Exactly six months before the crash, I had arrived in America. My new world. So this is America, I marvelled. Beautiful, beautiful America!
I was 23. I had been sitting away the last afternoons of my youth in my uncle’s constituency office in county Kerry. Finally, long after I had given up hope for it, a graduate scholarship I had applied for during my final year at college came through. Soon afterwards I arrived to do an MSc in Environmental Studies at Georgetown, a Jesuit-run university in a smart suburb of Washington DC.
At the welcome reception for new graduate scholars I was chatting to a Dutch nuclear physicist when Lucy appeared. “Wow…” I remember thinking the exact moment I first saw her swaying slenderly by the entrance.
I can see her standing there still more clearer and real than in any of the years in that terrible short moment’s shadow – as if I saw her there that once, then never again. The loose fall of her gleaming auburn hair – that floppy curtain over her face and her dark eyes’ peculiar brightness, bright, even from this distance, as a crush of diamonds. And her mouth… Already, the mystery of her mouth fascinated me. What lay behind those neat expressionless lips? I had to know. She was easily the most beautiful girl I’d yet seen in America. By far, the most attractive. I had been there two days. I could see she wasn’t comfortable. She seemed tentative. She looked as if she was not quite sure whether she was going to commit to staying in the room. But despite that, her whole being managed to project a sort of secure, disciplined and rich elegance. The kind you would want to capture, somehow.
When she’d left, finally deciding to bail, I felt I was in the wrong place straight away. Fock it. Time for a smoke. She might be outside.
So I left. Exited the building. And there she was, suddenly beside me, clutching an unlit cigarette between the fine long fingers of her left hand.
“You look like my best chance for a match,” she announced way before I’d decided what to say. (Later, much later, I would read in her diary she just then noticed my ‘something about them blue’ eyes).
“I do. Sure. I do - somewhere.” I fumbled through each of the pockets of my corduroy pants.
“You’re from air. Aren’t you?” she asked Englishly.
I was patting the top pocket of my tweed suit-coat for the lighter’s outline. “Sorry?” I suspended my quest to work out what she meant.
“Air?” she repeated. “A r e y o u a c t u a l l y E y e r i s h ?”
“Air…” I echoed. “Éire. Fock. I thought you said ‘air’. Totally. I am.” Then resuming my search, eventually I manœuvered a yellow disposable from inside the lining of my jacket. Lucy waited for me to light it. “Your fag’s the wrong way around,” I pointed out. Slight embarrassment made her seem almost vulnerable. As she turned it the right way, she took the lighter from me, playing at being abrupt. I wondered in as earnest a manner as I could gather. “Czech or Khirgiz… I’d guess Khirgiz?”
“No…,” she replied with a strained look. “… No. Actually, I’m from London…”
“Really?” I tried to sound surprised. She offered me the pack and I carefully retrieved one while she still held on to it.
“You are joking?” she added slightly more softly.
“Feebly,” I conceded. I began my lighter hunt all over again.
“I see,” she replied inscrutably. But when she returned the lighter with such obviously feigned innocence I felt it’d be cool to introduce myself.
“I’m Lucy,” she responded and as she did so I noticed she had a peculiarly attractive way of being able to blow smoke out from one side of her mouth and at the same time speak. “I’m so glad I’ve found someone here with a sense of humour. Americans are like, so totally sincere it’s actually not true… So, ah,” she caught up with herself. “You study here?” Between pulls she was slowly twirling a silver bracelet around her wrist.
“Just starting,” I said after a drag.
“Me too. I was just at a reception… Eek! I should have stayed -”
“No, no you’re cool…,” I consoled. “… You can’t smoke inside.”
“… Or out,” she interrupted readily, pointing to a sign which said just that. “What brings you to the land, the land of the free?”
“Dinero, I s’pose,” I said after a moment’s thought. “You?”
“Me? Why, we don’t even know each other.”
“What?” Now I was confused. Touché! “I meant…” She was smiling. How beautiful was she when she did that. “I meant,” I continued haltingly. “I meant ‘did you get a scholarship too?’” She nodded, still smiling. “Oh, which subject?” I was very interested.
“Environment,” she replied.
“Snap. That is great,” I said, certainly. “Me too.”
“I haven’t seen so many blazers since school.” She threw her head derisively, vaguely in the direction of the reception.
“Only guy I’ve met so far’s doing Nuclear Studies,” I offered, meeting her level.
“Great. More Doctor Evil’s. Cambridge was crammed with them.” She radiated something. Even now - years later after all that has happened - I still cannot quite touch what it was.
“Speaking of Doctor Evil,” I suddenly thought to say. “I’m sure I saw Henry Kissinger in my hotel lobby this morning.”
“I saw him too,” she said, picking up the baton. “We must be in the same hotel.”
“Georgetown Inn?” I tried.
She indicated ‘yes’. “I’m actually about to go back for lunch.” She was offering, it seemed. But perhaps not. She stepped one of her feet on the cigarette she’d just dropped to the ground. I noticed her sneakers. Something about them made her still quite adolescent. Converse All Stars. Without them the rest of her was too grown up, too elegant: the unapproachable beauty you’d see at an opening of an exhibition. But Converse coupled with the rest of her perfectly matched what in reality she was: an American post-grad student with the definite air of an English In Tatler woman.
“What do you plan to do?” she asked, bringing my thoughts back to reality.
“City tour with all the blazers,” I replied. “You?”
“Actually, I saw it on the way in from the airport.”
“Nice?”
“Ish.” She paused. “Athens - without the ruins.”
“Yet,” I offered. She smiled. Wow. I resolved to make her smile as much as I could.
A group of name tagged enblazered students started pouring out of the building past us. I noticed some of the faces from the reception. “Pallas Athena for me then,” I added obscurely. “Still not tempted?” Lucy shook her head and touched her belly to say ‘I’m hungry’. “I’d better not bunk,” I said. I thought it probably was not a good thing to start mitching so soon after arriving.
“Square.”
“As if,” I replied. She cracked me up. And she smiled again. “Let’s meet later?” I suggested.
“Ah, so many people to see…”
London girls. To be expected. I’m here to meet Secret History Americans anyhow. “Right… See you in class, I guess.” And did I blush? Well, I suppose I must have – Lucy’s diary when I read later said I had.
“Joke? English humour,” she said with an American accent. “You do give up easily, don’t you? Like, I have anything to do here for, like, the rest of the year.”
“Hotel bar. Eight?” Bollocks. Doing it again. If I wasn’t absurd confidence masked by shyness, I was the other way around.
“Thirst got to you already?” Lucy put on her version of an Irish brogue when she said this. I struggled for a response. “I’ll be seeing you there,” she concluded Irishly before I’d found one.
And as I walked hurriedly after the group, I glanced back at her. She was already lighting another fag.
Later that evening in the hotel bar, we got pissed and had one of those enthusiastic getting-to-know-one-another-for-the-first-time kinds of conversations. You know the type: you share and find out how much in common you have with someone you’ve already decided to become friends with.
It emerged, almost immediately, that we’d charted similar courses through the post-adolescent rites of passage available to bourgeois north-west Europeans:
We’d both gone to boarding schools.
We’d both spent sixth form summer in Europe, with friends. Lucy in Rome. Me in Cap Ferrat.
That was the summer, I told her, I’d pulled my first real girlfriend. Something in her expression suggested my candour rather surprised, perhaps even appalled, her. Why I felt I had to tell her that then, I have no idea – in vino mistakass? But she’d quickly decided to reciprocate so told me that’d been the summer she had first fallen in love – he had been 25, in advertising, with his own Porsche.
We’d both learned Spanish during the first half of our gap years between school and university – Me in Barcelona; she in Madrid.
And we’d both spent the rest of our gap years’ travelling throughout southern Asia. We were there at the same time. But try as we might we never could ascertain that we’d been within five hundred miles of one another. We did discover, however, that we’d both spent long months travelling similarly alone in places not even mentioned in the Lonely Planet. I silently admired the strength of character it must have taken for Lucy as a lone girl to do so. She told me of that poor class in Kerala she’d mistakenly taught erroneous maths.
“Imagine we’d met there?” Lucy burst out as she was half-way through her third cocktail. I wished we had.
“It’s mad,” I gushed. I was trying to eke out the last drops of my fifth. I didn’t want her to think I was a boozer. “We both went to Trinity College.” Lucy had been an undergraduate at Cambridge. I had just graduated from Dublin University. We ordered a couple more.
She asked me about where I’d grown up. “In the Dublin mountains,” I replied. “We lived in the yard of a big house which belonged to my family. At night - night, from my bedroom window I used to stare at the lines and lines of yellow lights strung out across the bay. Stretching all the way from Malahide to Bray.”
“What lovely names,” Lucy said softly.
“It was countryside then. Now it’s suburbs. The big house’s gone. And the yard. And the rugged endless green Laurel clad glen with its old water wheel now all cleared. The river is culverted with concrete and what’s left of the gardens is a public park. It really breaks my heart. Municipal park Sunday walking, duck feeding and rock concerts now… It used to be our own private Eden. My cousin Sorcha and I knew every square inch. Two thousand acres. Years - we spent building our kingdoms. In wood and stone. Tree-climbing. I hate that it’s gone forever. Hundreds of years it took to get the way it was. They destroyed it in three weeks with Caterpillars and JCBs. Such a crime really. Lots of money though. I love my family! Do you still live where you grew up?”
“Kind of. We moved next door, when Mummy died. I was eight.” She played with her fringe. “I have always wanted to visit Ireland. I love Joyce. Molly Bloom’s, yes, yes, yes, song of songs was my party piece,” she added quickly. Closing off one subject by opening up another.
“I think he’s shit,” I said.
She just nodded her head from side to side knowingly. “I don’t really know where to start with you, Jamie,” she admitted with an indulgent smile. “You have so much to learn.”
After that we were silent for a moment or two. It wasn’t awkward – we both just lit cigarettes and thought our own thoughts. Lucy then got up to go to the loo. When she returned, I coaxed out of her something of her hectic west London adolescence: she hated all games except tennis. A cello prodigy, who became, by fifteen, precocious with coked-up champagne swilling City Eurotrash bankers and soon to be former model friends on Kensington Roof Gardens many weekday nights. The ‘Grey Goose’ days, she called them.
And I told her about mine and my comparably provincial backdrops: inseparable from my tomboy cousin Sorcha for years and years every day an adventure around the grounds. Then the goings away to schools there becoming rugby playing emo Cure head eventually chrysalising into a galloping tripped out magic mushroom party adventurer with an older crowd at weekend big house parties, high in the mountains of county Wicklow. Well, I was pissed!
Eventually we got onto relationships again. Lucy asked what my “relationship-status” was.
“I’ve just broken-up with someone.”
“Difficult?” Something in my expression must have suggested it had been.
“No way,” I responded bravely. “Been on the cards ages.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Growing apart. Arguments. All the usual crap.”
“Had you known her long?”
“Him.”
“What?”
“Joke.”
“Ha. Ha.”
“Years.”
“I see,” nodded Lucy.
“This time it is over.” I did try to sound as categorical as I thought I really felt. Lucy anticipated the fun she was going to have whenever she could provoke that sincere expression she just noticed flashing across my lips.
“Oh yeah…” Lucy said sceptically. “Where she now?”
“Dublin. She’s an architect.”
“How grown up is that? You’ll get back with her.”
“Fock off.”
“You will.”
“Well, I can’t even imagine you having a boyfriend.”
“That’s a stupid thing to say,” Lucy declared.
“Not stupid.” Truth was it was stupid thing to say. I dug in more deeply. “You’re, you’re kind of ugly. I’m awfully sorry if my famed honesty hurts.”
“I’ll fame you!” she said.
Before she had a chance to, the bar closed. We left. We made our way together through the wood panelled lobby to the elevators. Lucy, I would read in her diary later, had resolved never to be kissed by another boy for the first time while she was drunk. But it really might have happened then and there. Kiss centrale! But obviously that wouldn’tve been good. I don’t know why though. Some things just are, I suppose. In any event, as she was leaving the lift, Lucy wondered aloud if we shouldn’t go look together at places the following day. She didn’t make it clear whether she meant we might search for somewhere to live in together or merely share the burden of going through the process of finding one.
Next morning we met up early and started to make appointments to see apartments and houses. Lucy had already obtained a list from the Accommodation Office by the time we met. She had underlined a bunch of two beds. So it seemed moderately clear we were looking together for a place to share together.
We ruled Virginia out immediately even though it was just across the river from Georgetown. It promised much more space for the same money. But we agreed it was just too suburban. We had similar ideas about what constituted perfection: preferably a house rather than an apartment. Large living room. Tall ceilings. Big rooms. Near campus. And, ideally, a garden.
We spent the day traipsing casually happy around Georgetown getting to know it, each other and the inconsistency between descriptions of apartments and the actuality a little better. After a couple of shockers, Lucy was losing hope of finding anywhere suitable – especially when one prospective housemate jauntily informed us that having ‘worked for the government’ in Viet Nam he only felt comfortable sleeping on a roll-up mat in the utility room. I, on the other hand, was ever optimistic and I provided what I remember being a steady, welcome litany of funny retorts to Lucy’s equally funny outbursts of despair. We fell thus into a harmonious double act. “This next one’ll be perfect,” I said brightly.
“Let’s have dinner before we see it. I’m starving.”
“Lucy?”
“Yesey?”
“Only 5 o’clock. It’s too early for dinner.”
“Hmm. Let’s have coffee then… Somewhere also does food?” Lucy tried.
“Lard ass.”
“Slave driver.”
“Slacker.”
“Jamie?”
“Yes.”
“If I’m annoying you, you must say.”
“Never.”
“Jamie?” she spoke in a little girl’s voice. “I must be annoying you?”
“Who’s going to do my homework if we’re not living in the same place?” I replied. “We’ll find somewhere, Lou,” I reassured her. That was the first time I’d tried that tone with her.
Well, I was right. My optimism was justified - the next place we looked at was perfect. The whole house - a dream. Shabby, not unchic what with its chipped, half-exposed, purposely distressed pale blue coloured brickwork. Its black painted metal three-step stoop up to an elevated black front door made of dense, plastic wood. The whole house tilted to the left, which, given what we’d come to Georgetown to study, seemed appropriate.
“Number 49,” read Lucy. “My lucky number actually.”
“What an omen.” I was beginning to see confirmatory signs in everything.
We were the first to arrive for the viewing. Pretty soon afterwards quite a few people had collected behind us. I chatted to a couple of them. Lucy was stand-offish and not very forthcoming. The house only had two bedrooms. I remember Lucy sneezed. The ubiquitous air conditioning had given her a cold. I handed her an un-ironed folded cloth handkerchief from my trousers pocket. “It’s clean,” I assured her.
“It wasn’t that,” she replied kindly, thinking I might misinterpret why she’d hesitated. “My parents met when my father offered mummy his handkerchief. It’s never actually happened to me before.”
Still more putative tenants were arriving to see the house; the pressure was on. So with all of our youthful and excitingly instinctive trust of one another, we decided we had to have it. We got it - The house’s English owner warmed to us. But the other viewers were also keen to make the deal. With only vague reluctance and actually quite a bit of relief we there and then signed a twelve-month lease.
It was a two storeyed house with two bedrooms and one bathroom. Lucy agreed to settle for the crimson front room to your right as you went in - provided I’d help her to get the fire working. That meant I got the enormous room which with the bathroom took up the whole of the top floor.
We’d share the ground-floor kitchen and dining room. And although there wasn’t a garden, there were doors in the kitchen and in the dining room which gave onto an elevated red coloured hardwood deck overhung by vastly tall tropical trees themselves inhabited by an array of wildly coloured chattering birds.
On those first few evenings after we’d moved in I’d join Lucy in her bedroom (there being hardly any furniture elsewhere in the house) where we pored over the humongous booklet featuring all of the classes available to us. We both chose the same specialism within Environmental Studies – the Environmental Revolutions programme. It was taught by a man known around campus, I gathered from conversations, as The Monsignor. There were a lot of intriguing rumours about him. One had him about to win a Nobel prize before the Vatican intervened to stop it. Another had him as the disenchanted founder of a group of revolutionaries in southern Mexico. Still another had him as a disaffected liberation theologian who might well become a Cardinal under a different papal dispensation. When I reported all of this, after one of my many curious forays around campus, to Lucy back at 49 O street she mentioned she’d actually read a couple of his books – her psychoanalyst mother had known him vaguely – and that he’d actually been the reason she’d applied to Georgetown.
We also chatted about the books we most liked; our taste differed (Lucy liked George Sand, magical realism, and authors I’d never heard of). But it also coalesced – we both agreed Florentino Ariza was basically a pædo. We’d both brought copies of Hughes’s Birthday Letters with us to DC. We both knew The Waste Land practically off by heart. And among our favourite novels were The Secret History and A Handful of Dust. I had brought Season Two of Arrested Development with me. We agreed it was the best TV show ever. Omen central. Basically.
We talked about what we’d most wanted to do when we’d grown up – Lucy said deciding for her was a process. I wanted, I told her, to help unite Irish people.
She just wanted to be happy. “I’ll be happy if I’m happy. Does that make sense? It’s actually how I feel,” Lucy concluded. There was something so English, so perfect about the way she said some things. Like crystals, if you know what I mean.
A couple of days afterwards we had our first class with the allegedly nearly en-Nobel-ed Monsignor.
In a windowless and fluorescently lit seminar room, ten moulded plastic school chairs had been arranged closely together around a long plain grey table. When we walked in, two others were in there already. One boy and one girl. They were talking animatedly, as if they knew each other well. Before our teacher arrived, we introduced ourselves.
Sylvie Macdonald was from Manhattan and very pretty. Tom Buchanan, from Long Island, was properly well-built. He sported a red Irish looking friendly face. They were both final year undergraduates. They also were, we found out afterwards, off and on lovers.
Sylvie had just pointed at how grey the room was when the Monsignor, smiling, opened the door. Lucy and I discussed afterwards how we had both noticed that by the time he had properly entered the room Sylvie had altered her expression. She somehow now projected appropriately proportioned degrees of sweetness, solemnity and seriousness just by sitting there.
The Monsignor examined each of us closely. He was sixtyish, tall, with an ascetic brown face and beautifully brushed white hair. He wore a russet coloured shirt with a priest’s collar – otherwise he was in black. He instructed us to call him Monsignor and the serenity he’d entered the room exhibiting evaporated as he started to write up on the board with extravagant strokes and a black marker.
‘COLLABORATE AND DIE OR REBEL AND DIE’
“Now,” he said. “Tell me in a sentence what you expect of this class? -” Just as I was preparing something to say in the pause that followed that last sentence, the Monsignor began to speak again. “…Or I will tell you: perfection. Always. For make no mistake, my students,” the Monsignor continued in a tone which somehow managed both tenderness and firmness in the same breath, “to be accepted by me as my very last students is a great honour. A greater honour I very much doubt you shall ever experience. Unless, of course you pay attention always in my classes. If you do that, you will be drowned by honours.” There didn’t seem to be any irony in his voice as he said this. He seemed deadly serious. “Drowned,” he repeated. It was true though each of us had had to fight off reputedly enormous competition to win our space in his classroom. I however had never doubted that I would be one of the chosen few or that Lucy would be too. “You have a sentence. Lucy Anstey, what a lovely name?”
“I want to work in nature conservation. Your work in that area is fascinating,” she announced simply, looking at the Monsignor. There wasn’t any hint of shyness or self-consciousness about her now as she said this. The Monsignor held Lucy’s gaze. I was totally so distracted by this new Lucy I forgot I had to come up with my sentence.
“So Lucy wants to change the world,” the Monsignor summarised. “Sylvie?”
“Everyone says you’re the best teacher at Georgetown and I, well, the same as Lucy.”
“Mister Buchanan?”
“I haven’t ever thought much about the environment. It’s time I did.”
“Good. Okay. Mister Dwyer? Your sentence, please.”
“I think most governments are corrupt,” I replied. “I suppose that’s what interests me is how to protect the environment from also being corrupted.”
“Well,” the Monsignor began again. “Thank you all for your honesty. You’re probably all in the right place. Probably.
“I have little tolerance for dishonesty however. If I suspect you of intellectual flippancy, I shall stop teaching you. The post-modern times we live in see value in inconsistency. I don’t. So how,” the Monsignor reverted to pedagogical mode, “have we managed to get from a civilisation living in the jungle in scattered communities in which everyone either ate or starved together? A civilisation in which no one being stood above another – rock, insect, human, animal, river or flower… And most importantly… how do we get back there again? How? Through revolutions, that’s how. But what kinds of revolution? That is the question. Jamie?”
“I, I, I’m not sure there’s an always-ever answer to that question,” I stammered.
“Not sure? Of course you’re sure. That is the correct answer,” the Monsignor continued. “My purpose, Jamie, as you well know is not to embarrass you.” I was embarrassed. I was certain by now Lucy was doubting the sincerity of someone – me - who had spent the last week being admired for the rigour of their convictions. More times than I cared to remember just then, she had said things like “I wish I had your discipline, Jamie - Do you think I’m terribly weak?” And now it seemed the Monsignor had exposed me for a fraud.
Then with a long sigh the Monsignor’s expression changed into an alternative mode we were all to get used to.
“I’ve been teaching at Georgetown on and off now for a total of twenty-five years, two hundred and eighty-two days precisely. How do I know this? Why am I telling you this? Well, this very morning I received in the mail my first ever pension payment. When I finish teaching you, God willing, in nine months’ time you will have been my very last pupils. But does that explain why I should then hang in the refectory?”
We all seemed to calculate that this was a rhetorical question and we stayed silent. The Monsignor continued almost immediately after holding my eye for a second.
“Indeed. I don’t wish to be remembered in oils. I want nothing at all to do with oil. My image, I trust, shall live on in my students’ heads. In what you all do in your lives and, more importantly, in what you don’t. In what you refuse to do. I just want to rest and tend my garden. I am like one of those indigenous people who feels put upon by all these outside forces. They all; you all; you all want a piece of me. Well, you are the last class who shall have a piece of me. Thanks be to God.”
Lucy was writing down in shorthand every word the Monsignor said. I started to write them down in longhand but couldn’t keep up. Sylvie chewed her pen for most of the class. Tom looked very concentratedly. He occasionally noted stuff, but mostly sat there looking non-committal.
“Right. So what have we learned today?” the Monsignor started in again. “The powerless have the most to lose in a revolution. And the powerful have the most to gain. Or is it the other way around? I don’t know. What I do know is that you are not going to turn your backs on the powerless. Are you? I am going to see to that.
“When the conquistadors arrived in the Americas, the Aztecs had a choice, and they chose to collaborate. The result? Decimation. The Maya, on the other hand, revolted. They were also decimated. Lessons for us? I don’t know.”
I was beginning to work out the Monsignor’s rhythm, or so I was beginning to think, again.
“Your first week’s reading is Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution. Good. Now, have a good read, a good think and, by God’s grace, we’ll see each other next week.”
As the others left the room, I hung back and asked whether there were any particular aspects of the book I might focus upon.
“You shall see,” was the Monsignor’s impossible response. “Oh, Mr. Dwyer,” he called to me just as I was out of the room. I re-entered and stood by the door. “I scanned the manuscripts sent with your applications.”
“Manuscripts?”
“Yes, I read them with interest. Lucy’s, of course, is better realised. But your idea is much cleverer.” I didn’t let the Monsignor see I didn’t know exactly what he was going on about. He seemed to think maybe Lucy and I had applied to Georgetown together.
“Normally, as you know,” the Monsignor continued, “to pass this course you would need to do an internship in an environment related organisation. I have considered your stated desire very carefully to be excused from this requirement. I think if you spend your time profitably instead turning that paper you sent with your application into an article for a prestigious learned academic journal, Jamie, we will have no problem finding you one in which to publish it”.
“That’s amazing. Thanks very much.”
“Right. See you next week.”
When I arrived outside the building into the large open red bricked square – known as Red Square – (where Lucy and I had had our first conversation less than a week before) the end of summer heat hit me. I was going to have to ditch the tweed jacket. Lucy, Sylvie and Tom were standing there smoking.
“Sylvie thinks you’re going to be teacher’s pet,” Lucy said as I approached them. Sylvie started, and seriously too, to deny this. “Did you ask our teacher for some extra homework?” Lucy continued unabashed with a mischievous grin I hadn’t seen her wear before.
Tom was chortling.
“No, I told him I thought you’re not, well… You completely sure you’re up to this level? I don’t want you falling behind.”
“The finest leaders always come from behind,” observed Lucy.