Chapter 43 2012
They hit the Grand Social, the room pulsing with electricity, and Viola allows herself to be dragged through the tapestry of movement, fed pints of Guinness. Music splashes out of windows and voices call and heavy feet hit the ground and everywhere is senseless laughter, senseless joy.
She doesn’t want it. She doesn’t want to be wearing makeup or her best-fitting dress. She wants to be liquid, to sink into the ground. Dublin becomes a contemptuous purgatory. Somewhere she was meant to belong but never would.
“I’m going to say something you won’t like, okay?
Because I’m drunk. And I know this is going to sound stupid coming from the girl living with her monogamous whatever, but I am just begging you.
You have to interrogate your own happiness.
Sometimes I think you’re so set on one image of love that you might be depriving yourself of everything it might be. Love is not just one thing.”
“Okay,” Viola says. “I will think about that.”
They walk back across the Samuel Beckett Bridge, harp-like and impossibly suspended, a model of asymmetry.
Her mother had come here to visit her relatives as a child, Sadie once said.
How many cobblestones have changed in the interim?
This bridge didn’t exist then, nor did any of the glassy buildings or fiber-optic cables or rich Europeans in fancy glasses.
How did it feel to be here? Did she love it or hate it or belong or wish she were somewhere else?
What would she think of it now? What would she think of her child, here?
It’s all gone. No one, not even Orson, can tell her. What you miss is an absence, he said.
None of those feelings matter anymore, do they. Nothing I feel matters much either, she thinks.
Under the cold stars, they pass a homeless woman with sores on her face singing to a dog.
Normally she would pass. It’s a matter of safety, in the city, only seeing what you’re supposed to see.
But she can’t, not tonight. She reaches into her purse and gives her all the money she has. She can’t take it with her, anyway.
A thought flutters across her mind, freed at last from her own self-consciousness and the threat of Orson’s feeling. Her mother, naked, was beautiful.