"Wouldn't you say?"
"Sometimes it feels more like trapped," said her friend, slapping a leaf off her sweaty cheek. "If I met some god from Paraguay, I might just go there."
"You would not."
"I might."
"The thing about your situation..." Jude didn't know quite what she meant to say.
"It's a trap in itself," Gwen said drolly. "I might as well be on the other side of the planet from Luke, some days. I sit around biting my cuticles, wishing I could call him without his wife picking up."
"Oh, Gwen."
A shrug. "He's a nice guy."
"Nice enough?"
"You take what you can get."
Did this mean Luke Randall, out of all the men available for affairs in this corner of southwestern Ontario, or Gwen's meagre share of him? Jude didn't ask; it was too sad either way.
"My point is, you and Síle should quit bitching and moaning. There's nothing keeping you apart except for an ocean," said Gwen. "You can dial her number and talk to her anytime you like, say whatever comes into your head. You can see each other every month or so without anyone standing in your way."
"I guess so," said Jude grimly. It was like wanting ice cream instead of meat loaf, and being told that children in refugee camps would be grateful for the meat loaf. Yes, of course she had nothing to complain about, compared to so many people, but when had that ever stopped anyone from complaining? Happiness was a balloon that always hovered just out of arm's reach.
Work helped, some. For the next month, Jude would be organizing the third annual 1867 Day, which took place on the second of November, All Souls. She had to wangle loans of period clothing from the costume workshop at the Stratford Festival, argue with the insurance company about covering the children's haystack climb, and track down a replacement for the blacksmith who'd succumbed to carpal tunnel.
"I'll really try to make it down this year," said Estelle, her old boss from the Pioneer Museum, on the phone. "You've done wonderful things with that little schoolhouse."
"I have, haven't I?" said Jude, laughing at her own cockiness. "And now we've got a good shot at substantial funding from the same foundation."
"But you know, if you ever wanted to stretch your wings, there are some interesting opportunities in Toronto—"
"I thought it was all cuts, cuts, cuts?"
"True, but there are two retirements coming up in a special regional collection that just so happens to be run by a good friend of mine..."
"Thanks for thinking of me, Estelle, but I've got big plans for my little museum," Jude told her.
That afternoon she borrowed Rizla's pickup to bring a slightly rusty Dominion Cheese Company churn down to a museum in London, Ontario; it was just too big for her to display. In return, the curator gave her a copy of a clipping from the London Free Press of January 9, 1883, headed "Ireland Ont. Farmer Stabbed in Market Day Brawl, Liquor to Blame."
Jude found herself reluctant to start the drive back. In the city's handsome covered market she found a café called The Little Red Roaster, and sipped Fair Trade Organic Sumatran from a tall blue mug. She thought even Síle would call this a good cup of coffee. She was quite enjoying the energy of the surging, chattering shoppers. She shut her eyes and pictured the building in 1883, full of liquored-up, brawling farmers.
At the next table, below a spindly coffee tree in a pot, a young woman with jaw-length brown hair was deep in conversation with a boy of six or seven. Her son, he had to be, he had the same dark-eyed charm; she must have had him very young, thought Jude, watching out of the corner of her eye, pretending to read a pamphlet about Falun Gong. They were talking like friends; there was none of that "now let's wipe our mouth" stuff. Suddenly the woman burst out laughing at something the boy said, and the flash of teeth transformed her face. He dropped his muffin on her folder, glugged his milk, then jumped onto her lap, and she wrapped her arms around him. Jude angled toward them unobtrusively, catching a few lines of a conversation that was either about a bush or George W. Bush, she wasn't sure. She glanced at the pages sliding out of the folder; an essay headed (ah, her radar was working)
Yana Petronis
"Bad Little Sisters: A Case Study of Cross-Border Censorship
"Women's Studies 253 (Lesbian Issues)
Time to head home. Jude tried to catch the young woman's eye for a quick smile but didn't manage it.
As the sprawl of new subdivisions gave way to open fields, she found herself imagining another life. A no-distance-at-all relationship. You met your girlfriend at the market, saw her again at dinner, slept a hairsbreadth apart all night. A life measured in minutes and hours, instead of weeks and months; plans wouldn't need to stretch any farther than tomorrow's bike ride or Saturday's music festival. Not necessarily perfect, but made up of one fresh day at a time.
But why had this never happened to Jude, in the years between leaving Rizla and meeting Síle? Why, despite all her genital encounters, hadn't she fallen hard for someone local? Look at it pragmatically: There was probably someone in every town whom Jude could love, who could love Jude. What perversity had made her fixate on a foreigner instead? Why was she sweating out her heart for a faraway woman when no doubt there were people just as intriguing, all around her? It was like some sinister fairy tale in which the prince fell into a decline: I long for the fruit of the tree at the end of the world. Nothing but that fruit will satisfy my thirst: only its juice can save me.
THINK GLOBAL, BUY LOCAL said an ad in the window of the general store as Jude drove into Ireland, and she gritted her teeth.
Re: Keeping Busy
Today I was in London--yup, another place named by lonely emigrants. They have this weird 1826 miniature castle that was the courthouse and jail, it turns out it's a copy of Malahide Castle near Dublin. (Take me next time?) Before anyone had actually settled in London, there was a public execution that folks came from all over Upper Canada to see. The rope broke, so they had to string the guy up again, and the worst thing is that he was Francophone, but his confession's in perfect English, which suggests he was framed...
In the market I saw a woman in a café and thought, why can't I love someone like her instead of you?
On second thought—Jude highlighted that sentence and hit Delete. There were things you could chance face to face, but e-mail was a blunt medium.
One day without a call from Síle was okay-ish; two days were lonely; three days of Silence led to paranoid thoughts. (She's pissed at me, I've slipped her mind, she's got better things to do.) Jude was fighting to keep her overdraft the right side of $5,000, and the sight of an envelope with Bell Canada on it made her stomach knot. Síle kept telling her to set up a line of credit backed by the house, but Jude could just picture her mother's pursed lips. "It's not borrowing," Síle insisted, "it's just liquidating a little bit of an asset." For lovers who'd slept together for a grand total of fifteen nights, it occurred to Jude, they spent a ridiculous amount of time discussing money.
"Sounds like marriage," Rizla sniggered, over a hot dog at the Garage.
Jude didn't rise to the bait. "I was thinking of selling the Triumph. The insurance just went up again, they're killing me. I might be better off downsizing to an eight-fifty cc, seven-fifty, even."
Rizla was goggle-eyed. "Man, she's got you by the balls."
"It's not Síle's idea," she snapped.
"The bike's a freaking family heirloom. What would your uncle say if you flogged it to some Toronto lawyer to pay your phone bill? Here's the line in the sand," he went on, his finger scoring in the air. "You're a biker with a vintage Triumph, you don't cash that in. Geez, sell the house first."
Jude was aware of a certain relief. "Dumb idea, I guess. I just ... I really need to see Síle. She's been sounding exhausted; she's on this heavy rotation to New York and L.A. I wish I could be there when she gets home, making her some risotto."
"Why can't she make herself some risotto?"
Jude shook her head. "It's too slow;
she always turns up the heat and burns it."
He chewed one broad, leathery thumb. "If gals can't cook, you might as well have stuck with guys."
She fixed him with a look.
"Hush up, now, Richard," he scolded himself, "your little friend's got luuuuve problems."
"Love isn't a problem, geography is."
"But geography wouldn't be a problem if you weren't in love, right? I mean, I live thousands of clicks from Céline Dion but that's fine by me."
"Okay, so it's the intersection of love and geography." It sounded to Jude like a surreal street address. "The what and who and why are easy, it's just the when and where."
"And the how much," he laughed, reaching for their bill.
Jude picked up a napkin to dab ketchup off his chin. "It isn't that Síle would want me to give up the bike," she insisted. "She'd rather pay for everything herself."
Rizla threw up his hands. "Shit, forget the cooking, then: If I had a sugar mommy, I'd lay back and take it."
Jude rolled her eyes.
"She's something else, that gal," said Rizla with a grin. "When she was over in July, the way she shut Gwen up!"
Well, if that was how he chose to remember the incident—
"But you'd better face it," he said mildly, "it's only ever going to be a vacation thing."
Jude stared at him.
"You've hooked the big fish, and she's a beaut all right, but you're never going to land her."
"You don't know that." Why were her own thoughts so unbearable when he spoke them? "Why would you say that?"
His mouth twisted with something like compassion. "Who's going to be the mountain and who's going to be Muhammad? It's not going to happen."
"It could, theoretically!"
"Well, so could me becoming the next Dalai Lama," said Rizla. "Tell you what, let's put some money on it. Let's say, if you and the lovely lady are shacked up together anywhere in the known universe in, what, two years, I'll pay you ... the cost of our divorce," he finished with a grin.
"You think you're funny, but you're just mean." Jude's voice was ragged.
"Hey, no skin off my fat ass, either way—"
She shoved back her chair and walked out, and only halfway down the street did she remember she hadn't paid for her hot dog.
Síle stood demonstrating the nearest exits with smooth fluting hand movements. She'd done this mime so often, she could have completed it with her eyes shut, only that might have alarmed the passengers. Then she strapped herself into the jump seat at the back, between two colleagues who were discussing the risks of rain for a January wedding. As the plane thrust away from the earth, Síle waited for the familiar rush in the stomach, the pure, sweet liftoff as gravity was shed.
But it didn't come. They were in the air and Síle didn't feel any bliss. Only a heavy craving not to move anymore, not to go anywhere anymore. She felt as if she'd suddenly forgotten how to have an orgasm.
That day passed in a blur of conversation, hatch-latching, rubbish-collecting, discreet yawning. Some days, this job was like working in a very cramped burger joint during an earthquake. The plastic food-handling gloves were making Síle's palms itch, but she refused to call it an allergy. Jude, Jude, why aren't you here, in Seat 39D, grinning up at me?
Sometimes, these days, when Síle felt the plane touch down she had no idea what country she was in. She woke up in hotels and stared at the ceiling in bewilderment. The aeronautical term was "losing situational awareness." In the privacy of her head she was thinking Jude, Jude, how long, like some cadence from the Psalms, though she knew the comparison was absurd. How many visits can we manage without losing momentum, grinding to a stop? How far can this go? Sacrilegious thought: She tried to remember whether she'd been more content in the old days, before she'd ever laid eyes on Jude Turner.
Cabin crews had all voted, last week, and the union had got its mandate to strike if the airline imposed the mass redundancies. But Síle could think of a few colleagues who were ready to go on any terms: Nuala, for one, and possibly Jenny. They'd all had it up to here with the tussles and changes—new short-haul routes every month, schedule snafus, ludicrous performance targets—and the only thing that seemed to stay frozen was their pay. And if the airline did manage to carve away another thousand-odd jobs on top of the two thousand already purged, Síle thought with a surge of anxiety, the survivors would have to work harder than ever.
"So it's all going great with Pedro, you lucky buggers?" she asked Marcus, speaking into her gizmo in the back of a taxi.
"Yeah, though we mostly talk about vegetables, these days," he said benignly. "No, your situation's much more romantic: the great lovers doomed to live separate, Heloise and Abelard and all that."
"Oh, well there's a comfort," she said, sardonic.
"Wasn't it Socrates who said we only really love what we lack?"
"You're disgustingly well-read, my boy."
"Actually I think I heard it on BBC2. But it is an interesting question: How far apart should lovers live?"
"The space of a kiss," she suggested.
"Well, sometimes, yeah, you need the amazing proximity of skin," Marcus agreed. "But at other times it's probably better to be farther apart than you can bear, so you can really see each other, realize what you want, what you're missing. Maybe it should be like muscles contracting and relaxing: near, far, together, apart."
"Yeah, that's what I thought at first, but I'm burning out. Just together would do me grand," said Síle, mulish, and then Marcus had to ring off because his mushroom consommé was boiling over.
Off-duty, Síle retreated from October rain into Polish film series or Crawford double bills. She loved that about films: They sucked you into their world so it didn't matter where your body was. You could walk into the most garish, blaring multiplex, or the grottiest old country cinema, and the film would still be the same. (Well, apart from that one time in Carlow town when it had slipped off the reel and got snagged.) When she tried to recall her life with Kathleen nowaday, that was what she saw: The two of them sitting side by side in a cinema, hands touching maybe, eyes on the screen. It was very strange, how little she missed Kathleen. It was like coming across old clothes neatly folded in a drawer, clothes that you couldn't remember yourself ever having worn.
Walking down Grafton Street, Síle was handed a flyer headed "Ireland of the Welcomes."
Are you an immigrant or asylum-seeker? At our Drop-In Centre we can help you make the often difficult ajustment to life in Ireland today. Legal/medical/benefits advice, counseling, creche for under-fives, free refreshments (tea, coffee, soup).
Darkly amused that she'd been targeted, she made a note to tell Orla that whoever wrote her leaflets couldn't spell adjustment.
For the first time in her life, Síle would get into bed in the dark, bone tired, and find herself unable to sleep. She switched her gizmo's sound programme from white noise to forest calls, ocean surf to whale music, but nothing worked; the waterfalls track only made her need to get up and pee.
Síle had to have her Jude reservoir filled up, that was all that was the matter; she was feeling hollow and shaky. No matter how often they went over their schedules, they couldn't seem to find an opening for a visit. Like dancers who couldn't get in synch, lurching and stepping on each other's toes. Fuel exhaustion, that was the term; she remembered reading about a plane that, because of delay and communication problems at JFK, had simply run out of petrol and dropped out of the sky.
She put her tiny framed photo of Jude beside her bed, in every hotel, and nearly lost it once when it slipped behind a table. Absence in love turned you into an idolator. Síle's gold hung heavy on her throat, her ears.
"Excuse me. Excuse me, Miss? I rang my bell hours ago. My light won't come on..."
"I've got to sit with my fiancée. There's been a mistake, we were meant to be together, but this woman won't move..."
"Miss, Miss? My daughter says the film is in English in one of her ears and French in
the other—"
"But how do you know she hasn't been sleeping with the Mohawk brave," asked Jael, "or somebody new, for that matter?"
Síle's purple sofa was so small, their curled-up stockinged feet touched. "She just isn't. Look, Jude and I talk about everything. That's all we have, is talk."
"The most eloquent love letters I ever got were from that ex-nun in Lisbon," Jael remembered, eyes on Síle's ceiling, which was strung with fairy lights. "They were so passionately written, so alive, they nearly burned my fingers. I even kept them, for a couple of years," she added, in her more usual tone.
"Sister Snake?" asked Síle, bristling at the comparison. "She borrowed money off you, infected you, then dumped you by postcard."
"Oh, Anton says I had it coming, karmically. The letters were deceptive, yeah," said Jael with a curious gentleness. "I think now that she meant every word of them, at the moment of writing. But yes, there was a lot she left out, including the younger girlfriend and the chlamydia. It's in the nature of letters to be selective. And emails," Jael added, before Síle could get a word in, "and texts, and phone calls, and whatever devices we use to keep in touch when we're not living the same life."
"Doesn't Jude seem honest to you?" demanded Síle.
"This isn't personal. Stop defending your true love and switch your brain back on for a minute."
"This is such bollocks," said Síle, the back of her head starting to ache. "Deception and distance are unrelated variables. Can't people who share a house tell lies too? In fact, maybe living together is so claustrophobic, it makes people hide things just to win themselves some breathing space." Síle wasn't sure she believed this, but she was provoked. "Marriage, even more so!"
Jael shrugged. "I don't know the stats. My only point is that correspondence has room for lies built in. It's inherently misleading. When you're writing to Jude, or on the phone, I bet you talk as if your whole life is given over to love."
Síle struggled for an answer.
"But then you say bye-bye, and you get on with things till the next time, don't you? Work and friends and shopping and coffee and smelling the roses. This is your busy-busy world and she's not in it." Jael's tone was almost vengeful. "You live on your own, and for all the romantic angst—this is your life, Síle, and you like it."