It was quite early on in my stay in New York that I met him, and to begin with I was sure that the excitement that I felt every day on waking up was to do with the notion of spring in New York …

The Gingerbread Woman

(continued)

New York is a bizarre city, so full of contradictions – black and white, heat and chill, awful poverty and equally awful wealth, dust and drenching rain the like of which we do not suffer here, callousness and inestimable kindness. Perhaps all cities are the same, but it turned Dublin in my mind into a village with all the properties and problems of a village and the comforts always there. New York has few comforts. Perhaps that is why it is so exciting to live there, the razor’s edge of life.

I have already indicated that I am a cautious person and I fell, to start off with, cautiously in love with James K’van as I will continue to call him as I need to fictionalise him in my mind now, remove his cruel reality which has left scars not just on my body, but on my heart and mind as well.

Throughout my careful and loving upbringing I had observed love to be a walk into privacy. Two people, it has always seemed to me, are far more private than one. They do not need any longer the flamboyant and sometimes corrosive fever that whirls people into close encounters and even distant encounters, exposing their pains and privacies in their search for a companion. I watched my siblings with a certain amusement, and also my friends who climbed rather than fell into love while I kept running like the Gingerbread Man, away, away. You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man. You will never catch me. I, upper case, am the Gingerbread Woman.

I am not going to write all that down, just the merry and sad tale of myself and James K’van. Foolish, I think I should say rather than merry; my years of light-hearted flirting and fucking had made me very careless. I did not recognise the danger signs because I had never had to before.

I never thought I would see him again after our dinner in the Italian restaurant. With somewhat old-fashioned punctiliousness he left me at the door of my flat in Morton Street, just north of Houston and five minutes’ walk from my work. As I mentioned before, it had been lent to me by a friend called Jodie for the academic year, while she was on sabbatical leave; all I had to do was feed her cats and water the plants that filled her small backyard in earthenware pots. She was having a whale of a time in India, according to the postcards she sent from time to time, and I was teaching my course on Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O’ Brien and Molly Keane.

The outside of the house was dark brown and unprepossessing, and I saw that thought pass across his face as he handed me out of the cab and then gently kissed my hand. He waited on the pavement by the cab until I had turned the key in the door and opened it into the darkened hall. I turned and waved to him and he stepped back into the cab and away he went. I hadn’t discovered where it was he lived, but I presumed it was the Upper East Side somewhere.