Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

She let the suggestion flow like a current to the back of Stephen’s head. But his body and spirit were too out of balance to receive it, she decided, and so said, “I have a special on those plums this week.”

“Oh yes, thank you,” said Stephen, jostling the bags of apples and oranges against his chest, holding the bananas down with his chin, and reaching toward the basket of plums. Nelly came forward. When she moved across the small shop the oils that scented her body followed her through the air. She was able to fill the space like a large sound.

“I’ll take these,” she said, and unloaded the fruit bags and bananas, standing briefly next to the stranger so that the wholeness of her energy and the scent of lavender might soothe his embarrassment. He was the most awkward man she had ever seen, but that very awkwardness was attractive, too, for it broadcast an intensity of feeling. She watched him gather three more plums, and then the two of them moved back to the register. As if she would not allow him to buy them, Nelly put the other fruits to one side. She did not weigh the plums, but charged him two pounds.

Hurriedly Stephen reached inside his coat for coins. Even that, Nelly thought, reveals him.

“And the … em …” He looked over at where she had left the apples and oranges.

“These are very good,” she said, ignoring his gesture, looking directly at him with the green compassion of her eyes and patting softly with her right hand the bag of plums.

“Oh yes, I’m sure,” he said. “Well, thank you. Thank you very much.” He nodded quickly, as if to an allegro, and then turned towards the door.

“Come back again,” Nelly Grant said. “All my customers come back.”

“Yes; yes, I will.” He stopped at the door as if he had suddenly remembered something important to say to her. He turned. She was looking at him.

“Em …”

Then he sighed, nodded, and was gone.

Stephen stayed that night at the small clean guest house of Mary White, a woman of fifty-nine who had buried her husband and lost her children to the invisible places where only telephones reached them. She was a slender woman with fine white curls and thin legs who, since losing her left breast, had become a close friend of Nelly Grant’s and believed without hesitation it was she who had helped her recover in the world. When she saw the man arriving at the front door with the bag of plums, she knew where he had come from and brought him forward into the yellow bedroom that had once belonged to her eldest daughter. Then she went and made him tea, calling him from the room with a gentleness he felt like a mother’s hand.

“Perhaps you’d like me to wash the plums?” she asked as he sat down in the living room, where the extraordinary green beauty of her back garden rose before the window.

“Or just tea,” she added, “and some biscuits.” Then she left him alone there and went to warm fresh towels for his room. Mary White was a slight woman, but knew the enormous goodness of giving comfort. That it might be given to her, that she might deserve or need it, did not enter her mind. She warmed the towels, turned on the oven, and baked fresh scones and brown bread for her visitor out of that simple and immeasurable force of goodness that moved within her. When he finished his tea she brought him more, and asked him to tell her if there was anything he needed to feel comfortable.

That evening the mist came down into the streets of the town. A damp clothlike darkness fell, and when Stephen slipped out of the house within it he could smell the pine trees in the mountains. He walked to the hotel, feigning casualness and calm. His forehead shone beneath the yellow streetlights, and the moisture of the night glittered on his hair like a crown. By the time he had arrived at the wide gateway and the illumined sign welcoming visitors, he was breathing so shallowly the thin air of both fear and desire that he might have fallen down there on the pathway. He balled his fists inside his coat pockets, as if squeezing the life of his own timidity, and then headed up into the bright lights of the hotel. The stone steps were red-carpeted. A round-faced man in a black uniform and cap nodded to him as he entered and stood in the timbered hallway where a wood fire was burning. Stephen didn’t know where to go. He had planned on getting to the hotel to see Gabriella play the violin, but now that he was standing inside the door, he felt lost. He ran his hand up over his forehead and hair, and then had to hide it momentarily in the collar of his jacket, until the drench of white sweat disappeared. The porter stepped over.

“Evening, sir.”

The man had a way of making the greeting seem like a question, a way of looking with round brown eyes that declared he had seen the world in all its guises come through the doors of this hotel and now knew intimately, intimately, sir, the myriad vagaries of the visitor in Kerry. He knew Stephen did not belong there. Or so Stephen imagined, holding like a lip-tremble the impulse to hurry back out the door.

“Can I help you, sir?”

Stephen held his lower lip between his teeth.

“Sir?”

“For the em, for the music. I em was hoping to hear some music. Played.”

Maurice Harty studied him like a new text, reading in him the plot of a simple mystery novel and noting the clues with a small satisfaction. “What music would that be, sir?”

“Here. I thought there was — a concert, of violin and …” Stephen looked away down the hallway towards a large lounge. Maurice Harty touched his arm and was startled to feel its thinness.

“That would be Friday or Saturday night, sir,” he said, and watched Stephen Griffin’s spirit fall like a shadow.

“Friday?” It was a breathy sigh. As if the swimmer had closed his eyes and made a hundred strokes, only to open them and see the shoreline had receded even farther.

“Or Saturday, sir.”

Stephen did not move, he floated there on the harsh awareness that he was encumbered with some invisible baggage of misfortune which guaranteed the unease of his passage.

“You’re not a guest in the hotel, sir?” Maurice Harty thought the visitor might faint. “There’s tea served in the lounge if you’d care for it.”

But Stephen did not move or answer. He only nodded his head slowly, watching a place on the carpet, waiting, swallowing the bitterness, and then taking the decision not to be defeated, not to see as failure the dreamlike journey across the Shannon and through the mountains to see the woman who was not there, not to suppose these were signs or messages and that he should abandon everything and return to Clare. When he lifted his head and thanked Maurice Harty, he had regained some balance and, assuring the porter that he would return to hear the music on Friday, he walked out and down the steps of the hotel into the moist blackness of the night, returning to the yellow bedroom in the guesthouse of Mary White, to lie in his clothes on top of the blankets and eat slowly, one after the other, the dark and delicious fruit of the plums.

When Philip Griffin returned home from the hospital he wore the cancer like a suit of clothes two inches too tight in all measurements. His life was constricting about him, and although he played Puccini and left the lights burn through the night, he could not escape the feeling of things closing about him. He had three bottles of tablets, but only the white ones were painkillers. These he took three times a day, imagining them as timber ramparts against an advancing army of iron. Since he had been in the hospital the pain had increased enormously. Often when he was tailoring he had heard stories of men and women being opened in surgery and the doctors seeing the cancer almost growing in the exposure of the air and quickly stitching the patient closed again. Air makes it multiply was the given wisdom among the middle-aged men standing for their leg measurements, and Philip Griffin had believed them, taking the strange apposition of air and death as another of the mysteries of life and thinking on it no further. Until now. Now the pain that rode up his stomach into his heart seemed better for air, and he wondered if the ease of pain when he walked outside was in fact the approach of death.