A New York Moment

The shade under the maple tree speckles us like dust and we stand with our drinks, side by side, like a pair of mismatched bookends pressed together. I hear her sigh and I turn towards her. We toast each other with our plastic cups. Time has etched intricate lines around her eyes and each year they grow softer, finer and more elaborate.

I see you then, at that moment, stepping onto the lawn. Your head is turned away. You are laughing with the host. Is it you? I think it's you. My heart crawls its way into my throat, knowing it's you; it must be you. I cannot see your face but your black hair moves like a wallowing tide and I am back in New York. With you.

*

I remember that half-loft apartment in Gramercy, stuffed with camera equipment and paperback books. We never touched the dust on the window sills, thick with age and memory, undisturbed; it belonged more than we did. Geranium pots and underwear filled the fire-escape. On nights when the brick was slick with recent rain, we sat out there, listening to the swelling music as it mingled like rivers of pollen down the street.

I remember a hundred bars over a thousand nights. I remember the taste of Bailey's on your tongue and the holy, glittering shafts of light in fresh pints of lager. At private parties (and later, ‘functions’), rooms full of people would nod in unison as you talked while rolling another seamless joint, your long fingers of a jazz musician, all at once, while mesmerizing music pounded the bar below us to pieces. We took thousands of pictures of the city lights in the endless Hudson.

I remember how much you loved walking all the way downtown in July just to listen to the city, sometimes stopping to place your hand on the melted blacktop, your camera dangling in the folds of your dress and I remember the delight on your face as the heat coursed up your long, slim arm.

I remember you standing back as I got mugged on 12th and Broadway, of all places, and how you watched it happen. Later that night, you photographed my black eye and the harder I pinned you to the mattress, the harder we laughed.

I remember your skin glowing in the half-light chambered by the window beside the bed.

I remember you sucking pulled pork off the collar of my shirt.

I remember our clothes flung onto bare floorboards and you telling me to wear my socks inside out for job interviews and, once, with our hearts in our dry mouths, we watched a spider, clinging to a taxi-cab wing mirror as the driver bounced all four of us with a crazed abandon crosstown, past the USS Intrepid dripping in the fog, to a party that started at five in the morning.

I remember your black hair, as thick as wet seaweed, endlessly running between my fingers. I remember our white sheets, twisted around your torso and I remember the taste of fresh sweat on your shoulder.

You would speechlessly watch me cook our coffee, like a pair of addicts.

And then one bright, blue Tuesday morning, the towers fell. I realised later - maybe ten years later - that I had seen an opportunity. I had sought it; I had been waiting for this.

And I remember saying, “Let me take you home.”

*

My home is a place where the Atlantic air is a cold and savage drug, the beaches are measured in miles, the sunsets are as wide as the world and darkness descends fast, like the lid of an iron pot, draining the sodden fields of colour when you look again.

In the first days, you listen to the streams whispering under the dark bracken and find duck eggs hiding amongst the stones. Mesmerized, you watch the endless, shedding cliffs of rain, high and black, as they roll inland, giving us an hour to re-light the peat fires and pull closed the heavy curtains.

My mother buys you lined wellington boots, woolen hats and a pair of green, fingerless gloves. Only once do you come with me to walk in the freezing evening air, down the lane to the logger’s cottage as the dogs track us in the half light, letting us know where they are with low, gruff noises. After that, you stay by the Rayburn in the kitchen, a curiosity to the cats and the cousins, with those fingerless gloves wrapped around a mug of coffee. You smile and let my mother work tirelessly over endless stories and histories. You wear those gloves even asleep, like a soldier (I found them, by the way, eight years ago, bunched together at the back of the staircase and they stopped my mind for the rest of the afternoon). There is no song you can sing, no poem you know by heart and your riffs on Engels and Arbus or The Beastie Boys ring hollow with the crowd at The Shebeen.

I remember our first Sunday Mass together. The pews fill with people unadorned with irony, and I remember the shocking sound of your camera during the First Reading, the freezing affect the motor has even on the shuffling infants and Mrs Morris growing even more careful with her diction, turning as red as a rose as she finishes Matthew’s Letter to the Corinthians and I remember your wide eyes and a whispered ‘Sorry’ to me that nevertheless echoes into the empty choir stalls.

I remember you screaming in a tractor cab, horrified to be driven in it by my brother and how the sleet makes your mascara run as we row you across a corner of Lough Corrib to show you one of our childhood haunts. I remember your pleading eyes and your white knuckles on the stem post.

You become exhausted by the weather, by the pine needles in your hair, by the sand stuck under your nails and the grass cuts on your fingertips and the dogs licking your face and the seat of your skinny jeans soaking through by sitting for just an instant on a rain-drenched red bench in Lahinch. The cry of the curlew startles you and the whispering sand on the strand burns your ankles.

I remember I am making a point. You opened your world and let me taste it. Now, here is mine: taste it. But I am losing you. You start counting the days, I know. You sit in the kitchen, surrounded by teapots and toast and gammon steaks and you watch the birds in the garden and the night creep through the trees at four in the afternoon.

The day before Thanksgiving, you return. You have your head turned away on the drive to Shannon, just like now, and then, later, you hug me, smile, kiss me and rub my arms. You wave as you vanish around the corner at Departures. Yes: you vanish. You return to your terribly wounded city and we never speak again.

*

I watch you take another step and you vanish all over again: it’s not you. Of course it’s not you; you’re in New York.

---

Kevin P. Moriarty

Kevin lives in North County Dublin, writes short stories and dreams of writing a novel.