The Flower Arrangement (14 page)

“Do you think,” she asks him one night, “that we're one of those opposites-attract couples, like chalk and cheese?”

He props himself up and frowns, which for him involves a full facial workout. His forehead furrows. The comic-book caterpillars of his dark eyebrows inch along a bit then down over his eyes. “Chalk and cheese are way too similar. We're more like”—he tugs at his beard—“chalk and skis. Squawk and fleas.”

“Pork and knees.” She grins.

“Forks and antifreeze.” He rubs his chin against her shoulder, his beard prickly on her skin. She already has half a dozen friction burns. She wonders if it's too soon to start dropping hints about him shaving it off.

“You know, I've never kissed anyone with a beard before,” she says.

“How about after?” He growls like a bear and rolls her across the bed till her head is dangling over the edge, the tips of her hair brushing the floor. And she wonders why she never put growling on her checklist.

*   *   *

Mia meets Katy for lunch at the Fern House in Avoca in Kilmacanogue. “You're having dessert!” Mia says before they've even ordered. “We're going to have to fatten you up!”

“Says the size-eight minx to the size-twelve heifer.” Her sister rolls her eyes.

“You're not a heifer. You're a classic hourglass shape and skinny doesn't suit you, Katy!” Mia scrutinizes her face. It looks pinched and pale. “Single doesn't suit you either.”

Katy has instigated some kind of crazy three-month break from her long-term boyfriend, Ben. It's a bad idea and Mia needs to talk her out of it. Ben is practically a member of their small family and she
doesn't want to lose him, but she can't say this so she is planning to restrict herself to sympathy followed by advice. Take. Him. Back.

“Don't start, Mia!” Katy holds up a hand. “I don't want to talk about me and Ben. You lured me here to tell me about this new man, remember?”

“Okay, but you have to eat. We'll both have the risotto,” Mia tells the waitress. She usually has the superfood salad but all the sex has speeded up her metabolism. She pushes the basket of bread across the table.

Katy sighs but takes a piece of brown bread. She is used to Mia's orders. She has been taking them for years.

“Okay!” Mia begins. “His name is Ronan. Ronan Slattery. He's twenty-seven. Very tall. Brown hair. Kind of craggy. Fit in that kind of ‘I never go to the gym but I eat a lot of lentils' way. Huge beard, but that's only temporary.” Mia's inner auditor has opened a mental spreadsheet with “Ronan” in the box titled “Project name.”

“Is he in finance?” Katy begins to butter the bread fast.

“No. He used to lecture at the art college but now he's a conceptual artist.”

Her sister stops buttering, knife suspended in the air, to stare at her. She shakes her head. “Lentils, possibly. A beard, maybe. But an artist?” She says “artist” as if she is saying “porcupine” or “wildebeest.”

“I love art!”

“You do?” Katy says. “I mean, do you?”

“I had that poster by Van Gogh on my bedroom wall for years, remember?”

“It was Magritte and it was mine. You only put it up after the ceiling leaked and that weird patch appeared on your wall.”

“What I know about the art world could fit on a pinhead and what Ronan knows about finance could fit on a . . .” Mia tries to think of something much smaller than a pinhead and can't. “Another smaller pinhead. But we're amazing together. You'll see when you meet him.
Come to dinner on Saturday. Bring—” She is about to say “Ben” but manages to change it, at the last minute, to “Mum.”

“Introduce him to Mum?” Katy's eyes widen. “Are you sure?”

Mia wants to say “Of course not,” but she finds herself nodding instead. “Why not?” She is so loved up that not even her mother could spoil it. She covers her mouth with the back of her hand to try to hide her Cheshire Cat smile. “I'm sorry!”

“For what?”

“For being so happy when you're so miserable.”

“Mia, I don't need you to be unhappy just because I am.” The waitress puts down their bowls. Katy pokes at the pearly rice grains with her fork. “Stop worrying about me. I'll figure things out.”

But it's not just her sister that Mia is worried about. It's herself. For nearly eight years, Ben has been the fourth leg on the three-legged stool of their family. The much-needed dollop of testosterone in their estrogen soup. They are all much nicer women when he is there. Their mother, Angela, might go back over the edge without a man around to fix her dripping taps and bleed her leaking radiators and tell her she looks young enough to be their sister. Somehow Mia can't see Ronan doing any of those things.

*   *   *

The dinner is an unexpected success. Katy and Ronan hit it off right away. Ronan is polite to Angela but he doesn't let her monopolize him the way Ben did, and to Mia and Katy's amazement, she doesn't throw an attention-grabbing hissy fit. Maybe, Mia thinks, she's finally ready to relinquish her role as drama queen. But Angela can't resist turning the situation toward herself the way a compass automatically finds true north.

“I've never seen you so happy,” she says when she calls the next morning. Mia is sitting in the window seat of her kitchen on Ronan's lap while he tears at a baguette with his teeth and reads
The Brothers Karamazov
.

“No, that's not true,” she corrects herself. “You were a very sunny baby. I used to put you out in the garden in your pram and you'd lie there all day, chuckling to yourself.”

“Did I?” Mia remembers herself as a whiny child, perpetually trying to enlist the sympathy of adults. She used to scrape the thin skin on her shins with the pointy plastic hand of a particular Sindy doll till it turned red, on the off chance that Angela might kiss it better. Sometimes the only way to get her mother to stop crying was to cry herself.

“You changed, of course,” her mother sighs. Ronan brandishes the baguette and Mia takes a bite, then closes her eyes. She knows what comes next.

“Everything changed,” Angela says, with the telltale tremble in her voice, “after your father left us.”

Mia waits for the familiar doom-laden cloud of her mother's martyrdom to descend upon her, followed by the forked lightning of the remark she will make in order to shrug it off. But instead her mother's tragic tone sparks a fit of the giggles.

“Are you laughing?” Her mother sounds appalled.

“No!” Mia splutters. “Something went down the wrong way.”

Maybe, she thinks after she hangs up, that was a Freudian slip. After her father left, all of them had gone the wrong way. Her mother toward despair, Katy toward sensitivity, Mia as far away from her own heart as she could get.

*   *   *

Forget diaries, Mia thinks. You can learn pretty much everything you need to know about a person from their credit card statement. A payment to an iffy website? An expensive lunch followed by an extravagant purchase in the lingerie department of Brown Thomas? A significant payment to an optometrist who just happens to do Botox shots on the side? Everyone has something to hide.

But Ronan doesn't have a credit card. He pays his rent and his bills
in cash. As far as Mia can tell, he gets by on fresh air, surviving on measly community grants and arts bursaries and trickles of corporate sponsorship. He shops at German supermarkets. His house is furnished with things other people have thrown away.

It's the kind of place where terrorists would live in an HBO series. The living room is painted black, with a huge, lurid abstract oil painting instead of a flat-screen TV. The communal kitchen is not painted at all. The cooker is connected up to a gas cylinder with an orange rubber hose, the table is made from a Georgian door covered in a sheet of glass and surrounded by office chairs sprayed Day-Glo colors. There are half a dozen battered suitcases piled into one corner.

“Is someone moving in or out?” Mia asks, brushing plaster dust off a chair before she sits on it in her new Kooples trouser suit. This is her first sleepover at Ronan's place. Till now, they've always spent the nights at her apartment.

“Nobody's going anywhere.” Ronan is poking around in the fridge. “The suitcases contain Hilary's past.” He emerges, triumphant, with a saucepan. “They're part of an installation on psychological baggage. You're going to love Hilary. Everyone does.”

“He's your best mate, right?” Mia asks.

“He is a she.” Ronan takes the lid off the saucepan and peers in. “Yes, she probably is my best mate. We go back a long way.”

Mia pictures a woman like the ones who showed up her seminar. Dungarees and home-dyed hair, Dr. Martens, too much makeup or none at all.

Ronan holds out the saucepan. “Lentil and carrot soup. I made it on Friday but it just keeps getting better.”

Mia shakes her head. It is Wednesday.

Ronan's room looks as if it has been recently burgled by impatient, clumsy, tree-dwelling thieves. The floor is littered with books and cardboard boxes and bags of leaves and twigs and bundles of wood that somehow relate to Ronan's project. The radiator is still attached to the water pipes but not to the wall. A couple of hundred coat hangers are
piled to head height in one corner. It's only weeks later that Mia finally realizes they have been sculpted into something; exactly what is not clear, but it is probably art.

They sit on Ronan's lumpy futon with his ancient, cracked MacBook overheating while he takes her on a virtual tour of his artist heroes. A Korean who covered a ten-story building in brightly colored doors. A Belgian who lived in a giant bird's nest attached to a tower in Rotterdam. His favorite pieces are by a Scottish artist who spent weeks building enormous, intricate snow spirals and icicle stars in the Canadian Arctic and then left them to melt.

They are beautiful but she doesn't get it. Who is going to see them in the bloody Arctic? What's the point of going to all that trouble to end up with a pile of slush? Why didn't the artist make the sculptures in plastic so he could hang them in a gallery where someone might buy them?

“How is this monetized?” she says.

“Monetized?” Ronan looks up from the screen.

“How do people buy this guy's work?”

“They don't buy it,” he says. “They collect it in their heads.”

“But it's so impermanent.”

“Correct. The whole point is impermanence,” Ronan laughs. “The snow is a metaphor. Everything melts away to nothingness eventually.”

This thought scares Mia. She pushes the laptop away and pulls Ronan down beside her before this can melt away to nothingness too.

*   *   *

After Ronan has gone to sleep, Mia wraps herself in a sheet and picks her way through the piles of clutter to the door. She tiptoes down the uncarpeted wooden stairs to the landing, and she has her hand on the tarnished brass knob of the bathroom door when it is flung open from inside. The girl backlit in the doorway in the harsh bathroom light has delicate features and cropped inky black hair and very white skin. White except for the tattoos. The name “Donal O'Driscoll” is scrawled
across her left breast. Mia can see this because the girl is completely naked.

“I'm sorry.” Mia backs away and a splinter of wood catches in her bare heel.

“I'm Hilary.” The girl lounges in the doorway, eyeing her coolly. There are other names Mia can't read scribbled on the undersides of her arms—they look like signatures. “What are you sorry for? That racket you and Ro made earlier?” She shrugs. “I was working. I just put my headphones on.” She steps out of the way. “All yours,” she says.

She walks slowly, deliberately slowly, Mia thinks, up the stairs. She pads past the open door of Ronan's room, then disappears into the room next door.

Mia soaks her foot in the grimy bathroom sink and has a go at the splinter with a pair of tweezers that has been left to rust on the windowsill. She is clumsy and ends up breaking it in two. What kind of woman wanders naked around a house that she shares with three men? Not the kind of woman Mia wants to be best mates with her boyfriend.

*   *   *

“Mia keeps smiling for no reason,” her irritating assistant Dermot says at a work do a few weeks later. “Either she has a boyfriend or she's been brainwashed by a religious cult.” He calls her the Ice Queen, Mia knows, behind her back. “So which is it?” he asks her.

“The former,” Mia says. There is a moment of confusion while her half-cut colleagues try to work out what that means.

They badger her for details but Mia has had a lot of practice at stonewalling and she gives nothing away, and soon everyone at work loses interest, except Dermot, who thereafter never misses an opportunity to ask her about her “mystery man.”

*   *   *

In every other relationship Mia has maintained a mental spreadsheet of outgoings and incomings. Actual and emotional. But with Ronan,
that's like trying to herd mice. On paper, she is the one with all the outgoings. Restaurants, movies, taxis. But she is the one who wants to go out in the first place. Ronan would prefer to spend an evening with a bottle of cold wine in Mia's claw-footed bath. His idea of Sunday brunch is taking a flask and sandwiches to a sculpture garden. He would prefer to walk, not take a taxi, whether it's raining or not.

He never buys her flowers or chocolates but he gives her other things. A copy of a poetry book she loved at school that he tracks down in a secondhand bookshop. A heart-shaped ivy leaf he staples to her pillow. A gray pebble with a white seam of marble that makes a perfect “M.”

Ronan is right—everyone loves Hilary. Eamon and Andrew, his housemates, all of his arty friends, even the notoriously bad-tempered barman at Cassidy's. The only person who doesn't fall under the spell of her glittering eyes and her smoky voice and her carefully cultivated feline languor is Mia. She finds Hilary pretentious and stylized and it's hard to love someone who thinks they own your boyfriend.