“Who sent you?”
He took another approach, trying to pull her hands off, then trying to get his fingers under the cord, desperately tearing at his neck, drawing blood with his fingernails. He wouldn’t talk; he was at least that professional. She yanked up the tension an extra notch, and the flailing of the arms gave way to a more convulsive movement through his entire body. She had to use all her strength to keep him in the seat, but she couldn’t resist leaning down, whispering breathlessly into his ear.
“You know that song about Jeffers? It’s a celebration. See, Jeffers was a diamond trader, and he was English.”
She couldn’t get the phone working again, even after she’d disentangled it from his body. She took her cell phone and dialed. When Lambert picked up, she said, “Someone came after me. I’ll need removals.”
“Someone from the north?”
“No, he claimed to be one of us.”
“Name?”
“Patrick Jeffers. Passport backs that up.” She looked at the passport she’d retrieved from his jacket. He certainly had the right look.
“Jeffers? There has to be a mistake. Let me just check something.” She could hear Lambert tapping away on his computer keyboard. He was as much an old-timer as she was and always hit the keys like they belonged on a manual typewriter. “Liz, Patrick Jeffers is on his first assignment, but he’s in Damascus; he’s a Middle East specialist.”
She looked at the throttled body, slumped in the chair like a drunk, and now that she thought of it, he hadn’t seemed to recognize the name of Robinson Jeffers, and surely he would have, as surely as she knew who Robbie Burns was.
“Well, I hope he’s doing better than the Jeffers in front of me now.”
Lambert laughed. She liked Lambert; he had a good sense of humor. People didn’t need to look much in this game, but a sense of humor was an absolute must.
H
e took all his girlfriends to Ireland, as it turned out. “All” being defined as the four he had dated since Moira, the inevitably named Moira, with the dark hair and the blue eyes put in with a dirty finger. (This is how he insisted on describing her.
She
would never have used such a hackneyed phrase in general and certainly not for Moira, whose photographic likeness, of which Barry happened to have many, showed a dark-haired, pale-eyed girl with hunched shoulders and a pinched expression.)
When he spoke of Moira, his voice took on a lilting quality, which he clearly thought was Irish, but sounded to her like the kind of singsong voice used on television shows for very young children. She had dark
HAIR
and pale
BLUE
eyes put in with a
DIRTY
FINGER
. Really, it was like listening to one of the Teletubbies wax nostalgic, if one could imagine Po (or La-La or Winky-Dink, or whatever the faggotty purple one was named) hunched over a pint of Guinness in a suitably picturesque Galway bar. It was in such a bar that Barry, without making eye contact, explained how he had conceived this trip to exorcise the ghost of Moira, only to find that it had brought her back in full force (again), and he was oh so sorry, but it was just not to be between them and he could not continue this charade for another day.
So, yes, the above—the triteness of his speech, its grating quality, his resemblance to a Guinness-besotted Teletubby— was what she told herself afterward, the forming scab over the hurt and humiliation of being dumped two weeks into a three-week tour of the Emerald Isle. (And, yes, guess who called it that.) After her first, instinctive outburst—“You asshole!”—she settled down and listened generously, without recriminations. It had not been love between them. He was rich and she was pretty, and she had assumed it would play out as all her relationships did, for most of them had been based on that age-old system of give-and-take, quid pro quo, parting gifts. Twelve to twenty months, two to three trips, several significant pieces of jewelry. Barry was pulling the plug prematurely, that was all, and Ireland barely counted as a vacation in her opinion. It had rained almost every day and the shopping was shit.
Still, she nodded and interjected at the proper moments, signaling the pretty waitress for another, then another, all for him. She nursed her half-pint well into the evening. At closing time, she slipped the waitress twenty euros, straight from Barry’s wallet, and the young woman obligingly helped to carry-drag Barry through the streets to the Great Southern. His eyes gleamed a bit as she and the waitress heaved him on the bed, not that he was anywhere near in shape for the award he was imagining.
(And just how did his mind work, she wondered in passing, how did a man who had just dumped a woman two weeks into a three-week trip persuade himself that the dumpee would then decide to honor him with a going-away threesome? True, she had been a bit wild when they first met.
That was how a girl got a man like Barry, with a few decadent acts that suggested endless possibilities. But once you had landed the man, you kept putting such things off, suggested that the blowjob in the cab would follow the trip to Tiffany’s, not vice versa, and pretty soon he was reduced to begging for the most ordinary favors.)
No, she and her new accomplice tucked Barry in properly and she tipped the waitress again, sending her into the night. Once the girl was gone, she searched his luggage and selected several T-shirts of which he was inordinately fond. These she ripped into strips, which she then used to bind his wrists and ankles to the four-poster bed. She debated with herself whether she needed to gag him—he might awaken, and start to struggle—and decided it was essential. She disconnected the phone, turned the television on so it would provide a nice steady hum in the background, then helped herself to his passport, American Express card, and all the cash he had. As Barry slept the rather noisy sleep of the dead-drunk, snorting and sawing and blubbering, she raided the minibar—wine, water, cashews. She was neither hungry nor thirsty, but the so-called honor bar was the one thing that Barry was cheap about. “It’s the principle,” he said, but his indignation had a secondhand feel to it, something passed down by a parent. Or, perhaps, a girlfriend. Moira, she suspected. Moira had a cheap look about her. She opened a chocolate bar, but rejected it. The chocolate here didn’t taste right.
They were e-ticketed to Dublin, but that was a simple matter. She used the room connection to go online—cost be damned—and rearranged both their travel plans. Barry was now booked home via Shannon, while she continued on to Dublin, where she had switched hotels, choosing the Merrion because it sounded expensive and she wanted Barry to pay. And pay and pay and pay. Call it severance. She wouldn’t have taken up with Barry if she hadn’t thought he was good for at least two years.
It had been Barry’s plan to send
her
home, to continue to Dublin without her, where he would succumb to a mounting frenzy of Moira-mourning. That’s what he had explained in the pub last night. And he still could, of course. But she thought there might be a kernel of shame somewhere inside the man, and once he dealt with the missing passport and the screwed-up airline reservations, he might have the good sense to continue home on the business-class ticket he had offered her. (“Yes, I brought you to Ireland only to break up with you, but I am sending you home business class.”) He was not unfair, not through and through. His primary objective was to be rid of her, as painlessly and guiltlessly as possible, and she had now made that possible. He wouldn’t call the police or press charges, or even think to put a stop on the credit card, which she was using only for the hotel and the flight back.
Really, she was very fair. Honorable, even.
“Mr. Gardner will be joining me later,” she told the clerk at the Merrion, pushing the card toward him, and it was accepted without question.
“And did you want breakfast included, Mrs. Gardner?”
“Yes.” She wanted everything included—breakfast and dinner and laundry and facials, if such a thing were available. She wanted to spend as much of Barry’s money as possible. She congratulated herself for her cleverness, using the American Express card, which had no limit. She could spend as much as she liked at the hotel, now that the number was on file.
It was time, as it turned out, that was hard to spend. For all Barry’s faults—a list that was now quite long in her mind, and growing every day—he was a serious and sincere traveler, the kind who made the most of every destination. He was a tourist in the best sense of the word, a man determined to wring experience from wherever he landed. While in Galway, they had rented a car and tried to follow Yeats’s trail, figuratively and literally, driving south to see his castle and the swans at Coole, driving north to Mayo and his final resting place in the shadow of Ben Bulben, which Barry had confused with the man in the Coleridge poem. She had surprised Barry with her bits of knowledge about the poet, bits usually gleaned seconds earlier from the guidebook, which she skimmed covertly while pretending to look for places to eat lunch. Skimming was a great skill, much underrated, especially for a girl who was not expected to be anything but decorative.
It had turned out that Yeats’s trail was also Moira’s. Of course. Moira had been a literature major in college and she had a penchant for the Irish and a talent, apparently, for making clever literary allusions at the most unlikely moments. On Barry and Moira’s infamous trip, which had included not just Ireland, but London and Edinburgh, Moira had treated Barry to a great, racketing bit of sex after seeing an experimental production of
Macbeth
at the festival. And while the production came off with mixed results, it somehow inspired a most memorable night with Moira, or so Barry had confided over all those pints in Galway. She had brought him to a great shuddering climax, left him spent and gasping for breath, then said without missing a beat: “Now go kill Duncan.” (When the story failed to elicit whatever tribute Barry thought its due—laughter, amazement at Moira’s ability to make Shakespearean allusions after sex—he had added, “I guess you had to be there.” “No thank you,” she had said.)
She did not envy Moira’s education. Education was overrated. A college dropout,
she
had supported herself very well throughout her twenties, moving from man to man, taking on the kind of jobs that helped her meet the right kind of guys—galleries, catering services, film production offices. Now she was thirty—well, possibly thirty-one, she had been lying about her age for so long, first up, then down, that she got a little confused. She was thirty or thirty-one, possibly thirty-two, and while going to Dublin had seemed like an inspired bit of revenge against Barry, it was not the place to find her next patron, strong euro be damned. Paris, London, Zurich, Rome, even Berlin—those were the kind of places where a certain kind of woman could meet the kind of man who would take her on for a while. Who was she going to meet in Dublin? Bono? But he was married and always prattling about poverty.
So, alone in Dublin, she wasn’t sure what to do, and when she contemplated what Barry might have done, she realized it was what Moira might have done, and she wanted no part of that. Still, somehow—the post office done, Kilmainham done, the museums done—she found herself in a most unimpressive town house, studying a chart that claimed to explain how parts of
Ulysses
related to the various organs of the human body.
“Silly, isn’t it?” asked a voice behind her, startling her, not only because she had thought herself alone in the room, but also because the voice expressed her own thoughts so succinctly. It was an Irish voice, but it was a sincere voice, too, the beautiful vowels without all the bullshit blarney, which was growing tiresome. She could barely stand to hail a cab anymore because the drivers exhausted her so, with their outsized personalities and long stories and persistent questions. She couldn’t bear to be alone, but she couldn’t bear all the conversation, all the
yap-yap-yap-yap-yap
that seemed to go with being Irish.
“It’s a bit much,” she agreed.
“I don’t think any writer, even Joyce, thinks things out so thoroughly before the fact. If you ask me, we just project all this symbolism and meaning onto books to make ourselves feel smarter.”
“I feel smarter,” she said with an automatic smile, “just talking to you.” It was the kind of line in which she specialized, the kind of line that had catapulted her from one safe haven to the next, Tarzan swinging on a vine from tree to tree.
“Rory Malone,” he added, offering his hand, offering the next vine. His hair was raven-black, his eyes pale-blue, his lashes thick and dark. Oh, it had been so long since she had been with anyone good-looking. It was something she had learned to sacrifice long ago. Perhaps Ireland was a magical place after all.
“Bliss,” she said, steeling herself for the inane things that her given name inspired. “Bliss Dewitt.” Even Barry, not exactly quick on the mark, had a joke at the ready when she provided her name. But Rory Malone simply shook her hand, saying nothing. A quiet man, she thought to herself, but not
The Quiet Man
. Thank God.
“How long are you here for?”
They had just had sex for the first time, a most satisfactory first time, which is to say it was prolonged, with Rory extremely attentive to her needs. It had been a long time since a man had seemed so keen on her pleasure. Oh, other men had tried, especially in the beginning, when she was a prize to be won, but their best-intentioned efforts usually fell a little short of the mark and she had grown so used to faking it that the real thing almost caught her off guard. Nice.
“How long are you staying here?” he persisted. “In Dublin, I mean.”
“It’s … open-ended.” She could leave in a day, she could leave in a week. It all depended on when Barry cut off her credit. His credit, really. How much guilt did he feel? How much guilt should he feel? She was beginning to see that she might have gone a little over the edge where Barry was concerned. He had brought her to Ireland and discovered he didn’t love her. Was that so bad? If it weren’t for Barry, she never would have met Rory, and she was glad she had met Rory.