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  “He wouldn't,” I said, glaring at Mulvaney, who glared back.

  “Not only wouldn't I!” Mulvaney retorted, as hard as any postcard of rocks. “I won't!”

  “Cognac?” Colm offered his flask to me outside the Georgian doors of the Foreign Affairs Building, and I took a swig. “It will make you feel better.”

  “I believe that, even if it is stupid,” I said as we stood facing St. Stephen's Green.

  “Nothing stupid about a booze prescription. It's as old as civilization itself.”

  We turned away from the Green and walked deeper into South Dublin, where the streets turned residential and less grand.

  “So is it true that the Irish are the lost tribe of Israel?” I asked.

  Colm put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Or are the Jews the lost tribe of Ireland?” he asked.

  I left his hand where it was.

  “We've had at least a handful here since 1079 and more than a few escaped Portugal in 1496, never worrying about British tyranny, of course. Shows a certain lack of forethought, don't you think?”

  “Not when faced with an Inquisition.”

  “How could you forget Cromwell?” Colm asked.

  I hadn't. I wondered if I ever would.

  We passed rows of squat, attached brick houses, smaller even than the ones in Belfast. A decent American contractor could do wonders with them. Then we turned onto Clanbrassil Street, a wider, equally crumpled commercial block, and stopped at a row of swankier Georgian houses. Colm opened the iron gate leading to one of them.

  “I thought Leopold Bloom lived on Eccles Street?”

  “Only tourists go there! This is before.”

  There was a green door. Number 52. A rosebush wound its way up near a plaque, that read “Here, in Joyce's imagination, was born Leopold Bloom, citizen, husband, father, worker, the reincarnation of Ulysses.”

  Joyce's imagination. My very words. Maybe, I thought, I could get a job writing literary plaques in Dublin.

  “Jews don't believe in reincarnation,” I said.

  Colm nodded, parked himself on the front stoop, put the now-empty flask of cognac back into his breast pocket, and picked a rose. He put the rose in his mouth and did a brief flamenco step, without touching a thorn.

  “We could break in,” I said.

  Surprised, he looked at me. What was it with Irish men? They try to seduce you, then look aghast if you merely give them a hint they might succeed.

  Colm dug back into his tuxedo pocket, fished around, and came up with a corkscrew so thick and substantial it could have been made from antique Dublin silver.

  “Are you going to screw the house open?” I asked. “Or open the house to screw?”

  He threw it hard, like a young man. The first-floor window shattered. Then he carefully slid his hand through the broken glass, unlatched a lock, and opened the window.

  “Care for a climb?” he asked.

  But it was a question. Not an answer.

  Still, he asked it.

  It was what I'd wanted, wasn't it? A suitor with some mischief that wasn't lethal. Vandalism over Felony Murder. So why wasn't I sure?

  “You're not the woman I thought you were,” he said after a long pause.

  “You think I'm Molly Bloom,” I said, hoping I could stop there. With only a B.A. in English, it would be reckless to use any more Joycean allusions to delay sleeping with this man while I made up my mind.

  “Molly Bloom,” I boomed out over Clanbrassil Street, throwing caution to the wind. “Molly Bloom would have been climbing out the window.”

  “That, dear, would have been Eccles Street,” he said.

  I had to think fast. Did I want to sleep with Colm McEligot? Or would anyone who wasn't Mulvaney do the trick?

  “Could you become a serial offender?” I asked.

  Mulvaney says that I am incapable of writing more than four very short, dull chapters without him as protagonist. He says that even when I am not writing about him I am reflecting his essence and that I do that even while showing something he is not.

  “Essence?” I say.

  I tell him that a man who wants a woman has to find ways to keep her.

  CHAPTER 27

  Gypsy Music

  I called Claire to ask her if Leisure Suit had forgiven me for the guns yet. Or the vacation.

  “How the hell should I know?” Claire exploded transatlantically. “He won't even lean across the desk to talk to me! He just sends messages! While you were gone, they put Message Pending on all the computers and he blinks it on and off a million times a day, like the crazy person he is. My whole life is Message Pending! Message Pending, Message PENDING, MESSAGE PENDING!!!”

  Sounded familiar.

  I reminded Claire that it was her fault, too, I was here.

  “You ought to thank me,” she snapped. “Losing a job at Newsday is the best thing that could happen to a person.”

  So I was getting fired.

  “And I'm helping you to find true love.”

  I hung up on her.

  “Look,” she said when she called back, “I'm sorry. Give me some time. Things are worse here than you can imagine. On top of everything else, there's going to be a Naked Came the Stranger sequel.”

  “Naked Returned the Stranger?”

  “Worse. The Men Who Wrote Naked Came the Stranger are teaming up with the Men Who Didn't. Even worse, they are going to write it on Message Pending!”

  “Electronic and epistolary?”

  “Only the Men Who Didn't still can't. The dogcatcher story bombed. We had to print numerous corrections.”

  It made for a wonderful collaboration, though.

  Young men who couldn't write sex.

  And old men who didn't use computers.

  How nice, I thought, when I heard a knock the next morning. The Kilronan House has sent me breakfast in bed. Maybe I don't need a job.

  I stepped out of the bathtub, tied a large towel around myself, and opened the heavy pine door. But instead of room service with eggs and blood pudding, I found Mulvaney wearing an awful green sport jacket.

  “Get dressed,” he said as he merrily pushed his way in, handing me a newspaper and a sausage roll and eyeing my towel as if he hoped it would fall off. His black doctor's bag thumped onto the floor. “I have a great story to show you.”

  “Mulvaney, you look like a game show host.” I returned the pastry.

  “It's a big international story—with a Huntington angle.”

  I shook my head.

  “If you don't write it, I will.”

  I considered the impact, on me, of a Newsday Sandinista story with local implications—and Mulvaney's byline.

  “I'll give you an hour,” I said. “For old times' sake.”

  Outside, he sped along, ten large steps ahead of me. I shouted from behind, through a sea of pedestrians. “You remember insisting I come with you?” He slowed and I tried to enjoy this brief moment of moderation. We had walked beyond St. Stephen's Green, past the Foreign Affairs mansion, before Mulvaney, his green jacket flapping in the breeze, spoke again.

  “Look for Clanbrassil,” he said.

  I stopped and shivered in the weak Irish sun. “You are taking me to the house where Leopold Bloom was born?”

  “Nah. But the book's not bad. Needs more plot—and a better protagonist. That one's an empty suit. Guy takes your wife, ya shoot him. At the least.”

  You could accuse Mulvaney of many things, but being a Joycean wasn't among them. I shivered again. “Do you think anyone would ever let you have a gun, Mulvaney?”

  “Nope,” he said, stopping at a run-down butcher shop. In the window, chickens hung from their necks.

  “Look!” he ordered, pointing to a small sign.

  It was in Hebrew.

  Jim Mulvaney, who had once accused me of being unable to find a church in Brooklyn when he meant a Jew in the Bronx, had just found a kosher butcher in Dublin. This, I had to admit, wasn't bad. But what was t
he Huntington angle? An international meat scandal would be great, I thought, then scolded myself. I did not want to visualize a story I didn't have. Classic reporter error.

  Mulvaney's chest puffed as he opened the glass front door and gently steered me inside. A petite woman with brown hair as stringy as stew meat smiled from behind the counter.

  “And that's her. She's a broad! A broad butcher! A kosher broad butcher. How many of those you seen, anywhere?”

  His eyes shone blue and white like the Israeli flag.

  The butcher wiped her hands on a bloody apron, picked up a chicken, arranged it on a board, and chopped its head off. The cartilage made a loud crack. She did it again—and again—until she had decapitated six chickens. “Bloody rabbi!” she said, smiling at us.

  A murder story?

  “The Chief Rabbi of Ireland is . . .” Mulvaney said, pausing for drama. “A . . .” He smiled blue. “. . . vegetarian!”

  I looked at him as if he was nuts.

  “He's ruining her business,” Mulvaney explained, with his best “I am a sane man” look.

  The butcher's thick white fingers tensed. She grabbed more chickens and went at them like an axe murderer presented with a bevy of starlets. “He couldn't leave soon enough for me.” Crack! “If he were a real rabbi, he'd be in America.” Crack. “America! A place that became great because the people there eat meat!” Crack, crack, crack.

  “Mulvaney,” I said, not hopeful. “What's the Huntington angle?”

  “Easy. Remember that story you wrote, about the Huntington Lawyer's Club?”

  How could I forget? I hadn't written one for Newsday since. Had he been reading all my pieces, in Belfast?

  “Well, this is a story that shows how much more advanced Ireland is than Huntington. There, they don't believe in broad lawyers. Here, they even believe in broad butchers!”

  So this was Mulvaney's plan? I'd save my job by writing about a kosher girl butcher while he covered the Irish Republican Army?

  “I'm leaving,” I said.

  “It's a great story,” he said. “And there's another one in Belfast about a man who rides a horse-drawn carousel into Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. Nobody else can go back and forth like that without getting shot.”

  I remembered dreaming of Mulvaney's death sentence. Now I imagined him begging for his life and insulting the executioner.

  Outside, ahead of us on St. Stephen's Green, a tinker woman, her face smudged with fake dirt, sat on the sidewalk. She held a baby in one arm and extended a crumbling Styrofoam cup with the other. “Coppers?” she asked. “Have any coppers?”

  Mulvaney handed her a five-punt note.

  “Since when did you become a social worker?”

  He scowled blue. “I'll have you know that Mulvaney is a tinker name.”

  Of course. The wild eyes, the flashes of temper. The inability to walk slowly or stay in one place.

  The deranged ideas that he believed made sense.

  Mulvaney could easily be descended from a long line of Irish Gypsies who lived on whichever side of the road of whichever town suited them at the moment.

  “How do you know it's a tinker name?” This would be important if we ever had children. We wouldn't, though.

  “The PR man at the Irish consulate in New York,” he said.

  “Hell of a way to get the press on your side.”

  “I just want you on my side,” he said.

  Why did Mulvaney do this to me every time I wanted to flee?

  “You should have thought of that before you left me for Ireland, moved in with the IRA, got my mother closer to violence than she's been since 1919, and then tried to win me back with two of the stupidest feature stories on the face of the earth.”

  “Okay, I'll give you Armagh Prison.”

  “You're giving me a correctional facility?”

  “Filled with IRA broads, and the Brits are torturing them. They're making them take off their clothes ten, twelve times a day.”

  “The male guards?” I said.

  “No. It's broads torturing broads.”

  It had sounded too good to be true. “They're in prison, Mulvaney. They're bomb throwers and gunrunners. Why shouldn't they be searched?”

  “You don't get it. Irish broads hate to take off their clothes.”

  “Not for you, apparently.”

  On a wrinkled single sheet of reporter's notebook paper, he wrote down what he claimed was the name of a prisoner. “She's my cousin,” he said as he handed it to me. “I swear.”

  “Long Island angle,” I muttered, crumpling the paper into the pocket of my skirt. “Mulvaney, why don't you just suggest I do some mildly offbeat, overdone travel story? I can see it now: “‘Paris in Winter, Spain Before the Tourists . . .'”

  “Pamplona without bulls,” he said. “Not a bad idea.”

  • •

  I agreed to have coffee with him, only because it was already noon and I needed a jolt of something. My uneaten sausage roll stuck out from the pocket of his green jacket, symbolizing nothing as much as our rotting romance. “Anyplace but the Kilkenny Design Centre,” I said.

  “What's that?” he asked.

  I'd gulp my coffee—the only way to drink most coffee in Dublin—say goodbye to Mulvaney forever, and meet Colm McEligot for lunch. I'd get enough insider Sandinista poop to let me pass Leisure Suit and go directly to Safari. I'd save that guy's job, he'd be eternally grateful, and I'd never have to go to Ronkonkoma again.

  “Leisure Suit's not so bad,” Mulvaney said. “And he's my boss again. I'm his only foreign correspondent.”

  Safari Suit, fighting for his job, had apparently considered it prudent to decline to supervise Mulvaney abroad.

  I followed him into another ratty storefront, where he pulled out a metal chair for me.

  The tablecloths were paper, as were the plates. A waiter—husky with long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail—set our table with plastic forks and knives, Dixie cups, and menus handwritten on paper torn from school notebooks.

  I took a quick look, curious to see what the worst sandwich shop in Dublin might serve.

  Lunch

  Prix fixe—Seven Pounds

  Escargot

  Cream of Carrot Soup

  Mixed Greens

  Lemon Ice

  Pigeon with Currants

  Assorted home-baked tarts, coffee, tea

  French cheese plate

  “Wait here,” Mulvaney said.

  “Mulvaney!” I said. “What is this place?” But as I spoke he charged out the door, returning less than five minutes later, brandishing a bottle of Château Margaux. “No liquor license, I forgot.”

  “Mulvaney, I said coffee.”

  The ponytailed waiter appeared with a corkscrew. “Shay Beano,” he said, introducing himself. “Welcome to Chez Beano. The only seven-course, seven-punt French meal in Ireland.”

  “The IRA loves this place,” Mulvaney said.

  “I'm leaving,” I said, for the second time that morning. Mulvaney took my arm and poured me a cup.

  Men who pour well, even if they are pouring into Dixie cups, look you in the eye to determine whether this is something you'd like to drink. As the wine hit the wax bottom of the cup, it occurred to me, yet again, that I had never seen a man pour better than Mulvaney.

  But why did anyone think you could base a relationship on that?

  Mulvaney presents me with an outline for the rest of the book. Now he wants to write the book he wants me to write about him.

  You could measure the temerity of this on a Richterscale.

  At the bottom of his outline he adds a handwrittennote:

  “Re: Colm McEligot. NO CONSUMMATION.”

  “Mulvaney,” I say, “not only might there be consummation, Colm McEligot might be the protagonist.”

  “Har-de-har-har,” he says.

  “Mulvaney,” I say, tears filling my eyes, “you watched The Honeymooners.” I have to fight not to let this turn my hea
d.

  “Just recently,” he admits. “I did it for you.”

  No, I say to myself. No. No. No.

  I harden. “It's too little too late. I don't know where I'm going with you in this book. With Colm, I know. He's going to give me a great story about the Sandinistas, and Newsday will send me to Latin America. . . .”

  “You can't take me out of The Jim Mulvaney Story,” Mulvaney says.

  “Mulvaney,” I say, “this has been a misdirected project from day one, from the day we decided that I would write your life story. You, Jim Mulvaney, were never meant to be in a memoir, even one written by your wife. Particularly one written by your wife.”

  “I was the last white guy—”

  “Mulvaney, would you listen to me! Every time I tried to write the truth about you, you changed the story on me. Anyone who is so disturbed by the bare, unadorned truth as you are just cannot be in a memoir. You pushed me into this.”

  “You're blaming me because you're having an affair!”

  “It's a novel, Mulvaney.”

  “It's a novel now? Good. Then just have Colm McEligot murdered. This book is filled with potential suspects. It would be a waste not to use them.”

  “Mulvaney, it just clicked with him and me.”

  “You need to make yourself hotter for me,” he says. “As for the tenderness, I may die from the chill, waiting.”

  “Why is this always my responsibility? Why can't you be hotter? You could be a little more charming, too.”

  “If you write me any more charming, people won't believe it's true.”

  “It isn't. So don't assume you can tell me what to do with Colm McEligot.”

  “You think putting some old Irish guy in it is going to make it sexier?” Mulvaney asks.

  “Colm McEligot,” I say, “is the rare old Irish guy who actually is sexy.”

  The Real Mulvaney is visiting and has borrowed my computer to check his e-mail. But now he stops, grabs his cane, and stands, poised to defend the attractiveness of old Irish men. Real ones. Supposedly. He is a bit hobbled by age, but not enough so that he stays off Internet sites for lovelorn senior citizens. He growls, sits back down, and mails out a touched-up photograph of himself.