This Is Happiness Read online

Page 27


  Inside the foyer of the Mars the world was left behind. You transitioned out of the blue of May into an illumined elsewhere, both gaudy and glorious. In the heated jostle of the next not-queue queue, this time to have the ticket you had just bought verified by a uniformed doorman, the buzz of expectation was like a human engine that gathered force on a fuel of the communal. The more ticket-holders there were pushing around you the more precious your ticket, and the more urgent your need to get inside. Caught up in the pulse of this, I didn’t distinguish myself by shoving ahead, Charlie following closely with her princess smile and right-of-way cleared by her vassal. ‘What is that scent?’ she asked, when she came next to me. But the crush of those coming behind made impossible any answer.

  Seating was not allocated, and so once past the gauntlet at the doors, there was a frenzied rush down the dim corridor whose floor, once carpeted in a Persian crimson, had over time been tongued black from the tramp of wet boots. In the aberration of that season, the heat outside had for once penetrated the damp bunker and now released a brown air of boiled sock. The walls wore a weeping gloss of condensation. It made no difference. The glamour of the Mars was immune to human realities.

  Like townies everywhere, to keep a grip on their own place on the ladder, the locals considered the country people living testaments to the cloddish, and were quick to the best seats, securing islets around them for their friends by embankments of jackets and leaving free the rows up near the giant screen where the antics of the country people could be monitored and tilted-back heads made targets if the picture dull. Charlie, of course, had her favourite seat, and like all things in her life up to that point the restrictions of our one-and-three ticketswere only nominal, and when I was turning in the doors to the stalls she took my hand and led to the balcony. Her fingers were on mine for only moments, just long enough to guide me into the stairwell, but long enough to fizz all of me into a state I had, and have, no words for. All my awarenesses were heightened in her company. Every cell alive.

  Like amateur robbers, we ran up the stairs. There was another uniformed doorman, but the perfect bow slayed him and he overlooked the one-and-threes and we breezed inside the balcony and up to the back.

  Charlie Troy led the Resistance against the wearing of glasses. A pure and breathtaking vanity combined I think with a low appreciation of the value of clarity, founded perhaps on the looks of men thereabouts, none of whom came close to the idols of the silver screen. She had a pale cropped curtain of hair. It didn’t seem like hair, it seemed like a lustrous helmet that came to just below the exquisite shell of her ear. She had been made perfect, and knew it, a knowledge that informed her every moment. The beautiful are different. The rest of us know it, that’s what magnetises us to them. When Charlie sat down she peered at those towards the front.

  ‘I have a beau, you know,’ she said. ‘Eugene.’

  For an instant I thought she had seen him and my heart went crossways. But Eugene, it turned out, was a banker’s son from Limerick, would be going into the bank himself, where his acquisitions would include a beautiful wife, and where soon after he’d start developing the soft, round bottom of a man who sat on money for a living. For his twenty-first birthday Eugene had been given a new set of teeth top and bottom. It was the done thing then among a certain class, and that was the one he was in, so the teeth were out, and he was out of kissing commission until the gums healed and he could say ‘Charlie’ without spraying.

  As with the church, the cinema was full well before starting time, and as with the church, those who refused to surrender to clocks proved their singularity by coming in their own time. This accounted for the first of the usher’s duties, which was a loaves-and-fishes job of making enough seats to go around. I say ushers because in the Mars they were not short-skirted usherettes in red-trimmed blazers but a big-shouldered fraternity, retired I think from the rugby club, who were not averse to the occasional mano-a-mano that would arise from the second of their duties, keeping the urgencies of frothing blood in order and the buttons of decency done.

  When the lights went out, a high-pitched gasp escaped, and the torches came on. Thereafter all that transpired had the character of the illicit, which was the true worth of the price of the tickets.

  ‘Chocolates,’ Charlie said, ten seconds after we had settled into our seats.

  I went and came back with an Eastersworth. She had slipped off her big-buttoned jacket of jade and was in a cream blouse from which her swan’s neck rose with what struck me as startling nakedness.

  The velvet curtains were pulled back in a series of manhandled jerks to reveal the scalloped one beneath. A kind only ever seen in cinemas, it had the sheen of a woman’s slip, and rose now with slow reveal to bring us the advertisements and coming attractions, during which no one stopped talking. The whole cinema was abuzz, as though all conversation had been postponed until just now, and everywhere matches were being struck.

  In the godlike beam of the projection, there were already twists of smoke. The focus was off, but only slightly, and under a cinematic spell, and in fear they might lose their seat, no one got up to complain. The less-than-clear picture was compensated for by a surplus of amplification. The volume in the Mars lived up to its name by being out of this world. The film stars’ voices boomed like gods and masked the sometime squeals, shrieks and pants of astonished pleasure that rose here and there among the rows of writhing humans below the screen. The balcony was nearer the gods than those in the fervid skirmish of the stalls below, so up here the performance of decorum lasted a little longer. Eventually, the cabbage and onions of men’s armpits defeated the artificial citrus of their pomade and from the stalls made rise a male fug that had the effect of the starter’s pistol on the balcony.

  It was a double bill, the first part a Western with Audie Murphy, who had the twin assets of an Irish name and an American jaw. The whole of the country was trapped in an incurable beguilement to cowboy pictures then, those who weren’t secretly cheering for the Apaches were cheering for Johnny Reb, unless John Wayne was in the picture, in which case all bets were off, because he had a farmer’s shoulders and your grandfather’s walk. Audie was up to his silver buttons in an ambush and I was trying to figure out how to get Sophie into the conversation when Charlie leaned over and hissed a disappointed: ‘Aren’t you going to kiss me?’

  For some things there’s no accounting. Or the accounting that’s done is not tabulated in columns of reason, but outside the margins and up and down in the swift squiggles of a heart monitor in a heart attack, because under that leaping imperative there I was, bringing my lips to the scarlet bow. It would be the first kiss of my adult life, performed to a soundtrack of cracking gunfire in a Martian elsewhere. Charlie Troy had tilted her head back and closed her eyes, for which I was thankful. I could never have kissed her if those polished jewels were watching. As it was, I was already battling with the ruby mesmerism of her lips. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Neither could I imagine damaging their perfection with any part of the likes of me.

  The time it takes for one face to meet another’s is in fact no time, it’s so charged as to be outside of ordinary measure, fast, fizzed, and in a held suspension at the same instant, and in that instant I am leaning across, I am keeping my arms down as if to mitigate what I am doing, no hands, I am an awkward and unnatural bird in neck-crane with lips pursed, as though succumbing to some elemental suction by which human beings are to be stuck together, laughably, by the lips, crossing the no-distance that is also enormous, inside the age-old force field of a Provençal perfume of jasmine and rose, and the cloying burnt-gold seduction of cigarette smoke, and in that crossing aware of sensory explosions, all kinds, and in the flickering silver thrown from the screen see that in the seat alongside Charlie another girl is being kissed and under the pinned onslaught has her eyes open and is watching me with a mixed female curiosity and incredulity that says This is who Charlie Troy is with?

  My kiss is the lightest t
ouch on a surface soft and sticky. It’s a kiss of imagination and worship. And mostly, it’s a kiss trying not to damage the bow. But the moment my lips leave hers Charlie’s eyes pop open, not with wonder, not with astonishment at such tenderness, but with the vexed puzzlement of a What-was-that? look, and her hand comes around the back of my neck and draws me smash bang into the bow, which proves a weapon of versatility, and is now knocking down the walls of everything you thought a kiss was.

  Charlie’s kisses, were, I suppose, in The Book of Kisses. But they’d be in the chapter called Devouring. There was biting and gnawing and teeth-banging in them, an urgent air of mouth-to-mouth combat, wild and violent and driving to an end that was out of reach, and known to be, but only the more pressing for that. And pressing was a big part of it. She pulled me against her in a mime of movie stars, but the three-dimensionality of our bodies made a bumping mockery of blending, elbows and knees proving extra to the parts required and noses on standby with an abashed air of being in the way. Of course, I was lost from the first moment, in a whirl carousel of taste touch sight smell, and sounds (all s’s – squelch, suck, smack), a carne-not-vale but salve, a loud hello and hallelujah both, a dizzying lostness in which was found another version of yourself, one that was tasting smoke and chocolate and make-up, none of which you liked but did now, even as your wrists were singing, the egg on your forehead breaking, and your eyes agape from the out-of-this-world experience of your face eaten by a swan.

  Charlie’s kisses were so encompassing that one of them took the time for a main course. She had mastered how to breathe inside the face of another, I hadn’t, and was glad when her teeth left the swollen rubber of my lower lip for a point of attraction I didn’t know I possessed, the fillet meat of my earlobes.

  My head sidelong then, I could see the whole of the back row was engaged in amorous acrobatics. The stiff outstretched armrests of purple velvet, like small bishops, were no obstacle to love’s professionals, who got their legs over, their heads buried in white necks, climbing the ramparts of their partners like fallen-to-siege castles, enjoying the cinema privilege of a borrowed glamour, knowing there was nowhere else for love’s declarations, but also that love was up against the running hourglass of how long it took Audie to gun down the Apaches and the lights come on. The professionals, I soon realised, had chosen the back row not only because, like the gods, you could watch the amateur sports below, but because unlike all other rows this one didn’t rock, and the back wall of the Mars provided the resistance to force that multiplied the friction.

  Life on Mars was not in the realm of the known. Nothing could be accounted for. Here was the flawless magnificence of Charlie Troy with eyes closed, pulling at the front of my shirt because, by an unvoiced directive, what she wanted now was to feel the flesh of my chest, only to discover Christy’s shirt had no buttons, pulling it up, and pulling it up, choking me on the last-line-defence of my scapulas, and pulling it some more, half undressing a surrendered parachute-musketeer until the torch beam found us and a rugby roar of ‘You!’ was bellowed, causing sidelong mid-kiss glances from our compatriots who wanted to witness the tantara but not disengage their tongues. There were drowned-out moans, outraged yells, and here and there the smacks that followed some fellow chancing his arm for a fondie. From the disappointed there were matches struck and tossed over heads like falling-star loves that weren’t (Who threw that? ), girls getting up and going to readjust themselves, like rough-handled equipment, in the thronged workshop of the Ladies where the competition for the mirror was a sport of shoulders, lads sending out fight invitations by putting their feet up on the seat in front of them, and bottles of minerals crashing, spilling and drooling down the slope of the floor where the drool would dry but never completely, Martian homage to the dark stickiness from which humanity sprang.

  The second picture coming to climax (the prophylactic of the torch beams flashing more frequently but with less certainty of containment), there was a general rush into the caresses of last resort. Where the time had gone, none knew. The professionals availed of one last go at everything, in a condensed version. Charlie let me know she was done by a lift of her hips and a faraway look. We had not spoken a word.

  There was a general hasty redress of decency once the credits rolled and the lights were imminent, buttons and zips attacked with a fierce and cleric urgency, me tucking in the parachute just as the lights came on.

  How we got outside was also unknown, the after-Mars experience as perplexing as the in-Mars one, eyes blurred, ears singing, and feet not on the solid world of before. Propelled by the firm calls of Goodnight now, goodnight, now! of the ushers-turned-janitors, we spilled like the chastened on to the broad street, a mild night sky thrown over the town and an unreal ordinariness in every sight. Behaviours were instantly redrawn and, The Book of Kisses shelved, there were no intimacies of any kind. Under the steady gaze of the fine buildings, a buttoned-up code of respectability prevailed, betrayed only by the urgency with which cigarettes were lit, flushed goodbyes bid, and men walking away with the saddle-sore gait of a cowboy walk, as if they had tenderised steaks in their pants.

  Charlie neither took my hand nor looked at me. She spotted the hackney idling outside the bank, crossed ahead of me and took out a cigarette while waiting for me to open the car door.

  The journey back to Avalon was notable mostly for the awkwardness a person can feel. Charlie smoked. I had no idea if she was contented or not, no idea what she was thinking, and no way to begin to know. From time to time Heaney eyed me in the mirror and in that boxed rectangle his gaze had the weary glare of a confessor. He’d seen it all before, his eyes said, the cloud of his powdery hair lending him a look of evaporating wisdom. When we arrived at the foot of the avenue, Charlie was interrogating a hand-mirror and was as far from me as I imagine anyone in the world could be, a truth made colder by being together in the backseat of a bumping Ford.

  The nearer we got to the house the more urgent my sense that I needed to say something. But, with a bewildering contrariness, the intimacies of the Mars were between us and too vertiginous to cross. I was too removed from myself to know what I was feeling, but wonder was part of it and fizzing in me along a cable of pleasure fairly thickly embraided with guilt and betrayal.

  By the time the car came into the front circle and Charlie had posted her cigarette out the window I had edited a long speech to what was most pertinent, Do you think your sister Sophie—, but Heaney thumped the brakes to let the gravel announce our return, Charlie turned to look at me a last time and my speech was slain by the indescribable eyes, and the over-the-shoulder command as she pulled the lever and stepped out, ‘Next Friday.’

  In a dark of cats and bats, the gravel soundless beneath her practised steps, Charlie Troy went around the house to slip in at the rear. The doctor opened the front door and looked out. Heaney put back a hand to be paid and I realised I was walking home. I gave him the last of Ganga’s money, and stepped out, and was then in the scrutiny of the doctor from the top step.

  There is no manual for how to greet a father after a debauch with his daughter. I improvised a musketeer’s flourish salute. Doctor Troy didn’t move, but returned only the dark beads of an appalled glare and let the stiff moustache say the rest, some of which was That girl, and more of it was This idiot?

  36

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  My coming up the ladder had woken him. He propped on an elbow to look at me, though the room was in a blessed dark.

  ‘Good?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  After a moment: ‘The shirt?’

  I must have somehow indicated it was helpful.

  ‘I knew.’ He sounded a small laugh that began through his nose but defeated confinement and was soon shaking in his chest, his happiness for me like small white feathers of down in the dark, going everywhere.

  I went to get out of the shirt but Charlie wa
s inside it in a cling of her perfume and I left it on and got into bed with her.

  ‘Sophie Troy,’ Christy said gleefully to the thatched dark. ‘Sophie Troy. She has a beautiful name.’

  What exactly Christy did once he left the house in the mornings I classified under the inexact term ‘work’. He was going about the parish with the memorial, trying to rein in the last of the hold-outs and negotiating the smooth passage of the workers through lands the State had gridded. This much I knew, but when he came home he told no tales, and when we went on the bicycles in the evening talk of work was outlawed by the exertions of the hills and the hope of hearing a legendary music. Now that the poles were strung and the parish wore at least the look of electricity, I knew his time with us would be coming to an end. And in this was a sour taste of failure. I had the classic impatience of the young, who want more from life, not yet realising that by that more is made. The more that I wanted I’ve already told, but between he and Annie Mooney was a sundered story and after the evening with Charlie Troy I had lost some of my certainty that two lines could be joined or love understood.

  What in fact Christy was doing in those days I would only find out when he was gone.

  During the limbo that was the wait until the following Friday, I adhered to the regimen of the spiritually unrequited by eating little, taking long, sun-blazed walks by the sparkling river, turning over the arguments for the defence and entering the difficult negotiations between morality and desire. The crux was, Charlie Troy had not replaced Sophie in my affections, she had joined them.

  I was, I decided, in love with both of them.

  One afternoon, exhausted from a muted dialogue with my selves, I came upstairs to find my fiddle case on the bed. In healing, my wrists needed stretching, Christy had been telling me, and I knew it was he who had put it there. I took it outside into the garden and, after the requisite agonies of tuning, scratched up one of the reels of childhood. I was not good, mind. Not good at all. But my playing was improved by the fact that there was no one to hear. The tendons of the wrists ached, but sweetly. Though the tune was simple and plain and a child of six could master it, the making of it was an air-ticket elsewhere. At first you were nothing but a side-chinned servant submitting to an instrument that would give nothing back but your own discord and inadequacy. You looked at your fingers and willed them to move to the places they were too stiff or slow to get to, the neck of the fiddle too narrow and the bow a contraption of capricious invention. But slowly, so slowly as to make new definition of that word, music emerged. It came through you and there was what I suppose was release, and soon enough release was its own end, and in the repetition and rhythm its own addiction too. And soon enough you were going into the attic of childhood memory asking How did that other tune go? and shortly after you were that fellow sitting outside in your grandparents’ garden playing on the fiddle a recovered music, living in and escaping from the torments of your heart.