Tender (37 page)

(This was what she found herself thinking, as she watched the front door slam.)

(Which meant that he was right, didn’t it?)

(Christ, you were taught and taught well.)

“Don’t even talk to me,” Lorraine said, when Catherine walked back into the sitting room, shaking, the tears finally, frantically beginning to fall. “Don’t even look at me, Catherine. I can’t believe you. I can’t believe you would try to do that to him. After all that he’s gone through. After all we’ve seen him go through. He’s finally happy, and you try to—you try to—I can’t even understand you. I don’t
want
to understand you. I have to be honest with you, Catherine, I think you should go. I think you should leave. I don’t think there’s any place for you here anymore.”

(
He never said he was happy,
was what Catherine thought.)

And she did not expect that Lorraine would talk to her again.

She expected that the silent treatment she was given that evening, and the next evening, and all of Saturday morning, and into Saturday afternoon—Lorraine and Cillian ignoring her, talking to one another as though she was not there—would continue, and that it would be a full weekend of silence, and a full week of it, and another, until she managed to find another place in which to live—

And she was fine with that. Or she was growing fine with that. She had cried all the tears she had to cry. She had hoped all the hope she was going to bother with. She had no use for it anymore. She needed to leave no room for it. This was not, it turned out, a terrible feeling. This numbness, this emptiness, was not the worst way to feel. She watched a lot of television, and she did not move from the armchair which was farthest from the sitting-room door, so that, if someone came in, she would find herself less tempted to look at them, less naturally inclined—

It was golf on the television all that Saturday afternoon, which she did not understand even in the slightest, but which she let herself watch for hours anyway. Slumped in the armchair for two days. No horoscopes on the Friday; they could do without her, she had decided. She had made a couple of grand out of them, and that would keep her going for a while, that would give her the deposit and the first month’s rent on a new place, and someone else, some other robot, could create lies about how people’s lives were going to turn for them, about how people’s days were going to be—

Her poems; maybe she would go back to her poems now, or maybe—
what happens in the heart
—maybe, actually, probably not. Something else. Something with a cleaner, blanker kind of slate.
Putt
again of the golf ball, and murmur of applause from the crowd so genteel that they did not even need a cordon, the crowd who stood there like good boys and girls, trailed the golfers across the course like a sea of chaperones.
Putt.
And applause. And the sun was streaming hot through the big bay window. And the picture on the television was filtered through its dusty, heavy haze. A red band running around the bottom of the screen now, but Catherine could not make it out, Catherine could not be bothered to squint at it;
putt,
and applause.
Putt,
and applause. Walk, and the crowd goes with you—stop, and the crowd stops too—

Then a clatter from the hallway. The clatter of someone tripping on the way from the kitchen, and then, over the clatter, someone calling her name. Someone coming closer; someone up on their feet again, coming towards the sitting room, calling—shouting—Catherine’s name.

Lorraine.

Catherine almost laughed at the sound of her;
that didn’t last long,
was what she thought. Probably, Lorraine had discovered that all her cigarettes were gone, and had made the assumption that Catherine had helped herself to what was left of hers. But she was wrong, and Catherine looked forward to telling her. Catherine looked forward to—

Lorraine at the sitting-room door now.

“Catherine,” she said again, and Catherine saw; Lorraine had the transistor radio from the kitchen clutched in her hands.

Her voice, when she said Catherine’s name, sounded at once very old and very young.

And her face. It surprised Catherine that faces could actually turn that pale. That they could be so drained; drained of every drop of blood. And yet, still, the freckles as dark as ever; seeming darker, even, and more vivid, even, against the whiteness; spilling across the whiteness like tarnished stars.

And her hands. Her hands, trembling so violently, Catherine saw now, that the radio should surely have fallen. That the radio could not stay—

And in that moment, the radio fell. Bouncing off the carpet; the battery cover knocked off, the batteries spread—

The voices silenced.

“Catherine,” Lorraine said, “Have you heard from James today? Have you heard from Liam?”

Catherine stared. Was this some kind of joke?

“Catherine,”
Lorraine said, and now a sob had leapt into her voice, and her hands, which had been hanging, went to her temples, went to her hair. “Catherine,” she said, and she said a sentence that Catherine did not understand. Some of the words she understood, and one of them she could not but understand—it was not a word you could ignore—but another of them, the most important of them, she could not understand; not just what it was, but how it was relevant, how it was relevant to them. Relevant to Lorraine, standing, really crying now, crying ragged, frightened tears in the doorway, the parts of the radio scattered, useless, at her feet; relevant to Catherine, sitting, still half hearing the
putt
and applause, in her big soft armchair in the afternoon sun. Relevant to James, or relevant to Liam, who were up with Liam’s parents in Enniskillen, or Derry, or wherever it was—

And then Catherine understood the other word.

Ah, a quiet old spot,
she heard Liam’s voice saying, from a day when Liam had not yet been Liam.

Except, she had been wrong about that, as well.

“Catherine,” Lorraine was saying now, trying to pull herself together; dragging palms across her streaming eyes, pushing wrists against her streaming nose. Gathering the batteries of the radio, as though that mattered; as though hearing those voices, and the news they were bringing, would change a single thing. “Catherine. We have to do something. We have to—”

But Catherine could only stare.

Because what was it, exactly, that they were meant to do?

What was it that they, two people standing in a sitting room, could possibly do?

J
ames gave the same name to every portrait he took that day.

Liam was the larger portrait. Liam: not the portrait of him that Lisa had expected as the centerpiece, but a newer portrait, and a starker one. The
Irish Times
review a few days later described how people at the opening had crowded around the portrait; how they had asked whether anything was known of its subject; whether he had recovered; whether he would be OK.

But then people had probably wondered that about all seven of the portraits, Catherine thought, about all seven of the subjects: about the three other men, one of them very elderly, staring gravely at the camera; about the three women, one of them pregnant, one of them crying, the tears glistening on her face.

The series was titled simply
Omagh,
and it was shown in its entirety at the show on John Street, a month and four days after the bombing. Which was too soon, some people said, especially given that most of the subjects were either still in the hospital where James had photographed them, or only recently discharged. Not to mention that so many others had never even made it to a hospital bed.

But James would not care for what people said, Catherine knew. James, she knew, would be very, very clear about what he was doing with the photographs, and why.

James. Who had escaped injury. Who had escaped worse. Who had separated from Liam for half an hour that afternoon to go to a camera shop on the other side of town, leaving Liam to run an errand for his mother. Milk, it had been. Just milk. To buy the milk, he had headed for a supermarket down the town, taking his time in getting there, calling in to the record shop on the way, to the bookshop, to the shop where, occasionally, they had in some decent-looking jeans. But what did any of this detail matter? Liam gave it to a journalist a few weeks later—the journalist, in fact, who had been at the party for Ed Dunne—and the journalist, writing a story on James’s show, had worked the details up into a narrative stark and unsettling in its simplicity, in the simplicity of a twenty-year-old man going out, on a Saturday, to buy his mother a carton of milk—

What did any of the details matter? A red Vauxhall, a Cavalier, the explosives packed into it like things needed for a trip. The number plates changed; the two men who had parked it gone, long gone, and the warnings phoned in to three different places, so that the overall effect was one of confusion—deliberately, accidentally, who knew? Who would differentiate? It was half past two on a Saturday afternoon. Liam was already on Market Street, weaving through the crowds of shoppers and tourists, when the evacuations began, when the police began cordoning people into the area, people who were complaining, but not particularly worried; laughing and chatting, many of them. Long grown used to this kind of drill: the threat, the scare, the all-clear shortly afterwards, the afternoon interrupted and the groceries yet to be bought.

Ten past three.

And for a few seconds after the explosion, said the next day’s newspapers, there was a silence, a frozen, disbelieving silence.

And then the screaming.

James, on the other side of the cordons, frowning down towards the other end of town, asking people around him if they knew any more than he did.

And then the noise of it. A noise like nothing he had ever heard before, he told the journalist, but a noise, still, that he could not but recognize. Not like a thunderclap, no, no. Nothing like a thunderclap.

What had it sounded like? It had sounded like the thing that it had been.

And then the silence.

And then the screaming. Except that James described it as wailing. James described it as wailing that rose from the streets in front of him and climbed, twisting and growing, into the blackened, burned air.

(Although maybe that had been the description of the journalist. The journalist who so loved the look of her own words; so loved the shapes they made, the rhythms of them.)

Catherine was not at the opening. Catherine knew that it was not her place to be there.

But she went to see the photographs, the next day, when the gallery—not even a gallery, just the stripped-down floor of what had until recently been a shoe factory—was quiet, when the only other person there was the attendant, a girl her own age, who did not give her a second glance.

After the reviews began to come, the gallery would not be quiet anymore. But on that day, it was just Catherine, and just the attendant, and then the attendant slipped out, and it was just Catherine, and just what James had seen. What James had understood.

They were the photographs which made his name.

A
stonishing piece, isn’t it?” said the gallery assistant, thin as a hat stand and with the face of a John Currin child, as she joined Catherine in front of the new Zhu Wang. The piece was enormous, its thickly sludged canvas taking up almost the entire back wall of the Lewis booth, and it was astonishing, all right, but for all the worst possible reasons: its gimmickry, its sloppiness, and the artist’s very obvious hunger to be done with it so that he could move on to its equally high-earning successor. Catherine shook her head slowly, to suggest that words could not suffice in the face of such artistry, and let her gaze scan them again, the red and scarlet clumps of oil paint, the rusted nails pressed into them like twigs crushed underfoot.

“It’s really a masterful one of Zhu’s,” the gallery assistant said. She was straining, Catherine knew, to read the laminated name tag hiding itself between Catherine’s jacket lapels; though it was the second afternoon of the fair and the grabbing and slavering of the big collectors was therefore over with, still Catherine—well-dressed, passably well-groomed—could be somebody it was important to greet—as the girl, finally making out the dangling name and affiliation, realized that Catherine indeed was.

“Oh my goodness, you’re Catherine from
Frieze
?” she said, and her smile took on its full Manhattan wattage—although they were not in Manhattan, actually; they were on a small island to the east of Manhattan, Randall’s Island, which, because it had space for the giant marquee, had been chosen as a site for the first New York edition of the Frieze fair. “It’s so good to meet you! I really want to come to your criticism panel later! I’m Ashley—I work with—”

“Nice to meet you too,” Catherine said, extending a hand. “We’re all so glad the gallery could be part of our first New York fair.”

This was disingenuous, and both women knew it; even the uncovering of a forgery operation in Nate Lewis’s back rooms would scarcely have been enough to block his gallery’s participation in the fair. As soon as it had been decided that there would be a Frieze fair here, it was assumed that Lewis would not only take part but would be assigned one of the most prominent booths; today, Catherine had spotted the Wang as soon as she had walked through the huge tent’s glass doors. The other pieces in the booth were also by big-name Lewis artists: the Lucas Borga dot drawings, the long, low marble Falken, the Michael Woyzcuk metal frames with the stones suspended in them like mutated bell tongues. There was a piece from the Wittenborn archive, and a very delicate, actually quite beautiful little Clara Long, and in the middle of the space, on a pedestal, a yellow Meccano structure which revealed itself, as Catherine came closer to it, to be a miniature camera tripod; a small Diana camera had been painted exactly the same yellow—the case, the lens, everything—and was perched atop it.

“That’s a Noh Ritter,” Ashley said, following behind. “She just joined us in March, as you might have heard.”

“Mmm,” Catherine said.

“We’re all very excited about her new show. If you’re still in town, the opening is—”

“Oh, no, unfortunately I’m really just here to do the panel, and then I have to get back to London. The July issue is about to go to print.”

“Oh, that’s such a pity. Nate will be so sorry to have missed you, too. He was here earlier, but he’s in LA now until Tuesday.”

“What a pity.” Catherine nodded.

“And you actually
know
Nate a little, right? From Ireland?”

“Well, not really. I mean, we met, but that was a long time ago. A very long time ago, really. I’m surprised he remembers.”

“Oh, he remembers everything,” Ashley said with a theatrical little lift of her eyebrows.

“Yes, I’m sure,” said Catherine, trying, with her laugh, to achieve the same tone.

“Of course, you’re Irish,” Ashley said, tilting her head now. “But to be honest your accent sounds English to me.”

“Well. I’ve been living in London since I was twenty. That does things to your accent.”

“Oh—there! I can hear it!” Ashley trilled, pleased as a child who has just heard the first cuckoo. “Yeah!
Does things,
” she said, in the ridiculous Hollywood brogue always used at such moments. But it could be worse. Ashley could be interrogating her further about her connection to Nate, and putting two and two together, with the glue of the Irish accent, and coming up with—

“Wait, so do you know James Flynn?” Ashley said then, more quietly, leaning in as though the matter was a confidential one, as though the knowledge of James and Nate’s now long-ended relationship was not as public, at least within the art scene, as these things could be. The rising young star just arrived in the city and the dapper young gallerist just opening his own space; the sell-out show and the affair that was an open secret; the older lover, wronged and betrayed and with his career on the skids and, a year and a half into the whole business, found dead in his loft on West 26th Street. Ed Dunne had in fact suffered a massive heart attack, as became clear with the coroner’s report a couple of weeks later, but this was 2005, when Gawker and the other media gossip sites were climbing towards their gleeful zenith, and the circumstances of Dunne’s death were the tinder for several posts about James and Nate and the tragedy to which their glamorous liaison had led. In London, Catherine, then still freelancing, had called into the Internet café on the corner almost hourly for updates; she had pored over the photographs of James and Nate at openings, of Nate and Dunne in their loft, of the glass-and-steel exterior of the new Lewis gallery, of James’s works on display there, that portrait series for which he had got so much attention—the high-school footballers, the bodega men, the hipster boys with their tattoos and their mullets, their four-hundred-dollar skinny jeans. James looked almost like one of those boys himself now, which Catherine found, out of all of it, almost the hardest thing to believe; there was a photograph of him standing outside the main entrance of Lewis at an opening, smoking, a bottle of Presidente in his hand, and his lip was curled like someone she had never known, and his clothes were shabby and expensive, and his eyes were sharp with cynicism and dark with something deeper.

He and Nate had lasted another couple of months after Dunne’s death, and then there had been the break-up, and the swoop of Jonathan Greene to snatch James away from the Lewis Gallery; by then, Catherine was an assistant editor at
Frieze,
and could track the story from the comfort of her cubicle and her high-speed broadband, and still call it work.

At Jonathan Greene in early 2007, there had been the collaboration with Ryan McGinley; in 2008 the
HO-HO-HOPE!
show, which had got the
Artforum
cover, and soon afterwards, the Infinity Award. On each of these occasions, Catherine was tempted to send a congratulatory note to James; she knew the magazine stationery would get any correspondence marked
Personal
past the gallery’s gatekeepers and on to his apartment in (she knew this from a
Vogue
profile) Bushwick. But she never knew what to say, or rather, how to go about saying it. She tried; she wrote the sentences; always, she ended up crossing the office to the industrial-sized shredder, and watching to make sure that they had turned into off-white ribbons. When, in June 2010, the civil union announcement appeared in “Vows,” with its language of almost comic combinations and formalities—
James Flynn, 32, the son of Peggy Flynn and Michael T. Flynn of Leitrim, Ireland, will commit Sunday to Christian Brandt, 33, a son of Denise C. Brown and Dr. Arthur D. Brandt of Stamford, Connecticut
—Catherine had actually gone to Paperchase and bought a card with two little, blue-tuxedoed grooms—
I don’t think Armani does a navy-blue tuxedo,
she had written inside it, across from her fondest wishes for many, many years of happiness and love, and that card was still in her desk on Montclare Street, just waiting for the office franking machine—just the office franking machine, that was all.

That was not all.

(Things, with her own groom, beginning to go so depressingly, irretrievably south during that same summer; that had not helped matters either, although it had also, arguably, been completely beside the point.
Catherine M. Reilly, a daughter of Patricia M. Reilly and Charlie F. Reilly of Longford, Ireland, and Lucien F. Gordon, the son of Appalled Alexandra A. Gordon and Flare-Nostriled Thomas E. Gordon of Lancashire, et cetera, et cetera, were married Saturday and separated Monday, or near enough as makes no difference…
)

“Oh no, not really,” Catherine said to Ashley now, with an apologetic wince. “I mean, I
know
of him, but Ireland’s funny like that. You’d be surprised the way that with some people, your paths never cross.”

“Oh, I can
really
hear your accent now,” said Ashley, staring at Catherine’s mouth in seeming wonder.

“Ha.”

“Well, anyway, if you’re interested, there’s a big Flynn in the Greene booth across the way,” Ashley said, pointing to the booth opposite, which was equally spacious, equally well-appointed, and equally equipped with a young blond assistant and a Russian bank vault’s worth of pieces. “I really like it, actually, though I’m not always sure about his work.”

“Oh, I know what you mean,” Catherine said, and with a smile and a thank you, she said goodbye.

The glass-walled auditorium in the center of the tent was full to capacity for the criticism panel. That was down to the participation of Hal Foster and Roberta Smith, though Dan Franks had his own groupies, too, Catherine suspected, and she noticed that when Foster or Smith spoke, there was respectful silence, contributions from Franks set a restless sort of charge ticking in the room, not the kind which made people want to get up and leave, but the kind which made them want to stand up and demand to hear more. Franks was in his late thirties, and was the founding editor of
Mauve,
a quarterly magazine dedicated to the crossover of contemporary art and fashion, the art content of which consisted partly of unsigned, notoriously snipey reviews, but mostly of photo essays of beautiful girls lying naked and spread-eagled across rusted fire escapes in Bushwick and long, possibly ketamine-fueled Q&As with high-end photographers or artists who had connections to the designers whose ads comprised most of the rest of the magazine. Though this was unfair, Catherine reflected now, half listening as Franks defended the particularly savage review of the Lucas Borga show which had run in
Mauve
’s winter issue; the magazine had alerted her to the existence of countless younger artists she would never have found out about from the pages of
Artforum
or indeed
Frieze,
much less
The New Yorker
or the
New York Times
.

Under her blazer, the short sleeves of her silk blouse were soaked through with sweat; she widened her elbows a little more on the table in an attempt to distract herself from the discomfort, and prayed that Foster, beside her, was too caught up in his evident bemusement by Franks to notice any odor there happened to be. She looked down at her notes—
Maintaining Independence, Making Decisions, Dangers of Celebrification, Pissing People Off,
one of her checklists read, and she underlined the last and began to mentally prepare a follow-up question for Smith, bouncing off of Franks’s remarks, when her gaze, floating languidly over the audience as she chewed over the words
enemy
and
adversary
, seemed, all at once, in the same moment, to clamp down and yet swerve maniacally. The room was not spinning, but slamming off of itself, like a rubber ball off a set of narrow walls, and she blinked as his face came into focus and then into yet another focus that was so sharp, so visceral, that the first instant of focus seemed only some kind of dreamlike meandering—and he was not looking at her, but now he was, and the eyebrow lift and half-smile he gave her before turning his attention back to Franks was as shocking to her, as much of a jolt to her whole being, as though he had stood up and somehow sung out her name.

Beside her, Foster cleared his throat, and Catherine realized that she had let hang onstage a moment of awkward, unshepherded silence, and into the microphone she let slip an awkward, unshepherded sound: the exhalation of someone who has just been obliged to run up several flights of stairs. Foster looked at her with an inquiring smile, and she turned to him with the follow-up question that was specific only to the coverage of the
Times,
and he took it like the fuck-up it was, and he babysat it for a while and then he handed it, smoothed out and newly layered, on to Smith, and by the time it came back to Catherine, ready to become the segue that would bring the whole discussion to a close, she had determined two things: firstly, that the audience was not a thing that needed to be looked at again, not even glanced at, not even during the long questions-from-the-audience part of the event which she would now have to moderate, and secondly, that her new Isabel Marant blouse was now ruined beyond repair.

The cheerfulness with which she would bestow her greeting would be immense. The warmth would be like a late-evening sun. The affection would be clearly of old, and deep-seated, and barely needing words, even, to settle its amber glow on the heavy air between them, and her smile would be so easy, so natural, and yet so full of knowledge, so full of understanding, of the things that had never been spoken, of the years that had marched through them, and over them, uninterested in the nature of their participation, uninterested in the way it had fallen apart like wet paper, their bond—

(Not wet paper. A tear. A craft knife, its triangular blade down a strip of cardboard, cleaving it so neatly, with such apparent symmetry, the trace of the wound visible even on the surface beneath the space where the parts had joined—)

So many times she had visualized it, dreamed it: their meeting again. At such moments, in such places that she was often ashamed, felt almost diseased with guilt at her own thoughts; even walking up the aisle to Lucien, she had imagined it: his smiling, well-wishing face in the crowd. Only a flash, only the fraction of a moment, but still, it had been there. Yet such moments were uncontrolled; when she daydreamed, when she steered and directed her reveries, they were like this: she saw James first, in enough time to get a hold of herself, get a hold of her face and the expression in her eyes, before he saw her. Thus composed, thus arranged, she would be waiting, and in the street—it was always Dublin, it was always Wicklow Street, for some reason, within view of watching, fascinated people in the window of Cornucopia or one of the other restaurants—when he turned, or when his face, lost in thought, registered the trace of her, the whisper of her, the first, freighted sighting, around them the traffic of cars and shoppers would seem to hush and to become a gentle blur, and they two, two friends, two lost ones, two people who had once again found one another, would stare—