Lurking - Part II
His classes at Wry Tech started the following week, and Declan forgot about TeenMag and Summer until she called him, two weeks after she had first recruited him. He was given a number to call, instructions to follow, and a girl to meet, all of which he did. Afterwards, Summer debriefed him:
-So how did it go? Seated in her office, she looked less fragile than Declan remembered.
-Terrible, man. She does hate me. Why yuh went and set me up with her? She does have a New Zealand accent, I didn’t understand a word she say.
-We had three couples. You were assigned each other randomly. We gave one couple $5, the second couple got $10, and the third couple $15, for their dates. The rest was up to you.
-Yeah, but ah only get $5.
-So you had to be creative, not just dinner and a movie for two. So what did you do?
-Bowlin. Went bowlin.
-How was that?
-Well, yuh can read about it in my writeup, nuh.
-And then?
-We did go to McDonald’s for ice-cream sundaes.
-What?
-What?
-You took her to McDonald’s?
-I only had a duller left.
-?
-So hear, nuh, Declan said.
-?
-Yuh does wantta get sumtin ta eat sometime?
-And a movie afterwards? Summer smiled.
-Sure.
-Sure.
-?
-That’s creative, she said.
Declan was overjoyed. That evening, he crowed to his roommates that he had met three women since arriving in New York less than a month ago, two of them brand new. The Brooklyners were unimpressed, so Declan called Delighting to tell her all about the bowling, and his upcoming date with Summer.
It-dinner and a movie-went well. Summer told Declan about how she had arrived in New York the prior year, with nothing but a high school degree and a suitcase. She had called up some of her parents’ friends, and had taken rotating advantage of their couches and floors, never overstaying her welcome, which averaged about five days per couch. She did this for two months, applying for various jobs, until she was hired as a receptionist at TeenMag. A kindly editor had her housesit for his friend until she could afford an apartment of her own. At the magazine, for six months she did the eight-to-nine hustle, then went home and wrote little articles-on being an American who had set foot in her own country for the first time at age eighteen; on what she thought the Eighties had in store for the fashion world; on being a single woman in the City; on growing up white in the Caribbean. She showed these articles to the helpful editor at work, and he told her to keep writing them. After her tenth article in two seasons (Fall, Winter)-on whether the idealized woman’s figure in the Eighties would maintain the Sixties’ and Seventies’ svelte, or cyclically bloom to the hourglass silhouettes of the Forties and Fifties-Summer was promoted to assistant editor.
Declan was impressed. He told her that he wanted to be a rockstar and/or poet, but was not sure what kind. She asked him to show her something he had written, and he said sure, the next time they met. They arranged to have dinner again, shook hands and parted ways.
Declan went home and called Delighting.
-What de scene? So you went out with her? Ow.
-Yeah man, I think she does like me, Dee.
-What she does look like? Delighting asked, and suddenly giggled eh-eh.
-She have brown eyes, darker than your. And she rounder, yuh know?
-…Eh bwoy, yuh sayin she have bigger tits? Delighting let out a short scream.
-Too big. And hips, man, she curve like a windswept coconut tree.
-… Muffled yelping over the phone.
-Man, yuh dere?
-…I here. So, she black? She take good care a yuh?
-She white, man, blondie.
-…Ah. We go? mmm? chat later?
-Sure, sure.
On their next date, Summer and Declan learned more about each other. She too liked the Doors, he discovered.
-Which is your favourite song? Declan asked.
-Well, there’s only one possible favourite for me, she said, and sang:
Morning found us calmly unaware
Noon burn gold into our hair
At night, we swim the laughin’ sea
When summer’s gone
Where will we be?
-That’s the best part of the song, Declan agreed, excited.
He learned that she, too, had written poetry, but had given that up for essays and articles. He showed her five or six of his poems, from the You-Ambrosia-Amritsar century, and Summer encouraged him to keep writing. They went for a walk around Union Square, and she told him that a hundred years prior, it had been the same kind of place-cafés, beautiful people promenading, but with calèches and broughams instead of yellow cabs and cars. Summer had fallen in love with the City upon arriving, and she was taking the time to learn all about it.
They started to see each regularly after that. During the day, Declan went uptown to Wry, while Summer worked at TeenMag’s offices in Union Square. In the evenings, they met either uptown, where Summer lived, or in the West Village, where Declan lived. It was a convenient arrangement-at either apartment, one or the other was in the part of town where he or she needed to be. Every month or so, Delighting met Declan, and they had coffee near Astor Place. She was learning so much at her own college, busy with textiles and portfolios and looking for internships with the New York designers-everybody wanted to work with Machiavelli or Lev Bronstein. Summer knew about these rendezvous with Delighting. Declan made sure to tell Summer about the love of his life, and he made sure to keep Delighting informed about his current girlfriend.
The year passed quickly. Declan experienced winter and snow for the first time. His lease ended (the professor of Women’s Studies returned from France and founded a new department at New Wye U, the Center for Critical Phallogocentrism, which opened for business in 1981) and Declan moved into Summer’s apartment uptown. This was even more convenient for him than before-his classes were now only ten minutes away. With only a second year to go before getting his diploma, Declan started to work part-time as a studio assistant, while his parents paid for the rest of his expenses.
In the evenings, Summer was delightfully domesticated, a creature of pure benevolence. She made Declan’s favourite food from back home, doubles. On weekends, she tended to her bonsai and made curried goat, while Declan assaulted her with the process of converting his latest poems into songs. Once a month, Declan packed some of the curried goat and presented it to Delighting during their coffee sessions. Sometimes, Delighting brought her latest flame with her, her newest boytoy or most recent manboy. They were all artsy types, her gentleman callers, and they reflected Delighting’s latest thinking on fashion and trends: there was a vicious Brit with safety pins in visible as well as undisclosed places; there was a fellow fashion student who tried his best to be androgynous and of ambiguous sexuality, but was flagrantly, unstoppably straight; there was a rastaman who looked forty but was twenty; there was an ageless junkie. But when Delighting came alone, Declan would get on his old hobby-horse, The Book Is Not Over:
-When you an I go get back?
-Darling, we’re done and gone, now we’re just good friends.
-The chapter is closed, Dee, but the book is not over.
-What book, bwoy?
-The book of our story, the story of us. It have more chapters.
Another year went by. Declan and Delighting went home (she during Christmas, he and Summer during Spring Break) to visit their parents and flaunt their newfound New York worldliness, and to gently taunt the left-behind islanders for their small ways, their accents and closed minds. Each returned to the City with individual relief: Delighting, because New York was now her home; Summer, because she wanted to get on with her life; and Declan, so he could repolish his American and be back where Delighting, or Summer, was.
A British band named Duran Duran had hit the airwaves Stateside. After a sputtering, backfiring year, The Eighties had finally arrived, all hair gel and narrow ties and new synths replacing the old Hammond organs. Delighting hunkered down and waited for the storm to pass. She resolutely avoided wide belts and shoulder pads. She cringed at the crimped hair all around her. At one point she wore only black or white, but then that became faddish, so she wore grey-risky, at best, for a south asian-but for nearly a season she got away with wearing ash, smoke, dove, gunmetal and stormcloud grey.
Declan looked deep within himself and decided to embrace the new age. Already irrelevantly tall, he managed to add a good three inches of pure hair to his six-feet-seven. He stopped writing poems and stuck to songs. He became obsessed with profundity. During dinners with Summer, he discussed Duran Duran’s lyrics:
-I love the line `Fear hangs, a plane of gunsmoke drifting in our room.’ I just love the image of fear hanging in the air like smoke. But why gunsmoke? It’s rally striking. And when he says `O, I walk out into the sun, I tried to find a new day / But the whole place, it just screams in my eyes’. Isn’t that great? It screams in my eyes. It’s like, how can a sound be seen? Fuckin A.
-Sometimes, said Summer, I think they’re just random images. I mean, every now and then there’s a good bit, or a bit that makes sense. In that song? wait, it’s `Careless Memory’, right?
-Of course. Declan sang: It just screams in my eyes.
-I think it’s called synesthesia. Anyway so there’s the part where he says `On the table signs of love lies scattered.’ I like that, I imagine, I don’t know, a lipstick-smudged glass of wine, a crumpled tie.
-Yeah, maybe. And then he says `And the walls break with a crashing within.’ That’s brilliant! A crashing within. I love that!
-Crashing within what? The walls? The room? I don’t understand.
-I think they’re making love and the walls are crashing down.
-But the signs of love are scattered on the table.
-? Declan was quiet, affronted.
-But the rest of the verse is great: Summer placatory. She sang:
It’s not as though–as though you really mattered.
But being close, how could I let you go
Without some feeling,
Some precious sympathy following.
Even before his momentous twenty-fifth birthday, Declan began to feel that his life was slowing down. Or, if not slowing down, the stuff worth remembering, the bits worth retelling, were getting more spaced out. Perhaps it was a trick of his memory, but more likely he had made it so, selectively highlighting what he wanted to brood on. When Summer signed up for college, Declan settled down to the new rhythm that overtook the next four years of their life together. The strange sensation that he was forgetting what it was like to be in a relationship kept him awake some nights. There she was lying next to him, warm, curved, and in the morning they would rush off to classes together, and in the evening have dinner together, and yet Declan felt strange calling her his girlfriend, with whom he had this thing called a relationship.
The summer before the fall when Summer started classes at Vespucci, Delighting graduated from Clausewitz, and started working at Mau Mau. In high school `back home’, her designs and ideas had revolved around the multiethnic influences of her island nation. Anything too modern, to Western, would have been laughed at-aping America, they would have said, who she does think she is, Lev Bronstein? At Clausewitz, Delighting’s design horizons had stretched far and wide: she had the freedom to engage in high-fashion, or she could return to her `roots’, or she could incorporate elements of the latter into the former. When she graduated and started working at Mau Mau, her designs were all raw silk, brushed steel, and distressed leather.
Declan and Summer went to their respective classes during his senior year, her freshman year. A much loved singer (`Oh-woh Mister Poh-oh-oh-oh-ostman, come deliver the let-ter / The sooner the bet-ter…’) who was part of a brother-sister duo died that year, from what the papers were calling anorexia nervosa. For her final project of her first semester at Vespucci, Summer wrote a piece on anorexia. The singer had been only ten years older than Summer.
Declan graduated Wry Tech. He got a job doing studio work, while Summer attended classes full-time and waitressed part-time. At night, when it was easier, when they were more susceptible, they made plans for the future. Summer would graduate with a degree in journalism, and on the strength of her experience, she would land a sweet job with a City daily. Declan would keep on keeping on.
On his twenty-fifth birthday, Declan disappeared, then reappeared the next day, still drunk. He had spent it, the Quarter, alone, in the City’s parks, on moody benches. A quarter century with nothing to show for it, not even the automatic spasm of kids. He was two years into his studio job, then Summer graduated a few years later and started working at the paper, and then it was seven years at the same job, so Declan decided he had spent enough time thinking about deciding to get married, and he got himself married just before his thirtieth birthday. (When the thirtieth birthday came around, he spent it drunk with his new wife, Summer.)
Proposing to Declan was the most ambitious step Summer had taken in her affairs with him. She knew he would not get around to it until it was too late, and she wanted to have children. Declan had been with her since she first moved to New York, she could not imagine him not being there. They had a childhood on an island in common, and sometimes they quizzed each other on where they had been on a certain day at a certain time, mining their converging pasts for clues and auguries. They played well with each other. She knew he was constant, or a constant. King Declan the Konstant.
For the past ten years, Mr Boylan had thought of Miss Blaze as a walk-on, a stand-by, not part of the original plan; an understudy, a sequel. Second-choice, rebound, usurper. First runner-up. But now he found that after ten years of waiting for Delighting-waiting for her to come back to him, or to take him back-ten years (a third of his life!) of waiting for `the story of us’ to continue, he was losing hope. His career as a rockstar had been a no-go, a no-start. He still wrote the occasional poem, but these days he felt midway between who he used to be, and who he was becoming, and he did not see the latter as a poet. Summer was soothing, intelligent, pretty and she would make a good mother, he knew. She loved him, she grew to love him more as time passed. She was constant, Constance Summer. He wondered why she was still with him, and because he could not come up with a satisfactory answer, because his imagination failed him, he decided to get married and to somehow stifle the question.
The wedding was, as they say, a quiet affair: the Blazes and the Boylans flew over for a week, there was a functional church, functional friends and coworkers, dinner and drinks afterwards.
Declan did not speak to Delighting for nearly six months, because she could not avoid being out of town that day: Buenos Aires, leather chaps.
Mr and Mrs Declan Boylan were a happy couple. It was plain for all to see, and Declan would quietly tell me so, in case I had not noticed. She worked as a senior editor for the cosmopolitan section of the city’s leading daily. In the evenings, there were cocktail parties, book readings and diplomatic dinners to attend. Declan was now a partner in a new studio catering to reggae artistes, and he managed to land an album session with a young up-and-coming Jamaican singer. One of the songs went on to become a hit, and Declan’s business picked up. When America discovered that the hit song actually contained homophobic lyrics-unintelligible to listeners unfamiliar with the patois-business slowed at Declan’s studio. So it went. But with her income, they bought an apartment near Union Square-a one-bedroom in a doorman building near their old haunts, which they mock-mockingly called their old stomping ground. They had both spent over ten years in New York, America, and could calmly speak to others about their early days, school days, and now their married years.
Declan had felt affectionate towards Summer almost from the moment he met her. Over the years, this affection had grown into a feeling of fierce protectiveness, more fraternal than paternal, which she reciprocated. Their conjugal relations had been relaxed, less than a standard deviation away from the normal. Mr and Mrs Boylan enjoyed each other’s company, and several times a month the temperature of this enjoyment rose to bloodheat. Then Declan started losing his hair, and at about the same time Summer began to lose weight. Both losses were layered affairs. Declan’s crown started to thin, and he found himself unclogging the shower drain more often. He wore caps, or knotted two loose braids to cover the winking scalp. Summer, twenty-six going on thirty-two, at first started to take on shadow and bone around her face. Then she lost weight all over, from her now-penetrating eyes to her increasingly swervy calves. She had predicted that the Eighties would mark the return of full-figured women, and indeed the glamazon look had vindicated her. Now in the Nineties, idealized women’s figures had started to shed any baggage that was more than strictly, severely necessary; curves had started to straighten, hips to deflate and hair to lose height. Even before the emaciated opiate waif look took full control of the fashion world, Summer had started to foreshadow it.
Declan took renewed vigorous interest, and Summer suggested that they have a baby.
-The book is not over, Declan said mysteriously.
-What do you mean, D? she asked him.
-We’ve only been married three years. Don’t you want to enjoy a few more years of what we have now?
-Sure, baby, but my clock’s ticking.
-I hear it, baby, Declan said. But if you had a baby, we wouldn’t be able to do this? he said, this sending Summer into a fit of tickled giggles.
While Summer and Declan were considering children, Delighting was busy setting up her own design house. She rented a small space in the East Village, on 9th Street, and opened for business with a line of punky summer dresses and accessories, all heavy metal and leather. In those days, before The Space set up shop on St. Mark’s Place, 9th Street used to be where all the recent graduates of Clausewitz and other fashion schools set up shop. A few years later, The Space opened around the corner, and the neighborhood went yuppie after that. Some of the other boutiques-Delighting’s competitors on 9th Street-closed up soon afterwards. Delighting’s boutique-called Tripwire-added new lines, rather than toning down its existing ideology. Delighting realized that while The Space sold basics, clothing of the lowest common denominator, the new East Villagers would still be interested in edgier, more hardcore fashions. She had, in fact, anticipated the bohemian bourgeois generation, and it paid off. By the turn of the century, she had opened stores in SoHo and Union Square, and had backers and plans for new stores in Boston and Los Angeles.
When Mr Boylan was fifteen, he used to say: Life is very long. He read this in some poem. At forty, he shared this information, this intelligence, with his child.
The year before the Internet exploded with Orinoco.com and e-commerce, Mrs Declan Boylan, aged thirty-four, had a baby girl. Summer plumped up nicely with the bun in her oven, and when she was born they named their daughter Siobhan. Mr Boylan wrote a few poems for his daughter. He hired a DJ and went into the studio to mix `Siobhan’s Song’, a techno affair whose opening ambience would lull the child towards sleep, then jolt her awake when the drum’n'bass kicked in. Declan decided that he had reached the age when it was time to stop trying to make contemporary music, and stick to what he knew. His own halfhearted, unpursued dreams of being a rock star had died, but at least he still wrote poems and lyrics now and then. All I got is a red guitar, three chords, and the truth, he thought, while writing `Song for Siobhan’ which he sang with acoustic guitar for accompaniment. His daughter loved the song, and Declan sang it as her lullaby when she was a baby.
The millennium came and went, and the Boylans moved to the Upper East Side with Siobhan and their bonsai. They sent the former to a prestigious school near their apartment. Declan went into the studio two or three times a week, and every other year turned a profit. Summer’s hours got longer after she was promoted to senior editor of her paper’s international section, and she started to travel abroad more. She had slimmed down immediately after Siobhan was born in some sort of post-partum load-shedding. But over the past five years, overworked, she had grown underweight. She regretted that she did not have more time to watch Siobhan grow up, but Declan told her that every working parent felt that way.
-It’s the Nineties, baby, he said. Women are taking over the world. We men will raise the kids.
At night, when he put his daughter to bed, he told her:
-Life is very long, Siobhan.
-How long?
-Too long.
-Longer than my hair?
-Steuupps, Declan said like an islander, sucking his teeth and cheeks. Longer than your hair, girlie.
-Longer than a subway? she asked.
-Longer than a subway, nuh. Kiss kiss, goodnight.
On nights when Summer was in the City, and home early enough, she put Siobhan to bed herself.
-Mummy, how long is life?
-Life is short, sweetie, Summer kissed her daughter on the forehead.
-But daddy said stsk, tsk, life is very long.
-He did? He said that?
-Ya, he said it’s longer than my hair.
-O sweetie, Daddy only said that because he is so long. Life is not long. It’s short, like you.
-Daddy’s tall, mummy, not long.
In her own bed, before falling asleep, Summer would tell Declan, Life is short, D. And she would whisper further wisdom to herself, and to him: And it begins at sixty.
The World Trade Center was destroyed, and the following summer the Village was awash in combat clothing and dog tags, camouflage designs, green and tan. Then Summer was pregnant again.
-What do you mean? Declan asked.
-What does pregnant usually mean? Summer said, uncharacteristically cantankerous and bitchy.
-How it? I mean, it have protection, nuh?
-…
-…Nuh?
-I forgot the patch. Or I was late. Or it didn’t work. I don’t know, D. Maybe it had expired.
They argued. Then Declan said:
-Even though I’m Catholic, I think maybe you should think about?
-…
-Baby, you’re not young anym?
-No, Summer said. We’re having this baby, D.
-Summer, think about it some more.
She did, and by the end of the first trimester, it was too late to change her mind. This time, Summer did not become round and rosy with child. She stayed skinny, and put off maternity leave until the last possible moment. Afterwards, the doctors were at a loss. They said she was too old, at forty-one, to have another child. They said she had lost too much weight. Some nurses speculated darkly about diet pills, secret regurgitation.
Summer Boylan née Blaze died giving birth to her second child, Gavin.
By the time he was sixty, he had been called many names, and had even adopted a few, some of his own devising. Romantic, loiterer, ingrate, bulimifier. Pedestal-raiser, moocher, anorexific. For forty years Declan had been a nostalgic lovelorn malcontent in his own head. When his wife died, he was left with the outliver’s solitude to consider these names. She had left him and the children everything, including life insurance, a sizable portfolio with a low allocation of technology stocks, and the apartment.
Declan was inconsolable for a year. Summer’s parents, approaching seventy at the time of their daughter’s death, flew up from the Caribbean. Declan could barely look them in the eye. He felt he owed them an apology. It was my doing, my child. For all our gallivanting about, we reserve the right to die before our wives. She worked too hard. I didn’t know what was going on. Women deserve to live longer, if you can call it deserve, if you can call it living. She was too old. I grow old. I didn’t know. I didn’t see. I don’t know what I was looking at. I grow old. Maybe she had cancer. But the doctors would have known, wouldn’t they? I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Maybe I could sue.
He didn’t. At her funeral, he played a Doors song-not Summer’s favourite, but another one from the same album:
Winter time winds blue and freezin’
Comin’ from northern storms in the sea
Love has been lost, is that the reason?
Trying desperately to be free
Come with me dance, my dear
Winter’s so cold this year
And you are so warm
My wintertime love to be
And after twelve months of mourning, he began the process of making it up to Siobhan, who reminded him so much of Summer. Declan was now Lurking, Still Poet With Life.
In his late-forties, our Mr Boylan decided to let himself go, as befitted, he said, a widower of a certain age. He ate more curried goat, walked less, took more cabs around town, and slowly the pounds and kilos crept up on him. He had been waiting. The weight first settled around his abdomen, the inches a loose shanty-town of flesh that grew into tenement buildings. From his new paunch-rotund, commanding-the weight spread up, towards his chest and arms, and down, towards his thighs. Finally, after a several years of concerted eating, his face started to loose the contours that his black-Irish parents had given him, and eventually he grew jowls. The final effect was satisfying-his tremendous height and newfound weight combined to produce a silhouette that spoke of presence, of substance.
Except for the year after his wife’s death, Declan had always been an attentive father. Now he raised the children with a little help from his friends and a nanny or two. Siobhan grew tall and willowy, taking after her father’s youthful figure, but with her mother’s looks. She remembered Summer, preserved her memory, and visited both remaining grandmothers every year, soaking up the island sun and surf and songs. After college (where, on the strength of being one quarter black, she had been president of the African-American Students Union) Siobhan died her hair red, dreadlocked it, and shot to the top of the charts with her hit singles `Girl of the World’ and `Branched Lightning’. Gavin, who had never known his mother, and with a sister seven years older than him, and an indulgent father who overcompensated for his fear that he would blame the child for the mother’s death, had a spoilt-brat phase. He eventually grew out of it, came out of the closet, graduated from Vespucci University, his mother’s alma mater, and came to work for me.
Declan retired from his joke job when he turned fifty. He spent his fiftieth birthday-the Half Dollar-with his children, his business partner (to whom he sold his share of the studio) and me. In retirement, he spends his days tending to Summer’s bonsai, some of them half a century old, which are a living testament to her patient attention. For the last ten years, we have had coffee twice a week, every week. Siobhan and Gavin call me Aunty Dee, I am their parents’ friend from `back home’. At our favourite café, Declan and I talk about everything: politics, music, fashion, him, me. He tries to convince me that life begins at sixty. We shall see-perhaps in twenty years, I will agree. Sometimes we talk about Summer.
-You know, she used to say that she would understand if I left her for you, Declan says.
If he had said this twenty years ago, it would have been with special significance in his voice, expectation, hope, something like that. Now, he says it with muted regret. The Book Is Over. The August sun beats down on us, sitting outdoors on a sidewalk café in the City. The air shimmers with heat waves off the softened asphalt and from the fumes from buses; the sidewalks tremble with the shadows of smoke. These are the dog days of New York’s summer, and I am due for a vacation.
-What a strange thing to say, I tell him.
-She was a strange woman. A softie. Well, more than a softie, but less than a doormat, yuh know?
-A pushover?
-Something like that?
-… he says.
-…
-…I didn’t mean to…
-It’s okay Dee?. We’re getting old. Well, I am. Here I am, an old man in a dry month.
-So you know what?
-What?
-Gavin just designed a new sports bra. We’re marketing it in the fall.
-Eh-eh?
-It’s made from shape-memory alloy fibres woven into satin.
-…
-It’s a kind of metal that remembers its original shape, even after it’s been stretched or bent. So it’s like a perma-bra. You buy the shape and size that you find most supportive or flattering, and then you go bungee jumping or whatever. As you’re falling, the bra fights gravity and you retain your perfect bust.
-Dat rally wared. People will buy anything, nuh?
-If you market and brand it right. We’re licensing the bra to Machiavelli.
-Congratulations.
-Thanks, man.
We sip our iced coffees and watch the world go by on the street and sidewalk.
THE END