Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,131

tan mark, but not the cross, since it sits underneath his shirt, and it looks like he wears a necklace of white skin that finishes in midair. Some bruises on his skin still: his blood disorder.

He opens his eyes and blinks a moment, makes a sound that is somewhere between pain and awe. He pushes his feet out from under the sheets, looks around the room.

“Oh,” he says, “it’s morning.”

“It is.”

“How did my trousers get over there?”

“You drank too much vino.”

“¿De veras?” he says. “And I became what—an acrobat?”

From upstairs, the sound of footsteps, our neighbors awakening. He waits out the sounds, the eventual thump of their feet into shoes.

“The children?”

“They’re watching Sesame Street.”

“We drank a lot.”

“We did.”

“I’m not used to it anymore.” He runs his hands over the sheets, comes to the curve of my hip, draws away.

More sounds from above, a shower, the fall of something heavy, the click of a woman’s high heels across the floor. Mine is the apartment that receives all noises, even from the basement below. For one hundred and ten dollars a month, I feel as if I live inside a radio.

“Are they always this loud?”

“Just wait until their teenagers wake.”

He groans and looks up at the ceiling. I wonder what it is Corrigan is thinking: up there, his God, but first my neighbors.

“Doctor, help me,” he says. “Tell me something magnificent.”

He knows that I have always wanted to be a doctor, that I have come all the way from Guatemala with this intention, that I was not able to finish medical school at home, and he knows too that I have failed here, I never even got to the steps of a university, that there was probably never a chance in the first place, and yet still he calls me “Doctor.”

“Well, I woke up this morning and diagnosed a very early case of happiness.”

“Never heard of it,” he says.

“It’s a rare disease. I caught it just before the neighbors woke.”

“Is it contagious?”

“Don’t you have it yet?”

He kisses my lips, but then turns away from me. The unbearable weight of the complications he carries, his guilt, his joy. He lies on his left shoulder, his legs tuck into a bend, and he puts his back to me—he looks as if he wants to crouch and protect himself.

The first time I saw Corrigan, I was looking out the window of the nursing home. He was there, through the dirty panes, loading up Sheila and Paolo and Albee and the others. He had been in a fight. There were cuts and bruises on his face and he looked at first glance like exactly the sort of man I should stay away from. And yet there was something about him that was loyal—that’s the only word I knew, fidelidad—he seemed to be loyal to them because maybe he knew what their lives were. He used wooden planks to roll the wheelchairs up into the van and he strapped them in. He had pasted his van with peace and justice stickers: I thought maybe he had a sense of humor to go along with his violence. I found out later that the cuts and the bruises were from the pimps—he took their worst punches and never hit back. He was loyal to the girls too, and to his God, but even he knew that the loyalty had to break somewhere.

After a moment he turns to me, runs his finger along my lips, then out of the blue he says: “Sorry.”

We were hasty last night. He fell asleep before I did. A woman might think it thrilling to make love to a man who had never in his life made love before, and it was, the thought of it, the movement towards it, but it was as if I was making love to a number of lost years, and the truth is that he cried, he put his head on my shoulder, and he could not keep hold of my gaze, couldn’t bear it.

A man who holds a vow that long is entitled to anything he wants.

I told him that I loved him and that I’d always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it. He replied that I was not to worry, that the penny could come