“Well, you two are gas craic,” James said witheringly. “Shall we open a bottle of wine, or something?”
He rummaged in the kitchen.
“You’re trying for a baby together, aren’t you?” I said to Fred Byrne. “You and Deenie. Why, when you’re trying to start a…”
He rubbed at his temples.
“What are you doing?” I said it like it was my only chance to find out how, exactly, the grown-up world worked.
“Rachel,” James snapped from the kitchen doorway, “that’s not your business.”
“It is, I think, when I have to—”
Dr. Byrne put his hand up. “She’s right, James. Rachel is part of this, in her own way, and it’s not fair.
“Me and Deenie…we’ve been trying for a few years. It’s never worked. She wants one, very badly, but it doesn’t work.”
“What? Sex? Can you not…？”
He looked offended. “No, of course we have sex, Rachel, Jesus. She’s gorgeous. I’m very attracted to her. I love men and women. It’s fine. I’ve always been quite ambidextrous.”
“Just say bisexual,” James said, rolling his eyes. It sounded as if they’d had this discussion before. “Like a normal person.”
Dr. Byrne pulled a face. “But I…never thought of men as…as viable for a relationship. You’ll find that very old fashioned I’m sure, but you know, I’m almost forty.”
I’ve noticed, in the years since, that queer men of a certain vintage sometimes do this. They state their age, and they wait. They let you do the math. They look at you with an expression that says: I was born in 1972. I was a teenager in the eighties. Think about the things I’ve seen, the news stories I was terrorised with, the deadly body I was told that I might become. I later wondered whether Dr. Byrne’s famine obsession wasn’t just about being thin, but about AIDS, and the freedom to think about wasting.
“I never saw any men for the first years of our relationship. I swear. That was all over for me. A young thing, you know. I loved her. Love her.”
James sat down on the armrest, his face softer now. He kissed Dr. Byrne on the top of the head, then passed him his cigarette. It was amazing to me, how tender he could be despite the sentiment: the idea that men were a youthful treat, but not for real loving.
“But the more…the more the baby thing didn’t work, the more we tried, the more I felt like I was…disappointing her, I suppose, the more I needed…It’s hard to explain. Sex with her, sex with women, became a bit…”
“Heavy,” James finished.
“Yes,” Fred Byrne agreed. “Heavy.”
I looked at James. I couldn’t believe how little I had heard of all this, and how much James knew but hadn’t shared.
“James wasn’t my first slip,” Dr. Byrne said carefully. “But he was—is—my first lover.”
“Oh, God,” James said. “Just say boyfriend, like a normal person.”
“So when you ask me what I’m doing, Rachel, the answer is…” He looked at his hands. “I don’t know. I know that I’ve been miserable for months. That I love my wife. But I also…”
He took James’s hand.
“I love this young man, here.”
For once, James had nothing to say. His eyes looked enormous. “Christ,” he said at last. “I didn’t think you’d ever say it in front of…well, anyone.”
“Should I leave?” I said, feeling uncomfortable.
I was once again the third wheel in an evening that hinged on Dr. Byrne. It was like the night at their house, but in a parallel universe where the budget was much lower. We drank all the English Market wine and then went to the off-licence for beer and Monster Munch. We talked and smoked a lot, even though there was a dull, snapping tiredness under everything I did. I started to fantasise about bed, and eventually I went there.
Hours later, James climbed in next to me, his cold feet zapping me awake.
“Fuck,” I squealed. “What are you doing? Have you been outside? Why are you so cold?”
He snuggled down, the duvet up to his nose. “Fred just left. I walked him out. How did we seem?”
“He just left? What time is it?”
“Two,” he said. “So? How did we seem? Compared to them?”
I was awake now, and resentful of it. “I don’t know. He obviously adores you.”
“It feels really different now, Rachel,” he said, excited. “He used to be so withholding. But now he wants to talk about things. About how he feels about me.”
I put my head under the covers. “He’s not going to leave her.”
“You never know. Maybe after we move to London, he’ll miss me so much that he’ll want to start a new life.”
“You’re insane.”
“It could happen! He’s got nothing tying him down. No kids.”
“You’re forgetting that he loves her,” I said. “And that she’s very nice.”
“Oh, what do you know?”
But things did change, after that. Dr. Byrne finally understood that James could not live on wine and fancy cheese alone, and periodically we would get a knock on the door from the Tesco delivery man.
“Rache,” James hollered up the stairs, “Fred has done us a BIG SHOP!”
The big shop was an embarrassment of riches. Tinned beans, peas and spaghetti hoops. Bacon. Chicken breasts. Brown bread, packets of smoked salmon. Real coffee. Receipts were always in the delivery, and he never spent less than 150 euro. I thought of these as not just deliveries for James, but for us, for the household. He would sometimes tell me that I looked tired, or too skinny, and I would roll my eyes and say I was fatter than ever.
At last, putting away money was possible. I was making more money, but I was too exhausted to spend any of it. James was focusing his faith on Dr. Byrne, so wasn’t going out as much either. Our saving got so good that we opened up a joint account. We each had a card for it, and would sometimes walk to the ATM together to see how much was in there. Before my call centre job, our savings never got above 200 euro. Now we were almost triple that. A January emigration seemed feasible.
In our fantasy, it went like this: in January, we would move to London. James would get an agent immediately, and I would get a job at Penguin Books. We would spend three to six months being wild and discovering the city, and then Carey’s mother would die, and Dr. Byrne would leave Deenie. They would both move to London, and we would live in a fabulously modern house, all of us artistes and writers （Carey would discover a great talent, we decided）， and when we died our biographers would talk about us like we were a great collective of twenty-first-century geniuses. Our letters would be anthologised, just as soon as we got around to writing one another letters.
It was a nice fantasy, and perhaps it might have happened—a little of it, anyway—if I hadn’t been pregnant.
20
I DIDN’T SEE DEENIE for a while after getting my new job, and so when she called me one Thursday in early October I left my desk immediately, walking out into the car park to speak to her.