Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

When Stephen Griffin walked in the doorway of The Falls Hotel on Friday evening, his breath scented with parsley and his head clear from the chewing of lemon balm, Maurice Harty was not on the door. And neither was anyone else. The front hallway was deserted and only a young girl clicked the keys of a computer at the reception desk. At first he thought he was early. He had been waiting all week for this moment and now imagined that his watch had moved ahead of Time in rhythm with his mind and that perhaps it was not yet eight o'clock. He walked over to where a wood fire was burning low and mimed the warming of his warm hands to hold off for an instant his gathering sense of foolishness. Then he went to the receptionist and asked what time it was. When she told him it was eight o'clock, he nodded as if in exact agreement with her. He was like a lost traveller, having voyaged on long uncertain seas towards a land he presumed was there, but now, checking the coordinates, was vanished. Nothing was happening. He was there, clean-shaven and freshly scented, his eyes already glossily enlivened with the week of herbs and his head high, just above the sinking feeling of despair. But in a moment he might drown.

“I was wondering,” he said to the girl, his voice so low in his throat that the words were marshmallowy lumps of nothing, “if there was …” He raised a large one with a small cough. “A concert here.” It was as though he had declared the New World begins here and the men rushed to the side to see only the boundless watery horizon.

“Oh yes,” the girl sighed, “there is. That's why I'm not gone to the bingo. Don't say you haven't heard? It's with your Man Who Releases the Balls, you know, on the lotto, on Ty he's here tonight, down in the hall. For the football team. They're raising for a pitch.” And as if he could not already tell, she added, “It'll be brilliant.”

Stephen was trying to contain the shaking that had started in his legs.

“There is a concert, then.”

“Yes, in the O'Connell Room. Five pounds. I'd say it's just starting.”

He paid her the money with the butterflies of his hands and swallowed the air-apples that gagged him as he walked along the carpeted hallway to where the New World was and O'CONNELL ROOM was written in gold leaf above an oak door.

It squeaked when he opened it. No music was playing yet, he was in time, and it was only when he had turned to close the door that he felt the emptiness of the room at his back.

There were twenty-seven rows of chairs, fifteen chairs wide, and only seventeen people who had not gone to watch the Man Who Releases the Balls.

He walked into the middle of the room and sat down. Then Peter Sheils and Gabriella Castoldi entered, took their places, and began to play.

She wore a green velvet dress.

They played a Boccherini minuet. There was a light above her and he watched where it glanced upon the angle of her neck. She pressed the held notes and squeezed them for tenderness, her lips closed and her green eyes watching the invisible ghosts of feelings that she freed into the air. Her right foot appeared beneath the dress, and he watched it through the fullness of Brahms's Hungarian Dance no. 17. She played Kreisler, Elgar, Schubert, and Brahms. While she played, nothing else mattered in the world.

When the concert had finished, Stephen stood and applauded loudly, and was still standing there when the rest of the small audience had filed past and Peter Sheils had closed the piano and walked away.

Gabriella stepped down from the small stage.

“Thank you, thank you for coming,” she said to him. She might have been about to walk past him, but she stopped, and Stephen moved a foot closer.

He stooped down. She smelled like autumn below him. He wanted to eat her voice, and for a terrible gaping moment said nothing, waiting for her to speak again. A driplet ran downward on his crown until he turned his head slantedly to the right.

“We appreciated your listening,” she said.

Appreciated. It was like an Italian word when she said it, and he tasted it like a delicacy. He wanted to listen to her talk as he had listened to her play, but the fear of his pause growing overlong made him speak.

“You are … you … I think you are …”

She looked at him. She looked in his eyes and she touched his arm.

“You are very kind,” she said. “I think I saw you before.”

“Yes. In Ennis,” he said. “And Galway” He wanted so to look at her face that he did not.

“The Interpreti Veneziani. Oh”—she stopped—“you are the man who nearly died.” She smiled when she said it, but even then, he thought, there was sadness in her. Her hair smelled like autumn rain, and he stooped down deeper within it. “Only then you had more hair.” Her face was lit with small laughter, and Stephen reached his hand to his bare crown as if covering the revelation of some inner secret. “You must love music,” she said.

I have not listened to music for fifteen years, he wanted to say. I have been dead and woken up. I am shaking here in every particle of my spirit because of you. Please stay. Please stay here talking to me, he wanted to say, but the idiot in control of his body merely nodded at her, breathing parsley-breath on the single word: “Yes.”

She stood there. She stood there in the green velvet dress, and he imagined he could sense the Adriatic and the sunlight in the skin of her shoulders. She was as different as Venice, and when she spoke again, giving him words like fruit in her rounded and softly bruised English, he had to try hard not to reach out and touch her.

“We play tomorrows,” she said. “There will be maybe more people.”

“I don't care.” The idiot was making his words into flurried, pauseless gasps now. “I mean I don't … if nobody comes I will be … You might prefer to play with more people … but I could pay more for … not that it's the money, you … But I …”

And there the words ran out and he was tongue-tied and trussed with a glittering crown of sweat falling from his forehead.

“No.” She touched his arm once more, as if she were a balm. “It doesn't matter. I like to play,” she said, moving a step back from him, this strange, anguished man with the stiffly bent wire of his emotions piercing his insides. “Bye-bye.”

She was already walking towards the door with her violin when the idiot freed him and Stephen could whisper after her, “I will be here,” closing his eyes and lifting his heart to repeat it louder, “I will be here,” and causing Gabriella Castoldi to stop at the doorway and look back at him one last time before she said bye-bye again and was gone.

She did not even know his name. And yet when Stephen rose from the bed he had not slept in the following morning and opened the window on the continuing blue-bright and balmy summer of the first day of December, he felt the force of goodness moving in the world. He sensed the sweet energy of regeneration and bloom, the tenderness of light, the majesty of birdsong, and all the rapturous gladness and wonder that were the familiar quick-pulsed delights of those who since time immemorial have fallen in love. He was the Hollywood version of himself, the more handsome, white-shirted, and well-proportioned man singing while he shaved and finding that the perfect clean lines of his blemishless skin revealed no cuts and only the immaculate smoothness of his own face. Everything was charged, loaded with a richness of sensation: the water he splashed on himself, the scent of the witch hazel and aloe vera in the lotion, the peppermint in the toothpaste. Music should have been playing. And was when he arrived in the small dining room, where Mary White was bringing him his breakfast.