Nothing to Declare
All the senior partners were having a laugh about a movie they’d seen. Forty-Five Years. Something, something about the movie taking forty-five years to sit through. The woman McGuinness thought he recognized was into it with them at the far end of the table—leaning in, as if hearing everything for the second time. “Miss Nail!” they were calling her. “What do you say, Miss Nail? Tell us.” They were all laughing. He didn’t know what it was about.
The woman wasn’t tall, but was slender in a brown linen dress, a tailored dress that set off her tan and showed her well-drawn body. She’d glanced past him twice—possibly more. A flickering look asking to be thought accidental, but could be understood as acknowledgment. She’d smiled, then looked away, a smile that said possibly she knew him, or had. So peculiar, he thought, not to remember. Eventually he would.
They were at the Monteleone, the shadowed old afternoon redoubt with the bar that was a carousel. It wasn’t crowded. Outside the tall windows on Royal a parade was shoving past. Boom-pa-pa, boom-pa-pa. Then the trumpets not altogether on key. St. Paddy’s was Tuesday. Now was only Friday.
At his end, the younger associates were talking about “contracts for deed.” People were getting rich again, they said. “Help the banks out,” one of them said. “The first fish to go ashore. Gut und schlecht. Man would rather will nothingness than not will . . .” Theirs was the old Poydras Street Hibernian firm Coyne, Coyle, Kelly, McGuinness, et al. Friday was the usual after-hours fall-by with the juniors. Give them a chance to find their place, etc. McGuinness was there to be congenial.
The woman had arrived with someone. A Mr. Drown. Someone’s client who’d left. She was drinking too much. Everybody ordered the Sazerac the moment they arrived in New Orleans. The guilty taste of anise. She’d had three or more.
Her eyes passed him again. Another smile. She raised her chin as if to challenge him. The old priest was to her left—Father Fagan in his dog collar. He’d fathered a child, possibly two. Had diverse tastes. His brother was a traffic judge. “Why would sex with me be better than with your husband?” he heard the woman say. The men all laughed—too loud. The priest rolled his eyes, shook his head. “What did Thomas Merton say . . .” Old Coyne said. The priest put his hand to his brow. “What’re they saying now?” someone said where he was sitting—one of the young women. “Nothing new,” was the answer. “Coyne thinks he’s a priest when what he is is a son of a bitch.”
“Miss Nail! Miss Nail! What do you say about that?” They were shouting again.
THEY HAD TRAVELED TO ICELAND TOGETHER THIRTY-FIVE YEARS ago (though to be here now was shocking). Both students in Ithaca. They’d known each other only slightly, which hadn’t mattered. A Catholic-school boy from uptown. Her mother, a rich landscape painter living in the Apthorp; her father on a yacht in Hog Bay. Both parents were colorful drunks. Minor exotics.
They’d first decided on Greece for spring recess—again, knowing little of each other, but ready for an adventure. Mikonos. The limpid water. The little bleached houses you rented for pennies. Each day the natives caught a fish and cooked it for you. However, there was money enough only for Iceland. Their trip wasn’t being advertised at home. She was then called “Barbara.” A name she disliked. He was simply Sandy McGuinness. Alex. A lawyer’s son. His mother was a school teacher. Nothing about them was exotic.
With their pooled money they took a package flight to Reykjavik and the bus to the far western fjords. Ten hours. There’d be hostels, they believed; friendly Icelanders, wholesome, cheap food, cold Scandinavian sun. But there’d been none of that. Not even a room to let. A fisherman who tended a cod-drying rack far out a dirt road, and who spoke little English, offered them a sod house with goats asleep on the roof. Free of charge. Sandy was in love with her before the flight departed.
In the sod house, they slept cold together, talked, smoked cigarettes, sat beside the fjord in what little sun was available. He made unsuccessful efforts to fish, while she warmed her legs and read Neruda on Machu Picchu, Ken Kesey, Sylvia Plath. She told him she had Navajo blood on her father’s side. He was a blacklisted director. Her mother was in essence a courtesan and half-French. About herself, she said she wished to acquire repose—the inner resolve (elusive) she’d read about in Fitzgerald. She told him she’d loved women.
The fisherman provided them cod, hard soda bread, herring, yeasty homemade beer, blankets, candles, kindling for the March chill. One night he invited them. There was his wife, and two children who spoke English but were shy. The wife scowled at Barbara. They visited only once. They were twenty. It was 1981.
Sandy McGuinness did not know, really, what to think about what he was doing. When they talked, Barbara punctuated her phrases with small, audible intakes of breath, as if these were conversations they neither would forget—though in his view they didn’t seem very important. What he did think was that she was beautiful and intense and unfathomable, but possibly not as smart as he was. Often, as their week idled past, he would see her watching him as he performed his homely duties required to keep them warm and dry—moving wood, airing blankets, sweeping. She was assessing him, he knew, as prelude to some decision. He didn’t know what needed to be decided about him. And then she told him, unexpectedly, she was intending to stay on after he left—to learn to read the sagas, which she believed would help confer the repose she so badly wanted.
To which Sandy McGuinness thought: Yes. Loving her did not mean more than how he felt at that moment. He would go happily back. Perhaps he would see her again, or not. He was thinking about veterinary school. She could read her sagas. He also felt he could easily marry her.
On their last day, they’d gone into the little town for Sandy to find the bus, after which she was returning to the sod house. She’d arranged to do domestic work for the cod dryer’s wife—a victory, she said. She also said—to him, smiling into the glinting sun, looking luminous and foreign in her big blue sweater—“You know, sweetheart,” she said, “we don’t want anyone else once we’ve learned who we are. It’s a very hard choice to make.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” he said. His cheap, black-nylon bag sat beside him at the bus stop. She had the smile. Radiant. Caramel-colored eyes. The shining mahogany hair she dried in the sun. They had made love that morning—not very memorably. She had begun to talk with fewer than the necessary words. As if so much didn’t need to be said, and so much was obvious. She was, he felt, pretentious and self-infatuated. Leaving was a fine idea. What he’d be missing was miss-able. In the stark light her face bore a coarseness he hadn’t noticed, but supposed he would grow to dislike.
“Good choices don’t make very good stories,” she said. “Have you noticed that?” The sun passed across her eyes, making her squint.
“I haven’t,” he said. “I thought they did.”
“We’ll see each other again, won’t we?” she said. “We’ll talk about that. Decide if it’s true.”
She kissed him on the cheek, then began making her way purposefully back down the narrow street.