Blood and Water and Other Tales (7 page)

Something odd had in the meanwhile begun to happen to
Wharf.
As the stump of the leading timber more strongly assumed the look of a hoof, so the other timbers by association became the legs of galloping beasts. The hooded figure hung like a dark conspiring angel close upon the ghostly herd as it came stampeding out of the yellowy fog, an eerily silent chaos of headless, bodiless, tar-smeared limbs. From what world had they come? On what foul plain had these hellish cattle grazed? Jack gave it up for the day. He opened a beer. He had arranged to meet Erica at eight, not in the loft but in Dorian’s. He was feeling anxious, but doubtless that was the hangover. At least he was clean.

The streets were quiet in the late afternoon. A sea gull cried from the edge of a warehouse roof, and a single forklift moved back and forth on the sidewalk, between wired bales of compressed cardboard and a stack of wooden pallets. Jack crossed the highway to the waterfront, where scraps of black plastic and thin, hardy weeds fluttered and flapped in the wind, and a sudden motion of waves washed against the rubble of concrete and dirt and old tires as a long, low barge moved downriver, far out in the middle of the stream, and the light of the wintry sun blazed up fiercely off the water despite the cold. This was the site of his “swim.” He walked out on the landfill, down the side of a long gray hangar in which was piled to the roof a vast hill of coarse dirty salt, for spreading on the roads in winter. Somewhere atop the hill of salt a fire was burning, he could smell it, and he stood at the open end of the hangar gazing up into the roof where the smoke poured out through a missing panel. From high in the salt a figure appeared and gazed down at him. For some moments they stared at each other, and then the other turned back to his fire and was lost to sight. A group of men had been camping in the salt for two years now, living on the meat market’s leftovers and handouts. Jack had been up there drinking on occasion; they were young white men, and they probably ate better than most of the city: there had been fresh lobster and prime steak the night he’d dined with them. His particular friend was Blue, a red-bearded hillbilly in a baseball cap from West Virginia. Blue told him stories about life in the salt, about rats the size of dogs and crack-heads who murdered one another with shotguns. Jack always gave him a few bucks, and Blue always spent it on liquor. “We live good up here,” he said. “Can’t beat the rent.” They all laughed about that.

Jack sat down by the river and watched the light thicken over the Jersey shore. Already to the east the sky was dark, and to the south the twin towers reared up amid the forest of high buildings that rise beyond the roofs of Tribeca, all hazed in the last light and oddly unreal, like a film set.

Erica was already in Dorian’s when Jack came in at twenty past eight. He had had some drinks since returning from the river; he imagined she would find him crumpled and likable; this was the impression he intended to give, at any rate. But Erica was English and had common sense. “My god, Jack,” she said, “you look bloody terrible.”

“Thanks, Eric,” he said. He always called her Eric. “You’re looking well.”

Then, without preamble, and simultaneously searching her bag for cigarettes, she told him she needed a divorce. Jack turned away, looking for a waiter. “Well?”

“Why now?”

“I’m going to marry someone.”

“Paul Swallow?”

“Yes, I’m going to marry Paul. Don’t make faces, Jack!”

“All right, all right. Do you want a drink?”

“No. So there won’t be a problem?”

“Of course not.” Jack sniffed. He ordered a beer. “Good. Thank you.” Her cigarette barely lit, she ground it out in the ashtray and reached for her coat. She began to slide out of the banquette.

“You’re not leaving?” said Jack, rather shocked. “Yes, I’m leaving. You obviously don’t want to see me—”

“Why do you say that?”

Erica paused. “You ask me to meet you here, not upstairs. You arrive late. You’re drunk already. I don’t like watching you get drunk, Jack. I did it for four years.”

“Christ, Eric, get off it,” said Jack. “You mean you’re going back to London tomorrow and that’s it?”

“Not tomorrow, Friday. But yes, that’s it.” She slid out of the banquette.

“Jesus.” They shook hands and said goodbye. She left. That was it.

Quite predictably, Jack Fin got very drunk that night. But he was not murdered, he was not arrested, he didn’t even go for a “swim.” He was, in fact, asked to leave only one bar, and that because it was closing. The tone of his night was maudlin, and at several points he informed sympathetic strangers that his wife was divorcing him. He was back on his couch by five in the morning, and awoke the next day with a compound hangover. But it was a rule with Jack that a hangover must never keep one from working. He took a shower, and made coffee, and settled on a hard chair in front of
Wharf.
It was not easy to concentrate, for Eric’s face, and the sound of her voice, kept rising unbidden into consciousness. But he forced her down and anchored his gaze in
Wharf.
The secret to making work, he knew, was very simple: you just had to be with it until you saw it clear and straight, without illusion. The trouble with a great many artists was that they couldn’t accept that all work must fail. Fear, that was what kept them from making good work. Fear of seeing it straight. Not Jack Fin. He could stare into the teeth of his failure hour after hour after hour. That was his strength. In the early afternoon he realized it had to be a bull, and he saw the bull very clearly: it was a beast with massive shoulders, heaving slabs of sheer muscle, and blazing eyes, galloping straight out of the yellow depths of hell, a thousand pounds of concentrated animal fury, timber-brown and oozing tar from every pore—now, that was power! He hauled the clinking paint trolley in front of the canvas and began to work.

All through the afternoon he worked, and on into the evening. He left off at nine, feeling very happy indeed, for he knew he had solved it, that it was going to
come out.
He exulted. From somewhere deep inside himself he’d squeezed out another one—and you never know which will be the last. This is art’s angst. He drank not in Dorian’s, but in a rundown bar on Washington Street, a quiet bar, where he could savor his day’s work, his triumph. He did not think of Eric; he saw only his great bull, his bull out of hell. He stood at the bar with his Scotch, bewitched by his glorious bull.

The boy from the Plymouth was standing by the jukebox. Jack was by this point reconstructing the process by which his bull had come into being. He remembered the figure that had haunted his wharf, then hovered over his cattle, and then been swallowed in the emerging bull; and it was with a shock of embarrassment that he saw the boy now. He felt guilty; he was, in imagination, deeply familiar with the boy, for he’d used him, he’d exploited him thoroughly to reach his bull. They had met only once, when Jack gave him a light on the waterfront, but he found it uncomfortable to look at him now.

“Hey mister,” said the boy, coming across the bar to him. “Why you go in the river?”

“I don’t know,” said Jack, turning on the barstool. “I was drunk, I guess.”

“I saw you,” said the boy. “Yeah, I saw you go in the river. Hey, I thought, this guy’s crazy.”

“Pretty crazy,” said Jack.

“Give me a cigarette,” said the boy. He stood there looking Jack over, grinning at him. He was quite self-possessed, a cocky kid, sizing up the crazy guy who went in the river. He looked at Jack’s hands, with their smears of yellow and brown. “Hey mister,” he said at last, “you an artist or something?”

“Yeah,” said Jack.

The boy lost interest. “Yeah, an artist,” he said, and went back to the jukebox. Jack returned to his reverie, without difficulty extinguishing the brief spurt of heat he’d felt while talking to the boy. He returned to his bull. He thought he would call it
Beef on the Hoof.

Ambrose Syme was a man of God and a superb classicist, perhaps the finest student of Petronius since Sir Hugo Crub; but before I begin his tale allow me to say a word or two on the subject of priest’s clothing. First, it’s been suggested that since the collar is worn backwards, ought not the same be done with the trousers? The idea is less absurd than it may at first appear, for the Catholic priest, if not his Protestant colleague, is bound by a very strict vow of chastity and has little call, urination excepted, for a system of buttons the sole function of which is to permit the member to be extracted with ease and rapidity from its subsartorial crypt. A rather more peculiar feature of the priestly garb, however, is the sleevelike strip of material attached to each shoulder of the long black cassock favored by the Jesuits. These curious appendages, possibly a vestigial legacy of the days when the Holy Fathers had four arms and could distribute the Body of Christ in two directions at once, tend to flap in the breeze when the priest is in motion and are for some reason called
wings.

When I say, then, that Ambrose Syme stepped across the quad of an English public school called Ravengloom one very wet December morning not many years ago with the skirts of his cassock billowing about his long stick-thin legs and his
wings flapping,
you will understand exactly what I mean. He was a tall young priest with a long face of sallow complexion and slightly pointed ears, and he held aloft in one hand a vast black umbrella. His arms were like pipes, and had a way of branching from his shoulders at sharp angles so that the umbrella-bearing, or
umbrelliferous,
limb, for example, shot up on a steeply ascending vertical before articulating crisply at the elbow into a true vertical, while the other arm seemed to correspond precisely in the descending plane. His bony knees jerked like pistons in his swirling cassock and black baggy trousers flapped wildly about his skinny shanks. His feet were shod in stout black brogues, the leather soles of which would, in drier circumstances, have rung out loud and clear on the cobblestones; and against this rather dreary composition in clerical blacks and yellowish fleshtones only the stiff white collar stood out with any luster, gathering up what light there was in that dull day and reflecting it back into the murk with a pale gleam; and thus the figure of Ambrose Syme, agitating itself across the rainswept quad.

On three sides of him reared the high, inward-facing walls of Ravengloom, the gray stonework punctuated by serried ranks of narrow casement windows. Behind him two great crenelated towers flanked the main gates, beyond which the gravel driveway stretched straight as an arrow for half-a-mile before disappearing into the mist. It was at the top of one of these towers that Ambrose Syme had his lonely scholar’s cell, and for hours that morning the rain had flooded down the gray slate roofs all around, streaming into the troughs beneath the eaves and descending by drainpipes to the gutters below. The drainpipes were old, and several of them clogged with dead birds and tennis balls and the like, so that in places the rainwater overflowed the eavestroughs and gushed down the walls, and in those places a greenish lichen had begun to colonize the masonry. The eastern wall of the quad was the one most heavily afflicted by these fungoid incursions, and against it now there leaned a high swaying ladder. Standing on the top rung, framed against the wild gray sky with a long barbed probing tool in his left hand, was a figure in a black oilskin raincoat.

Were we to examine Ambrose Syme’s features at this moment, seeking some clue to his mood, we would find them locked, tense, and grim. We might detect there a quiet desperation. When he looked up, however, and saw the figure poised on the ladder, a startling change came over him. His high-step faltered. He gazed aghast at the poised probing tool and a febrile spasm seemed briefly to seize his long black stripe of a body. Then, as the color rose perceptibly in his cheeks, the figure up aloft suddenly plunged the probing tool into the mouth of the nearest drainpipe, hooked out a soggy mass of decomposing material, and deposited it in a bucket dangling from a nail on the side of the ladder. The purpose of the work was clear; why, then, did Ambrose Syme react with such apparent horror? We cannot know, not yet; but as we observe him resuming his progress across the quad, we notice that his jaw is now hanging slackly open, his eyes are bright with shock, and something less than dynamic vigor characterizes the angles of his joints and the tempo of his moving parts. And it is at this point, as he ducks into the cloistered gallery giving onto Raven-gloom’s east wing and with trembling fingers folds the flapping panels of his umbrella, that we must briefly examine the mind of Ambrose Syme, a piece of machinery rather more complicated than the simple system of jointed pipes alluded to above.

First of all, a couple of facts about the setting. Ravengloom heaved up out of the damp Lancashire moors some fifteen miles from a decaying industrial town called Gryme. Originally the country house of an eccentric Liverpool merchant with a fortune made in the slave trade, it had been appropriated by the Order in 1867 and converted into a tortuous complex of cubicles and classrooms, wherein the priests had begun instructing the sons of the Catholic gentry in two dead languages and a Spartan regimen designed to tone their physical and spiritual gristle.

When Ambrose Syme, aged thirteen, arrived at Ravengloom in the year 1947, he was in most regards quite unremarkable. He was tall for his age, rather bookish, and equipped as most schoolboys are with a sort of erotic condenser deep in his loins that generated a steady stream of vividly pornographic imagery and constantly interfered with his reading. Ambrose’s father, an Anglo-Irish businessman with extensive holdings in Malayan rubber, had himself been educated at Ravengloom, and knew what boys of thirteen were like. He trusted that the Holy Fathers would harness the boy’s impulses and divert them into socially useful channels.

In the years that followed, Ambrose Syme was first terrorized with visions of eternal damnation, and then taught how to displace energy from the lower part of his body to the upper. The technique employed in his case was somewhat analogous to the operation of the common refrigerator, in which liquid is pumped up through tubes to the evaporator at the head, being turned in the process into
gas.
This transformation requires the absorption of heat, and thus is the temperature of the refrigerator’s contents lowered. Ambrose Syme did not turn his sexual urges into gas, exactly; rather, he learned to convert them into long, ponderous sentences of a verbose and bombastic turgidity which he then translated into Latin verse, after which he analyzed the form, function, and interrelation of the various parts of the verse, counting the accents and scanning the feet until the heat generated in his nether organs had been drawn off and the primitive thoroughly assimilated to the classical. And this, in a nutshell, is the psychosexual history of Ambrose Syme, a textbook case of compulsory sublimation in the literary mode. In the fullness of time he joined the Order and after a long and rigorous novitiate was ordained a priest and returned to his alma mater to teach classics.