Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

Gabriella sat up, and the bedclothes fell down. She looked at him and laughed.

“You are so sweet,” she said, smiling at his attendant heart sitting beside her and passing through another wave of her own disbelief that such a man existed. She held out her arms to him, and in his jacket, shirt, and trousers he stretched himself across; he did not reach for her with his hands, but closed his eyes as he craned forward like a finishing sprinter and was an instant there in that invisible place of long-imagined arrival, until her fingers touched his face and drew him toppling onto the bed. She was laughing. She drew him against her breasts and rose her body against him, caressing him with the fullness of her so his face travelled the length of her skin and tasted the perfume that was herself and did not come in bottles. He shook again in spasms. He clung to her as she moved now beneath now above him, now turning him over like a shipwreck in the churned-up waters of a passion that she could not fathom. She undressed him with a quick and flashing urgency, not thinking that her actions were like those of a saviour or that the dampness of her mouth finding his was the ageless, time-honoured way in which the world was resuscitated and gasped anew the miracle air. She thought nothing. She kissed the white and shaking wreckage of his body and swallowed his tears that spouted and rolled; he wept and tried to cling to her, embracing in this woman for the first time in his adult life the possibility of happiness and feeling at the same moment that the wave might crash, drowning him in that strange foreknowledge and expectancy of suffering which every day had taught him. He held her so tightly she arched and cried out, the breath squeezed from her in a thin red-and-yellow ribbon, and she was pressed onto him like a transparency. Their loving was thrown about; it rose up and fell down, it tumbled off the bed and arrived on the carpet among Gabriella's shoes. It squirmed and burned. She took handfuls of his skin and closed them tightly within her fingers, letting go and taking another even as he held hers. He hooped her, she enwrapped him. She rolled him over and shook him. She pressed his face hard to her breasts, she pulled his shoulders against her, as if the wholeness of himself might enter there; as if each of them had somehow forgotten their sex organs or forgone them as some hopelessly inadequate apparati of conjoinment, as if they wished not to be joined at all but to be one another, to blend. They wrestled and tumbled within each other in a way that sought transcendence and to make their bodies one as air or spirit.

“I love you,” Stephen said.

Gabriella touched the smooth moon of his bare head where he lay across her. But she did not say she loved him.

And so there was then a brief season before Christmas, a time which glimmered with the quality of fables and made for Stephen Griffin and Gabriella Castoldi the single most enduring memory of what happiness could be like on earth. The sun stayed between the mountains. When Gabriella told Stephen that the cold dampness of the weather in winter depressed her, he made the characteristically rash promise of the first-time lover that he would not let it rain on her. Within a few days, when the pine needles of the town's Christmas trees were drying and falling and the sun still warmed Kerry like Maytime, he began to believe, like a child, that love had more powers than he supposed and that the force of wishes sometimes made things true. His gift was one of pure sentimentality and he wanted so deeply for everything to turn out right that, in that brief season of sunlight, he imagined it would. He lived at Mary White's and visited Nelly Grant and carried to Gabriella's cottage the bags of fruit, honeys, and jams that fed pleasure and rapture. Sometimes she played for him. She stood beside the bed, and having bargained that he lie long and naked while he listen, she bowed a light quick music whose notes came like birds and sang through the cottage air. She played more easily than she had ever done, not yet knowing that the quality she had discovered was forgiveness and that in the secrecy of her spirit a healing had begun.

It was a season of love in the afternoon; of slow time and long caresses, of strawberries (that had been flown from Africa and bought in a market in Cork) passing from mouth to mouth like the wet ripe and softly bruised essence of pleasure itself. It was a season of nothing else; the world had been made small and sunny. Everything else had been lopped away, had in a single kiss been rendered meaningless, and while the days passed by, Stephen did not think of returning to Clare. He did not think of the letter that he must have known would come (and did) from Eileen Waters, the threat she did not quite have the authority to make that unless she heard from him at once he would be dismissed from the school, and that further, he would not get work from the department again; he did not consider tomorrow nor the diminishing funds from which he paid Mary White as Christmas approached. But neither did he hear the voice that whispers insistently beneath the surface of all our happiness, that urges you to gather each moment like a small stone and store it in the deep pockets of your soul, that knows what lies ahead and offers only the wisdom of living fully and cherishing like the briefest dream this season of loving, for these are the instants of passion which will later become those diamonds of memory that will cry out: Here, there, look, in these moments I lived and knew a boundless joy, I loved.

Stephen did not hear it. He did not think, A day will come when this will end, when I will sit in a room and turn over these moments like the story of another man's life. But rather, in those three weeks before Christmas, he awoke and loved and listened to music and clung to the thin belief that the things of the heart endured and mattered and were the secret magic which could entangle the varied and ingenious knots of life like the fingers of an ancient mariner. At thirty-two years of age, in love for the first time, Stephen was an early model of romance. He withdrew money from the bank and bought flowers from Mary Mungovan's shop on the lower street, which specialized in wreaths and funeral accessories. He carried the chrysanthemums in the crook of his arm like an infant and brought them to Gabriella as a lesser declaration of the inexpressible. It was in the character of his love that he could not describe it and tried instead to deliver it through an entire inventory of small gifts and gestures: he made her thick, undrinkable coffee every morning and brought it to her in her bed, he washed her dishes, he tidied the clothes it was her habit to leave on the floor, he brought her the Cadbury's chocolate bars she said she loved, leaving them in half-hidden places about the cottage, and telling her she was beautiful when she stood before the mirror and mockingly said he was fattening her into a Madonna; he wrote her small notes, he bought books and left them by her bed, he emptied Nelly Grant's shelves, buying every kind of fruit and fresh juice, carrying bottles of elderberry wine up the hill to the cottage in a string bag that Gabriella had brought from Venice.

Stephen did not suffer greatly from the fact that Gabriella Castoldi did not tell him that she loved him. He had the visionary blindness of a saint and wanted only for her to let him love her. He did not expect nor even imagine that she might requite his love. Life had imbued him with a deep humility and then nourished it with a Catholic sense of his own unworthiness. He was the lesser for not being beautiful, for possessing no gift, and for the flawed understanding with which he had grown up that fate had chosen him for misfortune. He was dazzled by her, and did not care how he appeared to anyone in the town, carrying her groceries, bringing her flowers, hanging her strawberry-stained sheets on the line. It was enough for Stephen Griffin that the great airy burden of love he had discovered inside himself could be given to Gabriella. He felt she was the saddest woman he had ever met, and wanted to heal her, to caress her, and to remake the world around her with tenderness in that earliest and most redeeming of our instincts that is the deep-felt and inexplicable longing to make another happy.