Andrew Fox: Over Our Heads

‘Satisfied?’ he said.

On the promenade, a woman pushing a stroller stopped to shake her head. Two little girls, straddling bikes that were far too big for them, pointed. Mangan heard on the wind in snatches the sounds of waves and of gulls. His bones felt out of joint, his heart like melted wax.

‘I have real work to do,’ the lifeguard mumbled. ‘Please, just get out of here.’ He turned his back and reascended swiftly to his watcher’s chair. Mangan crept out of the lifeguard’s sight and lay down in the shade of a dune. He dug his fingers into the sand until the skin pushed back at the nails. Then, for a long while, he felt nothing.

The sun dipped.

Between the islands and the shore, fresh whitecaps rose and fell. Oystercatchers waddled in twos and threes and bent to beak at rock pools. The incoming tide ran from ridge to sandy ridge, seaweed giving form to its movement in streelish trails. Mangan felt a breath of wind against his cheek and opened his eyes. No one approached him from across the sand. The cloud lifted further from between the islands and the light shone brighter.

I first met Carol at a poetry reading in a bookstore off Lafayette, up on the balcony level, where a pair of concrete pillars framed the view of the lectern. It was a wet night; we got chatting as we stood to dry ourselves beneath a heat vent, the smells of the subway rising from her coat. She had green eyes and a laugh so loud and full I felt it in my chest. She worked, she said, for an arts foundation that endowed one of the evening’s readers — a professor from the English Department where I was working towards a doctorate, whom I wanted for my supervisor and whom I cornered by the drinks table once the reading concluded. The professor wore a blue silk scarf wound carelessly around his throat. He agreed in principle to work with me, and then I went looking again for Carol, but the only remaining sign of her on the balcony was a small wet heel-print darkening the scuffed boards. I stared at it, feeling certain that an opportunity had passed me by.

So, when we chanced to meet again a few weeks later at a party on the Upper West Side, I was determined not to let her leave my sight. I followed her from room to crowded room, into and out of awkward conversations, and, in the early hours of the morning, on to the fire escape to smoke a joint and watch the water towers, the windows, the whole city quiver and stir and grope its way towards the light. Soon, I was spending most nights in her studio apartment above a taqueria in the East Village. We talked ourselves to sleep and woke up to make love, her warm breath at my ear shuddering to rise and fall. When she caught the flu, I spent a three-day weekend bringing her soup and tea. And when a cab knocked me off my bike, she ran through the snow to my hospital bedside and refused to leave at the end of visiting hours.

‘You’ll have to drag me out of here,’ she said, eyes ferocious.

‘Oh, I get it,’ the nurse flung up her hands. ‘Y’all in love.’

When Carol’s landlord raised her rent, we decided to get a place together. I was frightened by how quickly things were moving, but excited finally to get away from graduate-student housing — an ex-project crammed with small apartments chopped into smaller ones, with door hinges stiff from countless coats of paint and hallways echoing with the lonely bleats of video games. Carol and I couldn’t afford much, but after a few weeks we found a one-bed in Carroll Gardens that her salary and my stipend could just about cover. I’d got used to living in Manhattan, and the two-train subway ride seemed to take an age. But the apartment was clean, with high ceilings and two real rooms. And the neighbourhood was safe and grown-up feeling: neat streets of four- and five-floor walk-ups with children’s bikes chained to railings. We unboxed our clothes and positioned our furniture, hung our pictures on the walls and set up the cable. On weekends, we scoured flea markets and came back with a suite of French lamps, a cut-price Moroccan rug with cigarette burns at the edges.

Before long, though, it became apparent that we had gotten in over our heads. We could no longer conceal the habits and tempers we’d managed until then to keep hidden from one another, and it turned out that we’d been over-optimistic about our finances. When a fellowship I’d been banking on failed to materialize, Carol had to call her sister for a loan. The sister was five years older, and married in New Jersey. She stared at me hard over a plate of ribs in a barbecue place near Penn Station, dabbled her fingers in a bowl of lemon water and asked Carol when she was planning to call their father. He, I’d gathered, was a dry drunk who had raised them both alone upstate and never quite forgiven either of them for leaving. Carol nodded her head, sipped a glass of water and made a promise I knew she had no intention of keeping. Right then, I wanted to take her by the hand and run with her out of the restaurant and keep running.

Over the next few months, Carol’s job had her working sixty-hour weeks, while the qualifying exams for which I was preparing kept me in the library even longer. In the mornings, we kissed each other quickly with crumbs of sleep on our faces, and at night we sprawled on the couch too burned out to do much of anything else. She seldom laughed. We made plans to spend Saturday afternoons in the park together, then got into roaring fights on Friday evenings and spent whole weekends avoiding one another. On those days, I brooded over how, in such a short space of time, I had come so completely to depend on Carol, and wondered what I would do if she ever decided to cut me out of her life.

At better moments, I fantasized aloud about taking a holiday, and Carol began to ask questions about the place where I’d grown up. I told her that we couldn’t afford transatlantic flights, but in truth my reluctance came from someplace deeper. In three years, I’d been back to Dublin only for two Christmases, and each time I’d found the city a little more unfamiliar, as though upon landing I’d been jolted from a long and restless sleep. My friends had found new partners and routines or moved away altogether, and my mother was becoming ever more the wife of a man who was not my father. I could tell, though, that the idea of the trip had become important to Carol, and I wanted to try and show her that she was important to me.

After my exams, I coaxed a travel grant from the department, promising to spend a couple of days reading manuscripts in the National Library, and Carol put in a request at work for some vacation time. We packed and took the train to JFK and flew for the first time together, Carol jittery with nerves despite an Ambien. We landed at dawn, blearily caught a cab, sailed along the motorway. On the front step of what I still thought of as Eamonn’s house, Carol gripped my hand as a shadow moved behind frosted glass.

My mother answered the door and stood for a moment to look at us. She had cut her hair into a prim old-lady style, had given up squinting and pretending and had bought glasses. She told me I looked thin, told Carol she looked exotic . In the living room, we sat to watch the morning news with Eamonn, who peered at the TV along the full length of his nose as though he were above these events but monitoring them nevertheless. When my mother entered with a clattering tray of tea, he leaped to his feet to take it from her and set it down on the coffee table. He brought her a cushion, her slippers.

‘There you are now, missus,’ he said.

My mother rolled her eyes. ‘He’s a fusser.’

Once Carol and I had unpacked, we took a trip to Marlay Park, and I tried to remain calm as I watched the hitherto separate parts of my life collide. Eamonn and I drifted ahead through the topiaried grounds and the walled garden, chatting without saying much of anything. Every now and then, I’d glance behind at my mother in faded tracksuit bottoms and mud-caked walking boots, Carol in bright leggings and white sneakers she was happy to ruin on the trails.