that is.”
“Safe from my nihilism.”
“You mean you don’t allow what you believe to affect what you do.”
“I believe a number of things,” he hedged. “They’re not all comfortable sitting next to each other is all … Like certain women.”
“It’s called cognitive dissonance, and it’s dangerous as all fuck.”
“Suits me, then.”
She sighed. “I may be just making excuses. I always was a no-frills talent. I made ‘good grades,’ but at nothing in particular.”
“Are you running away?”
“From what? I didn’t leave my family behind in Pennsylvania sliced up with an electric carving knife. I don’t think I’m running away any more than I would in a Philadelphia condo with an answering machine and regular lunch dates. It doesn’t matter where I am, Farrell. So I might as well go as stay. And I like other countries. You—you’ve got a lot of spark, but you have this morose side. My autobiography doesn’t usually sound this depressing.”
“I depress you?”
“No, I must think torment will impress you.”
“I thought you didn’t care if people liked you.”
“I lied.” They toasted. The crystal sang.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” she expanded. “I haven’t lived for ten years out of a backpack. Especially for the last five, I’ve stayed places—I move into houses and buy dustpans. Right now I have a dynamite house on Springfield Road. I buy flowers, I have a whisk! Because you have to put together something to leave before you go.”
“Is that what you’re doing tonight?”
She didn’t answer. She ordered brandy. Estrin had spilled out. This man had made her tense as no man had for months, but that was earlier, and now she felt herself break and spread over the restaurant like a neatly cracked egg, her eyes shining, double yolks. “So though I’m not ambitious, I do work hard, because I like the feeling. In Israel, I got up to pull boots at four, and it was loud and hot. I did overtime. Before I left Kiryat Shemona I ran the night shift, and was the only Gentile ever offered membership in that kibbutz. In Berlin, the clinic tried to send me to school in social work. In the Philippines, I was a hotel dishwasher, but when the head cook disappeared they put me in to pinch hit; found out I pickled a mean ceviche and kept me there. So I ran the kitchen for six months; while the busboys ambled in late afternoons the color of polished walnuts, I worked twelve, fourteen hours a day and turned the color of kiwi fruit.”
“You’re not complaining.”
“No,” she exhaled, remembering. “And today Kieran asked me to manage the Green Door.”
“How did you pull that off?”
“Damned if I know! It’s out of control! Everywhere I go I just want to be a schlemiel and somebody hands me a set of keys and the books, and before long I have employees and late hours and a lot of problems. It’s the curse of the crudest possible intelligence. The fact is, if you tell a hundred people, Put the chair in that corner, fully seventy-five of them will promptly hang it from the chandelier. Did you know that most of the world is made of fruitcakes?”
He laughed. “You get more American when you drink.”
“I can’t help it. I was born this way.”
“You don’t like being American?”
“I’ve learned to get by with it, like any handicap—harelip, paraplegia. Do you like being Irish?”
“What do you think?”
She eyed him. “That you abhor it. In short, Ireland suits you perfectly.”
She was getting swacked. Her voice was louder and higher; people were looking over at their table. She used her hands when she talked, and as her motions got wider Farrell eyed their tall goblets warily, though she always missed. Then, she knew her way around a landscape with glasses, that was clear. She had reached a phase he knew himself, marked not by sloppiness but by inordinate precision—her pronunciation was getting more rather than less correct. Her phrasing grew considered, her gestures semaphoric, crisp as air traffic control. When she rose to find the loo, he recognized the careful placement of her hand on the table, the excessively smooth ascent from her chair, the purposeful step-by-step glide around other diners—too exact, too concentrated. She had crossed the point where all these ordinary matters could be executed without thinking, and now to negotiate finding the ladies’, asking Maire coherently, remembering the directions and being able to follow them, took the full application of her powers.
Farrell enjoyed her absence. He kneaded his forehead. He had to admit he’d no idea what to make of her. The boasting had been a bit much; though if she really had washed dishes in the Philippines and made plastic boots in Galilee, he supposed she deserved a little airtime over dinner for work that had surely been excruciating after the first half hour. Farrell was tired. That was it, she was tiring. He wished she would just quiet down. He was sick of words. This whole island never shut up, and he wondered at how much people said was in such reliably inverse proportion to how much they had to say. If Farrell chose to lose any of his senses, he decided he’d go deaf.
Yet when Estrin returned it was as if something had happened. She seemed sad. He felt sure he could make one mean remark and she would cry.
“Are you married?” she asked straight up.
“You know when I woke up at thirteen, but you can’t tell if I’m that much of a shite?”
“That’s right,” she said calmly. “Only the incidentals of your life are apparent.”
When the bill came and Farrell went for his wallet, Estrin crumpled into her pocket for a wad of pound notes. “No, no.” He put a hand over her fist of cash. He flicked a card to Maire, allowing Estrin to catch that it was platinum.
Farrell gave her a hand up, pressed gently at her waist between tables; opening the door, he slipped his fingers under a shock of hair still beneath the jacket and pulled it free; she paused to let him finish, and a little longer still for the back of his hand to rest at her collar. As a result, by the time they were outside they had run through all the routine moves of the gambit like speed chess. Then, she was thirty-two, he forty-three; openings had become so easy. Perhaps the very definition of adulthood is a fascination with the middle parts of games.
“I have my bike,” she said.
“It’s safe?”
“Locked, anyway. I suppose.”
“Leave it, then. We haven’t far.”
Estrin shot her motorcycle a mournful look. “Where to?” she asked, in tow.
“My hotel.”
“You live in a hotel?”
“No.”
“Then why—”
“It’s safer.”
