Straying by Molly McCloskey

Author:Molly McCloskey [McCloskey, Molly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

ONCE, NOT LONG into the affair, Eddie and I were in the car when I heard Cauley’s voice on the radio. I had a moment of dissociation in which I was not sure if the voice was in my head—I often imagined what Cauley might say to me about this or that—followed by another moment in which I wondered, ridiculously, whether he might say something that would give us away.

We were coming home from Eddie’s parents’ house. Celia and Gerry had had their first baby three weeks before, Ethan was his name, and they had driven down to Sligo to show him off. We’d walked into the sitting room, and Celia was in a big armchair, holding him. Gerry and Eddie’s mother were bent over, eyeing Ethan rapturously, and Eddie’s father was to the left, leaning forward in his wheelchair. Everyone was silent, struck dumb by the miracle of Ethan blinking.

“Ah, come in!” Celia said when she saw us. “The little guy is dying to meet you.”

She handed the baby to Eddie, who took him and rocked him gently, with a naturalness that surprised me. When he turned and offered Ethan to me, I panicked. I felt suddenly frail and shaky, the sort of person you wouldn’t hand a baby to in a million years. But I couldn’t possibly refuse, so I took him, and everyone looked on with their beatific smiles. The impulse to drop the infant was strong—I don’t mean I wanted to, of course, but it was one of those unbidden urges, like veering into oncoming traffic or pitching yourself off a mountain path. Some part of me wanted to drop the baby and just come clean, because it was too much, the way they were all smiling at me, the way they’d entrusted me with this baby of theirs, as though I were someone who could be trusted with anything at all.

“Isn’t that Kevin’s pal?” Eddie said, as we turned up the mountain road. The show’s host had just mentioned the names of his guests, Cauley and two others, who were there to discuss the future of the Abbey Theatre. “The one you met in Dublin that time?”

I had told Eddie I was meeting Cauley for coffee before going to the hospital to interview the psychologist. The idea had been to carve out a plausible space in my life for Cauley to inhabit, though I could see now it would’ve been smarter to say nothing.

I pretended I hadn’t been listening. “Oh,” I said vaguely, and looked down at the radio. “You’re right, it is.”

“Did you ever hear back from him? Wasn’t he going to set you up with some contacts?”

“No,” I said. “I never heard back from him.”

Eddie gave a little snort. He had a particularly low opinion of people who made a show of saying they’d do this and that for you and then didn’t deliver.

“I should’ve followed up,” I said. “I didn’t follow up.”

We listened for a minute. Then Eddie said, “He sounds full of himself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.