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  “I cannot move without my doctor's approval,” my mother said. She put her open hand over her forehead, sighed long, and faked a faint. Mulvaney stared at the soldier, who flinched. My mother opened one eye to watch.

  “I will have to examine her on the couch,” Mulvaney said.

  “We need to search her.”

  “She is not able to move.”

  My mother moaned. “He's the best heart surgeon in New York,” she said, forgetting she was supposed to have fainted.

  More silence.

  “I guess you haven't seen the movie,” I said. So this place did make people desperate.

  The soldier turned to me. “The one about my mother and her heart transplant,” I plunged on. “She has a baboon's heart, although in her case one from a larger beast would have been more compatible.”

  “I need to search her,” he repeated. His freckle-faced buddy cowered in the corner.

  Mulvaney moved in front of him. “Could be a general someday. Could be a Member of Parliament.”

  “Excuse me, mister?” He was beginning to look even younger.

  “Excuse me, Doctor,” Mulvaney insisted. “It would seem that you are career material. Political, even.”

  The soldier moved closer to my mother.

  “Kill an American woman and it's all ruined.” Mulvaney blocked him. “They put you in this godforsaken place, put you in charge of men fighting the most ridiculous, underappreciated war of the late twentieth century. I'm sure a smart young man like you understands that most of your countrymen don't want troops here. But you do this, do it well without killing anyone, because every death in Northern Ireland makes the British government look worse. . . .”

  The soldier shifted his leg. Then he shifted his rifle to me. I could hear myself sweating.

  “So,” Mulvaney continued, “they figure they owe you because you were in Belfast. You get promoted twice for every single promotion every guy who went to the Falklands gets. Before you know it, they want you to run for Parliament. . . . Be a pity to have some old Jewish broad from Brooklyn ruin all that.”

  On the couch, my mother shifted ever so slightly and cocked an eye at her physician.

  “Mister?” the soldier asked.

  “Doctor.” Mulvaney was undeterred. “You move her, she dies. One old, sick, Jewish-broad tourist from America dies on you, it's as if you killed a whole neighborhood of Catholics. Doesn't help matters that I need to bring her to my lecture at the university tomorrow.”

  “The BBC is taping it,” I added.

  “I'll have to search around her,” the soldier said.

  I held my breath. Each time he dug his weapon behind a pillow, my mother moaned.

  “Careful, Soldier,” Mulvaney said. “Wouldn't want to accidentally puncture her lung, would we?”

  Finally the boy soldier stopped rifle-butting pillows. “We'll be back,” he said as his sidekick followed him out the door.

  Nobody spoke until the street was clear.

  “Good thing I unloaded most of the couch last night,” Suzie said.

  “‘Sex for Siding'?” Mulvaney is triumphant. “You can't write sex to save your life. No one in their right mind thinks aluminum siding is sexy.”

  If they lived in my yellow house, they might.

  “Not only can't you write sex,” I say, “you can't read it unless it's about you.”

  “You want my opinion and then you're angry at me if I tell you the truth.”

  “When did I ever ask your opinion? You stand over me while I am writing and offer it to me.”

  “Your sex scene is filled with clichés.”

  I contemplate throwing china at my husband. I'll show him clichés.

  “James Dean is not a literary device!” Mulvaney is ranting. “He is a Banana Republic ad campaign.” Next he's going to tell me he can't believe anyone could be so stupid.

  “Well, Mulvaney,” I say, moments before banging the front door behind me, “I would do the same for you if only I could find the right product.”

  I walk down the street, hoping to run into my contractor. So, Mulvaney doesn't like “Sex for Siding,” which happens to be a true-true story? Fine. He never has to know how it ends.

  I am going to make up my next non-Mulvaney flirtation. And this time it's going in the main text.

  CHAPTER 23

  Main Text

  Would it be hyperbolic to say that the new man I met in Paris looked like Sean Connery?

  He had that gray beard, neatly trimmed, and he smiled with his eyes, which were green, not blue.

  He was not short, nor was he a medium-sized man who thought he was short and therefore tortured everyone with Napoleonic tendencies he had no right to exhibit.

  No, this man was tall and he knew it.

  He could be smart and interesting without requiring the world to blow up around him. He knew revolutionaries but he did not live with them. Nor did the revolutionaries he knew all come from the same ethnic group as he did.

  He had at least one friend who wasn't a cop, a criminal, or his father's bartender.

  I could tell you the specific details of how I met this man, but I don't want to give Mulvaney the satisfaction. Suffice it to say that he was in Paris visiting a sick friend named Samuel Beckett.

  Colm McEligot is from Dublin, which means that unlike Mulvaney, he really is Irish. But unlike Mulvaney's friends in Belfast, he is not a hoodlum. He is a Trinity College political scientist, whose area of expertise just happens to encompass the international connections of any number of revolutionary groups, including, but not limited to, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.

  I was sure Colm McEligot could help me fix my career problems, which was one of the reasons I followed him back to Dublin. That he looks like Sean Connery, an Irish Sean Connery, is mere coincidence. Despite what all those high-minded literary souls and expensive writing programs tell you, there is no reason why coincidence can't work as well in fiction as it does in real life, where it happens every day without causing any major intellectual rifts.

  If Mulvaney can do better, he should go right ahead. Let him figure out a more believable way for me to dump my mother in Paris and save my career. He should not, however, forget that he was the one who got me into this situation. It was his fault that my mother and I had to flee Northern Ireland before she got arrested for gunrunning.

  Or was it gun sitting?

  Mulvaney says that he would like to expand Marsha McCain's role in this book.

  “She's the new kind of Nationalist,” he says. “She's looking for a political solution.”

  Aren't we all, I think.

  “Mulvaney,” I say, “I'm thinking about taking her out entirely.” True-true: She's getting cut down to skin and bones after I use her for a few laughs. “A surfer babe in Sinn Fein. Who would believe that?”

  “Maybe nobody has to believe it. Maybe I made her up!”

  If he wants to do that, I tell him, he should write his own book.

  CHAPTER 24

  Dublin Princess

  In the café of the Kilkenny Design Centre on Baggot Street in Dublin, Professor Colm McEligot appeared behind his American exchange students and, with a flourish, served an overflowing plate of cakes, scones, and muffins. Their applause resounded throughout the café.

  After a bow gauged to tease, he took a silver flask from the pocket of his clean denim shirt, taut against his chest, and poured a shot of golden liquid into his white coffee mug. He poured for each student, too, but considerably less.

  A young man grabbed a cake. “Aw, c'mon, Professor McEligot! A drop more?” he said, faking a Boston accent. “Don't you want us to make you a legend in Harvard Yard?”

  “Already am one there, thank you,” Colm McEligot replied, his posh Dublin accent gone, his own version of a fake Bostonian in its place. Within minutes he switched to Gaelic, then Spanish, then back to English and so began his tutorial on “Irish Nationalism, America and the Sandinistas.”

  He saw me watching
, smiled with his green eyes and his mouth, and directed me to a nearby table, as if to say I could listen to him but only if I wanted to.

  Already this potential romance was progressing better than the yet-to-be-reconsummated one with Mulvaney. From the window next to my table I could see the stone walls of Trinity College as I drank my own cappuccino, a rare beverage in Dublin but not, I suspected, as rare as up North. The foam swirled in its elegant Danish white mug, and across the floor the design center displayed its other wares: clay teapots, pewter flatware, and piles of sweaters, none of them Aran. I got up and walked over to admire a black intarsia with a bold geometric design.

  “And what does a Jewish princess make for dinner?” Colm McEligot asked as I passed. This joke had been around New York for decades but he was, I could tell, being gently wry.

  “She could make an old Irishman happy,” I replied.

  “See?” he turned to his students, his green eyes aglow. “I am a true scholar of international relations.”

  The tutorial ended hours later in Toner's Pub on Baggot Street. Somehow, it dwindled to two. Colm McEligot asked me if I wanted to meet Chaim Herzog. It was not what I had expected him to say but charming nevertheless. Outside, he hailed a nonsectarian taxi and dropped me off at the Kilronan House, a bed-and-breakfast across from the Hebrew Congregation of Dublin, a shul for Catholic Jews that was also the only shul in Dublin. In the morning an invitation to an Irish state dinner for the President of Israel arrived.

  CHAPTER 25

  Circumstance

  Claire, on deadline, announced that the Men Who Didn't Write Naked Came the Stranger had unearthed a sex scandal. “Late bloomers,” she said. “They nailed the Huntington Dogcatcher.”

  For an animal story, this had legs. But how many and what kind?

  “Six,” she said. “But only two human.”

  “So hind legs guarantee upfront play?”

  Claire did not laugh. “I don't think you understand why you are in Dublin.”

  She was wrong. I was in Dublin because I wanted Newsday to send me to Latin America. “I didn't understand why I was in Belfast,” I said.

  “That was because you and Mulvaney belong together. Or, better put, you don't seem able to escape one another.”

  “Ah, but we did.”

  “Not for long. Circumstance is very important in romance. And it's a lot more subtle than coincidence. We don't give it enough credit.”

  Just ask the Huntington Dogcatcher.

  “I think I need someone more stable,” I said. “Maybe an academic type.”

  Claire snorted loudly. “Professors are even bigger nut jobs than faltering foreign editors.”

  “Safari Suit's been torpedoed?”

  “Close.”

  Leisure Suit, she said, wanted to steal the foreign editor's job and had mounted, speaking of dog stories, a campaign worthy of a presidential candidate, claiming, of course, that he could oversee Newsday's world coverage from Ronkonkoma.

  Had he noticed that I hadn't returned from the vacation I didn't tell him I was taking?

  Silence.

  “Well?”

  “Listen”—she sounded uncharacteristically sheepish—“this is not a good time. He just found out that you and your mother almost got arrested for gunrunning. . . .”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  “He just threw a clipboard at the trash can.”

  In the ballroom of the Office of Foreign Affairs, I leaned against a marble pillar, looked up at the carved ceiling and then down again, searching for Colm McEligot.

  A woman in white linen trimmed with lace played the harp, and underneath a Waterford chandelier the three Jewish members of the Dáil, the Irish Parliament, argued about legalizing birth control. The Jews could have had a voting block; they outnumbered Dáil Protestants. But each one of them belonged to a different party.

  Chaim Herzog, a determinedly pleasant man who held a ceremonial rather than elected position, stood in the midst of a bevy of Irish diplomats and freestanding pewter vases filled with blue West Cork hydrangeas. A few Gardai—Irish cops—huddled nearby as the President of Israel helped himself to a flute of champagne and a dollop of smoked salmon that could have been lox. He ate it with a grin. According to the morning's Irish Times, the Brits in the North, his birthplace, had tried to serve him prawns, also a local specialty but not a kosher one.

  Under the chandelier, the Jewish Dáil sex argument escalated. Ben Briscoe was the best known of the trio. His father had been Lord Mayor of Dublin and a hero of the Irish Revolution, which meant that the old man had blown up buildings. These days, though, that was rarely mentioned. Now when a Briscoe made the news, it was over opposition to what was known in every Irish pub as “the Condom Bill.”

  The crowd grew larger and pushed me so close to Briscoe I had to introduce myself. He said he was impressed that a Long Island newspaper had sent a reporter to cover Chaim Herzog in Ireland, which it hadn't.

  The lights dimmed and a spot flooded on the harpist, then moved. Next to her, transformed from professorial by a tux, stood my favorite Trinity political scientist.

  “A traditional ballad,” he announced and, in an alto, too high for a man but still strong, he began.

  When cocks curved throats for crowing

  And cows in slumber eeled

  She tiptoed out the half door

  And crossed her father's fields

  Down the mountain shoulders

  The ragged dawn light came

  And a cold wind from the westland

  Blew out the last star's flame

  Her father, the strong farmer,

  Had horses, sheep and cows,

  One hundred verdant acres

  And slates upon his house

  And she stole with the starlight

  From where her life began

  To roam the roads of Ireland

  With a traveling tinker man

  His hair was brown and curling,

  His eyes were brown as well,

  His tongue would charm the hinges

  Off the gates of hell

  Mulvaney has not spoken to me for two chapters.

  CHAPTER 26

  Wandering

  Whiskey in hand, bow tie perfectly straight, Colm walked toward me. “You shouldn't be singing about hell to a room full of Jews,” I said. “Not to mention tinkers.”

  In Ireland, tinkers—more courteously called “itinerants”—lived on the sides of roads in trucks or trailers. They sold pots for a living and were said to be fighters and thieves and—even worse—Gypsies, and therefore different. Not a good idea to remind Jews that their hosts, Irish though they might be, were capable of oppressing a downtrodden, misunderstood people.

  Colm tried to look down my red brocade dress, which I'd bought at the Laura Ashley shop on Dawson Street. I'd told the salesclerk I needed something sedate, befitting a state dinner. Drapery, I'd suggested.

  “Hard to see past the material,” Colm agreed as Chaim Herzog appeared.

  “Professor McEligot!” Colm bowed, exchanged his empty whiskey glass for a flute of champagne, and handed another one to the President of Israel, who took it and then the professor's arm. “We Jews, like the Irish Itinerant People, are wanderers. I myself, as you know, wandered out of Ireland and became President of the Promised Land.”

  As Herzog moved on, Colm took a triumphant taste of champagne. A drop hit his beard. Golden and gray. “Let's get out of here,” he said, green eyes aglow. “Would you like to see where Leopold Bloom lived?”

  I felt the kind of thrill that comes from being terrified. “He lived in Joyce's imagination,” I said, trying to buy time to think. Wandering Jews, I guessed, were the evening's theme.

  The lines around Colm's eyes formed arrows directing me to the center, the green. “Well?” he asked. “Would you like to see the manifestation of Joyce's imagination?”

  Suddenly, I heard stomping.

  “Hey, Sarge, how ya doin?”

 
I turned, hoping that I had eaten a bad piece of smoked salmon or that I was in a bad movie or a bad book based on a bad movie, all of which would have been better than the sight I saw: Mulvaney at the ballroom entrance, shaking hands, vigorously, with one of the Garda following Chaim Herzog.

  The Non-Naked Men had told me a wanted poster with Mulvaney's picture hung in Foresto Tuxedo in Mineola. It wasn't him they were after, as much as the tuxedo he had forgotten to return in October 1975.

  I know where it is, I thought.

  The tie was askew, the shirt untucked, the jacket wrinkled and unbuttoned and perched precariously on his shoulders. He took a bottle of champagne from the nearest waiter and popped the cork, which jettisoned off the marble pillar, flew up and hit the wooden carving of the ceiling, sped down, wound its way through the lace of the harpist and the strings of her harp. It knocked over a pewter vase, crashed into a crystal tear of the chandelier, and finally fell to the ground.

  Having defied many of the principles of physics, Mulvaney walked toward us. He put one arm around Colm and the other around me, his hand dangling just over the front of my dress.

  “Mulvaney!” Colm McEligot said with glee.

  “You know each other?” I asked, wishing for a better line.

  Mulvaney stared at me in incredulous blue. “You kiddin'? Colm McEligot's famous. You never saw him on Sixty Minutes? Every foreign correspondent in the world's quoted him at some time or other.”

  “We were just leaving,” I said, moving Mulvaney's hand aside.

  “So soon? The two of you?”

  I nodded.

  “I thought we had a good time together in Belfast.”

  “Mulvaney!” I shouted as Colm McEligot looked on with what could best be described as detached academic concern. “There was a couch full of guns in Belfast. It kind of ruined that good time.” So, I thought, did the red-haired Marsha McCain.

  “I got you close to the action.”

  “Mulvaney, we're supposed to be reporters! That close is too close.”

  “Would you like to join us?” Colm, ever the gentleman, asked Mulvaney. “On a stroll through Jewish Dublin?”