Under My Skin Page 19

  ‘There was marmalade,’ he says and he takes another drink.

  And for the first time tonight I feel for him. ‘Apples, pears, bananas, every kind of fruit.’

  ‘Keep it healthy,’ Jack says and he looks at me, grinning.

  ‘She walked down to get it and had to get a taxi back.’

  I can see the barman opening the hamper in their apartment now and passing his hands over all those glistening jars.

  ‘Chocolates. Caviar. You fucking name it,’ says the Kerry man who knows better than anyone that he didn’t make it in New York.

  ‘She walked down to get it and had to get a fucking taxi back.’

  Jack is as I remember him. Brown-armed from the sun with bright questioning eyes. He is the same boy who became friends with my brother Daniel. And after Daniel he became friends with me. He tells me about the landlady in Brooklyn who took him in.

  ‘She was forty-eight,’ he says. ‘She was my best friend in the world.’ In the winter the snow banked up and he shovelled it away and took out the trash.

  ‘I helped her,’ he says. ‘She needed help.’ He makes a life in New York sound simple, and hard. How they laid the markers down, how a friendship grew over trash cans and shovels of snow. He spent most evenings in her kitchen talking to her husband and they were all tired out from work. She gave him his dinner and he gave her rent whenever he could. He says if you can count your friends on one hand then you’ve been lucky in your life. Now Jack is rich. There are two hundred men who hammer down floors for him.

  ‘All over Manhattan,’ he says, ‘Staten Island. Chinatown.’ He sips his beer and turns the bottle in his hands.

  ‘Doing up two brownstones for a guy in Chinatown right now.’

  Then the woman died. He holds up one big hand. Five fingers and now – after Daniel and his old landlady – two friends are already gone.

  ‘She got cancer and it took her,’ he says simply.

  ‘They handled it well. She never complained. Then one night I went down to the basement and I found her husband down there, he was really quiet and the room was almost dark and he was working his way through the laundry and just crying there.’

  Behind us a hen party walks in. ‘Here comes the bride,’ Jack says. He always frowns a little as if to think before he smiles.

  ‘I’ll never forget that night I found him there,’ he says and he takes us, easily, back to a basement in Brooklyn, New York.

  ‘What they had,’ he says slowly, ‘that was love.’

  He holds up one big hand again in front of me.

  ‘Five real friends and you’re lucky,’ he says and he grins. ‘Talk to the hand.’

  The last train passes under us and we all wait for a second as if in respect.

  ‘There goes the subway,’ Jack says and we listen, not to it, but how it makes the bottles rattle gently behind the bar.

  Three pumpkins climb the steps to Jack’s house. The American flag waves from the door. There is a log fire burning in the grate and a little Halloween witch stands inside the porch. All around me the brownstones of Brooklyn are getting ready for Thanksgiving. And this year why would anyone say thanks? Everyone I meet is asked about Larry. There are pictures of him all over the city, sellotaped to every lamp-post and covering the subway floor. There is a new language in the city. It comes from the news bulletins and subway flyers and from talking to people on the street. It goes like this and until recently no one ever heard anything like it before –

  120 storeys

  1500 feet above the ground

  At 8.46 a.m. America was wounded by an aeroplane

  1000 degrees Celsius

  Windows of the World

  Pastry chefs and short order cooks

  1000 trapped in the North Tower

  600 trapped in the South

  Nearly 3000 people were missing

  ‘How many of them jumped?’

  ‘No one jumped – they were blown or forced out’

  The Falling Man

  Some poor soul

  Choosing to be seen

  The quietness of falling

  Nobody wants to know the jumper

  There was something ‘forever’ about him

  The grace of falling

  Such heat

  But to be out in the air

  Away from the heat

  The final act of control

  A lonely ten-second journey

  A very public way of dying

  A very private way of mourning

  No one knew him

  No one wanted to know

  A text that said, ‘I love you, Kate, take care of our son’

  No blood. No guts. Just a person falling

  ‘I would recognize my brother’s hands and feet’

  Landing loudly like stone

  The unknown soldiers

  A final email that asked, ‘Are you there?’

  I don’t know what any of this means. These words fall and land without any real sense around me.

  But where is Larry? These are the only words I need.

  New York. Swallow me up. It is a warren of yellow taxis, wooden escalators, skyscrapers and kosher restaurants, Mexicans, Irish, Chinese and blacks. Yesterday an old Jewish man beat a yellow taxi with his umbrella. That’s what you get if you don’t stop. The manholes puff out great moving clouds of steam. The cops eat doughnuts in their cars. It’s like being part of a new TV show. It’s better on TV. You can turn the volume down. Nicer without sound. The noise, the hum of it, the blowing, honking, screaming decibels of New York.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jack says suddenly and without any reason. And we stand and face each other at the bottom of his steps. ‘Nobody cares about anyone here.’

  Jack’s wife tells me where she was when the towers fell. Her name is Marcia Gallagher and she sits near the fire with her long blonde hair combed loose and falling below her shoulders. She is not what I expected. She is beautiful and soft and welcoming and she says her family, and this must include Jack, are ‘her joy’.

  ‘I was at home… nursing Adam. I was watching TV and there were two guys in the house, painting downstairs… and they came in and we watched it together… and I remember they started freaking out… they dropped everything and said – “We have to go home” – and I was just staring at the TV and thinking… “Oh my God, a plane just flew into the World Trade Center”… then my brother Sean called – and he was hysterical – he said something really weird had happened and then I started getting scared. I put Adam into the car and then I drove to my mom’s and then Franklin, my brother, got called in and everyone was trying to call The Chief. That’s my eldest brother – he heads up the Midtown North Precinct. Everyone calls him The Chief. All the firefighters were called in and Franklin was down there a whole week. And then –

  ‘they fell…

  … while we were watching…

  … I’ll never forget that…

  I just got up and ran to the car and went to the school for my kids. The teacher was saying, “They’re OK, they’re OK,” but I just wanted them with me, I wanted my family around me,’ and her eyes are wide and frightened now and she scoops the air in around her as she speaks.

  ‘So Mom and Sean were OK. And Franklin. And The Chief. He hadn’t been working. Thank God. And the kids were with me. But it’s a day I will never forget.’

  I want to ask her where Jack was and why she did not mention him in any of this. For me it would have been him before anyone. Jack, hammering on metal somewhere near Battery Park. Not far from it as it happened. He might have gone to get a coffee at the deli. He might have taken the wrong exit and ended up made of dust. I would have called him first and I would have cried just dialling up his number. But she didn’t seem to remember doing that.

  She tells me that this is a season of funerals, wedding bands buried without any fingers or hands, body parts, whatever they found, are mourned and laid to rest. She looks into the distance and her eyes ache with pain.<
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  ‘Funeral after funeral after funeral,’ she says like a mantra. ‘It’s like it’s never-ending. We all know someone who was taken. It could have been my brother. But you have to move on.’ And here she mourns the loss of other people and an America that has been lost. And yet she is calm and gentle around me. Like someone who understands pain and has seen more of life than me. She is sorry that I have lost my husband but she has seen so much of it now, she would be happier if I gave up. At a time like this and after all those funerals, it is uncomfortable to be around Hope.

  ‘The trouble with him,’ Marcia says, and she nods her head towards Jack, ‘is that he doesn’t know when to come home… and apparently…’ and now she looks at me, ‘neither do you.’ It was 5 a.m. when we left Kitty’s and we stood together and waited for our car in the cold. I didn’t want to go home then either. I would have gone anywhere else with him. Jack says that New York is the loneliest place in the world but at least we were together and we could have been anywhere if it wasn’t for the lights behind us on Brooklyn Bridge.

  Thanksgiving dinner. Jack’s boys have their hair brushed back and they’re wearing little dicky bows. We carry bottles of wine, chocolate cake, and Jack carries the turkey which was put into the oven at 5 a.m. And Marcia walks ahead, her hair blowing backwards, fresh and full of life, and our hangovers follow her through her neighbour’s door. There is no real welcome for me. Only her younger brother, the firefighter called Franklin, asks for my number and says he will take me to the firehouse so I can talk to the men there.

  ‘Everyone wants to slide down the pole,’ he says and I look back at him.

  ‘I’ve just lost my husband,’ I am thinking, ‘I will not want to slide down the pole.’

  The table is set for eighteen and everything is laid out on paper plates. There is turkey, egg salad, pickled onions and sweet potato pie. And there are children everywhere, under the table and jumping on every chair. This is Thanksgiving and the only time to say thanks is when it is finally over. At grace most people there are in tears.

  I am put sitting beside Marcia’s three brothers. Her eldest brother is Chief Gallagher who is in his fifties, and on the other side – the last remaining bachelor of New York and in the next place after that – the younger brother, the firefighter who has my number in his phone.

  Jack owns a green cardigan, bought at the Blarney Woollen Mills, and I look at it hanging on the stairs, and when it gets cold and that New York wind blows I want to put it on and in some way wrap a piece of him around me and feel safe and warm. But I can’t because it would look weird – and so I sit there, chewing on cold turkey and watching how his wife walks behind him and touches his shoulder with her hand.

  The bachelor looks like Jack Lemmon and he sits in close to me and tells us what he knows about women in New York.

  ‘The women are different in all the boroughs,’ he says. ‘In Brooklyn it’s all family. Having babies. Making a home. The Manhattans are different. Harder. The city makes you hard.’

  He watches me carefully. And when I look away I know he is staring at the side of my head. He is mentally undressing me and I am mentally dressing myself again.

  ‘What’s the beef?’ he asks quickly. ‘Do you have children?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  Silence.

  ‘Is there a man in your life?’

  Silence again.

  And then Jack walks past and puts one hand on my shoulder and Marcia looks up at him and then looks away. We make four pots of tea and then the table is covered with every kind of dessert. The people around the table begin to relax now and one by one they open up and talk.

  The Chief’s wife is called Maggie and she tells me about the subway people – the people who live in the underground city of New York.

  There is a man living under Greenwich Village. He has his own green couch. He carried it down the stairs and on to the tracks, in between trains and into subway land. He has a TV connected into the subway system. He has a favourite TV show. He has a woman. They live underground. They carried the couch between them. They know the trains. They’ve got the timetable down. They watch TV and there are rats. They don’t know or care about the dirt and the steel dust that they breathe. They can’t hear the noise any more. Without it the world would be a strange silent place. They’re together. In the dark. A subway couple. And if they can make it work, why can’t everyone else?

  ‘So there’s a whole world down there?’ I say.

  ‘A whole world,’ she says. ‘They’ve even elected their own mayor.’

  ‘What you need,’ the Lemon says suddenly, ‘is a man to keep you warm at night.’

  ‘Great… do you know any?’ I reply.

  Then they talk about relationships and Maggie and the Lemon have a lot to say about this.

  ‘Men and women fight about such stupid shit,’ he says. ‘Like who made the mess. If the mess bothers you, clean it up.’

  ‘Why should one person have to clean up after someone else all the time?’ Maggie asks.

  ‘I think the thing men and women fight most about is sex,’ she adds. ‘Men can never get enough. Never enough, and if you don’t give it to them – they sulk.’

  ‘I never sulk,’ he adds here, ‘and some women want sex all the time. Everyone knows women want to at more times than others depending on their cycle. Some men don’t want to have sex during a woman’s period – what do you think?’ he asks.

  ‘You’re putting me off my turkey,’ I tell him.

  And Maggie looks at her husband and smiles and then she takes another slice of apple pie.

  Later in the kitchen, in between scraping plates, the Lemon explains marriage to me.

  ‘When you’re single,’ he says, ‘you get a jar, and every time you get laid you put a peanut in the jar, and pretty soon your jar is full. When you get married,’ he continues, ‘you take a peanut out of the jar every time you get laid… when you get married you never have an empty jar.’

  Jack smiles at me from the sofa. He winks and holds one hand up. Five fingers and they’re like a secret code between us now. Around me everyone seems to be drunk from eating all that food.

  The firefighter’s girlfriend arrives. Her name is Caitlin and she is wearing a new outfit because she is meeting her boyfriend’s family today. She smiles brightly and nods at everyone and then she puts down a cake that looks like a chocolate hedgehog. And when they walk out into the kitchen someone whispers that ‘She is the one.’

  The Lemon is worried because he is losing his hair and Maggie tells him that ‘Baldness is a sign of virility in a man,’ and he says, ‘Any more virile and I’ll go mad.’

  We eat more dessert and I discover Snicker Doodle Cookies and then The Chief pulls up a chair.

  ‘Tell me about your husband,’ he says, and as the voices around me grow louder and the wind keeps howling outside the door, I tell a complete stranger everything I know. The date he got here. The last telephone call he made and how we think he was working near the World Trade Center but no one is really sure and how his family tried to find him but gave up quickly and went home. I tell him I believe that he is still alive and asked what did The Chief think – really? And he tells me the truth, like a good doctor would, that he really doesn’t know. Then he looks at me again and asks me a final question: ‘His name is engraved on his wedding ring?’ and I tell him ‘No’, that Larry put my name inside his and I took his for mine. And he nods here and his face is expressionless like a man who has seen it all before. And then he tells me he will do what he can to speed things up. I give him a photograph of Larry from my wallet and he tells me he will keep it safe. He takes out a cigar and moves towards the kitchen door and then he turns for a second.

  ‘Hope… right?’ he says and then he leaves without waiting for an answer and I watch as he sits outside on his own and smokes.

  Willow Street is quiet and it feels like Christmas night. I step outside and wonder where the res
t of the world is. The shops and diners are closed and behind every window families sit around tables and give thanks. My head is aching and my throat is sore and when I stood up to leave, the room was spinning around.

  ‘Do you know what they are doing there?’ Frankie had asked. ‘They’re giving girls wedding rings and zip-lock bags of dust.’ I didn’t even tell him that I had booked my flight.

  Recently I’ve got it into my head that Larry might have jumped.

  I think, knowing him, that he would have wanted the last ten seconds of life to himself.

  And he would have fallen with grace, and landed silently, like a single white feather on the ground.

  I leave the Thanksgiving dinner and walk towards the bridge. The lights are on and it makes me feel less alone. Across the river there is the Manhattan skyline and then I look towards Jack’s house and nothing will persuade me to go in.

  I walk to the payphone and I am thinking about the only other person I know on Thanksgiving Day in New York. And I begin to push the numbers slowly and carefully and somewhere on the Upper West Side a telephone begins to ring. It rings eight times, long shrill bells, and my heart is suddenly beating fast. Then there is a click and the receiver is lifted up. There is a delay before she speaks as if she can’t quite find the word. She might have been sleeping or having a long soak in the tub. A cat miaows beside her and after that I can hear the sound of freeform jazz. When she speaks her voice is smooth and quiet and as if she has spent many years just practising each and every word. I am not able to speak at all then and when I finally manage to say her name her voice comes back like music and Matilda is smiling and saying, ‘Hello.’

  Parallax n. The angle between two imaginary lines from two different observation points meeting at a star or celestial body that is used to measure its distance from the earth.

  Matilda sits at the piano. There is a cigarette between her lips and the smoke moves in a curl over her nose. In between talk of men and mortality, the piano has been nudging at us all afternoon. Three Slowballs later and she is sliding her fingers over the lid and then lifting it up as she gently touches the keys.