Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,132
out of the fountain again and again and again.
He wanted to repeat the attempt at lovemaking. Each time another surprise and doubt, as if he did not trust himself, what was happening.
But there is a moment when he wakes now—on this day that I will remember over and over again—when he turns to me and there’s still a hint of wine on his breath.
“So,” he says, “you took my shirt off too.”
“It’s a trick.”
“A good one,” he says.
My hand travels across the sheet to meet him.
“We have to cover the mirilla,” I say.
“The what?”
“The mirilla, the peephole, the spy thing, whatever it is called.”
There is a spyhole in every door of my apartment. The landlord, it seems, once got a good deal on these doors, and hung them all around. You can look from one room to the other and the curved glass makes it either narrow or wide, depending on what side you happen to be on. If you look into my kitchen, the world is tiny. If you look out, it stretches. The bedroom spyhole faces inwards, where Jacobo and Eliana can look in upon me while I am sleeping. They call it the carnival door. It seems to them, through the distortion, as if I lie in the biggest bed in the world. I puff myself up on the world’s largest pillows. The walls curve around me. The first day we moved in I stuck my toes out from under the covers. Mama, your feet are bigger than your head! M’ijo said that the world inside my bedroom seemed stretchy. M’ija said it was made of chewing gum.
Corrigan shifts sideways out of bed. His thin, bare back, his long legs. He steps to the closet. He puts his black shirt on a hanger, wedges the metal end of the hanger in the gap between door and frame. The dangling black shirt covers the spyhole in the door. From outside, the sound of the television.
“We should lock it too,” I say.
“¿Estás segura?”
These small Spanish phrases he uses sound like stones in his mouth, his accent so terrible it makes me laugh.
“Won’t they worry?”
“Not if we don’t.”
He returns to the bed, naked, embarrassed, covering himself. He slips beneath the covers, nudges against my shoulder. Singing. Off-key. “Can you tell me how-to-get, how-to-get to Sesame Street?”
I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it. Feel the rush of sweetness: we make love.
I do not even hear the pounding at the door, but Corrigan stops and grins and kisses me, a rim of sweat at the top of his brow.
“That’ll be Elmo.”
“I think it’s Grouchy.”
I step out of bed and remove the shirt from the hanger in front of the spyhole, look down. I see the tops of their heads: their eyes look tiny and confused. I pull Corrigan’s shirt on and open the door. Bend down to eye level. Jacobo holds an old blanket in his hands. Eliana an empty plastic glass. They are hungry they say, first in English and then in Spanish.
“Just a minute,” I tell them. I am a terrible mother. I should not do this. I close the door again, but open it just as quickly, rush out into the kitchen, fill two bowls with cereal, two glasses of water.
“Quiet now, niños. Promise me.”
I step back to the bedroom, glance at my children through the spyhole, in front of the television, spilling cereal on the carpet. I cross the room and jump on the bed. I throw the sheet to the floor, and then I fall beside Corrigan, pull him close. He is laughing, his body at ease.