Free Academy Street by Mary Costello

little apart. Long, lean, blond. He was talking to Tim and when she came
close he looked up and fell silent and she felt a powerful signal. In the minutes
that followed he did not look at her once, and she could not bear to look at him
either.
    His name was David. He was a cousin of Anne’s, out from Dublin, working for the last
nine months with a firm of lawyers in midtown. He reminded her of a brighter, quieter
Oliver.
    Later, she found herself sitting beside him. He reached out a hand and passed her
a soda. She saw he was a citóg and watched him closely after that. He had been to
university. She felt inferior, always, among city people, among the educated. He
spoke with a city accent. She became acutely aware of her own. She told him she had
trained in the Mater Hospital.
    ‘I grew up in Glasnevin, not far from the Mater,’ he said. He smiled at her. She
told him she used to visit the Botanic Gardens on her days off. She saw a monkey
puzzle tree there. She had never heard of a monkey puzzle tree before that.
    ‘The Gardens are just around the corner from my home,’ he said. They might have passed
each other on the street. He was silent then, as if reconsidering what he was about
to say. His arms were tanned, with a thick crop of gold hairs.
    ‘When I was ten,’ he said, ‘I saw a tree there struck by lightning. I was with my
brother. It went up in flames in front of us. I was terrified, rooted to the spot…but
under a sort of spell too.’
    She told him about her work, her home, the little groves of oak and beech. His legs
were long, strong, muscular. The sight of them made her shy.
    ‘I have an uncle, a teacher, in Australia,’ he said. ‘He told me in a letter once
that in the bush, years ago, when the police were hunting down outlaws like Ned Kelly
they’d burn a tree to keep warm on cold nights. They’d find a dead tree and set it
alight there where it stood, and gather around it. Then the outlaws would see the
burning tree in the distance and make off, gaining ground through the night.’
    He had beautiful hands. He was so far from Denis and Oliver, his life so polished,
that she felt a pang of pity for them, for all they lacked. At this thought she felt
suddenly disloyal.
    ‘Do you like it here, in New York?’ she asked.
    He looked out across the park. ‘Yes, I suppose. I don’t like the evenings. Late summer
evenings when…’
    He did not finish. He took out cigarettes and offered her one. She shook her head.
He lit his own and exhaled. She was aware of every breath, the flex of every muscle,
where his eyes fell, his hands. To be this watchful, this attuned to a man, a stranger,
excited and confused her. He lit another cigarette and looked pensive. He was on
the point of telling her something else, but he stood up and moved away, and she
felt the parting like a loss.
    Later, when they drew near again he did not say much. He gave off an air of mild
irritation, as if regretting all he had told her. Then a silence, a pall, began to
envelop them. It took all her talk away.

7
    FROM A DISTANCE he exerted a great force on her. She craved solitude to conjure him
up again, finding significance only in the recall of that day. Everything moved her.
Every sight and sound, every song, every man’s face—the whole city—turned him over
to her. She went out to Brooklyn one morning with Anne to help choose Anne’s trousseau.
In the afternoon they left the shops, each enwrapped in her own fantasy. They walked
along a street with a slight incline where kids rode bikes along the cracked pavement,
calling out to one another in the bright sun. She gazed at the clapboard houses and
imagined the back yards and clotheslines and husbands sitting in the shade. She began
to imagine coming home to this, entering, calling out ‘I’m home, honey,’ and he in
the kitchen peeling onions, frying meat. The meat browning on the pan, the smells,
the sounds of the kitchen. She, pausing in the hall, hearing the children