‘Where are you going with those flowers in your hair?’
Where is Maura going with those flowers in her hair? The electrician hanging upside down from the scaffolding posed this question tonight, after Maura spent another Day of Rest teaching wide-eyed Katie Couric want-to-bes about subject-predicate constructions. (Mr. Narcy’s bullet-laced prose is beginning to feel like a warm blanket in comparison.) Maura could feel The Almighty stirring the clouds, mixing the thunder, pondering whether the newspaper’s resident Catholic should be allowed to keep getting away with so many philosophical protestations against the need for weekly mass. But after ending last week with two intense discussions about the point in life she is going to start having those 15 womb-benders, since apparently it is something like deciding when she is going to prison in this Solzhenitsynian universe constructed as of late, she has been considering—where is the dear muse going?
She both loathes and lives on the idea of teleology. But it always begs the question (not logically) about where she’s been, where the entire trinitarian ensemble has been. One thing is certain—they are moving away from this role of the muse, this static position ironically mixed up with longing, a desire for a home, the need for endless self-aggrandizement.
Maura’s trail has been has been charted out, in part, on these pages. The Maura who returned to the dark Galway of her youth is no longer here. The tone, currently a bit more somber, reflects a journey of sorts. A journey that Mr. Narcy and The Other viewed only through late night skype calls, drink-induced Facebook messages and ragged marks on paper, blurred from those rainy nights when Maura thought it was a good idea to light a cigarette from her electric burner and proceed to smoke out her kitchen window. They all viewed their journeys in tiny snippets, marking the characters with epithets so that The French boy, the B.A. Fiction boy and even the boyfriends all seemed like slim caricatures of their true selves. Because all sense of self had been questioned, pushed and maybe even erased.
Now, Maura sits atop a green house full of emotional girls, a veritable whorehouse, where Saturday evening dance marathons shake the neighborhood. She is writing, watching The Other convince the public of the need for social change, with tea in her whiskey, a concoction brought on by The Other’s dangerous rhetorical powers. (Watch out for her exquisite use of silence and the non-look.) Maura sits here and thinks about the journeys the Trinity has been on, what they’ve learned from them.
She went on a few different journeys this summer—one to the one place where all questions of identity and belonging seem obsolete, a place that strips her Romantic longing down to the bare-bones collegiate pretension that it probably is, a place Mr. Narcy rightly notes may someday trap her forever with its barnacle hands. But there were other journeys—coasting out of the bleach-blonde world where sparks flew—the electrical sort—perhaps dangerously, and thus necessarily so, then dragging The Other back to this land of rain and unclear coastlines. The journey was rough—the mixture of new cities, un-sensitively selected Irish music and the desire for more whiskey and beer brought on a maelstrom of tears as the female di-umverate entered each new northern city.
But now the gang’s all here. Mr. Narcy and The Other both recently remarked that they never quite understood the homesick—thus, they never quite understood the perhaps somewhat stubborn one sitting across from them, demanding inspiration and guilt-inducing means of procrastination. Maura never longed for her place of birth, but rather for that place where Romantic longing takes on new meaning.
But the cost of too many journeys can be high—the wanderer never settles, never attaches. Maura only discovered her attachment to Mr. Narcy and The Other when they left. Now, they are here, and all planning their next flight off this boiling hot continental U.S. (The land of beach-blonde film stars is hardly the U.S., more like a non-world that can only be entered when one is armed with a militaristic Narcy-esque goal.)
And yet, maybe for the first time in her life, Maura is not yet itching to leave. Despite tiring of the way in which skinny jeans seem to tighten the scrotums and brains of many of her fellow students, the local dislike of outsiders and The Other and Maura’s inability to be ethereal and flighty enough, Maura must be here, at least for now. Here, geographically, and here, in a sense the Czech philosopher can translate. The Trinity will never be children again, but the joy of a child, the magic of a child, lies in the child’s complete inability to conceive the importance of the past or the future. They are entirely in this moment, this moment where Maura and The Other must cram 5 Chinese girls into Maura’s sex-on-wheels-mobile to find them a proper hotel and give them advice on dating American men. (Clearly they do not understand why Maura and The Other keep fleeing the continental U.S.) The moment when Mr. Narcy stuffs Maura with orgasm-inducing doughnuts after three hours of sleep and a Bon-Ap caffeine high that would put Starbucks’ marketing team to shame, only to stand in Costco’s freezer, debating the merits of different local, organic and oh so eco-friendly mushrooms while Maura searches for whiskey, only to remember that this lovely state does not allow the sale of liquor in grocery stores.
Snow hasn’t yet hit their city, inciting the endless playlists of The Commitments and Joanie Mitchell, the longing for darks ends of the street and rivers that make the Atlantic look like mere puddle in the crossing. But when it does, Maura, The Other and Mr. Narcy will once again feel the pull—the pull back to the cottage where questions of French salonieres, Apocalyptic fervor and depictions of Irish female corporality and their implications for silenced sexuality were all that seemed to matter.
But there is a reason that the triumverate is still here. Here they must remain, forever. Geography an accident, here the station.
Van the Man is breaking the current silence, telling Maura something probably far wiser than her own musings:
“If my heart could do my thinking and my head begin to feel, I could look upon the world anew, and know what’s truly real.”
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