The Pornographer by John McGahern
I ordered two more pints, placing the fresh pint beside his unfinished one on the ledge. He made small notes or changes as he read and I knew they’d all be improvements. Time was suspended as I watched him. I watched his face register the world of the words, Colonel Grimshaw and Mavis Carmichael. It is a chastening sight to watch somebody totally absorbed in a world you yourself have made.
“It’s good. As always. That’s what’ll juice them up. There’s just these few changes.”
He got curious pleasure from the changes, almost standing back to admire the line of the sentences, like someone admiring the true line of a wall he has just straightened.
“Nobody can stand anybody else, of course. You’re one person who really knows that, aren’t you? You just have to have someone you like stay in your house for a few days to find that out. It’s all got to do with room. But we can all stand a lot of the Colonel and Mavis,” and he began to tell me what to do in the next story. The couple should be split up in Majorca. Mavis should be given a bullfighter and the Colonel a brown-skinned Arab girl of fifteen or sixteen.
“You should write it yourself.”
“No. I’m too busy. And I wouldn’t manage it right,” he handed me a brown envelope.
“Thanks,” I could feel the notes in it as I took it.
“By the way, I’m expecting Moran any minute,” he named the most powerful newspaper man in the city. “You don’t mind meeting him?”
“Of course not. Why should I?” I was determined at once to deprive Maloney of his pleasure. One of his few new pleasures since becoming rich was to spring someone powerful or famous on his ordinary company and to stand back and observe.
“You should have seen her crawl to impress him, indecent ambition suddenly all over the place,” he’d remark as if remembering a good wine. “One moment his feathers were all preened and the next completely drooped. It was like the effect a pike might have on a shoal of perch,” I remembered hearing him boast.
“You don’t seem very impressed. Or are you just hiding it?” he berated me now.
“I’m too old. And I know you too well. Besides, I have to go in a few minutes.”
“Where are you going to now? You seem to be always going some place.”
“To a dance. To the Metropole.”
“All the young whores and the rich baldies.”
“Do you want to come?”
“I have to go home after I see Moran. Dada has to say good-good night, tuck the hush-a-baby in, go to safe-safe sleep, or Mama will spank-spank,” he mimicked before adding sharply, “You seem to have escaped all that crack?”
“It’s just as bad without it,” I had time to tell him as Moran pushed towards us at the end of the bar, a large florid man in thornproof tweeds.
“I see you’re inflaming the people again. You better not get them too riz or they’ll turn wicked on yez,” it sounded so well polished that it was hardly the first time it had been put to use. “I was just on my way,” I said, and with apologetic clasps on arms I left before there was time for protest. “I’ll finish that for you in a few days.”
I stood and breathed freely a few moments in the rainwashed air outside, and then moved towards the lighted dancehall. As I drew near I saw three girls with overcoats and long dresses get out of a taxi and go in ahead of me through the swing doors.
The womb and the grave.… The christening party becomes the funeral, the shudder that makes us flesh becomes the shudder that makes us meat. They say that it is the religious instinct that makes us seek the relationships and laws in things. And in between there is time and work, as passing time, and killing time, and lessening time that’d lessen anyhow, such as this going to the dance.
There was a small queue in front of the ticket window when I went through the doors, the three girls in long dresses who had just got out of the taxi at its end. An even longer queue had formed by the time I was able to buy a ticket and a porter brought out a small easel and a pale red House Full placard, and left the placard one side of the easel, ready for putting up.
With the ticket I climbed the heavily carpeted stairs, running into another queue half-way up, which only moved every minute or so at a time, four or five steps, like disembarking from a ship. A man at the head of the stairs in full evening dress was the cause of this last queue, his black hair slicked back from handsome, regular features that had all the marks of an ex-boxer. As he tore each ticket in two, handing a half back, stabbing the half he kept on to a piece of wire, he stared into the faces like the plainclothes policeman beyond the barriers stare when a watch is being kept on the ports.
In the cloakroom a man was carefully hiding a bald patch with a comb and side of the hand. He was concentrating so hard that he did not even notice when I excused myself to get past him to the towels.
The band was playing to an empty floor, slowly, a foxtrot, the brushes caressing the drums. The four steps up from the bar left the dance floor just below eye-level. I sat in the bar, watched its pale maple on which some silver dust was scattered lie empty in the low light. After a while a blue dress swung past, followed by a steel-like trouser leg, the first couple started to dance.
None of the tables were completely free. I sat by the windows across from a young man with dark red hair and a winning smile who had already several empty glasses in front of him.
“You’re enjoying yourself,” I said to the red-headed man who was little more than a boy but looked more aged because of a weathered face. The hands were scarred and the nails broken.
“Just getting up some old courage,” he was too involved with his anxiety or fear to want to talk and we just smiled and nodded back into our separate silences. Far below in O’Connell Street toy cars were streaming past, and most of the small figures on the pavements seemed somehow comic in their fixed determination to get to wherever they were going. I saw the boxer in evening dress leave the head of the stairs. The House Full notice must have gone up on the easel below. It was no longer possible to see onto the dance floor, the space at the head of the steps packed with men, and men on the steps below struggled to push through. Everywhere now there was the sense of the fair and the hunt and the racecourse, the heavy excitement of preying and vulnerable flesh, though who were the hunters and who the prey was never clear, in an opening or closing field one could easily turn into the other; and, since there were not many young people here, there must have been few in the dancehall who at one time or another hadn’t been both, and early as it was in the evening, if we could scent past habits and tobacco and alcohol, in all the gathering staleness, there must be already, here or there, in some corners, the sharp smell of fresh blood on the evening’s first arrowheads.
The redhead and I rose at the same time from the table which was immediately seized by the waiter for a large party of five or six couples who started to move vacant chairs away from half-filled tables.
“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 i
“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
She had on an expensive brown leather coat and matching handbag when she came back, her walk intense and concentrated 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.