The Pornographer

  “O I don’t know. I’m shocked. I suppose what shocked me most of all was to think you wrote it.”

  “But you know the stuff is around. That it’s sold in shops. That people buy it.”

  “Yes, but somehow one doesn’t think it has anything to do with oneself. It’s for others. So it’s quite shocking to come as close to it as this,” she tapped the pages.

  “Would you like a drink?”

  “All right. I’ll have the same as you. I somehow knew I needed an education but I never thought I’d run through one quite as fast as this.”

  I got her the drink, poured myself another, and stayed silent. It must have been the drink, for I felt the flat shake with an uncontrollable silent laughter, that I was both taking part in some farce and at the same time watching it from miles far off.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked sharply.

  “Nothing. You and I. Mavis and the Colonel. The whole setup seems somehow such a huge farce.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Nothing much. Sometimes it seems that we’re all being had, by ourselves as much as by others—by the whole setup.”

  “Writing that stuff is bound to have an effect on a person,” she’d come and put arms around me. I drew up her blouse and brassière to feel her breasts, warm and full, the nipples erect.

  “Did the stuff excite you at all?”

  “Of course. That’s what’s disturbing about it.”

  “How disturbing?”

  “It makes a farce of the whole thing, doesn’t it. It’s nothing got to do with anything. It just makes a farce of people, plays on them, gets them worked up.”

  “Like this?”

  “This is natural,” she’d put hands inside my shirt, and was running light fingers along my ribs and back. We kissed as I drew up her nipples till she caught her breath. “I just want to feel you. You smell so sweet. I just want to feel your skin, to lie beside you, even if it’s only for a little while.”

  In bed she said, “Don’t you know I love you? Don’t you know I’m crazy about you? Don’t you know I think about you all the time? I never fell before but when I did I sure fell hard.”

  “You shouldn’t be telling me that.”

  “It’s the truth. I love you.”

  “The truth’s generally disastrous.”

  “I have so much love for you that I believe you will come to share some of it, no matter how hard you try to fight it.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “If I believed that I don’t know how I could go on.”

  “You’d go on. Everybody does. Or mostly everybody.”

  As much as from desire to stop the words as from real physical desire, I drew her towards me. Afterwards it was she who said, “That’s far better than talking. It just makes sense in itself.”

  “It’s not verbal.”

  I broke the long silence that followed, “Are you sure you want to go on this boat trip? I enjoy sleeping with you, being with you, but I don’t love you. If you love me as you say you do you can only get more hurt by going on. Since it’ll have to be broken, it might be better for everybody if we just broke it off now.”

  “I don’t know what you wanted to say that for. Unless it’s just wanting to be brutal,” and I could feel her cry.

  “No, I don’t want that,” I rocked her. “I wanted the opposite. But are you sure you want that?”

  “Does a drowning person want a life raft?”

  “I don’t think the situation is as bad as that, but sure, we can go on that boat trip. There’s nothing else to stop it.”

  She kissed me, and there was a sense of rest. I knew it well. Two whole weeks were secured and rescued from all that threatened. A small heaven had been won. Within its secure boundaries love somehow might be set on its true course.

  “What are you doing tomorrow evening?” she tried to ask with a casualness that only served to highlight her anxiety.

  “I have to go to the hospital. It’s a bore but she depends on me now, especially for the brandy. After all, it was she and my uncle who brought me up after my parents vamoosed. So it’s no less than fair.”

  “How vamoosed?”

  “Dying, I suppose, is a sort of vamoosing, isn’t it? It’s not playing the game.”

  “But it’s natural,” she said slowly. “It’s making room for others.”

  The chrysanthemums had gone from the bedside when I next went to the hospital. Knowing her, she probably gave the flowers to someone she felt she owed a present to, possibly someone she disliked, maybe to the black-haired nurse. I thought she was watching me to see if I missed the flowers. “Mrs Mulcahy down the ward was saying how nice the flowers were so I gave them to her. You know I can’t stand flowers,” she said.

  “How do you feel?” I put the brandy down.

  “God and the brandy is all that’s any use now. It’s all I get any value out of. The pain’s still there. I don’t trust this place. I thought the pain was going but it’s back as bad as ever.”

  “But you look far better.”

  “I don’t feel as bad as when I was in the X-ray, but I don’t feel right. There’s a chance I may be let home. They’re doing some tests. They’ll tell me tomorrow.”

  “But that’s great news. That contradicts everything you’ve been saying.”

  “Maybe they won’t let me home after all,” she said warily. “Or maybe they’re just letting me home because there’s nothing they can do.”

  “They’d not do that,” I said and changed. “I see our black-haired friend is on duty.”

  Her swarthy, lovely form was moving between two beds at the far end of the ward.

  “That one. She has me still persecuted. I think she must have arranged to be on duty because I had to tell her you were coming in. Whoever has his luck there will find he has more than the full of his arms.”

  “I must tell her what you think about her,” I teased.

  “You will not,” she put her hand to her mouth as she attempted to laugh it away. “You can do anything you want. You’re all right. But she can take it out on me here. You see she’s moved now so that you’ll have to pass her on your way out.”

  Outside her natural attractiveness, the very fact that she was probably available made her more attractive still. We seem repelled as much by the hopeless as by what is too ferociously thrust upon us. Between these two, longing and fearing, we are drawn on.

  “I’ll go then, so,” I used the levity as an excuse to leave early without her opposition, “so that I’ll not miss her.”

  “You’d not be able,” she laughed.

  “The next time I hope you’ll have the good news.”

  “Will you be in tomorrow, then?”

  “The day after. You’ll hardly be gone home by then?”

  “I might never be gone home. Except feet first,” she put her hand again to her mouth as if to take away the words.

  As I passed the nurse, she faced me. She was not pretty but more than pretty, handsome and lovely, in her perfect health and young strength. “My aunt says she may be going home soon.”

  “She probably will. She’ll know for certain tomorrow.”

  “Thanks for looking after her so well.”

  “For nothing at all,” she laughed directly.

  “I hope I see you soon.”

  She didn’t answer. The clear laughing look in her eyes warned me to ignore what she showed me at my own peril.

  It was in Kavanagh’s upstairs lounge that we met to arrange the boat trip on the Shannon. She was so energetic with happiness when she came that I could believe she was lit by some inner light, except I knew by this time that all her power came from outside. Walter was thrilled by the idea of the article. The people that owned the boats were falling over backwards to help. Her two friends, the American girls, thought it a wonderful idea and were really dying to meet me.

  “Pornography and all?” I asked in more dismay than sarcasm.

  “I though
t they’d be shocked but it didn’t phase them one bit. They were tickled pink.”

  I groaned inwardly at the sea of talk that must have been set rippling by our small dark meetings, and resolved to end it as soon as the boat trip ended. Out of guilt at my own withdrawal, my useless passivity, I made my own poor gesture toward the doomed charade.

  “I’ll be able to get a car,” I said. “I’ll drive you down to the boat.”

  “You’ll drive us down.”

  “That’s what I meant.”

  “Betty and Janey said they’d be glad to lend us their car for the weekend.”

  “No, I can borrow a car or van from the paper. I used to have a car of my own but I didn’t have enough use for it.”

  “I’d have a car,” she said, “if I could afford it. I think a car is a wonderful extension of your life. It’s almost as good as a third arm.”

  “Will you have a last drink?” I asked towards closing time. “We’ll not go back to my place tonight.”

  It was like pulling the trigger of a gun that had been following the movement of a bird settling in high branches, pulled as much out of the tiredness of following it among the branches as any desire of killing.

  “Why?” she demanded.

  It’d serve as a rehearsal for finishing it, I thought, a sounding out, though plain sense said that the only way to finish it was by finishing it now, and I flinched from that.

  “There’s a lot of trouble,” I explained. “My aunt has taken a turn for the worse. My uncle is coming up. I’ll have to shepherd him around. And I have all this work to do.”

  Maloney was fond of saying that every good lie must be flavoured with a little truth, as whiskey with water.

  “He won’t be up tonight, will he?”

  “No, but there’s things I have to do before he comes.”

  “When will we meet, then?” she didn’t question it further.

  “Say, Saturday night.”

  “All that length of time. It’s almost time for the boat trip then.”

  “We’ll have all that weekend on the boat and I just want to be free this whole week. Since you complain of these pubs, we’ll do anything you want to do on Saturday,” I said by way of appeasement.

  She thought for a while and then said without hesitation, “I know what I’d like to do,” she was suddenly aglow. “I’ll come to your place and cook you a meal.”

  “My place is a mess as far as cooking goes. I’ll take you out for a meal. Any place you want.”

  “No. I have this feeling you’re not looking after yourself properly. I want to cook you a good meal. I’ll get the food but I’ll leave the wine to you.”

  I tried to protest but I saw that she had her mind made up. “What kind of wine will I get? Red or white?” I backed down.

  “Red. Get red wine,” it seemed she had the meal already half planned.

  My aunt was sitting up in bed, combed and made-up when I brought her in the bottle of brandy the next evening. She looked excited and happy.

  “I’m going home,” she said, though it wasn’t necessary to say it. “You’ll not have to waste your money bringing in the old brandy any more but God bless you for it. I don’t know what I’d have done without it.”

  “How are you going?”

  “I rang last night. Your uncle is coming up for me tomorrow. He’s taking the big car. He wants you to ring him tonight.”

  “Why isn’t Cyril coming?” I asked her sharply.

  “Poor Cyril is far too busy,” she answered with equal sharpness, intolerant of the question.

  My uncle was far the busier, but all the foolish sweetness of her late love was for Cyril and pardoned everything he did before turning it to praise. My uncle’s hard-working, decent life counted for nothing by its side, his refusal to be anything but his own man just another woeful example of bad manners and general inconsiderateness. Facts were just left carelessly around by other people in order to trip you up. “He’s certainly as busy as Cyril,” I said carefully, but she flushed with anger.

  “You never liked Cyril. Of course you’d take your uncle’s side, what else could I expect?”

  “Liking has nothing to do with it, just plain facts.”

  “It’s no wonder poor Cyril always complained the both of you ganged up on him.”

  “I’m very fond of my uncle but that has nothing got to do with it.”

  “Oh has it not? If you were to strip off those city manners you’d find that both of you are the exact same breed. What passes for quiet is stubbornness and you’re both thick as ditches.”

  “It’s useful,” I started to say, but then was appalled to find myself in the middle of a quarrel. These were the first unkind words we’d had all the time she’d been in the hospital, and she was going home tomorow. “I’ll see you tomorrow and I’ll ring him this evening,” I changed, but she didn’t answer. After a few steps I wanted to turn back to say that I was sorry, but by then I saw that she was crying.

  “O, aye,” my uncle said when I told him my aunt had asked me to telephone. “You know I’m going up tomorrow?”

  “I know that.”

  “Well, I was wonderin’ if you’d meet me somewhere out of the city. I don’t like driving the big car in the city.”

  “I’ll meet you at Maynooth, then. Would eleven be all right?”

  “Eleven would be fine. Say, at the gates of the priests’ factory,” it was one of his few jokes. “Is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine. How are you keeping yourself?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” he said. “And there’d be no use complaining anyhow if it wasn’t.”

  I took the bus out to Maynooth the next morning, and was waiting for him at the seminary gates when the “big car” pulled up ten or fifteen minutes after eleven, a black V8, old and heavy enough to have come out of any of several gangster movies. Among other things, he kept it on the principle that, since driving was so careless in Ireland, someone was bound to hit him sooner later and when that happened “The other fella wasn’t going to come out looking for a light.” Since he took it out so seldom, the fact that it swallowed petrol was a small price to pay for such insulated misanthropy. He left the engine running and moved over to let me take the wheel.

  “It’s a great ease for me that you’re taking her in,” he shuffled in his pocket and took out a box of small cigars. “There was a time I used to take trucks three times a week through to the docks but not any more with this traffic.”

  “She running beautifully,” I said, and it was a pleasure to feel her roll, solid and stately.

  “There’s no plastic in this old bus. They made them to last in those days.”

  As we drew in towards the city, I saw people nudge and smile at us. I smiled back and was glad my uncle didn’t notice. It would not have pleased him that the big car had now reached the status of an antique.

  “Well, how is the patient?” he had to ask at long last.

  “I’m afraid I ran into trouble with her last night.”

  “What sort of trouble?” he asked apprehensively.

  “It was nothing. I got a bit annoyed when she said poor Cyril was too busy to come up for her and told you were far busier. It was just a puff. It’ll be all over but you’re as well to know about it.”

  “The only time poor Cyril gets busy these days is on the high stool,” he chuckled. “But you couldn’t tell that woman that. And you should hear the pity he has for himself, you’d think it was him that should be in the hospital, especially if there’s a woman near to listen, and you know there’s no use talking to a woman once her mind’s made up. Trying to talk to a woman with her mind made up is like trying to turn back a pig in a wide meadow: they’ll always go past you.”

  “I was sorry I got into it. It was no time for crossing her,” I said.

  “Is she not coming home cured, then?”

  “I don’t know. I doubt it.”

  “Why are they sending her out, so?”

&
nbsp; “Maybe there’s nothing more they can do for her,” and I was glad not to have to watch his face.

  “Will you go in for her?” he asked when I parked at the hospital. “I’d sooner sit out here in the car. And there’s nothing much I can do in there anyhow.” And when I looked towards him he had already looked away.

  “I thought yous were never coming,” she was all waiting, her cases by the armchair at the entrance to the ward.

  “We’re hardly late at all.”

  “Once you know you’re going you can’t wait to get away. Where’s your uncle?”

  “He’s waiting out at the car.”

  “That’s just like him. Let you haul out all the cases,” she started to complain.

  He was standing outside the V8, the boot up, the back door open,

  “Will you look at him, standing there, like a railway porter,” I saw now that she was just complaining out of happiness and relief to be entering again into the familiar. He hid his nervousness by busily stacking the cases in the boot, and then settling her among the rugs and pillows in the back, she making noises of protestation. “Well, it’s great to see you better and going home,” he let rumble out as the car rolled away from the hospital.

  “Maybe I’m not well at all.”

  “Ah well, Mary, you never missed! You were always a great one for having both ends. Sure, you’re even looking well,” and though she grumbled on I saw that the tiny scold had reassured her.

  At Maynooth I left them. “There’ll be a bus back in any minute. I don’t want you to wait.”

  “You’ll be down soon?” my uncle said as we shook hands.

  “Promise,” she said as I kissed her. “And thanks for everything and God bless you.”

  “I promise. If you don’t go now you’ll soon find yourself driving into the sun.” I shut the door but she continued waving from the back window as the big car nosed out into the traffic.

  I took the story in Friday evening to the Elbow Inn. Every Friday evening the people from the paper met there just after work. I took the story in instead of posting it because I wanted to borrow a car or van for the river trip.