I believed it. I believe it still. He met our friends. When we were together, whether it was alone or in mixed company, I felt his eyes follow me around the room. He cornered me in kitchens at house parties, his hand up my dress, and he was constantly telling everyone about something funny I said the other day. He would read my essays for college while I was in the shower, and when I got out would start reading them back to me, smoking in my bed.
“I feel like I’m riding Noam Chomsky,” he said. “This is great stuff.”
When he was good he was very good, and when he was gone he was very gone. A lot of this, I now realise, was down to texting. There were six years between Carey and me, a gap I rarely felt unless it was regarding phone use. Courtship, to me, was about text messages. It was about sending someone a good-morning and a good-night message. It was ending every text with an x, or three x’s, or a long line of them when you were really pleased. It was about withholding x’s when you were moody, and then they would notice, and ask you what was wrong. These were the rules of love I had learned from my all-girls school, and it confused me when someone didn’t play.
I tried to hold off as long as I could on texting him in the morning, then break at around noon. I would make sure they were questions, things he had to answer to, like: Are you still coming round on Thursday? And: Remind me of your birthday, again? When he didn’t respond, I sent a barrage of “funny” messages that were supposed to read as Nancy Mitford but instead made me sound depressed, cranky and eighty years old.
I simply cannot abide the smell of Subway sandwiches
I’ve smelled fresh bread and frankly, that’s not what bread smells like
“Sandwich artists.” Get a grip!
I would send so many messages that the things I really wanted to hear back about would get lost amid my babbling nonsense, forcing me to contend with his mysterious, rare responses.
like the meatball
And then nothing, for days.
I turned twenty-one on 30 April. It was during one of his quiet spells. James, who was borrowing his mum’s car at the time, drove me out to my parents’ house for a dinner. They liked James a lot. I expected them to be shocked by my moving in with a gay man I barely knew. Truthfully, I wanted them to be shocked. I wanted to be their troublesome eldest who was spurning the family’s conservative values for a big, queer city life.
But my parents were cosmetic dentists and had been relying on middle-aged moneyed gay men for years. They’re the ones who pay for veneers. That evening, they couldn’t have been more glad for James, who ate and drank everything gratefully and with a charming stream of narration. “God, wouldn’t you go mental without paté?” he said brightly, smearing it on a cracker. “And do you know what else I’ve realised, Bridget: I actually love blue cheese.”
He was a bright spark in what I now know was a miserable time for them. Chris and Kevin were both in exam years, doing the Leaving and Junior Cert respectively, and swallowing the stress like pills without water. There was very little money coming in. The landlord’s widow had announced a rent hike, and my parents were considering moving their practice to another, cheaper part of town where they had no client base. They were only in their early fifties, but they were nodding more slowly, sighing more, and acting as if misfortune’s vision was based on movement, so they better not budge.
The fact that I was obviously unhappy didn’t help. My mind was fixed on Carey, who there hadn’t been a peep from in days, and I kept on hoping for an eleventh-hour appearance. My mum was worried about me. She never heard from me unless it was a crazy midnight phone call asking how she knew when Dad was “the one.”
“Any thoughts on what you’re going to do after exams are over, Rachel?” my dad asked. It was a fair question. Unfortunately I was not in the headspace for fair questions.
“No,” I snapped. “There are no jobs.”
“Brian Hegarty says there are jobs out in Bishopstown. Tech companies.”
Brian Hegarty was my dad’s best friend and was always referred to by his first and last name.
“Call centres,” I corrected. “I’m not killing myself at college to work at a call centre.”
But I wasn’t killing myself, that was the problem. I was torturing myself over a Northern Irish man who was six years older than me and shoplifted individual grains of salt. College I couldn’t gather the roughage to give a shit about. Classes were over but there were still end-of-year essays due, and I didn’t know where to begin with them.
“So what are you going to do?”
“Publishing,” I said. “I think I should work in publishing.”
I had run into Deenie Harrington recently, while I was with Carey. We were having a coffee near campus, and Deenie was there, a stack of pages in front of her. She was running the nib of her red pen along every sentence, making circles and notes as she went. She saw me, cackling on a high stool in the window. She waved. Her smile big and, crucially, real.
I left my stool and went over. “Hiya,” I said. “Nice to see you.”
Now, aged thirty-one, I would feel much more awkward about saying hello to the woman whose husband was spending random afternoons at my house. But I had accepted then that this was an arrangement that worked for everyone: Dr. Byrne was happy, James was sort of happy, Deenie seemed fine, the fridge was full of cheese.
“Rachel!” she said brightly. “How are you? Gosh—do you want to sit down?”
“I can’t,” I said. I pointed to Carey, pouring sugar into his coffee. “I’m with my…”
We had not talked about whether he was my boyfriend yet. The closest we got to talking about it was the second time we had sex, when he said: Rachel, why on earth don’t you have a boyfriend?
“…I’m with him,” I finished.
“Ah,” she said, and seemed tickled at this early-twenties problem of having a man in your life whose role you cannot name. “Well, lucky you. I’m stuck in line edits.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s like the last edit before it goes to the copy editor.”
“And who is that?”
“The person who looks for grammar mistakes, factual errors, that kind of thing.”
“You don’t do that?”
“No, I’m more policing the general story, whether the plot works, the vibe.”
“I would like to police a vibe,” I said.
The conversation had stuck in my head. It sounded like a great job. I loved to read, or I used to, before my main hobby was getting drunk. And Deenie had said that publishing was all about who you knew, and I knew her. I knew her in a weird way, but I knew her.
My mum put a bowl of crab linguine in front of me, then dusted parmesan over it. “I don’t know if there are jobs in books in Cork,” she said.
“There aren’t jobs in anything in Cork,” my dad replied.
“There are jobs,” James said. “Just no good ones.”
By May it became clear that I had, quite frankly, fucked myself.
We had a party at the house on the night of my twenty-first. My parents kindly gifted us two big bottles of Smirnoff vodka on our way out. Our cottage was bursting with people, thirty-five bodies jumping away like hot fleas. I never remember any neighbours from that time. They must have existed, but we never saw them. Carey had known about the party, had been invited, and of course had not shown up. When he was gone, he was very gone.