Andrew Fox - Over Our Heads

That night, after the light clicked off from the cracks around Dani’s door, I lay awake, my body clock suspended somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. The sheets were crisp, but the window seals were poor, the room airy and damp in a way that seemed thoroughly Irish. I checked my watch and calculated that, just then, Elaine would be finishing up and hurrying home from the 42nd Street Library, where she was spending the summer on an archivist’s residency. In the Main Concourse of Grand Central, she would stop for a moment to look at the stars constellated in gold against the vaulted ceiling’s blue, and she would think, I hoped, of her daughter and of me.

I reached for my phone and dialled her number, and as the phone rang I thought of the one time she had truly enjoyed a visit to Ireland, a post-engagement whistle-stop jaunt around the Burren of which, judiciously, we hadn’t informed my mother. For four gloriously, improbably sunny days, we had stamped our feet in sawdust shebeens to fiddle-and-drum combos, borne the slap of the Atlantic breeze at the lip of primordial cliffs and stood rooted to the rocky spot as two white horses raced inches from our elbows in love-chase. I had felt surer about things than I would be for a long time afterwards.

The phone rang five, six, seven times, and when Elaine answered I heard Miles Davis. But then lightly, distractedly:

‘Have you made it to Galway yet?’

My wife pronounced the word, and deliberately so, I thought, Gel-whay , the first vowel flattened and the second syllable stretched, as though the language from which it grew were too frail to withstand her tongue.

‘We’re leaving in the morning,’ I said. ‘Where are you? I thought you’d be —’

‘I told you this.’ Elaine paused. I tried to imagine what room of our apartment she might be in, but the stereo gave no clue.

She sighed. ‘I finished early. Calvin’s taking me to dinner.’

Calvin Barnes was a professor of something who sat on an admissions committee with Elaine. I’d met him once at a cocktail party at some dean’s apartment in Gramercy, and hated him on sight. He wore a grey corduroy three-piece with maroon felt brothel creepers, spoke in full paragraphs and, as soon as he got drunk (which was quickly), gazed deeply into my wife’s eyes, unashamedly at her legs.

‘Where’s his wife?’ I said. She was a big noise, apparently, in magazine publishing.

‘Somewhere,’ Elaine said. ‘Tell Dani love.’

‘Don’t drink too much,’ I said.

After I’d hung up, I thought about going out to walk the canal bank or the perimeter of the Green, as I had done sometimes in my student days. I fancied an adventure, or a drunken binge the like of which I never had permitted myself back then. But I didn’t go. I stayed, watching the weak moonlight angle on to the nightstand and listening to the night dogs yelp, while in the other room, my daughter slept.

I woke the next morning feeling sluggish, as though I’d been stepped on. But once I groped my way to the shower and the peeling blast of good water pressure, I allowed my mind to range over the long westerly drive that lay ahead, and began to brighten. I made coffee in the room, listened to the radio as I dressed, and was raring to go, relishing already the thinness of sole of my driving shoes, as I knocked on Dani’s door and waited for her emergence — but emerge she did not. I knocked again, heard a rustling. She opened the door a crack and held it on the chain.

‘Morning!’ I said. ‘All set to —’

‘Just give me fifteen.’ My daughter’s hair was madness, her eyes dark and fat.

‘What happened to you?’ I said and heard my voice find what Elaine called its Young Lady Range. ‘Did you go out last —’

‘Please,’ Dani said. ‘Fifteen.’

The door clicked shut. I wheeled my case to the lobby and, sitting beneath a plastic palm tree by the revolving door, scrolled through the Google docs Georgette had shared. An antitrust defence was in danger of falling apart a little less than a month before going to arbitration. I sent a stern but polite reminder to the client, some gentle reassurances to the partners, cc-ing Georgette on each and feeling negligent, detached.

When Dani finally materialized she looked transformed. She had gone with contacts for a change and her eyes seemed brighter than ever. Her skin was pale, her hair dark from the shower.

‘Ready?’ she said.

I followed her to the car and loaded our cases into the trunk.

‘So,’ I said as I programmed the GPS, ‘where did you get to, then, on this wild night out of yours?’

‘If you must know, I had three cocktails at the hotel bar. That’s the whole story.’

‘Did you talk to anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Did anyone talk to you?’

‘Some dude in a suit tried to —’

‘Jesus, Dani.’

‘But I pretended I didn’t speak English.’

I laughed: I couldn’t help it. We crossed the Liffey at Kilmainham.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘no harm done, I suppose. And probably best if we just say no more about it, yeah? But maybe, don’t tell your mother? I wouldn’t want her to worry. To be honest, I don’t know which of us she’d be maddest —’

‘That obelisk,’ Dani pointed out the window at a marble monument looming over the Phoenix Park, ‘commemorates the victories of Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, in the Napoleonic Wars. Elsewhere in the park there’s a monument to Pope John Paul II, who drew a quarter of the country’s population to a special Mass in the year of his visit.’

‘1979,’ I said. ‘I made my confirmation.’

On the far side of Maynooth, the cloud cover broke and rain pounded the car. Dani called her mother to describe the dreary territory through which we were passing. I pulled in at a Topaz somewhere before Athlone, took the phone and sent Dani out to fill the tank. The forecourt was empty save for a canary-yellow Volkswagen with tinted windows and outsize silver wheels. Its driver, a young guy, was filling up as well. He wore boot-cut jeans and an untucked stripy shirt. His hair was shaved close at the sides and gelled in a quiff on top.

Elaine was eating cereal and struggling with the cable box.

‘How was Calvin?’ I said.

‘Oh, I don’t think I’ll be seeing him again for quite some time.’

Dani tapped on the window. I opened it and passed out my wallet. I watched her walk to the shop to pay, and the Volkswagen boy did too.

‘What happened?’

Elaine groaned, embarrassed. ‘You told me so.’

‘He made a pass at you?’

‘He’s very depressed. And lost. And drunk too, of course. He really hates his wife. He touched my knee.’

‘Jesus,’ I said.

‘And so I picked up his hand. And I gave it back to him. And I said: Calvin, hate her or don’t hate her, you’re going home to her right now.’

Dani stepped from the door of the shop as the Volkswagen boy stepped towards it. He said something to her, his hands in his pockets. She folded her arms and smiled.

‘And did he?’ I said.

‘He passed out in the bathroom first,’ Elaine said. ‘But eventually, yes.’

The boy pointed towards his car. Dani laughed and pointed towards me.

‘When are you coming home?’ Elaine said, though well she knew.

The boy met my eye. Nothing passed between us.

‘I love —’ Elaine said, but then, ‘Oh, the cable’s back!’

I hung up. Dani walked the rest of the way to the car, her head bowed. She climbed in and I gunned the engine.

‘What the hell was that?’ I said.

She smiled. ‘What was what?’

Galway appeared to us late afternoon in a mess of crowd-control barriers and bunting. Banners strung across the road cried the second-to-last day of a street theatre festival and signs in the windows of pubs summoned musicians for seisiún . Road-weary, we headed straight for the hotel, a self-styled ‘inn’ near the Spanish Arch that I’d allowed Dani to choose, with a heavy stone facade, faded carpets in the lobby and a stag’s head and cutlasses and oil paintings on the walls. In the bar, a sweaty guy in a woollen jumper was playing an accordion.