchen until the myriad impressions had flown into the farthest corner of her mind. Then she called his name.

“Mr. Griffin? Oh, Mr. Griffin?”

He did not answer, and Moira walked slowly from the kitchen to the door of the sitting room. Everything about that minor journey — the condition of the carpet, the faded greyish quality of the wallpaper, cool as old skin when she touched it, and the swell of melancholy in that movement of the music that was tangible in its pain and dying — made her afraid. When she put her hand on the door and moved it ever so slowly open, she was inseparable from her own visions of television women detectives arriving on the scene of murder.

She eased open the door and put her head around it first. Then she saw him: Stephen Griffin, poleaxed, lying back in the armchair with his head turned to one side. His right hand conducted in a slow waving. His eyes were closed; he did not sense her beside him, and even when she said his name again with some alarm, nothing happened. Then Moira pulled out the plug of the music system.

“Mr. Griffin?”

Stephen opened his eyes. He did not want to.

“Mr. Griffin, are you all right?” She was standing over him. She did not ask him if he was injured or ill or if he wanted to get up; she did not suppose that he had been drinking, nor that a sudden seizure had knocked him back into the chair. Moira Fitzgibbon was more intelligent than that. The knowledge had gathered in her before she had to think of it.

“I said I’d call in because of tonight,” she said. “I have a complimentary ticket for the concert in Galway.”

Stephen took the ticket. Of course he did. He took the ticket as if it were a hand reaching down to him and drove the yellow car to Galway that night to hear Gabriella Castoldi play Vivaldi in the Town Hall. By the time he had arrived in his seat, his inner organs had each contracted into tight balls of anticipation and he carried them like a bag of stones inside the tight sweated cotton of his shirt. But when the musicians came onto the stage and Gabriella lifted her bow to the first note, the stones dissolved and everything was forgotten. He could breathe. There was a scent of lilies in the air, and as the concert continued, this time he did not take his eyes from the slender woman with the sorrowful face. He looked at her throughout. There was something about her face, he thought, something there in the places beneath her eyes, in the washed and drawn pallor of her skin, the smallness of her mouth, which was turned so minutely downward, the furrow in her brow as she frowned over the instrument and gazed down along the strings as if looking for evidence of the impossible. She is as fragile as the violin, he thought, and thought of the mesmerism of her sadness and how it merged into the notes. He loved how she played and loved the sorrow, too, seeing some part of himself reflected in her, the way lovers do.

Since Stephen Griffin had abandoned the idea of romantic love, he was not even aware of it emerging like translucence on his face, sweetening his tongue, and giving him the strange radiance of saints. He was not aware that Paolo Mistra and Maria Motte, across their cello and violin, could notice it, or that Gabriella herself recognized him as the man who had crashed his car and was now placed like a yellow light in the fourth row. Stephen did not think of these things. He was aware only of wanting the concert to continue indefinitely, of feeling the uneasy combination of peace and longing battling in the lower regions of his stomach.

When the interval arrived he realized his clothes were wet, but not that the man and woman sitting next to him had been soaked also, nor that the scent of lilies was emanating not from the stage or the perfumed ladies of Galway town but from between the fingers of his two clasped hands. He wondered if he should get up, if a walk around the foyer might dry him off, but when he moved his feet forward and saw the extent of the stains behind the knees of his trousers, he sat still while everyone else moved. He was so intensely in his own world that the ceiling might have fallen on him and white angels descended and he would not have moved but waited for the concert to resume.

The second half passed dreamlike as the first. When it ended the audience stood to applaud, and fanned the scent stageward. Standing quickly Stephen felt his head become a stone; its weight nearly toppled him, he lost the balance of himself as though the world he stood in was suddenly tilted now. He looked down, he opened his mouth to suck in the air, he reached for the back of the seat in front of him and then raised his head to look at her before she left. And for the briefest moment, a semiquaver, the slightest note in the music of what happens, he saw Gabriella Castoldi see him standing there.

Then she looked away.

And nothing more.

No words, no greeting, no meeting after the concert. A shambles of desire collapsing steadily in upon itself.