Читать книгу Ordinary Decent Criminals - Lionel Shriver - Страница 12

She had been waiting and pretending she was not, reading The Use and Abuse of Emergency Legislation in Northern Ireland, but she tired of these games with herself, as they no longer worked: she was waiting. All night; so she designed a reason she had to talk to him with that proficiency that characterized everything she did, and rang herself. No answer. And later, again, with only rugby and snooker and Ulster Newstime on TV—another bomb in the city center. Twice more; she wondered was he off on a tear. She knew it was not her affair. Not her affair. Words were always turning on Constance.

Finally she replaced the receiver for the last time. Her concoction was only so urgent; it was after midnight, and her excuse had just turned into a pumpkin.

Farrell kept a small office off the Lisburn Road with no sign on the door. It was a suite of two rooms and a reception area but no secretary, which Constance had long ceased to consider herself. Nowhere, not on his stationery nor on a single card in his wallet, was there a title or the name of an organization.

Constance Trower had no official position. He had never told her what hours to keep, paid her whatever she asked for, and gave her no itemized responsibilities, which of course meant that she would arrive early and stay late, ask for far too little money in return, and take responsibility for everything.

He’d bristled at an office, but later liked having another territory, another key. Farrell collected them; rings jangled every suit pocket. (Though he’d forgotten what the keys were to, he wouldn’t throw them out. Farrell placed a high value on access.) “For security reasons” he didn’t keep regular hours himself, though Farrell, like the British government, found “security” a convenient umbrella under which to protect a variety of idiosyncrasies.

He did not, for example, own a car, instead hiring taxis as far as Derry and Armagh. Yet Constance was convinced he was less terrified of gelly wired to his chassis than of insurance forms. Besides, he liked taxis. He liked making the driver go where he wanted, being conveyed. He liked privacy and scorned petty details like changing buses in Portadown; he deliberately had no sense of direction. Train schedules were an imposition; why, he might not want to go to Dublin then. The only organized transport he did not resist was the airplane. The atmosphere of hurry and importance made up for meeting the timetables, if barely—he liked nothing more than whisking onto international flights with the door closing on his coattails. Airports are the last refuge of urgency in this world.

His most aggravating “security measure” had to do with his own house—wherever that was. And if he didn’t tell Constance where he lived, he clearly told no one. Farrell admitted parties here had probably found him out, but he was hardly going to make it easy for them by publishing in the directory. Once more, however, the nature of Belfast simply conformed to the nature of Farrell O’Phelan, as if he were not camouflaged for the city but the city for him. He would hardly be holding hoolies on his front yard every June if only he could afford to share his address with his many friends and neighbors, with their children and dogs.

As for the office, he had no interest in decor—and the number of things Farrell had no interest in by policy could grow irksome if you listed them out—and left the walls to Constance. Her original selection of, she thought, harmless travel posters underestimated the depth of Farrell’s loathing for his island: the rolling hills of Kerry, the thatched byre houses in Tyrone—from which, he claimed, he could “smell the sheep from across the room,” the craggy sprat fishermen of Antrim. (“Look at that face,” he had cried, “twisted with fifty years of spite. You realize he’s not fishing at all—which would be economically useful—but looking out for a boat of Kalashnikov AK-47s for the UDA!”) After two days Farrell had had his fun, and Aer Lingus had to go.

Those intervening weeks had been frustrating; she wanted to please him. And Farrell did have an aesthetic, even if he wouldn’t dirty his hands with carpet swatches. Whitewells and all that travel had refined him beyond Glengormley—he bought only the best in clothes, gadgets, presents when he remembered (with Constance, once). While the Best Of habit was lazy, the application of an easy rule that spared him individual decisions, inevitably he’d become rather starchy. No help, Farrell had less taste than distaste: he recognized what he didn’t want. Had a Unionist streak in him, Farrell did.

When they next went to London, then, between setting up his interviews, she scuttled into the Museum Shop at the Tate. She turned her mind off entirely and just went by feel, flipping the racks of prints, art by Braille. What she unrolled back at the hotel surprised her.

For had anyone asked before the Tate how Farrell’s preferences in art might run, she’d surely have answered the Futurists, full of tumult and flight; the nightmares of Surrealists, trapped in their own heads as he in his—contorted Dalís, absurd Magrittes; or dour Brueghels. She might have made a case for the Middle Ages, with the flat agony of those pigments, the gory, long-suffering crucifixions in which he’d recognize his own face, the plain, self-denying, racked penitence and flesh effacement of his childhood. Or perhaps, recognizing his stodgy side, she’d have said nothing modern—only classics, Da Vincis and Michelangelos, name brands, the way he bought everything, the Best. But none of these presentiments described what she spread on the bed that night.

Women. Not conflicted character portraits, either, but young, even virginal things, with red cheeks and languid fingers. Simple women, with water. Soft women—Whistler’s The Little White Girl; seaside Seurat; Degas. Shapely, sway-hipped Tissots, splayed nineteenth-century picnics by a pool, languid bites into apples with a demitasse, bustles curved at a pleasure-boat rail. Inshaw’s The Badminton Game, long hair in breeze, shuttlecock midair. April Love, the Lady of Shalott. Round women, drowsy women, beautiful women. And while some were dolorous—Matisse; Ophelia—the girls were never angry or scheming, filled with nothing so demanding as desire. No, these were guileless women, tender, and probably even stupid, not that he would value their stupidity, but what he would want from them had nothing to do with talk. Farrell might slop through every rank backroom in Belfast, but Farrell’s women were innocent.

When she hung the prints late one night and waited for Farrell to walk in the office that morning, Constance jittered, only pretending to scan papers as he strode pensively from one painting to the next, all nicely framed. He said nothing. He studied each one a long time. He went to his own office and shut the door. He’d not mentioned them then or since, but neither did he insist they come down. And just as she knew to choose them, Constance knew not to bring them up. She was not hurt; he was, a little. The paintings were an intrusion. By accident or instinct she had found his neighborhood. Whistler’s Little White Girl stuck to the wall by his desk like a pin on a map.

Having phoned until midnight the night before, Constance knew it was ridiculous to feel injured. So he hadn’t rung himself, wouldn’t he see her the next morning? At the office she was unusually efficient—which is to say immeasurably efficient, frightening, perfect—and, as Farrell swept in and out, a little cold. As evening drew he ducked in the loo and reappeared, face washed, hair combed, tie freshly knotted, and smelling of cologne, his kerchief perking from his pocket. With no mention of Oscar’s, he kissed Constance officiously on the forehead and tripped, yes, ran, practically danced down the front stairs. Constance sat at her desk and typed an address. She didn’t cry or confide on the phone or go on a bout of irrational cleaning. She finished the letter and locked up, relieved to be such a practical person.

Estrin could not remember when she had last actually planned ahead of time what to wear to dinner. She picked the black silk blouse with a thin strip of Bedouin embroidery, pleased that no one could tell from the outside it was her favorite shirt. Otherwise it was back to full leathers, to remain thick-skinned.

How often had she thrown on anything hurriedly without even bothering to check her reflection, already annoyed at having agreed to go, already waiting for the meal to be over? It had been a bad, dry fall, and as such seasons will, it eclipsed all others, as if she’d only known evenings that rose with a bottle of wine, and fell as she finally looked across the table: he was smitten; she was bored.

Yet tonight Estrin did check the mirror, with despair. Ideally she saw herself as a tall Russian heroine, unpredictable and desperate, hollowed and harrowing, with high cheekbones and wide, lethal eyes. The real Estrin was consumptive. The real Estrin wore heavy hooded cloaks, under which she clutched a snickersnee; she had just done something dreadful. Estrin had read a lot of Dostoevsky when she was fifteen.

Instead, she was short. Her cheeks were round, her features even; if Tolstoy was correct, that a truly beautiful face always had something wrong with it, then Estrin was merely a pretty girl. And girl was the word, embarrassing at her age. The only aspect of her Russian heroine she sustained was the eyes: they crouched. They both took you in and threw you out. Estrin recognized that with satisfaction.

Otherwise there was a sweetness to her face she had tried to live down for years. No matter what she suffered, her face showed no trace of it. When she studied photos of Marla Hanson, the New York fashion model attacked by her landlord with a razor, the slash scars made Estrin envious. How much more fascinating Marla would look later, with the pencil of tragedy down her nose. Estrin looked nice. Of a full busload of passengers, Estrin was the one old ladies shook down for change. Panhandlers marked her from blocks away, crossing the street for her quarters; in India, “Baksheesh” could have been her name. And so long as she rode with an open visor, nowhere was this plaguesome Rebecca-of-Sunnybrook-Farmishness more apparent than at checkpoints.

That’s right, even in Newry and Crossmaglen, when they were stopping every goddamned car, license, computer check, boot search, all soldiers ever did to Estrin was wave. Witness: Teeming the Guzzi to the city gates toward Bedford Street, Estrin slowed long enough for them to see that yes, that back compartment could pack enough Semtex to blow that new shopping center sky-high. But no. Three smiles and a “Happy Christmas.”

Banking around City Hall, a banquet of a building whose Beaux Arts façade now blinked with reindeer, Estrin noted the BELFAST SAYS NO banner had been amended. The DoE had told the City Council it could not post such a patently Unionist response to the Anglo-Irish Agreement on public property. So the Prods had soldered on an extra section of sign: -EL. Estrin laughed. She loved this fucking town.

“You look beautiful.”

Estrin felt a wild compulsion to comb her hair.

As he took her jacket and asked for a back table, Farrell displayed that curiously grave quality which characterized all his minor moments; he attended forward neatly from the waist and ushered Estrin before him with precision, even delicacy. He was a formal man, deft and considerate in all the ways that didn’t really matter—he would hold your chair out, pick up your napkin when you dropped it, pour your wine, and next week fail to show up altogether.

The gravity fell away as he began to chat about the assassination of George Seawright, when he became entirely light-hearted.

“Creepface!” recognized the waitress. “And here’s another one! Don’t I see him every week with one more lovely lass in tears.”

Farrell glared.

“You’ll pardon, but Mr. O’Phelan must be seated on the wall, eyes on all the windows and doors, isn’t that right, love? Usually the lady’s seat, but none seems to mind. Sure, she gets a handsome view whichever way she’s facing!” She patted Farrell’s cheek and delivered their menus.

“How lucky, Maire, we were seated in your section.”

“Och, I asked, love, I switched! Like following Coronation Street and earning your keep at the same time.”

She brought a bottle of Pouilly Fuissé without Farrell’s asking. “Sure we can skip the charade of having you taste it,” she announced, trickling Estrin’s glass halfway and glugging Farrell’s to the top. “Never known you to send a bottle back if it was turned enough to dress your salad. Now, should I bring the second right away, or would you like to wait and order it? A nice ceremony that, but as for the third, it’s just from the case in the icebox. You’ll have to hold your horses.”

Estrin ordered seafood. She always ordered seafood. It was a rule; fish was light. Estrin ran courses like track. She followed precepts, and not because she wasn’t a sensualist, but because she was and therefore couldn’t be trusted. In Estrin’s personal mythology, should she ever be set loose in a stocked kitchen to do as she really pleased, you would find her an hour later packed incoherent with raw beef and rolling on the floor in a melee of ice cream and apple pie.

As they had both ordered exactly the same thing, Estrin asked on an odd hunch, “Do you always order fish?”

“Or chicken.”

“Dessert?”

“Never.”

“Do you have a morbid fear of fried foods?”

He laughed. “I’ve never put it quite that way, but I avoid them.”

She inclined an inch more forward. “When do you get up in the morning?”

“Seven. Exactly.”

“Sundays, too,” she filled in. “And go to bed?”

“When I am finished. Ideally before seven. Not always.”

“When did you get up as a child? Say, twelve, thirteen?”

It was wonderful. His eyes whetted. “Five.”

She nodded victoriously. “But when did you go to school?”

“Not until 7:30. Why?”

“It was still dark,” said Estrin. “No one else was up. The house was yours. Most of the time you worked, read, wrote. But some mornings you got up only to think. For hours, watching the light gray out the windows. The birds here are exotic. And you still believed in God.”

“Did you, at thirteen?”

“No, by then I was a violent agnostic. But my father was a minister, so that speeded things up. My most remarkable precocity was early disaffection.”

“I meant, get up at five?”

“Naturally,” she dismissed. “But I’m not finished. Exercise?”

His face clouded. “I don’t have time now. I used to run—”

“All weather. All winter. Rain. In fact, you liked it when it rained. Other people were agog, when secretly the problem is keeping cool. The mizzle felt good on your face.”

Farrell did look amused. “And how far did I go?”

She licked her lips. “Ten miles. Every day.”

He laughed. “Only eight, and every odd. Still, you’re very good!”

“I’m very like you.”

The eyes unexpectedly brambled. “You know,” he said, attacking his lettuce with no dressing at all, “I think it’s time we had an ordinary conversation.”

So what are you doing here?”

“You asked me to dinner.”

He would not dignify her with a response.

“All right.” She put her hands flat on the table. “I travel. For the last ten years, I must have been out of the States for eight. I used to go back between trips; not anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because I was living a fairy tale: that my real life was in the U.S. Every time I flew into Philadelphia late afternoon, I knew better by nightfall. The best safeguard against the rude news that you can’t go home again is to stop trying.”

“Don’t you miss your family?”

“Not precisely, though I am frightened my parents will die. Or get old, for that matter. I travel with an illusion of reverse relativity. I move at the speed of light and I age while everyone back home stays the same. In my head Philadelphia remains an impeccable diorama I can enter at will. But you know how you can leave for two weeks and come back and the furniture’s re-arranged, the mailboxes are repainted on your street? Try leaving for two years. Or twenty.”

“So now it’s twenty, is it?”

“Why not? I haven’t been back for three. And my parents will die; I’ll be in Pakistan. I’ll have to decide whether to go to the funeral, and it will cost a lot of money.”

“Would you? From Pakistan?”

“Right away,” said Estrin, with a lack of hesitation that surprised her. “Burning my way though a dozen Glenfiddiches and staying horribly sober anyway and hating myself, continent after continent, coming back too late. Years too late, not just a few days. Because if I had any integrity I’d book Lufthansa tomorrow and throw myself into my mother’s arms while I still have the chance.”

“You get along with your mother?”

“I don’t anything with my mother; we never see each other, thanks to me. She writes much more than I do. Chatty stuff, though sometimes— Well, my parents are liberal, urban, educated, but lately I get the same feeling from my mother that I would if she came from Dunmurry, you know? She’s sad like any mother, in an ordinary way. I’m not married. I have no children. I don’t even have a career. I have stories. Mothers don’t care about stories. She feels sorry for me. And maybe she should.”

“Meaning you feel sorry for yourself.”

“Sometimes,” she said defiantly. “Why not? Who else is going to?”

He tsk-tsked and leaned back. “Self-pity is indulgent.”

“I can stand some indulgence. I’m a good enough little soldier. I’m hardly frolicking across the continents with Daddy’s Visa card. It hasn’t been easy.”

Farrell gently flaked a forkful of sole and glanced up at her with a dance of a smile. “No, I’m sure it hasn’t been. How have you managed to support yourself now?”

Estrin smoothed her napkin in her lap. “No, the work hasn’t been that hard, or that’s not what’s been hard … I just keep going and going and I’m getting—”

“Tired.”

“Yes,” she said gratefully.

“I’d think you were beginning to run out of countries.”

“There’s something else you run out of well before countries,” she warned. “Though it’s been a good life. I’ve picked grapes in Champagne, lemons in Greece. I’ve made plastic ashtrays in Amsterdam, done interior carpentry in Ylivieska. I’ve bused trays in the Philippines under Marcos, manufactured waterproof boots in Israel, and counseled in a German drug-abuse clinic in West Berlin. Now I’m at the Green Door, and that’s just a sampling— I swear I’m not off target and it could be the best of lives forever if I were perfect, but I’m not and something is going wrong …”

As she drifted off, he touched her hand, and the question was intent: “How old are you?”

“I’m sorry. I should have told you before. I’m thirty-two.”

“That is—incredible.”

“I know.”

“Then you’re past thumbing around Europe in patched jeans. What are you doing?”

“You mean, when am I going to settle down and do something? Product is slag. The only difference between my life and a foreign correspondent’s is I don’t write it down. Does that matter? Someone’s sure to cover the fall of Marcos without my help. I am my product.”

“You don’t want to accomplish anything?”

Estrin folded her arms. “I’m not convinced you believe in accomplishing anything yourself.”

“I try to keep my work—”

“Whatever that is.”

“Safe from my nihilism.”

“You mean you don’t allow what you believe to affect what you do.”

“I believe a number of things,” he hedged. “They’re not all comfortable sitting next to each other is all … Like certain women.”

“It’s called cognitive dissonance, and it’s dangerous as all fuck.”

“Suits me, then.”

She sighed. “I may be just making excuses. I always was a no-frills talent. I made ‘good grades,’ but at nothing in particular.”

“Are you running away?”

“From what? I didn’t leave my family behind in Pennsylvania sliced up with an electric carving knife. I don’t think I’m running away any more than I would in a Philadelphia condo with an answering machine and regular lunch dates. It doesn’t matter where I am, Farrell. So I might as well go as stay. And I like other countries. You—you’ve got a lot of spark, but you have this morose side. My autobiography doesn’t usually sound this depressing.”

“I depress you?”

“No, I must think torment will impress you.”

“I thought you didn’t care if people liked you.”

“I lied.” They toasted. The crystal sang.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” she expanded. “I haven’t lived for ten years out of a backpack. Especially for the last five, I’ve stayed places—I move into houses and buy dustpans. Right now I have a dynamite house on Springfield Road. I buy flowers, I have a whisk! Because you have to put together something to leave before you go.”

“Is that what you’re doing tonight?”

She didn’t answer. She ordered brandy. Estrin had spilled out. This man had made her tense as no man had for months, but that was earlier, and now she felt herself break and spread over the restaurant like a neatly cracked egg, her eyes shining, double yolks. “So though I’m not ambitious, I do work hard, because I like the feeling. In Israel, I got up to pull boots at four, and it was loud and hot. I did overtime. Before I left Kiryat Shemona I ran the night shift, and was the only Gentile ever offered membership in that kibbutz. In Berlin, the clinic tried to send me to school in social work. In the Philippines, I was a hotel dishwasher, but when the head cook disappeared they put me in to pinch hit; found out I pickled a mean ceviche and kept me there. So I ran the kitchen for six months; while the busboys ambled in late afternoons the color of polished walnuts, I worked twelve, fourteen hours a day and turned the color of kiwi fruit.”

“You’re not complaining.”

“No,” she exhaled, remembering. “And today Kieran asked me to manage the Green Door.”

“How did you pull that off?”

“Damned if I know! It’s out of control! Everywhere I go I just want to be a schlemiel and somebody hands me a set of keys and the books, and before long I have employees and late hours and a lot of problems. It’s the curse of the crudest possible intelligence. The fact is, if you tell a hundred people, Put the chair in that corner, fully seventy-five of them will promptly hang it from the chandelier. Did you know that most of the world is made of fruitcakes?”

He laughed. “You get more American when you drink.”

“I can’t help it. I was born this way.”

“You don’t like being American?”

“I’ve learned to get by with it, like any handicap—harelip, paraplegia. Do you like being Irish?”

“What do you think?”

She eyed him. “That you abhor it. In short, Ireland suits you perfectly.”

She was getting swacked. Her voice was louder and higher; people were looking over at their table. She used her hands when she talked, and as her motions got wider Farrell eyed their tall goblets warily, though she always missed. Then, she knew her way around a landscape with glasses, that was clear. She had reached a phase he knew himself, marked not by sloppiness but by inordinate precision—her pronunciation was getting more rather than less correct. Her phrasing grew considered, her gestures semaphoric, crisp as air traffic control. When she rose to find the loo, he recognized the careful placement of her hand on the table, the excessively smooth ascent from her chair, the purposeful step-by-step glide around other diners—too exact, too concentrated. She had crossed the point where all these ordinary matters could be executed without thinking, and now to negotiate finding the ladies’, asking Maire coherently, remembering the directions and being able to follow them, took the full application of her powers.

Farrell enjoyed her absence. He kneaded his forehead. He had to admit he’d no idea what to make of her. The boasting had been a bit much; though if she really had washed dishes in the Philippines and made plastic boots in Galilee, he supposed she deserved a little airtime over dinner for work that had surely been excruciating after the first half hour. Farrell was tired. That was it, she was tiring. He wished she would just quiet down. He was sick of words. This whole island never shut up, and he wondered at how much people said was in such reliably inverse proportion to how much they had to say. If Farrell chose to lose any of his senses, he decided he’d go deaf.

Yet when Estrin returned it was as if something had happened. She seemed sad. He felt sure he could make one mean remark and she would cry.

“Are you married?” she asked straight up.

“You know when I woke up at thirteen, but you can’t tell if I’m that much of a shite?”

“That’s right,” she said calmly. “Only the incidentals of your life are apparent.”

When the bill came and Farrell went for his wallet, Estrin crumpled into her pocket for a wad of pound notes. “No, no.” He put a hand over her fist of cash. He flicked a card to Maire, allowing Estrin to catch that it was platinum.

Farrell gave her a hand up, pressed gently at her waist between tables; opening the door, he slipped his fingers under a shock of hair still beneath the jacket and pulled it free; she paused to let him finish, and a little longer still for the back of his hand to rest at her collar. As a result, by the time they were outside they had run through all the routine moves of the gambit like speed chess. Then, she was thirty-two, he forty-three; openings had become so easy. Perhaps the very definition of adulthood is a fascination with the middle parts of games.

“I have my bike,” she said.

“It’s safe?”

“Locked, anyway. I suppose.”

“Leave it, then. We haven’t far.”

Estrin shot her motorcycle a mournful look. “Where to?” she asked, in tow.

“My hotel.”

“You live in a hotel?”

“No.”

“Then why—”

“It’s safer.” To Estrin’s grunt of incomprehension, he simply replied, “Never mind.” He put his arm around her shoulders, though at Estrin’s height that was less like holding a person than resting on a banister.

“The swallow,” he told her as if beginning a bedtime story, “takes off when it’s young and flies all around the world. For up to four years it never lands, sailing over South America, Africa, Australia—thousands of miles, the circumference of the earth several times.”

“Does it mate in the air?”

“No, after sowing wild oats in Tierra del Fuego, the swallow settles down to raise a family. Buys a station wagon and gets fat.”

“Thanks,” said Estrin.

While no longer rolled up by dark as it once was, central Belfast was deserted after the pubs closed; their heels rang down the walk.

“Another parable,” said the American, whose voice, cowed by quiet, had gone soft. “A few years ago back in Philadelphia I decided I was sick of my ratty underwear—it was stained, the elastic shot. So I treated myself to, like, the best—in one store, silk, maroon, black lace; as my stack piled down the rack, other customers began to stare at me sidelong. I bought thirty pairs. When I got home I spread them out and not only felt insane, I felt deprived. All I could think about was going out and buying more.”

“You’re obsessive.”

“Not so simple. It’s greed. The same thing happens when I’m not halfway through a meal and I start thinking about a second helping. Or a cassette’s not nearly over and I decide to play it again. It’s a hunger like C. S. Lewis’s magic Turkish delight: the more you eat, the more you want, because you didn’t taste what you had before. When I decide in the middle to play a song again, I stop hearing it the first time. I have a problem with wanting what I’ve already got.

“Anyway, that’s what happens with me and maps,” she explained. “I spread them on the floor like underwear. I no sooner get my butt to Belfast than I start frantic plans to fly to the Soviet Union.”

“Still have the silk drawers?” He raised his eyebrows.

“Nope. After the shopping binge I stopped wearing underwear altogether.”

She couldn’t match his stride, and kept trying different rhythmic combinations, 3:2, 5:3, like solving an equation, and now tangibly hung back. “Listen,” she fumbled. “I don’t do this sort of thing much anymore.”

He stopped and kissed her hair. “Now, what sort of thing might that be?”

“I guess that’s my question.”

“Always in such a rush. Don’t we need something to discuss before we can discuss it?”

“Sorry. You make me nervous. I don’t know why.”

He liked her for the confession. He took her hand, swinging it a little, feeling … content. A mysterious sensation.