The Death of a Joyce Scholar Read online

  McGarr didn’t like the condescending note in that, but he nodded.

  “But what if love is an illusion and exists only in the mind or ‘heart’ of the lover, and the sort of love, if any, which the loved one holds for the lover can never be the same, or at least expressed similarly. Then what is love but the central lie in the grand fiction that human beings—who are categorically and unreconstructably singular—can communicate and ‘become one,’ as romantics would have it and the mating process suggests? That process in fact only further fractures the possibility, since it creates yet another.

  “We are born individuals who possess no innate knowledge. We are a void that is filled up with illusions. Love is one, or better, a multiple of illusions. Even the way we express what we feel or think is an artifice, created in words or notes or shapes or gestures that really can’t accurately express us in our own terms, since we have none of our own. We are nothing but transitory”—Holderness raised his glass—“holding vessels for those same illusions.”

  “Like a container,” McGarr suggested. Holderness nodded, and McGarr wondered how much Beckett’s approach, as stated by Holderness, owed to his acquaintance with Joyce and Joyce’s aesthetic of the novel, as stated by Flood/Coyle. Perhaps Ulysses, as an object that was filled up with the names of things, was itself a metaphor for man. After all, wasn’t it named for a man? Joyce could have as easily titled the book “Dublin” or “Bloomsday” or something else altogether.

  And finally, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, which closes Ulysses, was for all her talk of loves and lovers, of Bloom and Boylan and her children, a statement of how difficult, if not impossible, it was to know anything definite about life.

  Holderness concluded, “And thus Beckett would reject any sympathy for the human condition beyond whatever sympathy we might feel for ourselves, which itself can only be flawed because expressed—”

  “In the terms of Others,” McGarr completed.

  “Yes, those who’ve gone before.”

  “Tell me—do you feel sympathy?” McGarr asked.

  “For whom?”

  “Well, let’s start with yourself. You’re after telling me you think your future is dim, which implies some level of sympathy with your own situation.” To say nothing of pity.

  Holderness nodded his head once, as though to acknowledge that the quote was correct.

  “And Coyle—did you, do you feel any sympathy for him?” To say nothing of pity. “Or is that too impossible?”

  The smile reappeared. He turned to McGarr, a single eyebrow arching. “As luck and reality would have it.”

  “Who’s this?” McGarr held out to him the artist’s rendering of Jammer, his other hand covering the spiked hair.

  “Don’t know,” he said too quickly. Police sketches were generalized to allow for small errors in perception and recall.

  “Never saw him before?”

  “Never.”

  “Doesn’t look like anybody you know?”

  Holderness shook his head.

  “Doesn’t look like you?”

  “If I were vain, I’d be offended.”

  He was vain, but it was McGarr who was offended. The man thought him a dolt who could be hoodwinked. “How ’bout now?” He removed his other hand.

  “How about it.”

  FIFTEEN

  “IS THAT YOU, Rut’ie?” Ward called, when he heard the key in the latch. He was sitting up in bed in a bolster that looked like something chopped from a vintage Citroen, if not a Rolls. It was gray in color, and contained his tanned and bare torso in a plush of velour.

  And of course it was Rut’ie—who else?—who was struggling with the “supplies” that he had asked her to bring him: two full sacks of supposed food stuffs, the names of which she had never heard until that morning and still could not pronounce, but which, she also supposed, had helped him heal and stay fit after the beatings he had given and taken in the ring, or at least they should, given the price they asked for such measly amounts in the shop on Great St. George’s Street not a spit from the Castle. It explained how the little tyke had slipped out for lunch all those months and been back at work in ten minutes, making the modest brown bag that she pulled from the drawer of her desk in a near faint look like a potato sack stuffed with plunder.

  Tofu, one of the things was called. It took the shop girl a good minute to get Bresnahan to pronounce it properly while half of “weedy” Dublin looked on—drawn, gray people with eyeglasses and thin little smiles, as if they knew the secret to some Higher Truth but wouldn’t tell—and she still came out with “too-foo,” which sounded like a polite attempt to say something dirty. “But what is it?” Bresnahan asked, and was told by one of the weeds, who looked at her head to foot as though she had never seen a decent, upstanding, strong, and at that point in the lunch hour, very hungry human being in her life, “Bean curd.” Bresnahan had looked down at the pale lump of plastic-wrapped, jelled matter in her hand and nearly dropped it. “Curd?”

  “Like cottage cheese is to milk, but pressed from soy beans.”

  Bresnahan tried to imagine how that was done. Ireland—or at least the Ireland that she knew—did not grow soy beans, and all the beans that she had ever known had been on a vine or in a can. She struggled to understand how the contents of the can could be pressed and perhaps then strained and filtered and colored to come out with the look, but mainly—she had shuddered—the fleshy feel of the limp stuff in her hands. And to put such a concoction in your mouth? Why, she had thought, when the shops were filled with lovely rashers and steaks and chops and kidneys at half the cost? When Bresnahan was so moved she ate fish, which her people back home in Kerry still considered famine food and never touched. Ever.

  Then, at the opposite end of the “feel” scale, was mochi. “No, no, no,” the shop girl kept saying. “Moshe is the name of the Israeli general, the one with the patch over an eye who won the Six-Day War. This is a hard C. Mochi.” But Bresnahan had already decided that Hughie Ward or no Hughie Ward, she’d never learn to like such fare. Mochi had the dense look, the hard feel, even the sharp corners and hatched-out brick shapes within the block of some class of building material, and there it was, rice all along.

  Nori was next, pressed sheets of inky-looking seaweed. In Kerry seaweed was something that was put on fieldsfor fertilizer, for goodness sake. “What do I do with this?” she had asked. “Anything you like. You take a scissors and cut it up in strips to add to soups and stews. Or you can fry it. It crisps up and gets sweet as a nut.” Now there was something that Bresnahan understood. “How?” “In olive oil, is the way I prefer it. I realize olive oil is high in cholesterol but it tastes so good. It’s my treat to myself.” Bresnahan had turned away. Olive oil had the consistency, the smell, and almost the taste of the emetic she had been dosed with as a child anytime she had had the bad sense to let on she wasn’t feeling well.

  After that she had simply loaded the cart with the other half-dozen items on the list. And finally she selected a few frozen, organically grown vegetables and a free-range, organically fed chicken, as if some farm products were not and could not be “organic.” One thing Bresnahan knew was farms. She had been born and raised on one, and her father, who was as large as the side of a barn, and as strong too, still worked one. And anything—sometimes, unfortunately everything—on a farm was organic, right down to the odor in the sitting room when guests were present.

  When told organic meant no pesticides or herbicides or growth hormones were used in the production of such things, she was moved to laugh up her sleeve. Perhaps on the big farms in Wexford or the Midlands farmers were moved to use such things, but in most of Ireland, where cash was scarce or hard got and seldom parted with, older truly organic methods that cost nothing were invariably employed.

  Thus, piqued with indignation at what she designated the yuppy life-style, Bresnahan bundled herself out of the shop and fled to the markets of Moore Street, where she purchased new potatoes, leeks, and brussel sprouts
. In a butcher shop she asked, “I hope that’s not organic,” pointing at the largest, best-looking chunk of sirloin steak displayed. “Not a chance,” said the butcher. “There’s nothing living in that whatsoever. It’s all the choicest dead meat.”

  Well, one thing was certain, she thought, depositing both sets of goods in the yuppy kitchen area of his yuppy loft flat, getting to know Hughie Ward was teaching her a few things about yuppies, the aspiring snobs of her generation. Someday she hoped to arrest and charge at least half of them with…pride, that was it. They were just too awfully sure of themselves and what they chose, what they blessed, and what they didn’t, which was as certainly bad.

  And how did they decide such things? Did they meet in committee and review, say, automobiles or perfumes or couturiers? Or—which was what she suspected and what irked her most—did they simply know? If so, Bresnahan did not have an inkling of how that knowledge was gained, and she was not a little bit envious of what seemed like a genetic predisposition to elitism, which made her angry.

  Until she pulled her purse and jacket off the clean line of her shoulders and turned to Ward in the bed, with the covers about his waist. There he was in his contained perfection, all sleek but well-defined muscle, nut-brown in color, and—what was it?—vulnerable with the side of his face black now, and his wrist in the cast. The adored one, the loved one, though he knew (and Bresnahan suspected she must do everything to keep him from knowing) not.

  “So—Bernie gave you an extra hour.”

  She smiled. She would be jolly for him and keep it light. Yuppies did not like heavy, which reminded her that she must go on a diet. She wasn’t actually heavy, and in fact had lost a full stone since coming to the Squad, but the svelte image, such as portrayed in certain women’s magazines, was something she had always wanted for herself, though how one lost muscle she did not know. “Your hour. The sergeant said, ‘If you’re popping over to Hughie’s, you can take his hour too.’ And this—I almost forgot.” Turning back to her purse, she extracted the half liter of Red Breast, a choice aged malt, that McKeon had given her. “For strength to get you through the long afternoon, says he. If you feel strong enough after and think you can make it, the lads and he are meeting in Hogan’s around half past six for a gargle.”

  Ward turned his head away.

  “I know—I told him you don’t touch the stuff, and especially now with your head and all, but—well, maybe it’s good on tofu.” Jesus, she’d got the word right, and Ward turned to her and suddenly began laughing.

  “Did you buy some?” he asked.

  “The entire blessed list. You should have seen their faces in the shop. When I appeared in the doorway, they thought for sure it was a reenactment of the film classic Revenge of the Red Meat Eaters. All I needed was a cigarette and a bit of booze on me breath to be entirely in caricature.”

  He laughed louder and then raised a hand to his head. “Ow—that hurts.” He had no idea that Bresnahan could be such good company.

  “Though I’ll give you a choice, sick one,” she ranted right on, sliding the whiskey across the counter toward the other liquor, rows of it that, imagine, he never drank. Surely he was a curious Irishman, which was in that way good, and she wondered if he had been a foundling and was really Italian or Spanish or of one of the dark, southern peoples who only drank wine.

  Swinging back to him, she straightened up and tucked her light blue uniform blouse into her dark blue uniform skirt; as she did so, she watched his eyes trace the line of her breasts, turned in profile to him. “Tofu or mochi with tahini, miso and tempeh, all in a soup of kefir”—here she began laughing herself—“just to keep it down. Followed by enough evening primrose to choke a horse, polished off by a brilliant dessert of trail mix.

  “Or, on the other hand”—she dug into her Moore Street packet and pulled out the steak—“a thorough meal of meat and potatoes with fried onions and brussel sprouts done by a farm girl who knows of such things as strength. Afterward you’ll simply sail down to Hogan’s with enough ballast in you to float the British navy, if you’re of a mind.”

  “Really?” Ward had still not taken his eyes from her body, which he considered large but fetching, in the way one could admire proportion and strength. Her broad shoulders, which looked to have little knobs on the ends, devolved to a narrow waist and thin but definite hips. Her face wasn’t exactly pretty, but with its light gray, laughing eyes, and a smile that pouted high cheekbones, and a strong chin, it was certainly acceptable.

  And then there was the way she carried herself, like a boxer dipping to loose a left hook or a rugger who had just been slipped the ball. It had something to do with the fact that she was a bit bow-legged and tended to rock when she walked, as though those shoulders were a burden that took some strength to bear.

  And yet her movements were contained and fluid, and Ward imagined—and had heard tell—that she had been a fine athlete in her day, which, mind, wasn’t long past. Field hockey, he seemed to recall. And basketball, which Ward had always thought of as a woman’s sport. How old could she be now, twenty-six, twenty-seven? Surely not thirty.

  The truth was that Ward was now feeling very much better, and suddenly about as horny as he had ever been. Staring at the lovely configurations of her chest—which those shoulders made seem pendulous—Ward felt an actual gut-gnawing ache in his stomach, and it occurred to him that getting Bresnahan into bed for the afternoon was precisely what he most needed, though it would be wrong. They worked together and were in a way rivals, for Jesus’ sake. One did not go to bed with staff (or at least the staff that Ward one day fully intended to head), and she was just an innocent country girl. What would he do with her afterward, which meant every day for the rest of their careers? Maybe he was just hungry.

  She had said, “It’s so pretty I know it must look like plastic.” She meant the beef steak.

  “Give us another look,” he asked, if only to get her from behind the counter so he could have another glimpse at her hips and her legs, which were large but long and shapely. As she bent to him, his eyes darted to a mirror and he checked the gentle curve of her well-muscled backside. He hated himself for the thought that she could be, would be, fun. He couldn’t imagine that she hadn’t in her time: On his several forays into the country he had found the girls quick and ready and rather expert at the sort of dalliance that satisfied all, got them home on time, and raised not an eyebrow the next day in the village.

  “Nice?” she asked.

  “Nice,” said Ward, “and—” His good hand shot out for her wrist. “Crack open the Chablis, would you? It’s on ice in the fridge, and you’ll like it.”

  “But I don’t drink,” she said, almost blurting out that on her Confirmation Day she had taken The Pledge and observed it faithfully for fourteen years, of all unreasonable, unfashionable things, before she added, “on duty.”

  “But you’re off.” He smiled, and she could have melted.

  “For two hours.”

  “A sip—what could it hurt?”

  And there went The Pledge, right out the window on the first suggestion from the little devil.

  His good eye met hers and—was it?—color rose to her face. Yes, it was, and suddenly Ward felt the need to release her hand and reach for one of the several newspapers that were strewn about the bed. After a quick scan, he dropped it on his lap and watched her move back toward the kitchen, chatting away now. Happy, he thought.

  Was it just the brush he’d had with danger, he wondered? He could have been killed, and he’d read somewhere that the threat of death was a definite aphrodisiac and that more women got pregnant on the eve of battle and shortly after than at any other time.

  She returned with the wine. “Just a sip, now. I believe I’ve a weak head, and how in the world I’ll ever return to the Castle—”

  Ward raised his glass in toast: “To a good woman from a man in need. I don’t know how to thank you.”

  Bresnahan hated to think she knew how he co
uld, and as she looked down to sip, her eyes fell to the newspaper, which was pulsing slightly. She hadn’t spent all those years on a farm not to know what that meant. He liked her. Or at least he’d like to have her, which wasn’t really the same thing, though it might be a start, done right. Which was how? She panicked, and in a single gulp tossed off most of the wine in her glass.

  Her hand came up to her chest and she forced herself to swallow and was pleasantly surprised. Far from tasting like whiskey or stout smelled, which was bitter and harsh and heavy, the wine actually tasted slightly sweet and mild and light. She turned on her heel and went back to the kitchen with a slight bounce in her step; expertly—and as quickly as she could—she began making their dinner.

  Was it going to happen to her here and now, in the middle of the day, for the first time, when she’d taken her first drink and really should be at work with a man whom she secretly loved but was nothing more than a little roué? It had all the—earmarks was not the right word—of a penny dreadful.

  The negatives were the hour, which wasn’t romantic, the occasion, which was ministering to a sick friend, the possibility that she might nettle the boss (McKeon) returning late (how much late, if done right?) or the big boss (McGarr) if he might need her, and, Jesus, she didn’t want that. He was a Turk, that one.

  Then there was the further and more important negative that he (Ward) would take her lightly—a boff in the afternoon—after which she wouldn’t have even his respect. And finally there was the possibility that he wasn’t the roué that rumor painted him, and she might get pregnant. Not having any experience at such things, she didn’t know that she would, but she had always imagined that, given the way she looked (healthy) and felt (healthier still), the mere touch of a man would blow her up like a pumpkin.