“It’s a lot of romance,” I said, giving a slightly apologetic wince and then hating myself for doing it. There was no reason I couldn’t own up to what I liked to read. It wasn’t just that I often braced myself against any of the usual dismissive reactions to the genre, although those could be annoying. It also felt too…revealing, somehow. It cut a little close, telling someone how much you liked reading about people falling in love. It felt too much like naming your own secret desires out loud.
“I saw some over there,” he said, leading me to a shelf that was mostly general fiction, but did have a few romance novels mixed in alphabetically by author. It was comforting to see names I recognized, even if the editions were a little different. Another touch of the familiar in a foreign place.
“Do you read romance?” I asked. I was impressed that he’d even known what to look for.
“I’ve read some,” he said. “I think. You’re more the expert, you can tell me. Where would I start?”
I pulled a book off the shelf, handing it to him. “This one is a bit melancholy, I’ll warn you,” I said. “But it does end in a happily ever after—spoiler alert, except not, because it’s baked into the genre.”
He flipped the book over as if to scan the back cover copy, but I could tell he wasn’t really reading it. That disappointed me a little. He was being polite, which I appreciated, but if hewas going to go through the motions he really didn’t need to. As he’d said, life was short, and if he wanted to read other stuff, that was fine. I just wished he wouldn’t patronize me by asking about it in that case.
“What do you like about romance?” he asked, and maybe it was because of those thoughts, but my answer came out sharper than I normally would’ve said it.
“It makes me feel hopeful,” I said. “Men aren’t trash, multiple orgasms are real, true love is out there, that kind of thing.”
Eamonn made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a cough.
“What, you don’t agree that men are trash?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.
“That was the part that least caught me up,” he said.
He slid the book back into its place on the shelf, and we kept wandering around the bookstore. It wasn’t very large, but still, when he headed into another room I let him go without following, making my way instead to the shelf of Irish folklore I’d seen right by the door as we walked in.
I had to flip through a few books until I found one that listed “The Wooing of Becfola” in its contents. My heart kicked up a beat as I turned to the story.
I skimmed the first few sections, discovering that Eamonn had really given quite a good overview of the tale. Becfola arrives mysteriously, the king asks her to marry him, but she leaves him to go off into a fairy realm.
Then it got into new parts I didn’t know yet. In the fairy world, Becfola follows a light that beckons her, which turns out to be a fire where a young man is roasting a boar. She’s struckby the young man’s beauty, and also by the fact that he barely looks at her—just lets her eat some of the boar and then lets her follow him onto a boat and to the place where he goes to sleep. She watches him and thinks about how beautiful he is and why he doesn’t seem to admire her own beauty the way everyone else has.
Eamonn rounded the corner heading back into the front room, his body language loose and casual as he scanned the book spines. He didn’t seem as if he was looking for anything in particular, just browsing, and I appreciated the chance to watch him for a second. He had such long lashes—I could see them from across the room, the shadow they cast over his cheekbones as he looked down at a shelf of books. His face had a shadow over it most of the time, it seemed to me. It was as if there was a deep sadness inside him, so far down that he probably thought he hid it well, but then he looked at you and it was right there in those eyes.
His browsing had been bringing him closer to me, but then the clerk said something that made Eamonn back up and talk to him. There were some typical pleasantries at the beginning—the clerk making a comment about the weather, Eamonn asking a question about a book that was propped up on the counter—and eventually the talk turned to football and a bunch of specifics I couldn’t follow. I brought the folklore book with me over to the wingback chair in front of the window, where I sat with it on my lap, leaning over it as I read the rest of the tale.
So Becfola has now left the king and is off in some magical realm with this beautiful, aloof young man, and they’reawoken to seven men who want to fight. The young man, of course, defeats all of them. Becfola wants to know why he battled them, but more important, why he won’t evenlookat her. He says he’s not worthy of the mate of the King of Ireland until he has won the kingship of his own fairy land, and she should return to her king and her home until he’s ready to get her.By my hand, he says,I will come.
Becfola returns to her king, and is astonished when it seems as if no time has passed at all. The king treats her as if she’d only just decided against her Sunday rendezvous that had set her out in the first place. She knows the original prince she’d been planning to meet—god, I’d already forgotten about that poor sap—is probably still out there, waiting for her, but she realizes she doesn’t care about him anymore. She only cares about the beautiful young man, her fairy beau.
That morning, a cleric comes to tell the king of some urgent news, which of course the king is pissed to receive because it’s Sunday and haven’t we already been over that nothing is supposed to happen on a Sunday. The cleric says that he came upon seven dead men in the road, which is shocking enough but the king takes it in stride, already thinking of how to divvy up their gold and make the necessary arrangements.
But then the cleric delivers the really shocking news. There was one man left alive, and next to that man was…the wife of the king! The woman called Becfola!
If that be in truth a woman, the cleric says,either she is a woman of this world to be punished, or she is a woman of the Shí to be banished.The king agrees that she is no doubt some sort of fairy creature—how the hell else can you explain that shecould be on the road with another man at the exact same time she was still at home in bed with him? And anyway, she’s obviously cheating on him, so he tells her to go to her supernatural lover. The story ends with her going to meet back up with her young man, and she’s never seen in the living world again.
For a minute I just stared at the book, no longer seeing any of the words in front of me. Was this a happy ending? There was something ominous about Becfola leaving the physical world, never to return. But then her very arrival at the start of the story had been so mysterious…maybe the fairy world was where she’d come from in the first place, and she wasn’t leaving her home so much as going back to it. I wished you knew for sure if she even made it to the fairy realm and her young man, what happened to her in the end.He is waiting for me,she says,and the thought that he should wait wrings my heart.So is he waiting still? The story doesn’t say.
Either way, at least she didn’t die. Eamonn had been right about that part. The options had been punishment or banishment—because of course, she was a woman in a story—but as far as I could tell, a return to the fairy world seemed like it’d be an improvement. I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life with that king.
When I glanced up, I caught Eamonn looking before he cut his gaze away. He turned his attention back to the clerk, who was in the middle of telling a story that involved lots of hand gestures. Eamonn was smiling and making noises of assent, and it struck me, how open and friendly his face looked in that moment. No shadows on it at all. For some reason I thought back to the man with the motorcycle earlier in the day, the wayI’d gotten the impression that Eamonn had stopped himself from making any overture to him although he’d wanted to.
I closed the folklore book, getting up to slide it back in the empty slot on the shelf where I’d found it. I didn’t know why I didn’t want Eamonn to know I’d looked up the end of the story, but I didn’t.
I let myself meander closer to the front counter, where the clerk was showing Eamonn some pictures on his phone. “We were given out to by our wives, I can tell you that,” the man was saying, “but worth it. We try to do it once a year, it’s become a sort of tradition.”
“It’s good to have those,” Eamonn said, but his eyes were on me now. “Did you find anything you wanted?”
I shook my head, then gave the clerk a smile, feeling a little self-conscious. “There are so many incredible books here,” I said. “But I don’t have any way to…I’d just better not.”
It would be rude enough of me to expect him to buy me a book, much less a tote to carry the book aroundin, although it was hard to picture Eamonn minding. He didn’t seem nearly as concerned about the money side of things as I was. A part of me desperately wanted a book from here, fromhim, wanted it both as an object and as a memory. But even something as simple as a book felt like breaking the rules somehow, like I wasn’t allowed to have any memories I could take back with me and touch.
