Over Our Heads

Stag

Goofy on Valium for a lumbar sprain, I hobbled the streets of Midtown. It was early evening, late spring, and the pavements were thronged with open-collared crowds muscling from office to subway. Behind me lay a day’s frustration examining bulge-bracket risk assessments; ahead of me a night of TV, back pain, analgesics. On the Lower East Side, Jeanine was bacheloretting with three of her Gamma Phi sisters, all of whom had blown off work to treat her to a spa day. In a week’s time, my own half of the wedding party would consist of the sisters’ husbands, since the last of my real friends were back home in Ireland and each was too skint to cover air fare or too slammed with work or whatever else.

They were decent guys, the husbands — prep-school types to a man, who wore loafers with no socks, went out to brunch on weekends and spoke in booming, good-timey voices that got boomier and good-timier the more they drank — but they weren’t my friends. Neither were the other analysts with whom I chatted solely about work-related topics across cubicle walls, or the guys with whom I played silent, elbowy pick-up basketball on Thursday evenings. I’d told Jeanine that it would be too weird to ask any of them to stand at an altar with me, told her too — when she’d called from the cab between the seaweed wrap and pre-dinner margaritas — that I’d be fine and that I didn’t mind not having a stag night. But now I felt homesick and thirsty.

During my first few months in the city, I’d often fled with a book and a flask from the lonely jostle of the streets to the tranquil water and open air of the Bethesda Terrace. I’d stopped needing to do that since meeting Jeanine, yet now — bookless, flaskless — I set a course for the park in hope of finding an hour’s escape. I waited to cross Fifty-ninth in the shadow of a grand hotel in whose bridal suite, at my father-in-law’s expense, I would soon spend my wedding night. Traffic pulled at my sleeves and dung-stink crowded my nostrils. On the far side of the street, I saw a horse tethered to a hansom cab and, beside it, a figure in the shape of Stephen Quinn. Whenever I was lonely, the faces of New York crowds had a way of throwing up people from home — a half-glimpsed ridge of nose or freckle of cheek that to my mind could belong only to someone who’d been better than me at football or sat beside me in Art. Most of the time, probably, it was a mirage. But this time it really was him.

When we were kids, Stephen and I had been close in a way that I think might be exclusive to friendships between only children of divorce. His mother cooked dinner for me twice weekly, and mine for him, and we hated each other’s fathers almost as much as we hated our own. We ran away together, shoplifted together, defended each other in schoolyard battles — and then, the summer we finished school, I spent a night with his girlfriend for reasons I could never fully grasp, and ended up starting college with a partially detached retina and two fractured bones in my right hand. The bones had healed by Halloween, and I suppose Stephen’s bruises had too, but he wouldn’t take my calls, and by Christmas I stopped calling. It had been almost a decade since we’d spoken, but I knew from Facebook friends of Facebook friends that he and Ciara were still together, and that recently they’d been in the city visiting her sister who was over on a J-1. With Jeanine in the bathroom one evening, I’d stalked my way to Ciara’s photo albums and scrolled through them, both glad and disappointed that we hadn’t run into each other. I knew now that the sister was back home in Dublin. I hadn’t known that Stephen and Ciara had stayed on.

The light changed. I waited. Pedestrians surged past and Stephen approached without seeing me. Was it Valium or loneliness that made me shout his name? His eyes were neutral as they met mine. Then his lips divided in a smile, and we stood for a moment to look each other over. He wore a red hoody, baggy jeans and tightly laced desert boots, all of which appeared to have been picked for nights lounging in beer gardens but had seen too much work and wear. I noticed that he was balding and had grown harder through the shoulders. I noticed him notice my greying temples and swelling middle.

‘Well,’ he said.

We dispensed quickly with how-have-you-beens and what-are-you-up-to-nows, volunteering little and pretending to know less about each other than we did. We asked about each other’s mothers and I asked him how he liked New York. And then, pleasantries over — we were Irish, what else was there? — he said:

‘Pint?’

Three avenues to the east, I knew all too well, there was a string of places with walls decked in county colours and jukeboxes stocked with the Fureys and the Clancy Brothers. And a short F train ride to the south there was a dark hole in the wall with the best Guinness in the city on tap. I could smell the resin of the tables, taste the tang of hops in the air, see the glint of light on the optics.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m off the stuff.’

‘For how long?’

‘For good.’

‘Jesus.’ Stephen sounded scandalized. ‘That’s a bit drastic, no? How’d you decide that?’

‘It was decided for me.’

He grinned. ‘Ball-breaker, is she?’

‘Who?’

‘Your missus.’ He shrugged off my look of surprise. ‘You’re getting married, yeah? You know the way it is. My Mam met your Mam’s neighbour.’

I thought of loose talk in supermarket aisles, coffee-shop eavesdropping on Sunday afternoons. I missed my mother.

‘No,’ I said — what was the point of lying? ‘It was the doctor.’

‘Doctor?’ Stephen frowned. ‘You’re not going to tell me you were, what, an alcoholic?’

‘They tell us we always are.’

‘Jesus.’ He held a hand to his mouth to conceal either shock or delight. ‘Of all people —’

A toothy kid in a top hat with tassels interrupted Stephen’s victory lap to thrust a laminated price list between us.

‘Carriage ride?’ he said. ‘Around the park. Very romantic.’

‘Go ’way, you,’ Stephen said. ‘We’re not queers, we’re —’

‘Old friends.’ I waved the kid away. ‘I was about to go for a walk in the park, actually,’ I told Stephen, eager for any company at all and curious as to what his company might mean. ‘Interested?’

He looked beyond me, deep into Fifth Avenue. I followed his gaze and saw a mob of shoppers and a tangle of traffic squeezed between glass buildings and shrouded in silver steam.

‘Sure,’ he stroked his dark stubble. ‘Herself is working around the corner but I’m not picking her up for a while yet.’

We beat a cab off the line and, passing through the cloud of doughy sweetness wafting from a churro stand, made for the entrance to the park. I tried to see in Stephen some of my old excitement about the city, but he walked with the same languid economy as ever; even with my limp it was no struggle to match his pace. Growing up, I’d understood his listless stride as expressing comfort in his surroundings, but now it made him seem stubborn and incurious. As we walked he told me his story: laid off from the garage where he’d worked since school; tourist visas they’d already overstayed; a waitress job for her, a construction gig for him; a month-to-month in Elmhurst. I told him about Jeanine, my lack of stag.

‘You poor bastard,’ he said, a little too happily. ‘But what would you have done anyway, what with your … you know?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I didn’t get that far. Pizza?’

‘Board games? Orange juice? Sounds like the birthday parties we had when we were nine years old.’

I stumbled on a root and checked my fall with an arm around Stephen’s waist. Through his clothes, he was warm and solid.

‘What’s up with you?’ he said.

I told him about the weights I’d been lifting in the run-up to the wedding and the muscle twinge that had laid me up in bed for the past three days.

‘Jesus. You’re falling apart, lad.’

‘Says you, bald as a coot?’

‘I’m not bald, it’s a solar panel for a … what’s the joke?’

‘A sex machine.’

‘So, come here to me, did you at least get any good meds out of it?’

I took the pill bottle from my inside pocket and passed it to him. He squinted at the label, unscrewed the cap and shook a pill into the palm of his hand. He brought the hand to his lips and passed the bottle back. I pocketed it again.

‘Are you not having one as well?’

‘I’m pacing myself.’

We walked in silence along the mossy bank of a duck pond, below street level and hemmed in by trees. Water moved in slow ripples to the bank. Old men sitting on benches tore up loaves of bread.

‘So, how’s herself?’ I said, to get it out of the way.

‘She’s grand.’ Stephen reached out a hand and watched himself turn it over in the breeze.

We stopped at the crest of the bridge to lean against the wall. Its stone was scored and eaten, its grooves crusted with seed pods. In the water, the buildings of Central Park South reached down towards a failing sun. In the distance, rocks like the backs of whales jutted from the park’s green surface, above them the vivid leaves and the grey filigree of branches. I thought I could smell on Stephen the compound of soap and old apples that would always be his mother’s house.

‘So, let me ask you,’ he said, ‘why really did you … you know?’

Often, in the years since — at the library in Belfield, my cubicle in Citywest or my office in East Midtown — I’d thought of the evening I’d run into Ciara at the pub while Stephen was at work, of our drinking and dreaming aloud about our futures before staggering down towards the beach together. I’d wondered what either of us might have been hoping for. I’d wondered why she’d felt she had to tell him and how he could forgive her but not me. And I’d wondered too where Stephen might be, and what it would be like if we saw each other again. Of course, I’d known that I’d need to have an answer for him. Why didn’t I?

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Honestly, Stephen, I am.’

‘Yeah.’

‘No really, that’s something we’re supposed … It’s something I’ve wanted to say.’

‘Lord,’ he spoke through his nose in a rising cadence I remembered from mimicking priests, ‘grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and — shit, what’s the rest of it? The wisdom?’

‘Courage.’

‘The courage to — shit. What?’

‘Change the —’

‘Forget it.’

At our feet, in the breeze, candy wrappers dragged their knuckles against the stone and fingered our ankles. Stephen’s lips parted to shape a word but he didn’t speak. He flicked a pebble from the wall, and we moved off over the bridge. We crossed a running path and cut through a copse of apple blossoms. On a baseball diamond, two Little League teams were playing. The kids wore bright uniforms, orange versus blue. Without discussing it, Stephen and I sat on a rock that gave us a decent view. I thought of truant afternoons by the cliffs, bottles of strong cider in our schoolbags. The orange team’s pitcher stamped the dirt and squinted at the catcher’s signals. The wind-up was brief, the pitch itself a blur. The ball slammed into the catcher’s mitt as the batter swung at air. The pitcher’s mother, a sinewy woman not much older than us, nodded slowly and clapped just once, while other parents, clustered on the bleachers, twisted the corners of their mouths.

‘There’s always one like that, isn’t there?’ Stephen said.

‘Like what?’

‘Like it’s a law of the universe or something. Put any group of kids together and one’ll always stand out head and shoulders above the rest. Wouldn’t you think he’d leave off a bit?’

‘I was always shite at sports.’

‘Remember your run?’

‘It’s still my run.’

‘All elbows and high knees. What’d we call you?’

‘The chicken.’

‘The chicken, that’s right.’

Stephen flapped his elbows and squawked, and a few of the parents shot us stony glances until I punched him in the arm to stop. The teams changed over. The blue team’s pitcher was a beanpole whose jersey bunched around his belt. Soon balls were plinking off bats.

‘Come on,’ Stephen said, ‘or I’ll be in trouble.’

He helped me to my feet and we walked to Columbus Circle. A smear of yellow cabs wound around the fountain. High above us, atop his pillar, the stone Genoan stretched a foot into space.

‘Well,’ Stephen said, ‘this was unexpected.’

‘It was good,’ I said. ‘And here, take my number. Give me a shout if you need … if you ever want to.’

He punched into his phone the numbers I recited. I watched him hit ‘Save’ and type the letters of my surname. I took out my phone and waited for him to speak numbers of his own. He looked at it in my hand.

‘Sure, I’ll see you again,’ he said, and I realized that what I’d hoped for was impossible. He thumped me in the biceps and I watched him lope away, thick shoulders rolling as he sought space in the crowd that swallowed him.

A metal globe tilted from a marble plinth beside the subway entrance. Its continents shone, encircled by rings that traced the orbits of things I couldn’t see. I rode the 1 to Ninety-sixth where I ground my teeth as I climbed the steps and the grip of Valium weakened. The wind howled across Broadway edged with the dankness of the river. I stopped at a deli on the corner to buy aspirin, bagels for the morning and, at the register, two new bridal magazines to add to Jeanine’s collection. As I waited for my change, I tried not to listen to the fridges’ hum. Instead I wondered about Stephen and Ciara, and where they might have gone to once he picked her up.

At the door of our building, I nodded hello to Armand from across the hall and retreated from the scent of whiskey rising from his breath. Inside the apartment, I plugged my iPod into the stereo — a habit from when I’d lived alone and grown to fear what I might do with silence. I refilled Jeanine’s two-gallon water filter from the tap and, as I manoeuvred it on to the shelf, a shock of pain stole my breath. I closed the fridge door and leaned against it gasping, uncapped the aspirin bottle and swallowed three of them dry. Then I limped to the armchair and lowered myself slowly. I rested my phone on the arm and watched its screen not lighting.

Some hours later I woke to the sound of Jeanine clunking in the hallway. I gripped the arms of the chair and tried to stand but couldn’t. She lurched into the room with her hair slung over her eyes, one knee-high boot flapping in her hand and the other still clinging to her calf.

‘I’m trapped.’ She heaved the booted foot into my lap and braced herself against the bookcase. ‘Off. Help.’

I followed the line of her leg to a hard stomach bared just a sliver where her white shirt lifted. The flesh there was pale and taut, both powerful and fine. I swallowed the pain of raising my arms and fumbled with the boot’s tiny buckles.

‘You’ll never guess who I met,’ I said.

Jeanine kicked the boot into the base of the sofa and veered towards the stereo. She squinted at the screen of my iPod and spun the wheel to rack up the volume.

‘Neighbours,’ I warned, picturing the pleated face of the Russian woman in the adjoining unit.

‘To hell with the neighbours! Dance with me.’

Her fingers trailed in the air above her head and touched a current she let flow through her limbs. Her hair kicked about her face, her eyes closed, her lips parted. Who had watched her while I waited?

‘I can’t,’ I said.

‘What is it?’ She yanked the iPod from its cable and dropped to a knee at my side. Her eyes were wet, the pupils yawning. ‘What do you need? The doctor? I’ll get the doctor.’

‘I’m fine. I just need to rest.’

‘Okay,’ Jeanine swallowed. ‘I’ll just go puke real quick.’

Through the slats of blinds we’d hung together, I watched the darkened buildings of Ninety-ninth Street. The brickwork was chipped and traffic-blackened, and something white shone from a corner window. I tried to remember the feel of double vision, of a floor tile against my cheek. Jeanine emerged from the bathroom, throat pale, lip bitten. An orange trickle rimmed the collar of her shirt.

‘You’ll never guess who I met,’ I said.

‘You know,’ Jeanine drifted into the centre of the room, ‘it’s not really fair that I had such fun at my bachelorette and you never got to have a bachelor … No — what do you call it? — a stag party.’

Her hips began to sway against remembered music. She dug her thumbs inside the waistband of her jeans and tugged them over the points of her hips.

‘Jeanine,’ I said.

‘Would you have wanted something like this?’

She backed into me giggling and aimed a kiss across her shoulder. I rested my hands on her thighs and read the Braille of gooseflesh.

‘You’re freezing cold.’ I pulled the blanket from the chair back and held it over her chest.

‘I just wanted to dance for you,’ she said but her voice was distant, her body still, her eyes already closed.

Until dawn I sat holding on to her as she mumbled to herself and frowned. Her face was red from drink, smudged with make-up, free of worry. A week later we were married. Jeanine’s friends wore green and their husbands wore the ties I’d bought for them. We looked good together. Jeanine looked happy. The photographer wanted to take pictures of us in the park but it rained all day.