"Into the Mystic"

“I’m goin’ to New York, Mystic.” She kissed him. “I’m sorry, but I’m goin’.”

Martello Tower, Sandycove, Dublin, Ireland

INTO THE MYSTIC

—Terence Clarke

Mary Dalton’s star had ascended. Quickly. Named in a New York Times magazine article as one of the dozen hottest executives of the year under thirty-five, she ran marketing for Hachette in the U.S., a senior vice president. In the cover photo, reclining on a leather couch, she gazed out the window at the passing pedestrians on The High Line. Her corner apartment was two floors above the level of the pathway itself, so that Mary could watch the strollers below, so many of them having such fun walking through the linear gardens. To the east, north, and south lay all Manhattan. The buildings rose in a great clutter of shapes and heights, one of the influences that had brought Mary to New York in the first place. The roar of the city filtered through the double windows, and was greatly subdued by them. It was a background whispering that she actually loved for its simple constancy. Indeed, though, she knew that, in Manhattan, she was being cradled by irrepressible change, even though she worried that that change—even the principle itself of change in this town—was too immediate and too dismissive of what had been inspiring, or even uncontrollably riveting, just a few days before.

   New York was indeed, as Mystic had once told her, a lot of noise. Mary cherished the excitement of it but suspected now, since her phone conversation with him a few minutes earlier, that there was something far more profoundly ungovernable to be found elsewhere.

   Ten years earlier, Mystic had been standing on the cement stairway leading down between the rocks at the Forty Foot in Sandycove, County Dublin. He was about to descend into the Irish Sea. Rain and wind the night before had stirred the sea up so much that its blue, green, and white skirmishes were indistinguishable one to the next, now muddied beneath the morning gray. Mystic stood on the last step. He turned to Mary, who sat waiting at the top of the stairway. He held his arms out to her, his skin pearlescent and shivering in contrast to the pair of black undershorts he wore.

   Mine for the taking, Mary thought, Lord help me.

   “Mary. Stay.” He then continued into the waters. Swimming out, he ignored Mary’s cries to come back. But then he turned toward her. The swells lifted, buoying Mystic up and back. His hands fluttered at the surface, his treading balancing him despite the shove of the waters as they came and went.

   “Mystic. Please.”

   He swam back to the stairway and ascended, his skin now turned pale blue. The élan with which he had been swimming through the Neptune swirl seized Mary’s heart.

   But once she helped him put on his pants, sweatshirt and jacket, and handed him his shoes, she took the lapels of that jacket in her hands and knelt before him, bringing her face close to his. “I’m goin’ to New York, Mystic.” She kissed him. “I’m sorry, but I’m goin’.”

—

Dermot Cleary, an immigrant whose life had settled into its insistence on conservative carefulness the day he was born in Cashel, County Tipperary, sat across the table from Mary, at the Beatrice Inn in the West Village. “I don’t understand.” He was an investment banker, forty years old, whose company had hired him out of Harvard Business School. “Are you going to answer me?” Now, fifteen years later, he was an American citizen.

   “The greatest adventure of me life,” Dermot liked to say when it was important to him for some reason to admit that he was Irish. People already knew that about him, but Dermot felt that the importance of being an American was much greater. American humor, American speech, the New York Giants, the Knicks, and the Liberty Plaza Brooks Brothers store were first on his list of cultural priorities. A home in Greenwich, Connecticut was his formal long-term goal. It would be the imprimatur—along with a membership in the Greenwich Country Club—that would certify his having made it, big time, in the States. Dermot espoused, silently and gratefully, the traditional ethics of the Republican Party. Money and place were everything to him…except for what, now, just in the last few months, Mary was bringing to his life.

   They had met at the party celebrating Mary’s appearance in The Times, to which one of Dermot’s corporate senior officer friends had brought him. It took place at the White Horse Tavern, and Dermot was uncomfortable there. The portrait of Dylan Thomas, his drinking interrupted, looked down upon the festivities. Dermot and his colleague were the only men wearing suits and ties. The other celebrants wore jeans and hoodies, some of them fashion-conscious in hiking boots, others more casually attired in soiled running shoes without socks. There were many writers, the kind of people that made Dermot nervous. Seemingly with no financial sophistication—a lot of them actual anarchists, it seemed to him, crazy declaimers—they were notable for confused beer-driven speech and gossip riddled with professional jealousy and distrust.

   Are all writers like this? he had asked himself. Mary had assured him they were not, although judging from the few authors of hers whom he had met on that evening, Dermot had concluded that she was wrong. They seemed to look upon him as they would an operative from the National Security Agency.

   But he also met Mary that evening, which caused him to stay on at the party, even after his business friend left after twenty minutes. ”Got to get back to the office,” he said, equally flummoxed by the party guests.

   Dermot had been watching Mary across the room. He recognized formal adventurousness in her that did fit in with the bohemian sloppiness of most of the other guests. She stood out from them, though, because of the kindness of her gestures and especially the way she spoke with others, her eyes directly on theirs and darkly noticing everything they were saying. Reacting to them. Listening…and then offering responses that seemed to Dermot, even this far away from her, to be filled with humor and joy.

   Mary was not beautiful in the way that so many women in New York are—those involved in fashion, Broadway, or movies—whose looks are one of the few tools they’ve got. Hers were far more engaging—her black hair like deep evening itself, her eyes conveying so many considered, and considerate, ideas—and therefore more refined than the Photoshopped perfection common to the fashion press. Mary’s eyes were also dark, her hands large for a woman as diminutive as she. Her smile opened the conversation even further. Authority flowed from it. It provoked responses.

   She wore a leather coat, black, with long collars, over a pair of red silk pants and a black turtleneck sweater. A woven heart, made from thick red and black yarns, hung from a strand of black leather around her neck. She played with it from time to time, and Dermot noticed the precision of her dark red nails and the way that, when she gestured, her fingers seemed to be punctuating what she was saying. The three men with whom she was speaking were paying close attention. Dermot guessed they might be clients, and so, writers. While the others in the room were scattered about in slovenly conversations, these men were simply enthralled.

   He made his way through the guests, and when he arrived at the conversation, obviously wanting to be part of it, Mary glanced at him with surprise.

   Dermot was a big man whose face revealed the good-natured humor that blustering Irishmen often have. But he didn’t drink, so that that particular cultural trait, often encountered among the Irish in New York—and, to be sure, the Irish in Ireland—was subdued in him. But he displayed wellbeing that came as a surprise to people who might think that being so large a conservative financial executive meant that you were also a bully. Dermot was not, but neither was he delicate. When he spoke, his American accent misled whoever was listening to him who may not have known of his origins. But once they discovered what those origins were, they would routinely ask him why, if he was from Tipperary, he talked like a New Englander.

   Like Mary, Dermot was Catholic, but he had put an intentionally Northeastern Protestant spin on the way he spoke. There was little Irish in it, nor in his gestures, which were, at best, occasional and simple. He planned on people mistaking him for a reserved American blue blood…from Connecticut, to be sure, but he could accept being from Rhode Island as well, even from some parts of Massachusetts. All those states represented the kind of accepted self-regard that he knew was essential to his work. If he wanted to become a CFO or CEO of a Fortune 500 company, he would have to project the sort of personality that, driven by ambition, was also open to conversation, ever friendly (although from time to time politically judgmental), and interested in the things that others who spoke similarly would be interested in…so, golf in The Hamptons, boating on Long Island Sound, goddamned government interference, R.O.I…..

   Dermot was therefore a kind of fraud, personally. But his easy manner and conversational willingness allowed people to like him, and he was on the fast track at Citibank.

   Mary’s silence at the Beatrice Inn silenced Dermot for a long moment. They now had been dating for a few months, and Mary had told him that she enjoyed her time with him. But Dermot sensed, with this conversation, that there was a new hesitation of some kind in her feelings for him. He declared himself to her. He loved her, there was no doubt about it.

   He was hers, he said.

   And when he uttered those words, Mary’s soul seemed to pull away from him. He couldn’t put his finger on it. The declaration brought about so subtle a change in Mary’s treatment of Dermot that, at first, he barely noticed it. But after a few minutes, he began feeling isolated. She smiled. They talked. But Mary now held back, beginning with that very moment in which Dermot had tried to put himself—himself alone—into her heart.

   She had come back from Dublin a few weeks before, from a vacation visit to relatives with her mother, and Dermot wondered what else had happened there.

—

Dublin was no Manhattan. Just now the sky, the sidewalks, the architecture, and the Liffey itself seemed to Mary to be colored the same. Walking across O’Connell Bridge, she recalled how this much gray had been a major element in why she had left Dublin in the first place ten years ago.

   Born in the Dublin suburb of Dalkey, she had remained a hometown girl, even spending a few months during her last year in graduate school at Trinity College as a bargirl at Finnegan’s. She was already a fan of American writers, and had plans to go to the States. Just thinking about it thrilled her. Central Park. The Great White Way. Walt Whitman loafing on the grass. It was a glimmer for Mary, a dream, all of it.

   It was in Finnegan’s on her first night working there, in 2004, that she met Mystic, serving him a pint of Guinness at what she learned was his usual table in a corner. She recognized him right away. Though an American, he lived in Dalkey and, besides Maeve Binchy, was the pub’s primary celebrity.

   Mary loved Mystic Brennan’s band, The Yank’s Laughter. She owned all six CDs. Who would have guessed that a fellow with an accent like his (“Hey, you know, P.S. 155,” he had at first explained to Mary, “Up there in East Harlem.”) would enjoy Dalkey?

   “What’s all that, then?” The number, the spare references, meant nothing to her, although Mystic had given her the information as though she, too, had grown up on the East Side of Manhattan.

   “You don’t know?”

   “Haven’t a clue, love.” Removing the empty pint glass from the table, she left a fresh paper napkin next to the full pint glass.

   “It’s New York. What do you think?”

   Mary, put off by the rough question, remained standing at the table. Just because this man was so famous a rock musician and actor didn’t mean that she had to take this kind of guff, so barren of information and friendliness.

   To her surprise, Mystic spoke again. Regard brimmed from a smile. “Sorry, Mary, there’s no reason for you to know.”

   Mystic had all the world-weary bravado that immortal rock musicians are supposed to have. He slouched on the cushioned bench on which he sat, one hand extended onto the table, where it caressed the pint. His black leather jacket was unzipped, scruffy and darling. His dark eyes shone as though some recent happiness had awakened them to luminescence. He wore a Yankees baseball cap, from beneath which flowed, Mary noticed immediately, locks of ebony hair. About thirty, he had a dark complexion that pleased her quite a bit because of her own Black Irish antecedents. Her mother, who was from Connemara, had explained to Mary when she was a girl that “sometime way back, there was a trade route, Mary, that included a port over there somewhere… Killary Harbour, Leenane, probably…who knows? And there were Spaniards and the like….” She laughed, hiding her lips with the back of her hand. “Mohammedans, maybe…” She raised her eyebrows.

   Mary had decided that one of those Mohammedans had spotted her medieval relative Ailish or Éirinn or some such, pretty and barefoot, waiting there on the rocks, and that was all he needed to know. Thus, with time, Mary’s mother’s flourishing black hair had come to be, as had Mary’s.

   But Mystic was no Irishman, and Mary wished to ask him why he liked Dalkey so much. He lived up on Killiney Hill, on Vico Road, and the barman Liam had told Mary that the wall that protected Mystic’s estate was “more or less impregnable. You can’t even see the place.”

   “Is he a hermit?”

   “Mystic? A hermit?” Liam laughed. “He’s a swashbuckler, Mary. Famous for it.” He placed a couple of napkins on her tray. “Very famous.”

   A few days after they first met, Mystic came into the pub early and asked for a cup of tea. There were few customers. The place was almost silent, the conversation in the different dark wood-lined rooms being settled and close. Mary placed the pot of tea and the cup and saucer before Mystic. She offered him a warmed scone as well, with butter and jam. “It’s on the house.”

   “Thank you.”

   Mary began turning away, but noticed that Mystic was observing her with what she surely mistook as…interest. What does he see in me? she asked herself before finally turning from him entirely.

   “Mary.”

   She looked back.

   “Please. Would you bring me some cream?”

—

   As Dermot escorted Mary from the Beatrice Inn, they argued.

   “I don’t understand this wordlessness,” he said again.

   The next day, after he had hung up on her, he appeared in the lobby of her apartment building. The security man Julio announced his arrival. She did not reply, and the silence on the phone finally brought another question from Julio. “You still know this gentleman, Miss, don’t you?”

   “I do…yes…send him up please.”

   Dermot entered the apartment on the very verge of making a scene. But as he removed his overcoat and tossed it onto a chair, turning to Mary with his opened hands extended before him in a gesture of insistent declaration, he saw that she was weeping.

   “What is it?”

   “When I was in Dublin, Dermot—”

   “In the company of your sainted mother.”

   The remark was rude, but she figured Dermot had a right to be angry. It was the only mean-hearted thing he had ever said to her.

   “Dermot, I met someone I used to know.”

   “Used to know.”

   “That’s right. Ten years ago.”

   “A classmate, then, eh? An old boyfriend.”

   “No. Hardly.”

   “Then who is it? Not an old girlfriend, I hope.”

   “Dermot. Please. He’s just someone I knew.”

   As Dermot sat down on the couch—at the other, far, end of the couch—Mary continued feeling terrible. Dermot was hers. She had won him, she realized, almost the moment he had arrived at her side at the White Horse Tavern. The other men with whom she was talking, two Hachette marketing guys and Mary’s assistant, immediately noticed his arrival, too, and the conversation turned a bit lumpish and unnerved, as though Dermot and his suit, his looks, and his serious executive comportment should be in some other bar somewhere. But he was also extremely handsome. (Her assistant, Brad, his hands gathered together breathlessly beneath his chin, exclaimed about it during the Uber ride home later.) Mary realized right away that Dermot was an Irishman, even before she began talking with him.

   Dermot asked Mary out that very evening, and she accepted. He took her to dinner the next night at Jean George, and their romance proceeded apace. Thrillingly.

   But now, in Mary’s apartment, she realized that she had to tell him what had so thoroughly, abruptly happened in Dublin. “He’s a musician.”

   Dermot’s silence exuded disbelief. Mary knew he was not an adventurer. She admired the carefulness with which Dermot addressed his prospects and pursued them. His organization. He’s a lot like me, she thought. Came to New York looking for success. Found it. Loved New York. Loved me.

   “Plays with his flute, does he?” Dermot frowned, looking out the window.

   ”Please, I—”

   “Mary, I wish you had let me know about this before you let me—”

   “Dermot.”

   “Sweep you off your feet.” The phrase came from him with real hurt.

   “I didn’t know.”

   “Then how did you find out?”

   Mary wiped tears from her cheeks, and then she, too, looked out the window. “I guess…I guess I did know.”

   “When? The night we met?”

   “Oh Dermot, no. It was years ago.”

—

A few days after she brought him the scone, Mystic came into Finnegan’s again and asked for a pint.

   “But what’s this P.S. 155?”

   “It’s the public school I went to when I was a kid. You know…” Mystic fondled the pint glass with both hands. “We all talk like this up there.” He grinned. “All of us, no matter what color we are. Puerto Rican. Black. White. It doesn’t matter.”

   Mary had had just a few exchanges with him, but with this one she realized that it wasn’t just Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, whose movies she had seen and loved, that spoke this way. In New York, apparently, lots of people did. She walked from the table, her heart excited by the fact that Mystic Brennan was actually speaking with her.

   He did once more the next night, and then the night after that.

   Mystic explained that his mother was Puerto Rican, a third-generation New Yorker. “My father was Irish. I didn’t know him.”

   “His name was Brennan.”

   “That’s right. But from Philly, which is a ways from Ireland.”

   “I know. The Liberty Bell. I’ve seen it on the map.”

   It was early in the evening. Liam had also explained that Mystic had very respectfully asked the Finnegan’s employees to respect his privacy. “Sometimes,” Liam told her, “he’ll have musician friends with him. You know, Keith Richards came in here with him one night. And, once, the hip-hop guy…what’s his name? Jay-Z? Even Amy Winehouse, who shook the place up considerable, I can tell you.” Liam, dressed as always in a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up, and a black wool vest buttoned in front, leaned forward over the bar, looking to his left, as though he were about to whisper. “But Mary, normally he doesn’t want to be bothered. So, bring him his Guinness and leave him alone.”

   Mystic, though, welcomed Mary to his table. Employees were not to fraternize with customers except to service their request for another drink or a meal. Mystic liked the fish pie and the apple and blackberry crumble.

   “Why the name?” she asked him, slipping the pie in its serving dish toward him.

   “My mother. She was a fan of Van Morrison.”

   “Oh. ‘Into the Mystic.’”

   “Yeah. She was listening to it when she went into labor, she told me. She said that there was no other possible name for me. Boy or girl, it had to be Mystic.”

   “But weren’t you ever embarrassed?”

   Mystic fixed Mary with an amused gaze.

   “By the name, I mean.”

   “Me?” He frowned, at first with comic quiet. She felt that she had asked a foolish question. He touched her hand. “Never.” He removed his hand, taking up a fork with it and addressing the fish pie. “Not once, sweetheart.” He laid the fork down a moment. “For her, the mystic was the other world, see? The place where you dream. Everything’s chaos and experiment. Nothing’s settled there.”

   “Chaos and…?”

   “Dreams.” Mystic unzipped his leather jacket, to reveal a T-shirt with the word “Manhattan” on it. His fingers traced the lettering that traversed his chest. “That’s what they think they’ve got here.”

   Mary grinned. “They have your heart?”

   “No, Mary…The heart was what my mother was talking about. In Manhattan, they just make a lot of noise about money—”

   “That’s all?”

   “ —and nothin’.”

—

Dermot sent flowers. He wrote her a long love letter in which he spelled out what he had to offer to her.

   “You clearly don’t understand, Mary. We both came here, and found what we were looking for. You’re famous now. Mary Dalton. Came to the States and into her own, all on her own.”

   This was true. Everything. And there was more, as far as Dermot was concerned.

   “I would do anything for you. I love you. You don’t realize how much I love you.”

   Mary disliked the harridan-like indifference that suddenly invaded her. But the words “I love you”…pronounced the way that kind Dermot pronounced them…. How many had uttered them since the formation of the earth, and meant them as true, not realizing that the words themselves were wooden, a cliché, an utterance more like everyday marketing than deep-felt yearning or the sighs of connection or sweat-laden embrace? She couldn’t evade the fact that, although Dermot was ever considerate and, yes, loving, he was more affectionate with her than obsessed, more fine-tuned than rugged, more a man of the mind and of few words than a creature from the ocean whirled up and back from the Irish islands.

—

After her shift at Finnegan’s one evening, Mary walked to the video store in Dalkey and rented Mystic’s movies. On screen, he was a chameleon. He could play a Nantucket sailor drowned by a frustrated whale, a minor league center fielder in the Mexican leagues, a betrayed Mafia hit man dumped into the East River, even the romantic lead (electrifyingly so to Mary) in an L.A. drug thriller opposite Jennifer Lopez. Suave, lovely, idiosyncratic, and funny, Mystic was now as well known for his acting as he was for his music.

   “Is acting part of that chaos you talked about?”

   Mystic took up a helping of salad. “Sure it is. It’s pure deception, you know. It’s like fiction. You make it up as you go along. You lie. But you’re not really the character. You’re just playing the role, and the character arrives from…from—”

   “The mystic.”

   Mystic pushed his fork around the plate. “I think so, yes.“

   “What your mother knew.”

   Mystic shrugged, looking away. Mary could tell, from the sincerity of his shyness, that he liked her.

   After a few more weeks, over a plate of blackberry crumble, Mystic asked Mary to join him in Dublin. It was the fifteenth of June.

   “Oh…I can’t, Mystic. You know…” Mary looked over her shoulder toward the bar. “We’re not supposed to…you know—”

   “To go out with me.”

   Startled, Mary sucked a moment on her lower lip. “You’re…you’re—”

   “I’m not actually asking you out, Mary. Tomorrow’s Bloomsday.”

   “Ah, so it is. I forgot.”

   “And I go into Dublin every June 16 to spend a little time with Joyce.” Mystic nodded. “North Earl Street.”

   “The statue.” Mary did not speak for a moment, hoping that Mystic was indeed asking her out. She looked again over her shoulder. The few patrons were involved in their own conversations. Liam was wiping some glasses. She turned back. “Do you know his books, then?”

   “Well, I…” Mystic rubbed his left arm with the palm of his right hand, leaning forward as though in conflicted thought. He reminded Mary of himself in the drug dealer romance, when he made a similar gesture just before declaring his dangerous love for Jennifer Lopez, who was playing an undercover cop. “I—”

   “Finnegans Wake.”

   “Yeah, I tried. The first page wasn’t bad, but the rest of it was the biggest piece of shite I ever read.” Mystic looked up.

   Mary was charmed by his use of the Irish variant. “Shite, you said?”

   “That’s it.”

   “If you think so, why do you visit him?”

   He grabbed his arm once again. “Because he was so brave. And, you know, he wrote Dubliners too. Now, there, that was—”

   “What? Sitting at a desk and writing down words?”

   “Exactly. No money. No Dublin. Stuck in Paris. Going blind. And look what he tried to do!”

   “But—”

   “It doesn’t matter to me that Finnegans Wake makes no sense, Mary. Joyce plunged into the light. It took him by surprise, and it dazzled him. It riveted him. I think he lost his mind.”

   “He came out the other end, though, didn’t he?”

   ”Yes. But, electrified. Blinded by it.”

   Like many others, apparently including Mystic, Mary had given up on Finnegans Wake after fifty pages or so, offering Jim Joyce the suggestion that he fuck himself. But she had read his other stuff and walked often beneath the Martello Tower in Sandycove, in which Joyce had once so famously slept for a night or two. Looking out to sea, she had felt that the tower, the cold, the rain, and the darkness had been holding her consciousness from the moment she had been born. The Irish Sea. The terrifying deep. The wish to leave this place, like Joyce himself had. The far world.

   Mary took up the plate, now empty of its crumble. “Yes, I’d like to go with you.” The few stains of blackberries did nothing to quiet the fork rattling against the ceramic. “Just don’t tell anyone here, Mystic. Please.”

   “Not a word.” He, too, looked to the front of the pub. “But can I drive you home?”

—

Mystic had parked his Land Rover a few streets from Finnegan’s, and he gave Mary surreptitious directions to where it was. Once she got into it, he asked whether she would like to see where he lived.

   Mary thought about it, and was stunned by the brevity of her caution. “I would, yes.”

   They drove up Dalkey Avenue and then ascended Killiney Hill to Vico Road.

   “Do you like living here, Mystic?” Mary’s heart fluttered as she looked down at the view of Dublin Bay.

   “I do. It’s private.”

   “You get pursued a lot, I imagine.”

   “I do.”

   “Everywhere.”

   “Yes.”

   A high double gate, wood painted red, opened before them. The wall Liam had described, of yellow sandstone, extended left and right into the darkness. Ahead, the drive turned through a grove of deciduous trees and flowering bushes, all now just coming into leaf, toward what looked like a small castle in the darkness. A broad swath of yellow daffodils bordered each bank of a meandering stream that ran through the property, bordered by the gravel drive.

   Mystic leaned forward over the steering wheel, looking out. “You like flowers, I hope.”

   Mary placed two fingers against her lips, enjoying the small, welcoming spectacle. “’…Lonely as a cloud.’”

   They made love, and Mary, in Mystic’s arms, fell into floating release, the colors in the candlelit room gathering into swaths of cloud-like warmth. He treated her with close gentleness of touch and startled generosity. Finally, their sighs of shared excitement gave her such joy that she asked him—unexpectedly, thoughtlessly—to please love her.

—

It rained that night, and now very cold morning light broke up the colors in the still turbulent waters below. They sat on the stairs at the Forty Foot. They would take the train into Dublin, but Mystic had asked her to join him for the one other stop he routinely made on June 16, with the Martello Tower in sight, to look out to sea.

   Mystic took her hand. “But why do you want to go to the States?”

   “Adventure.”

   “In the States?” He waved a hand before him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

   “That’s why I’ll be going there, mate.”

   “Yeah, I know. Everyone thinks that New York’s the center of the world. That that’s where the action is….” Mystic looked down into the waters as the roughness turned them to white foam and green rivulets, advancing and receding. “But they all think that getting rich is all there is. And they tell you about it.”

   “What do you mean?”

   “Their own importance.” Mystic leaned forward and placed his elbows on his knees. He continued studying the tide pools. He tossed a stone into the sea. “There are a lot of schmucks in the United States.”

   Already, Saul Bellow was one of Mary’s favorite American authors. So, she well knew from his work what a schmuck was. “There are plenty of those here, Mystic.”

   “Yeah, I know.”

   “So, what’s the difference?”

   “The ones in New York are idiots.”

   “And the ones here?”

   “At least they’ve got that blood…the blood you’ve got… running through them. The Language. The stories, Mary. Talk.”

   Mary nudged him. “Shite, you mean.”

   “No. Myths. The long ago. Blood. Heart.”

   “And they don’t have that sort of myth in New York?”

   “No. Their myths are all about J.P. Morgan and those guys. Rockefeller.” Mystic tossed another stone. A wave cobbled into the inlet. “Mary.” The sound of the wave was full with embrace, the sea’s voice. “Will you stay here with me?”

   Mary turned her head quickly toward him. She worried that she hadn’t heard him right. But Mystic surveyed her now, his eyes engaging hers with not one hint of uncertainty. He held a third pebble between the fingers of his right hand.

   Mary glanced at it, its gray surface interlined with light delicacies of white. “But you’re Mystic Brennan.”

   “Sure, that’s right.” With the P.S. 155 accent, the Irishism sounded loving, as though Mystic were making fun of himself for Mary’s benefit.

   “You’ve got nothing but girlfriends, Mystic.”

   His lips turned down. “Maybe so.”

   “Comes with the territory, I imagine.”

   “It did, yes. But, please. Mary, stay with me.”

   Mary’s stomach quivered. Suspicions of misuse and arrogance wavered through her. This man was internationally known, and she was a student of business headed for who-knew-what in New York City. He had to be joking with her. This request could not possibly be sincere.

   “You think I’m making it up, don’t you?”

   “Mystic.”

   “That I’m probably already getting ready to leave you.”

   “Oh, no, I….”

   Mystic stood up and removed his coat. One shoe came off, and then another, plus his socks.

   “What are you doing?”

   He unbuckled his belt and slid his pants down his legs. Sitting down, he pulled one pants leg from one foot, and then the other from the other.

   “You’ll catch your death of cold.”

   “I’m going into the Irish Sea, Mary Dalton.”

   “Mystic!”

   “The waters, see?”

   “Please.”

   “For you.” He took the first step down the stairway, toward where the waves rose up to take him. He turned back. “Mary. Stay.”

   She had to tell him. New York was waiting. She was leaving.

—

She hadn’t seen Mystic for ten years. Her father had died and her mother had moved to New York, to an apartment in Park Slope that Mary bought for her. The two women were in Dublin now for a visit and were staying up Killiney Hill at the Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel. Mary knew he still lived on the hill, but even though she was back in Ireland, she couldn’t call him. Not after what he had asked of her, and how she had refused him.

   But Mystic knew she was back, and he called her at the hotel, to ask her to meet him at Finnegan’s. “Yeah, Liam told me. He said you came in yesterday.”

   Now so successful a “Yank,” as those at Finnegan’s who remembered Mary’s tenure at the pub years earlier now called her, she spotted Mystic at his table and, when he stood to greet her, she embraced him.

   “Look, we’re going to be in New York next month.” The allure of his eyes summoned even more of a hug. His hair had begun to gray, a feature that made its still-swirling blacks even more attractive than those of the bedraggled rocker who had sat at this table a decade earlier. She had been following his career, and she knew that he had given up music in favor of his acting for some years but had recently formed a new band.

   “Manhattan?”

   “Yeah, we got two nights at the Beacon Theater.”

   “Oh, Mystic, I…”

   He pointed to the bench. Mary looked over her shoulder. Liam, who indeed still remained behind the bar, smiled at her and gave her a thumbs-up. Mary, embarrassed by her own lack of candor, waved back. The gesture felt listless, as though it were caught in some sort of hidden, unrealized surprise. She sat down.

   “Can I see you there?”

   “Mystic, it’s…”

   He took up her hand and looked to the front of the pub. “What, is there something there you don’t want me to know about?”

   “Please.” Mary’s heart stumbled.

   “Some reason you don’t want me to show up?”

   She swallowed.

   “Come on, Mary. There is something else. I’d—”

   “I’d love to go. But I—”

   “You’re spoken for.”

   Mary’s eyes fluttered as though, a little girl, she had been caught in a subterfuge.

   Mystic sat back and surveyed her. “I’m surprised to see you without a…without a reply, Mary.”

   She laid her hands on her lap.

   “You’re married.”

   “No.”

   “Well, at least you’re in love.”

   She recalled the regret that had lingered in her that day at the Forty Foot, and that returned from time to time, usually in the morning dark in Manhattan, when she would awaken, her throat tight, her breathing hurried. Salt water had been dripping from his hair that day like beads of light itself, and, his face glistening with it, Mystic had asked her, did she still want to visit James Joyce with him.

   She had said no, and he had gone alone. Since then, she had regretted her response and missed what she suspected she would have seen that day in Mystic’s company. What they would have loved seeing together.

   “I am in love, yes.”

   For a moment, the meandering of other conversations in the pub was the only thing that broke the silence. Mary wished to tell Mystic the truth. But Dermot…Poor Dermot…and his feelings for her kept her silent.

—

Mary walked alone to the Forty Foot. She sat down on the same step from which she had watched Mystic hurl himself into the sea years before. She imagined the falling rain that pummeled these waves. So much of it, it must add to the Irish Sea itself, she thought, an ancient flood. And she thought of all that black water pushed about by the terrible winds that drub Ireland from everywhere. She imagined Mystic leaving her there on the stair, swimming out until he could swim no more, and disappearing beyond the horizon. The image was a romantic fantasy, she knew, and she was amused by it. It was like some sort of Pre-Raphaelite painting, the young hero poet losing himself in the waters because of love’s having abandoned him. Mary smiled. She imagined herself, a ringlet of flowers surrounding her hair, a medieval white gown hanging from her fine shoulders, as she, the lost love, looked out to sea for the drowned boy whose lyric voice she had always cherished. The Lady of Shalott, rendered by John William Waterhouse, only this time seated on the salt-eaten cement at the Forty Foot instead of in a finely wrought Viking boat on a lovely English pond. She wondered if those rains fell across Mystic, too, his hands in the pockets of a heavy coat, his footsteps sodden as he wandered beneath the Martello Tower. He thought of her, she knew. At least there was that. And she thought about him.

   He phoned her just as she arrived back at the hotel.

   “I’ll leave a stage pass for you.”

   “Please don’t. It wouldn’t—”

   “Just in case.”

—

In New York, he called her.

   “You’ve got what you want in Dalkey, Mary, and you don’t even know it.”

   “What about my work?”

   “You’ve got a computer?”

   “Of course.”

   “A cell phone? Wi-fi? The cloud?”

   “Yes.”

   “Then you can work in Dalkey.” He paused. “Six months here.” Mary awaited what she knew was coming. “Six months in Manhattan.”

   She recalled the day he had first touched her hand, at Finnegan’s, when she asked whether he had been embarrassed by his name. The brief innocence of that caress had thrilled her.

   “Besides which, you got me in both places.”

   She lowered her head, conflicted by the prospect of what he was offering her. She had not lost Mystic as, for these years, she felt she surely had.

—

Dermot was silent.

   Mary gripped the phone, feeling graceless. “I’m in love, Dermot.”

   He was a fine man but— “And not with me,” he finally said.

   She looked south to the Hudson River. There was a sailboat here and there, ferries, a couple tugboats, and New Jersey lay beyond all that beneath a covering of roiling clouds. All benefitted from the seeming stillness that their distance from Mary’s window afforded them, as though they made up a grand painting of the physical American world in its entirety.

   She looked downriver, where it flowed toward the east into the mutinous Atlantic. “That’s right.”

   “But Mary—”

   “Dermot, I’m leavin’ New York. I’m sorry, but I’m leavin’.”

—

She sat on a stool offstage that one of the hands had found for her. From this angle, the audience appeared like a vast flood of fingerlings clustering at the surface of the sea, seeking food. There were many in their thirties, fans of the now fondly remembered The Yank’s Laughter. Mary was startled by the number of much younger people in the audience as well. Mystic Brennan still packed them in, just like he had years ago.

   The band came up a hallway from their dressing room. In conversation, laughing and hurrying through the clutter of wiring on the floor, backstage stuff, lighting stands and numerous onlookers, they were clearly excited—way excited—by the prospects for this, their first night of an East Coast tour. She had read the article about it in The Observer, in which the writer had extolled the virtues of Mystic Brennan’s music from a few years ago. “This new band is new,” the critic had written, “and Mystic’s public has been waiting too long for his absence to end. His fans now have kids, and we expect they’ll be there tonight too.”

   Hidden as she was to the side, next to a curtain, she watched as the band began passing her by. Mystic, dressed in a slim black suit with a white open-necked shirt, was the last in line, looking about him, carrying a guitar in his right hand, searching the backstage. His face was drawn, worry passing across it and emphasized by his tightened lips. He looked lost, his soul darkened.

   Mary reached out and touched his sleeve. “Mystic.”

—

© Copyright 2017. Terence Clarke. All rights reserved. 

Note: This story comes from Terence Clarke’s collection titled New York, which is available everywhere, in print and digital versions.

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