Andrew Fox: Over Our Heads

On Friday morning I sent my essay to the colour section of a weekend newspaper, and that evening I decided to surprise Sarah at the airport. I dressed in the shirt and jacket she always picked for me whenever I asked her advice. I called a taxi and waited for it downstairs. The air was warm and murky with twilight. I sat on the lip of one of the planters and smoked my first cigarette in a week. Behind me the door opened. I turned to see Maria.

‘Hi, neighbour.’ I grinned.

‘Oh, hi.’

She was wearing a thin T-shirt and no make-up. I patted the planter beside me but she didn’t move.

‘I’m just waiting for a taxi, going to meet Sarah. She’s coming in tonight.’

‘Good for you.’

‘I saw you yesterday playing with the dog.’

‘Okay.’

‘No more jailbreaks, I presume?’

‘No.’

‘Come here to me, though, I was meaning to ask you, what was in the parcel?’

Maria shrugged. ‘Just some stuff for Turlough. It’s not important.’

Her eyes met mine. They were wet and shining. She was, I could tell, in the midst of some new search. I felt compelled to ask about it, to offer her something. I stood, but just then the lights of my taxi appeared at the end of the street. I took a step back from Maria and waved for the driver. The car hitched over a speed bump and eased its way towards us.

‘This is me,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ Maria nodded.

‘Maybe we’ll see you two over the weekend?’

‘I’ll have to check with Turlough.’

The taxi pulled to a halt beside us. I opened the door and got in.

‘Airport,’ I said.

‘Right you are,’ the driver said. He spun us round and pointed the car towards Sarah. I was careful not to look back.

Goofy on Valium for a lumbar sprain, I hobbled the streets of Midtown. It was early evening, late spring, and the pavements were thronged with open-collared crowds muscling from office to subway. Behind me lay a day’s frustration examining bulge-bracket risk assessments; ahead of me a night of TV, back pain, analgesics. On the Lower East Side, Jeanine was bacheloretting with three of her Gamma Phi sisters, all of whom had blown off work to treat her to a spa day. In a week’s time, my own half of the wedding party would consist of the sisters’ husbands, since the last of my real friends were back home in Ireland and each was too skint to cover air fare or too slammed with work or whatever else.

They were decent guys, the husbands — prep-school types to a man, who wore loafers with no socks, went out to brunch on weekends and spoke in booming, good-timey voices that got boomier and good-timier the more they drank — but they weren’t my friends. Neither were the other analysts with whom I chatted solely about work-related topics across cubicle walls, or the guys with whom I played silent, elbowy pick-up basketball on Thursday evenings. I’d told Jeanine that it would be too weird to ask any of them to stand at an altar with me, told her too — when she’d called from the cab between the seaweed wrap and pre-dinner margaritas — that I’d be fine and that I didn’t mind not having a stag night. But now I felt homesick and thirsty.

During my first few months in the city, I’d often fled with a book and a flask from the lonely jostle of the streets to the tranquil water and open air of the Bethesda Terrace. I’d stopped needing to do that since meeting Jeanine, yet now — bookless, flaskless — I set a course for the park in hope of finding an hour’s escape. I waited to cross Fifty-ninth in the shadow of a grand hotel in whose bridal suite, at my father-in-law’s expense, I would soon spend my wedding night. Traffic pulled at my sleeves and dung-stink crowded my nostrils. On the far side of the street, I saw a horse tethered to a hansom cab and, beside it, a figure in the shape of Stephen Quinn. Whenever I was lonely, the faces of New York crowds had a way of throwing up people from home — a half-glimpsed ridge of nose or freckle of cheek that to my mind could belong only to someone who’d been better than me at football or sat beside me in Art. Most of the time, probably, it was a mirage. But this time it really was him.

When we were kids, Stephen and I had been close in a way that I think might be exclusive to friendships between only children of divorce. His mother cooked dinner for me twice weekly, and mine for him, and we hated each other’s fathers almost as much as we hated our own. We ran away together, shoplifted together, defended each other in schoolyard battles — and then, the summer we finished school, I spent a night with his girlfriend for reasons I could never fully grasp, and ended up starting college with a partially detached retina and two fractured bones in my right hand. The bones had healed by Halloween, and I suppose Stephen’s bruises had too, but he wouldn’t take my calls, and by Christmas I stopped calling. It had been almost a decade since we’d spoken, but I knew from Facebook friends of Facebook friends that he and Ciara were still together, and that recently they’d been in the city visiting her sister who was over on a J-1. With Jeanine in the bathroom one evening, I’d stalked my way to Ciara’s photo albums and scrolled through them, both glad and disappointed that we hadn’t run into each other. I knew now that the sister was back home in Dublin. I hadn’t known that Stephen and Ciara had stayed on.

The light changed. I waited. Pedestrians surged past and Stephen approached without seeing me. Was it Valium or loneliness that made me shout his name? His eyes were neutral as they met mine. Then his lips divided in a smile, and we stood for a moment to look each other over. He wore a red hoody, baggy jeans and tightly laced desert boots, all of which appeared to have been picked for nights lounging in beer gardens but had seen too much work and wear. I noticed that he was balding and had grown harder through the shoulders. I noticed him notice my greying temples and swelling middle.

‘Well,’ he said.

We dispensed quickly with how-have-you-beens and what-are-you-up-to-nows, volunteering little and pretending to know less about each other than we did. We asked about each other’s mothers and I asked him how he liked New York. And then, pleasantries over — we were Irish, what else was there? — he said:

‘Pint?’

Three avenues to the east, I knew all too well, there was a string of places with walls decked in county colours and jukeboxes stocked with the Fureys and the Clancy Brothers. And a short F train ride to the south there was a dark hole in the wall with the best Guinness in the city on tap. I could smell the resin of the tables, taste the tang of hops in the air, see the glint of light on the optics.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m off the stuff.’

‘For how long?’

‘For good.’

‘Jesus.’ Stephen sounded scandalized. ‘That’s a bit drastic, no? How’d you decide that?’

‘It was decided for me.’

He grinned. ‘Ball-breaker, is she?’

‘Who?’

‘Your missus.’ He shrugged off my look of surprise. ‘You’re getting married, yeah? You know the way it is. My Mam met your Mam’s neighbour.’

I thought of loose talk in supermarket aisles, coffee-shop eavesdropping on Sunday afternoons. I missed my mother.

‘No,’ I said — what was the point of lying? ‘It was the doctor.’

‘Doctor?’ Stephen frowned. ‘You’re not going to tell me you were, what, an alcoholic?’

‘They tell us we always are.’

‘Jesus.’ He held a hand to his mouth to conceal either shock or delight. ‘Of all people —’

A toothy kid in a top hat with tassels interrupted Stephen’s victory lap to thrust a laminated price list between us.

‘Carriage ride?’ he said. ‘Around the park. Very romantic.’