Redemption - Leon Uris [39]
“Jack, you’ve always played it with me with too much constraint. Can’t you let yourself go? You might even like it. Oh, Jack, I get so damned frustrated in Dublin. I need you as a partner. We could do so much together.”
“What? Riding a tigress in constant prowl for the kill?”
“Do you indulge in much sex, Jack?”
“I think of it more in qualitative terms rather than numbers.”
“Are you in love…with a Canadian woman, then?”
“Truth?”
“I don’t know if I Want the truth. Well, are you?”
“Aye, I am.”
“Desperately? Madly?”
“Deeply, committedly.”
“Are you married?”
“No, but she is and she has two children.”
“Oh, shyte, isn’t that always the way? Is this person in Toronto?”
“Nearby.”
“How sad for you.”
“It’s not sad at all. It’s very joyous.”
“How can it be joyous? Love, maybe…but joyous love under those conditions?”
“We make it joyous. We are more-grateful for the time together than we are mournful for the time apart.”
“I suppose I see.”
“No, you don’t see, Atty. With you it’s either possess him or send him packing. There are a million variations on the love theme, darlin’.”
“Like subtleties that I don’t have,” she said, turning her back.
Jack gripped her softly and turned her around. She wished he had gripped her hard and spun her hard into him. Not Jack.
“Beloved little Atty,” he began.
“I’m not so little.”
“Beloved little Atty. Your great flirtation in life is your sporting for tragedy. As far as tragedy is concerned you’ve found the pot at the end of the rainbow here in Ireland, and it suits you fine. You don’t have to look very far here…just down the road to the next village…into the Dublin Liberties with their open sewers. Death by cholera. Even your poor old dad finally found his plush chair and sat down and died in it. Tragedy is always at hand…open a letter and find it…or it may hit from the sky as lightning. Or you may be standing at the crossroads and some messenger will come up to you and tell you someone you love is desperately sick or that your house is burning down or that a ship has sunk in midocean. Tragedy, over which we have absolutely no control, is never far away. And it’s the place you’ve chosen to live.”
She put her hands over her ears. He brought them down.
“Now joy is another matter. We can create joy any time, any place. Joy comes from our inside, and it’s ours if we’ve the will to find it. Tragedy is a human legacy. Joy is a human creation.”
“Am I that grim?”
“Grim enough to have slammed a steel door and locked your joy in you so that it can’t escape.”
“I’ve never felt any joy like that,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“You’ll be amused to know that I have had sex a number of times,” she said suddenly.
“I’d be shocked if you hadn’t,” he replied.
“I mean, being in the theatre with all those mad actors and writers. They die for my body. Well, actually it was four times…five if you count having it twice with the same fellow. It wasn’t all that grand, Jack. In fact it was lousy. But I like men, you know. There seems to be a sticking point.”
“Could it be that you can’t memorize lines of a new play, run a rents strike, write an editorial, and make love at the same time between meals or acts of a play?”
“I’d like it better if you shouted at me, Jack, rather than slice me up with your bloody delicate razor.”
“Sorry, Atty. But—”
“But what!”
“Your magnificent breasts and all the rest can sorely inhibit a poor fellow who is doing it by the numbers on command, probably too petrified to perform decently.”
“I hate your ugly fucking mouth, Jack!” she yelled.
“So, don’t ask me about sex I didn’t bring the subject up.”
“Don’t you even know how to curse! Get mad, Jack!”
“Atty, love, we both knew this conversation was going to come up. So let’s finish it off and enjoy our few days together.”
That was always the way that bloody Jack Murphy handled things, she thought. Unflustered! Thoughtful! Why doesn’t he wilt like other men? No stutters, no awkward shifting of feet, no dropping of eyes. Just a dead-on answer and “If you don’t