And The Oscar Goes to….!

Joey Bates had learned to watch. Animals, speeding trucks, birds in the trees, raspy men, millionaire athletes complaining on TV, small men on crutches, skinny women laughing, scurrying spiders, priapic skyscrapers…. It didn’t matter. Small dogs scratching. Large magnolias in bloom and breeze. He wanted to know what they were feeling. He wished to learn why they felt that way and how he might be able to pantomime that feeling. If I were in a movie, he had thought as a boy, how could I do a skyscraper?

Joey was smart and not unhappy. He liked school. He had friends. He enjoyed his father and mother and had no frightening longings or deep worry. He did not wish to become any of the things he wasn’t. He just wanted to know how it felt to be such things.

“Try standing up straight, Joey,” his mother had told him one day when he was eleven. “Act it out.” They were looking at a photo of The Empire State Building in a magazine, and he had realized right then how understanding his mother was. He knew he didn’t want to be a skyscraper. He just wondered what would cause him to act like one, and she had the best suggestion.

To…act, he had thought.

So now, on the completion of his third role in a movie, and this one a starring one, he was being heralded for his performance. “Joey Bates’s ability is worthy of every appreciation,” The Los Angeles Times had gushed.

The movie, The Last Apostle, told of an American named Fitzgerald, an ex-Marine twenty-five years old, a Vietnam veteran who goes to Belfast in 1970 to fight with The Provos. Fitzgerald quickly becomes a principal guy for them, sharing his Vietnam experiences with them, training them, and finally betraying them. The experience of making the movie had been uniformly unhappy for Joey as he had struggled to find in himself why this fellow Fitzgerald would ever want to do such things. What’s in it for him? A Yank? The Provos? Joey asked himself. So much danger for so far-away a reason? It was not the character Fitzgerald’s worries in the script that caused this second-guessing. It was Joey’s own, even as his fine talent as an actor was acknowledged. Joey was noted for his pensive, handsomely battered looks. His jaw was large and moved a bit back and forth as he pondered some difficult moment. His eyes, quite darkened by what seemed personal doubt, were even written about favorably by critics. Those eyes observed what passed before him with self-contradictory caution, but no fear. Joey himself had even received offers of marriage. His now and then smile onscreen was a pleasing threat, and he was congratulated in the press for the smile’s often dangerous appearance.

But Joey’s current worries besieged him, the worry of immersing himself in the Marine Fitzgerald’s self-questioning, with Fitzgerald’s shadowy, only partial understanding of his actions…of his missing the point of doing something as murderous as this. Were the Provos a lark for Fitzgerald? Or were they the solution to Fitzgerald’s deep-felt anger over what had happened in Ireland during the last many centuries and his own having missed all of it, out there in San Francisco and South Vietnam? Or maybe just Fitzgerald’s rattled apprehensions, brought on by his recollections of the savage Battle of Khe Sanh in 1968.

But those ponderings turned out, for the critics, to lead to the very positives of Joey Bates’s performance as Fitzgerald. His self-questioning countenance had been constant through the movie itself, and he was being congratulated for playing a character whose shaky personal commitments far outshine his firm political beliefs. Joey knew he had not really understood Fitzgerald’s character, confused about it as the film was being shot in Belfast itself, a city he found uneven and quite unhappy. Even as the director, producers, and movie critics lauded his “full accounting of the foolishness of The Troubles,” as the fellow at The Irish Times had put it in his amazed review. “How could an American know, even one of Irish descent as this Fitzgerald is supposed to be?” Just before this question, the critic had spent two full paragraphs lauding Joey’s superb understanding of the many layers of idiocy in that sad conflict. “So small a conflict, The Troubles” he had written. “So murderous. So self-defeating. The Irish against themselves are anything but civil, especially when they’re Protestant and Catholic, and this lad Fitzgerald’s worries about why he is even in Belfast show that instability. Which side is he on, and why? Does he even know?”

So, here it was, the evening of The Academy Awards, and Joey was unnerved by the fact that he was even here at all. He had once supposed that those actors that achieve such a moment are born self-assured and confident. But Joey now knew that that is seldom the case among actors, even among those for whom personal self-reckoning confidence is at the center of every scene. John Wayne as Sean Thornton. Cillian Murphy as Tommy Shelby. Et. al.

Joey knew it was all just an act.

He also knew that everyone, at some point or another, acts. No cameras or anything. No sound equipment. No badgering director. But the moment someone tells a lie, he is acting. Insincerity requires dissemblance. The attempt to save a relationship that has lost its allure reveals hidden truthlessness. Happiness is often betrayed by what seems a loving smile. Even outright anger is now and then a guise intended to save love. The guy in his living room attempting to explain to his wife why he has gone astray plays the fool, especially when he is the fool.

Is everything a play-act? Joey asked himself. But he also realized that, in his own case, what was an obvious deception…the taking on of a fictional character…gave him the way to tell some sort of truth with blessed accuracy. His dissembling profession revealed to him now and then the realities of his own heart.

Sitting on the aisle in the fourth row at the Ovation Hollywood/Dolby Theater, he took Lila Gowan’s hand. Joey was smitten with Lila and realized, after they had worked together, that she was smitten with him. A fiercely fallen-away Irish Catholic and an accomplished actress at the age of twenty-four, Lila had played Fitzgerald’s Belfast love, Maura Sentinel. An Irish Protestant spy for the British, Maura is ordered to give false information to the American Fitzgerald about the kinds of weaponry being stored for The Ulster Defense Regiment and where it is to be found. Thus, the British hope, they can ambush an important number of Provos during any attempt to abscond with those weapons. The couple’s back-and-forth leads to romance, the second plot in the movie, the difficulties of which lead to great danger for Fitzgerald himself, as well as for Maura. Maura’s own doubts about her soul find questioning resonance in her love for the American. She worries that if she betrays him and the weaponry, in the end Hell will await her. She’ll be an accessory to murder, after all. Perhaps to Fitzgerald’s own murder. She knows that he is risking everything to act on her information, and that death may surely await him if he does not succeed in getting the weaponry into the right Provo hands.

In one of the movie’s most lauded scenes, Maura is in conversation, in tears and deep, fearful self-condemnation, with a British officer named Smith, played with fine force in a cameo by Tom Hardy. Especially when having to present the officer’s own streaky pro-Brit befuddlements, he counsels her, “Listen, Maura. These bleedin’ Micks deserve everything we force on’ em.” Her surprise at this clear murderousness was one of Maura’s most lauded moments, stuck in morbid discovery across Smith’s desk of his simple condemnation of the Irish, be they Provos or not. The camera, right in her face, revealed silent, shocked horror.

As the presenter held up the envelope, Lila caressed Joey’s hand. “And the award for best actress goes….” He opened the envelope with brio intended to remind everyone that he was himself the winner of such an award a few years ago, as a ruffled Brooklyn New Yorker known personally for his drink-induced rages. “To Lila Gowan!”

Lila’s hand tightened. It seemed itself to be in immediate disbelief as the audience in the theater broke into noisy, chaotic applause. Others around the couple shouted out their congratulations and, as Lila stood to go to the stage, she turned to Joey, who also stood and grabbed her, giving her such an embrace and such a whisper of congratulation that she began to weep, to wipe the tears away, and to kiss him. “Oh, Joey!” A terrorized smile beamed from her lips.

—

He had been struck by her the day they had met. The film’s director, the American Vincent Gillette, had done a half-dozen independent films, the most recent of which, about a pair of Los Angeles hoods running afoul of each other in the 1920s, had convinced Warner Brothers to hire him for the The Last Apostle. Vincent had invited Joey to his office, to meet his leading lady. Lila Gowan, who wore a pair of close-fitting jeans, a flowing, voluminously long-sleeved red blouse, and a flower-immersed silk scarf hurrying from her neck and shoulders. She stood and offered Joey her hand. A smile glistened from her, as did her clover-green eyes.

“I’m sorry I haven’t seen any of your work,” she said. “Vincent just told me about you this morning.”

“I’m not surprised.” Joey offered a smile. “My work in film is not august.”

“August?”

“Which is to say that, so far, it exists only in…” Joey grinned. “…lower case.”

She turned to Vincent, who shrugged. “Don’t worry, Lila. He can do it.”

As they sat at a conference table speaking about the project, Joey realized that, put simply, he could not not look at Lila. First, although it required no eyesight, her voice was filled with a kind of dark authority that no twenty-something young woman he had ever met possessed.

“Your family came from Dublin, you say?” Lila said

“They did, yes. Stonybatter. You know, where the Misses Morkan come from. My grandmother came to The States after her parents died. A single girl. She even succeeded in getting an American accent.”

“Don’t suppose I can meet your grandmother.”

“No, she’s gone.”

“She became an American.”

“She did. But other than the difference in your accents, she had what you have, Lila. The sound your voice has got.”

“Oh…well….” Lila looked away, taking in a breath. “Thank you, Joey. I’m sorry not to…not to….” Lila seemed to question herself, and looked back at Joey, into his eyes. “Joey. Not to meet her.”

During the filming, Lila gave him significant help, offering advice especially about one scene in which a couple of Irish actors playing Provo drug dealers are plotting how to assassinate Patrick Smith, a PSNI detective sergeant in Belfast, and are seeking weapons from Joey’s character, Fitzgerald. Lila’s advice had to do with Fitzgerald’s not understanding some of the slang, Belfast lingo that confuses the American. “The script’s got it right, Joey. These Provos…this Benny McDonnell and the other one…Jim Slattery. The language they’re using, I mean. It would be good if, just now and then, you don’t understand what they’re sayin’. You know, the Yank doesn’t get the language, even though…” Lila offered a fervid, slight smile. “…sure doesn’t he understand the guns.”

The assured affection accompanying this charmed Joey.

That advice became something of a sub-theme in the film, very occasional humorous moments when Joey’s Fitzgerald is confused by some Provo’s odd language. Lila even suggested to the director Vincent an addition to the script in which one of the hit men laughs at Fitzgerald’s request for a translation and responds, “What’s wrong with ya, ya spoon?” The others in the room, all from Belfast and all laughing, chagrin the offended Yank. But they nonetheless know Fitzgerald is a warrior who understands the weaponry better than they do…or ever could. Joey knew he had to give the American Provo Fitzgerald a threatening stare that, in the script, causes the hit man to turn to the others in the room, shrugging. “Well, this here’s no spoon, boys.

Joey himself had had to be trained in the weaponry. One of the fellows from the studio, indeed an ex-Marine, showed him the principal arms to be used in the movie, all circa Vietnam era: the Russian AK-47s, the American AR-18s, the HME homemade explosives. The character Fitzgerald is wary of such weapons himself because he knows so well what they can do. Joey decided that that reticence should be part of Fitzgerald’s reactions: a Marine who understands the destruction these weapons can cause. Joey made much of those hesitations, even as he so thoroughly understood them. The Provos give Fitzgerald a nickname... “The Apostle.”

“Sure you know about them, don’t ya?” one of the older Provos asks him. “Mick Collins and his Apostles.” Fitzgerald’s not knowing about Michael Collins gets a laugh from the others in the room. “Where ya been, Yank?”

Several Belfast women were indeed arms-carrying Provo combatants. In the film, Lila’s Maura Sentinel is one of them, and Joey’s Fitzgerald supplies weapons training to them as well. With the way she played the scene in which, along with a half-dozen other women, Maura shows up by surprise to receive an AK-47 and ammunition for it, Joey saw Lila add a layer of wishful confusion to her character. Lovely Maura, a Catholic Falls Road girl, had attended Catholic schools all her youth, even Saint Mary’s College, yet harbors real worry about the sinfulness of murder, whether in a righteous cause or not.

There had been a moment during the filming during which Lila had argued with Joey about one scene. In it, Lila’s Maura is taking an AK-47 apart, to clean it, while she and Fitzgerald are having a lovers’ tiff that has been caused by Fitzgerald’s anger with her being so directly involved.

“You’re Provo?”

“As rain falls from heaven,” Maura says, examining the weapon in her hands.

“But aren’t you worried for your own soul?”

Lila looked up at Joey, offended disbelief showing from her eyes. She improvised. “What about you and yours?”

Joey, flustered by the made-up line, didn’t know how to react to it, and they had to re-do the scene.

In the scene, Maura is both fascinated and terrified by the rifle, studying pieces of it as she disassembles it. She caresses the bolt handle ball with her right hand, the camera exploring her delicate fingers and the fine curve of the rifle part. She admires the protection against misfire offered by the trigger guard. The authority of its action causes her remark that “sure it’ll let me know when to pull the trigger, won’t it?” All this while the two characters argue with each other. “I wouldn’t love ya if you paid me to,” Maura says at one point.

This fervid remark and Lila’s delivery of it as she was so intently reassembling the rifle had made her acting in the scene uniquely notable.

Joey had worried that Lila would be shy about handling such a weapon since, as she had told him and the director, she had no previous experience with such things.

“But don’t you worry, Joey,” she had said, examining the rifle. It suggested to Joey violent death itself. “You just watch me.”

—

Lila did win Best Actress. The applause was deafening and congratulatory. They kissed once more and Lila’s smile was accompanied by an offering of simple accessible joy. As she ascended the stairs to the stage, she took a look back at Joey as, to his surprise, she was bringing her cell phone from a pocket in her dress. Joey was too excited to pay much attention to it and, once she put the phone away after a hurried moment and received the Oscar from Adrien Brody, she turned to approach the microphone to offer her thanks. She looked at Joey, her eyes now brimming. But the tears seemed to him to be of concern. Her shoulders drooped downwards. She was looking at him. But Joey could not be sure that the gaze was congratulatory. Rather, it appeared worried.

In the limousine on the way to the Vanity Fair party, Lila took Joey’s left hand in her right, looking out the window at the hurried flashing lights and traffic. They had spoken, but haltingly, until Joey asked her about the phone call.

“Joey, I….” She took his hand to her lips and offered it a very slight, passing kiss, holding it a moment longer to her cheek. “There’s an actor in Dublin. A friend of mine.”

“A friend.”

“Yes.” Lila looked down at his hand. Her study of it was silent and lacking in joy. “A boyfriend.”

Joey kept his hand in hers. The way Lila held it seemed so shy that he simply waited.

“Have you ever heard of Finn Gallagher?”

“No.”

“I wouldn’t expect so. He’s known in Dublin but never been in films.”

“A boyfriend!”

“Yes.” Lila now let go of his hand and brought hers to her eyes. She wept.

“Lila….”

“Oh, Joey. I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“He’s comin’ here, he says.”

“Why?”

“To find out why I’ve been seein’ you, he says.”

“But is that any of his business?”

“He thinks so. And, Joey, I don’t…blame him. I can’t tell him to stay away. I can’t—”

“And it was this Finn who was phoning you.”

“Yes. He’s seen the film. He’s read the trades…about us. He saw how I kissed you tonight. You and me.”

“And he’s upset.”

“Oh…. Joey….”

Joey was not surprised that he received no message or call from her once they left the Vanity Fair party. He had put her into the limo…no kiss…and gotten a taxi to his own hotel. When he called her finally the following morning, he got just Lila’s recorded greeting and the request to leave a message. He turned his phone off and slumped on his unmade bed, the phone resting on his stomach. Hollywood lay in the sunshine outside. He was convinced he had lost her. He had a recollection of holding Lila’s hand at The Oscars, the moment before she had been named Best Actress. Her hand was calm, small, and caressing. He had wondered in that moment whether a simple hand could feel apprehension and worry…expectation…excitement. Holding hers, he had known it could…all four possibilities in the same moment. He was chagrined as he recalled how Lila’s hand was now nowhere to be held.

He spent the day in worry. He wanted to call her. But he was angry. Silence in a loving relationship occasionally reveals betrayal, and he suspected now that Lila’s silence was just such. But Joey wasn’t a schmuck. He also understood that Lila could possibly have been swept up in her feelings for him in the same way his had been swept up for her. Far away in California, she had kept this Finn Gallagher a close secret. With Joey Bates right here in her arms, Lila perhaps had simply not known what to do. Confusion. Worry. Suspicions of her own personal betrayal...of both men.

But Joey’s seeming open-mindedness was indeed a kind of ruse itself. He was hurt. He was angry. Lila could have told him about this Finn. She could have been straight with him about her Dublin boyfriend. But then he wondered if, instead of her quite real confidence as an actress, her very presence so appealing and right there in front of you, she had been embarrassed and worried. But again, this effort at understanding didn’t last. Joey wanted Lila to tell him that she was in love with him, and that this Finn guy was, as they say, history. Even though it was clear that this Finn guy indeed was not. Not yet.

—

Lila called him.

“Where are you?” he said.

“L.A. International.”

“What are you—”

“The airport.”

“I understand that, Lila. What are you going to say to him?”

A silence lasted several seconds. There was no weeping from Lila. No declaration of love for Joey. Rather, there was simple, unrestrained nothing.

“Lila.”

“I have to tell him what’s happened.”

“But what has happened, Lila?”

“I mean between you and me.”

“But—”

“How I feel about you, Joey.”
“Well, what is it that you feel about—”

“And how I feel about him.”

He hung up. Lila called him back. She offered no hello. She simply hurried to a question. “When can I talk with you?”

“Now.”

“No, Joey. I mean person to person. I need to see your face, your eyes. I need to see how you feel?”

“Lila, I can just tell you how I feel.”

“No. Please…. Joey.”

He grumbled. “Okay. But just you and me, right?”

“Tomorrow. Yes.”

They met at The Maybourne Cafe. It being Beverly Hills, the arrival of the two young movie stars on the colonnade carried little weight among the few other coffee drinkers. A mild glance here. A few of the diners obscurely pointed fingers, before a return to coffee and talk. Lila wore a dark green summer dress. Sunglasses did hide her eyes, although Joey saw, when she removed them to clean them, that she had not slept well. That she had been weeping. That she had been defending herself in an argument or some such, with ragged tears. She put the glasses back on with an apology.

Once they had ordered, Joey leaned forward. “So…. Lila.”

“No, let me talk, Joey. Please. I need to tell you.”

“I would hope so.”

“Joey….”

He noticed they were getting a bit more attention from others on the colonnade. He assumed these people knew that the famous couple were having a tiff. He sat back, glancing about at some of them. He frowned, in such a way that would assure them all that they could fuck off. The murmurs and knowing smiles turned away with cool embarrassment, in favor of a return to pastries.

“Finn and I have been lovers for more than a year.” Lila swallowed, sighing.

“I’ve assumed that.”

“And he’s worried that he’s lost me.”

“Well, is that—”

“To you.”

“And is that the case, Lila?”

Silence hurried across the table from her, across their lattes, the full set of silverware, and the small vase of flowers that seemed so festive even as all the objects were paying only trite, petty attention to the conversation.

“Is it, Lila? Has he lost you?”

Lila brought her napkin toward the sunglasses. Lifting them, she daubed her eyes with it.

“I suggest you tell me you love me, send Finn back to County Galway, and—”

“Cork.”

“Okay. Cork. Just send him back.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“He wants me to go with him.”

“So?”

“And I won’t.”

The possibility for cruelty hurried from Joey’s heart. “What, Warner Brothers have another star turn for you? You’re setting up shop in Hollywood? You’ve bought a mansion in Santa Barbara? You’ve—”

“Joey!”

“You’ve—”

“Stop!”

Joey held his breath, looking down at the table. He kept quiet a moment, trying to calm himself. “Sorry, Lila,” he whispered.

“He wants to talk with you.”

“What?”

“Please.”

“Talk with him!”

“Please, Joey.”

—

The two men met at The Maybourne the following day. Morning sun shone across the entirety of the terrace, so that the umbrellas over each table offered needed shade. Finn Gallagher was tall and straight. Were he an athlete, Joey thought, he’d be a high jumper. Olympic caliber. Wearing a white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up a few inches, a pair of spotless black Levis, and dark brown loafers, no socks. Entering, he was the very best-looking man in the whole place, Irish pale, in his mid-twenties. A full gathering of brown-red hair with fine curls. His features were slim and, in the face, even delicate, with the sort of presence that did not surprise Joey, knowing that Finn too was an actor. Finn recognized Joey and, as he approached the table, Joey stood up, holding the cloth napkin. He did not offer to shake Finn’s hand.

“May I sit down?”

Joey gestured to the chair across the table, and both men settled into clumsy silence.

“I admire your work,” Finn said finally.

“Look, Finn. Just now, neither of us is acting.”

Finn nodded, sitting forward to study the coffee before him.

“How much are you in love with her?” Joey said.

“I’ve known her since we were twelve.”

“Did you love her then?”

“I did! Although…” He sat back. “…well, differently.”

“And how long has this different love been going on?”

“A year.” Finn leaned over the table once again. “It just happened, Joey. No plot. No manipulation. None o’ that.” He sat back, looking away a moment.

“You love her.”

“I do.”

“And what do you think about…about me and Lila.”

“It upsets me, mate.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

“You? You’re upset because of you and Lila?”

“No. Because of you and Lila. Look, Finn—”

“And the truth is….” Finn slumped back, sliding down a bit in his chair and observing the tablecloth with dulled, somber silence. He fingered the edge of the cloth. Joey watched quietly, especially as Finn seemed to grumble, twice. The cloth had all the Irishman’s attention. “The truth is, I want her.”

“I know that.”

“I want her back in Dublin with me. I’ve known her since we were children. She’s my closest friend. I—”

“But which of us does she love?”

“Both of us, ya eejit!” Finn now straightened up. His actorly presence had disappeared. He leaned forward and placed a hand, palm down, on the tabletop and stared into Joey’s eyes. “Don’t ya understand that?” After a silence, he spoke once more. “Both of us!”

Joey remained silent. He could see Finn’s suffering and hated the fact that he sympathized with it. He wished to be outraged, to stand up and pull the tablecloth away, splaying the dishes and silverware across the floor with rattling noise, the tablecloth spattered with coffee. But he knew that that would just be a playact, and an insincere one at that. And, in this moment, silent and chagrined, he could really sympathize only with himself. There would be no attacking Finn, none of the action of an…an…. He searched the word for a moment. An eejit. Just two men in love, stuck with each other. Lila, the object of each’s wish, had given herself to each, even as she clearly realized how foolish such an arrangement was.

With sudden whisperings, the other customers on the colonnade looked around to the door from the café. Pointed fingers. Appreciative sighs. Lila Gowan strode toward the two men’s table. The white summer dress she wore was buttoned to the very bottom, which swirled just above her knees and the svelte black high heels she was wearing. She had on a broad white sun hat and the same sunglasses, offering a demeanor of glamorous authority. A gold necklace, so fine that it seemed barely there, made a frame below her smile that itself seemed simply delicate, not at all forced. Both men stood, each holding a napkin in a hand and, as she approached, Finn stepped to the side to pull a chair from the table for her.

“Thank you.” She sat down and crossed her legs, looking up at each man, a lovely glance at each. The men remained standing a moment, both disconcerted, until they too sat down.

“You’ve met, then,” Lila said.

Both nodded.

“You know, I did come out here just now as though I owned the place.” Lila looked to the side. Many of the others on the terrace were still watching. “But the truth is…. The truth….” She lowered her head, wrapping the fingers of her left hand around those of her right, observing her own action. “I don’t know what to say.”

Joey looked on. Finn remained quiet.

“Except that I care for you both.” She took in a breath, still looking to her hands. “And I want you to forgive me.”

“Forgiveness!” Finn seemed almost to choke on the word. “What is that, Lila?”

“Understanding, I hope.”

“Understanding!”

Lila, silent, swallowed what further words she had planned to offer. Finn looked to the side and Joey simply looked on. Confusion flurried between the three of them.

“I won’t lie to you, Finn.” Lila shook her head, glancing at Joey. “To either of you.” She remained silent a moment, as though not breathing. “I care for both of you.”

Anger eddied in Joey. “Lila, listen….” He would insist on his wish just to talk with her…without…without…. He glanced at Finn. Without this guy sitting right here. “I—”

“Joey. I need quiet.”

“Lila—”

“Quiet!”

Joey looked over the table setting.

“I want to explain myself to you.” Lila sipped from the glass of water before her. She adjusted her sunglasses. “I’ve loved Finn forever.”

Joey nodded although, unexpectedly and quickly, Lila turned toward Finn.

“And I fell for Joey, well….” She offered a saddened smile. “Finn, it seems like just the other day. The day I met him.” She shrugged. “So, can either of you understand how these things can happen?”

Joey frowned. ”I, well….”

Finn glowered. “You’re joking, Lila.”

“I am not.” A long wordlessness ensued until, still impatient, Lila took up the cup and saucer before her. The cup rattled against the saucer as she lifted it toward her lips. Her taking of the tea itself was arrestingly beautiful. “I’m not.” She replaced the cup and saucer on the table.

It seemed for a moment that Finn had lost his looks. “Then what is all this?” Although indeed he had not. His right hand had just passed with such frustrated hurry through his hair that he had badly mussed it, nothing more. The real fracture in his appearance had come with the gruff downturn in his voice. “What—”

“It’s an admission of….” Lila nodded with a seeming silent request. “Finn— A wish for….”

“For what?” Joey offered.

“The truth.”

“And which of us wins that truth?” Furious and hurt, Joey could yet see how genuine Lila’s feelings were, although he had no wish to accept them.

The silence that now enveloped all three was long, itself waiting. Joey pondered the certainty of his loss. Lila had known Finn as a child and loved him now. But she had lain with Joey, beset with ecstasy. Before he had learned about Finn, he had felt Lila was his. His love flamed when she was in his arms. He strove for those arms.

“All three of us win,” Lila said.

Each man remained in rough quiet.

“Please accept me.” She looked at each separately with wistful worry. “Please. Accept this.”

Joey tried battling with the jealousy groveling about in his heart. He could see, even just with the slight glance he offered the Irishman, that Finn was scowling the same.

“Lila, you’re kidding,” Finn said.

Joey nodded agreement.

Lila shrugged. “Finn, I hate asking you this.”

“What?”

“Will you go back to Dublin?”

Joey nodded.

“Only if I have you with me. Only if—”

“No. Tonight. By yourself,” Lila said.

“What?”

“I’ll come to you in a while.”

Joey turned to her. “Wait a minute!”

“And we’ll be together then, Finn.”

“Lila!” Joey pushed his own cup and saucer aside, creating a ragged spill.

“Until I come back here to be with…to be with you, Joey.”
Finn, shaking his head with a kind of elegant disbelief, nonetheless broke into a profanity. “That’s feckin’—”

“No, Finn.”

Joey offered a small, very quick smile. “Lila, I—”

“To be with you a while, Joey.” She breathed out. Silence worried all around her. “A while.”

“How much of a while?”

“Until I go back to Dublin.” Lila removed the sun hat. Her black-brown hair, with its fine occasional curl, its great softness and luxury, the qualities it had displayed so finely in The Last Apostle, took Joey’s entire attention. “For a while.” She hurried a breath, wetting her lips. “And during this time, we can all act…act civilized.”

Copyright © 2026 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.

Note: No Plagiarism Software, also known as Artificial Intelligence, was used in the composition of this piece.

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