The Pornographer (4 page)

“I suppose we better be making a start,” the man smiled apologetically.

“I suppose if we’re ever going to,” I smiled back in the same way as we allowed the tables to part us, making our separate ways towards the dance floor.

Way had to be pushed through the men crowded in the entrance at the top of the short steps. The women stood away to the left of the bandstand, between the tables, some of them spilling onto the floor. It is not true that we meet our destiny in man or woman, it is those we meet who become our destiny. On the irreversible way, many who loved and married met in this cattle light.

I went towards her, the light blue dress falling loosely on the shoulders, the dark hair pinned tightly back to show the clean, strong features. She seemed not to be with anyone, and she moved nervously in the first steps of the dance.

“Did you come on your own?”

“Judy was to come with me. She works in the office with me, but she got a sore throat at the last minute. And I had the tickets. So I said—to hell—I’ll come on my own,” she explained.

“What sort of office do you work in?”

“The bank, the Northern Bank. It’s boring but as my uncle used to say it’s secure, and you can’t beat security.”

She was not as young as she’d looked in the light across the dance floor, there was grey in the dark hair, but she was, if anything, more handsome. The body was lean and strong against my hand.

“And do you come here often?”

“O boy, are you kidding? Some real weirdoes come to this place. The last person I was dancing with asked me if I slept with people.”

“And what did you answer?”

“I was too shocked to answer and then I was angry. And then he asked me again, quite brazen-faced. And when I didn’t answer he just walked off and left me standing in the middle of the dance floor.”

“Not many people are young here,” I said.

“I’m not young. I’m thirty-eight,” she answered as if she’d been challenged.

“It wasn’t that kind of age I was thinking of,” I said.

All around us on the maple the old youngsters danced. The stained skin did not show in the blue light, but paunches did, bald heads, white hair, tiredness. People do not grow old. Age happens to us, like collisions, that is all. And usually we drive on. We do not feel old or ridiculous as we pursue what we have always pursued. Tonight, as any night, if we could anchor ourselves in the ideal greasy warm wetness of the human fork, we’d be more than happy. We’d dream that we were flying.

“What do you do?”

“I write a bit,” I said.

“What do you write?” she asked breathlessly.

“Just for a syndicate,” I said cautiously. “It’s a sort of advertising.”

“That’s funny,” she said. “I write too. It’s not much, but I write nearly a whole magazine, it’s called
Waterways
. It’s the magazine of the Amalgamated Waterways Association, old dears and buffs who meet twice a year. Walter—he’s my friend —he’s the editor, but he’s so lazy I wind up writing nearly the whole of every issue. You should see us the last two nights before we put it to bed—it’s a panic. Luckily, it only comes out every two months,” she was laughing and unaware that she was bumping some of the couples on the crowded floor.

“Do they pay you for this?”

“A little, but they don’t have any money, just enough for a small salary for poor Walter, who’d work for nothing if he had to, he’s that crazy about all rivers and lakes and even half filled-in canals. What I get, though, is plenty of trips and cruises.”

Enough similar tags had been cast into the air to mark us off for one another, like a dab of dye on the markings of mallards.

“Why don’t you come and have a drink with me?” I asked,
and when she hesitated, “It’d be easier and more pleasant for us to talk than in this bump-around.…”

For the first time she looked at me sharply, stepping instinctively back, taking stock of the whole. One of the few laws of the cattle light was that if you came off the floor with someone for a drink the sexual had been allowed in.

“All right,” she said suddenly, without qualification.

The bar was jammed downstairs and when I found the waiter I’d had earlier he told me that there were some tables free at the far side of the upstairs balcony and that he’d bring the drinks there. “Bring large ones. Gins and tonics,” I told him.

I pushed ahead of her through the crowd downstairs and then followed her through the women crushed together on the stairs outside the ladies’ cloakroom. She had a magnificent strong figure beneath the light blue woollen dress, and when she turned her fine features, seeing the empty tables across the balcony, and smiled, “It’s a wonder they’ve not been taken,” she looked astonishingly beautiful, a wonderful healthy animal.

“Some prefer the milling downstairs. As well, they probably don’t know that it’s empty up here.”

We got a table where we could lean against the balcony rail and watch. A fine dust was rising from the floor as well as the thick curls of tobacco smoke. The drummer had taken his jacket off and was sweating profusely as he launched into a solo. The waiter came with the drinks. He spooned in the ice from a jug he carried on the metal tray.

“Will you be wanting anything else, sir?” he asked.

“Bring the same again in a while. You might as well take for both now,” there’d be no need to think again of the drinks.

“Do you live in a flat…?” I asked when we lifted the drinks.

“No. I live in my aunt’s house. I’ve lived there since I was six. Three of her daughters live there as well, my cousins. It is a house of women,” she spoke excitedly.

“How do you happen to be there?”

“It’s a long story. I have one sister but she’s married to a solicitor down the country, where we come from. My father was a small builder. He struggled all his life, and when he was just beginning to do well—we had a bungalow in Clontarf—and mother and he could afford to go out together in the evening, they were coming from a dinner-dance in the Shelbourne, driving, and somehow missed the turn below Burgh Quay, and went into the Liffey. My sister and I were too young to know much about what happened except the bustle. We were shared out between two different aunts. The aunt and uncle I was given to already had eight children of their own. It was much stricter there than with my poor parents. My uncle taught chemistry. He was the Professor, a light of Maria Duce. He certainly wouldn’t approve of this place,” she was looking down on the dancers below. It was a slow waltz. Some of the couples were so wrapped round one another on the floor that except for the drapery of clothes they might be dancing in coitus.

“No, if he was like that I can’t imagine he’d approve of it,” I said idly.

The waiter came with the other tray of drinks.

“I don’t think I’ll be able for all this. Already I’m feeling a little tipsy,” she said.

“Pour me what you don’t want,” and having established the intimacy we clinked our glasses.

“It killed my uncle having to retire,” she went on.

“Is he long dead?”

“Two years. He suffered a terrible death. One Sunday I came into the room and found him crying. ‘Josephine,’ he said. ‘I never thought anybody could go through this pain and still believe there is a God.’”

“Where are all his sons now?”

“They’re scattered all round the country. They’re all in professions. I guess they all got out of the house as fast as they could. Just the women stayed.”

“It’s odd that there wasn’t even the ceremonial black sheep,”
these idle words mattered and did not matter. They mattered only in the light of where they led to.

“Johnny was for a while. There were some terrible scenes over his drinking. But he qualified. Now he makes more money than any of them but he never lost his old gaiety. You’d like Johnny.”

“Why don’t we dance?”

“I’d like to dance,” she rose from the table.

We danced close. At first she held nervously and suspiciously back, but when I didn’t press her she came naturally close. I could feel her hair brush my face. A hot, fierce burning ache—the Colonel and my Mavis again—grew to bathe in this warm living flesh beneath my hands. Across her shoulder I saw the gleam of a man’s wristwatch as his hand crossed a neat pair of buttocks beneath their shimmering silk. And then our lips met.

“And are your aunt and cousins home this night?” I asked.

“They’re sound asleep by now,” she said.

“Why don’t you come back to my place, then? We can have a quiet drink and talk.”

“That’s fine,” she hesitated, and then added nervously, and too brightly, “We can talk far better there.”

I waited for her in the downstairs bar, at the head of the stairs. The tired waiters were cleaning up but still serving drinks to what were now very drunken tables. It was the hour they usually cheated most. The bouncer in evening dress who had earlier taken our tickets was patrolling between the tables, his hands clasped behind his back. He’d pause where the petting at the tables was too heavy or where there were disputes over change. When he spoke his whole body went completely still, his lips barely moving. Beside me there was a solitary man at one of the small tables trying to shake salt from an empty saltshaker into a glass of tomato juice or Bloody Mary, growing visibly frustrated.

She had on an expensive brown leather coat and matching handbag when she came back, her walk intense and concen
trated on anything or everything except what she was doing, like a man concentrated on the far trees while striking the golf ball at his feet; and she wa s smiling unnaturally hard.

“You look much younger than I thought,” she said suddenly as we went down the stairs, her arm now in mine.

“I’m not young. I’m thirty,” I said.

“That makes me ancient at thirty-eight.”

“You don’t look it. Anyhow after you leave twenty, age doesn’t make much difference,” I heard the phoney unction in my voice that I’d heard in others declaring that money counts for little in this life.

To escape any more of such conversation I put my arm firmly round her on the stairs: to hold this beautiful body, to enter it, to know it, to glory in the knowing, was age enough, or seemed no mortal age. Catching my desire, she looked at me, and we kissed. It was cold when we went through the swing doors but there was a line of taxis waiting for the end of the dance and we got into the first car.

The light from the Chianti bottle was shining so calmly on the typewriter and white pages on the marble when we came into the room that it jolted me far more sharply than the cold outside the dancehall. I took the leather coat and hung it on the back of the door. “You have a lovely place,” she looked along the shelves of books and then went to the typewriter, touching the keys without pressing them deep enough to move the bar. I grew aware of the large bed in the room as I put a match to the fire in the grate.

“Is this what you write?” she asked.

“That’s it. It’s poor stuff. Sometime I’ll show it to you. When you show me your pieces,” I took the page away from her, the Colonel and Mavis might prove a rough overture. “What’ll you have to drink?”

“What are you having?”

“A whiskey. I feel cold.”

“A small one for me—a very small one, then.”

I heard the pieces of coal shift in the grate as the fire caught. I was grateful for the whiskey burning its way down into the tension.

“Is it all right to put off the light?” I asked. “Soon the flames will be bright.”

“It’s nice to sit and watch the fire,” she said and I turned off the light on the typewriter and marble. The flames bounced off the ceiling and walls, came to rest on the spines of the books, flashed again on the marble. We sat in front of the fire, and when I put my arm round her she returned my kiss, over and back on the mouth; but when I slid my hand beneath her dress she reacted so quickly that the whiskey spilled. Suddenly we were both standing, facing one another in front of the fire.

“Boy, you don’t move half fast,” she said.

“What did you expect?”

“You hardly know me.”

“That’s right.”

“You couldn’t love me or even care for me in this length of time.”

“Love has nothing got to do with it. I’m attracted to you.”

“You’ve.… ” She paused, embarrassed.

“Slept with people without being in love with them? Yes I have.”

“At least you’re honest about it.”

“That’s no virtue. There’s no way I can make you sleep with me if you don’t want to.”

“I’m sorry about the whiskey,” she said.

“That doesn’t matter. There’s more. Will you have some?”

“I’ll have a little,” she held out her glass. We drank in silence. The fire had completely caught, the coals glowing, a steady, flickering flame dancing everywhere about the room.

“O why not,” she said suddenly, and I felt no trace of triumph, only an odd sadness. “I want it too.”

“Are you sure? We don’t have to do anything,” I said, but our kissing spoke a different language, and without a word we
started to slide out of our clothes. I was first in the bed and waited for her. For one moment I saw her stand as if to record or reflect, the flames flickering on the vulnerability of the pale slip with lace along the breasts, and then she slipped out of the rest of her things, and came to me.

“It’s wonderful just to lie and bathe in another’s body. You have a very beautiful body,” I heard my own words hang like an advertisement in the peace of the firelight, the flames leaping and flaming on the brass bells of the bed, on book spines and walls and ceilings.

She was excited and yet drawing away in her nervousness.

“Is it safe?” I asked her in the play.

“It’s the end of the month. I’m afraid I’m as regular as old clockwork.”

“I won’t hurt you,” I said.

“Be careful,” she answered. “It only happened once before,” and she guided me within, wincing whenever I touched the partly broken hymen.

Within her there was this instant of rest, the glory and the awe, that one was as close as ever man could be to the presence of the mystery, and live, the caged bird in its moment of pure rest before it was about to be loosed into blinding light; and then the body was clamouring in the rough health of the instinct, “This is what I needed. This-is-what-I-need-ed.” And we were more apart than before we had come together, the burden of responsibility suddenly in the room, and no way to turn to shift it or apportion it or to get rid of it.