Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,164
toast. Anything at all. Up a lazy river, how happy we could be.
Ciaran breezed back into the pub and said to her in a distinctly American accent: Guess who’s coming to dinner?
He drove a brand-new silver Audi. The house was just off the seafront, whitewashed, with roses out front and a dark ironwork fence. It was the same place the brothers had grown up. He had sold it once and had to buy it back for over a million dollars.
—Can you believe it? he said. A million plus.
His wife, Lara, was working in the garden, snipping roses with pruning shears. She was kind, slim, gentle, her gray hair pulled back into a bun. She had the bluest eyes, they looked like small drops of September sky. She pulled her gardening gloves off. There were spatters of color on her hands. She drew Jaslyn close, held her for a moment longer than expected: she smelled of paint.
Inside, there was a lot of artwork on the walls. They wandered around, a glass of crisp white wine for each of them.
She liked the paintings: radical Dublin landscapes, translated as line, shadow, color. Lara had published an art book and managed to sell some in the outdoor art shows in Merrion Square, but she had lost, she said, her American touch.
There was something of the beautiful failure about her.
They ended up in the back garden again, sitting at the patio, a bone of white light in the sky. Ciaran talked of the Dublin real estate market: but really, Jaslyn felt, they were talking about hidden losses, not profits, all the things they had passed by over the years.
After dinner, all three walked along the seafront together, past the Martello Tower and back around. The stars over Dublin sat like paint marks in the sky. The tide was long gone. An enormous stretch of sand disappeared into black.
—That way’s England, said Ciaran, for no reason she could discern.
He put his jacket around her and Lara took her elbow, walked along, wedged between them. She broke free as delicately as she could, drove back to Limerick first thing the next morning. Her sister’s face was glowing. Janice had just met a man. He was on his third tour, she said—imagine that. He wore size-fourteen boots, she added with a wink.
—
Her sister got shipped to the embassy in Baghdad two years ago. Every now and then she still gets a postcard from her. One of them is a picture of a woman in a burka: Fun in the sun.
—
The day dawns winter bright. She finds out in the morning that breakfast is not included in her hotel bill. She can only smile. Four hundred and twenty-five dollars, breakfast not included.
Upstairs, she takes all the soaps from the bathroom, the lotion, the shoeshine cloth, but still leaves a tip for the housekeepers.
She walks in the neighborhood for coffee, up north from Fifty-fifth Street.
The whole world a Starbucks, and she can’t find a single one.
She settles on a small deli. Cream in her coffee. A bagel with butter. She circles back around to Claire’s apartment, stands outside, looks up. It is a beautiful building, brickworked and corniced. But it’s too early to stop by yet, she decides. She turns and walks east toward the subway, her small bag slung over her shoulder.
—
She loves the immediate energy of the Village. It is as if all the guitars have suddenly taken to the fire escapes. Sunlight on the brickwork. Flowerpots in high windows.
She is wearing an open blouse and tight jeans. She feels at ease, as if the streets are releasing her.
A man passes her with a dog inside his shirt. She smiles and watches them go. The dog crawls to the top of the man’s shoulder and looks back at her, its eyes large and tender. She waves, sees the dog disappear down the man’s shirt again.
She finds Pino in a coffee shop on Mercer Street. It is just as easy as she has imagined: she has no idea why, but she was convinced that it would be simple to find him. She could have called him on his cell phone but decided against it. Better to seek him out, find him, in this city of millions. He is alone and hunched over a coffee, reading a copy of La Repubblica. She has the sudden fear that there is a woman somewhere nearby, perhaps even one who is due to join him at any moment, but she doesn’t care.