Port Mungo

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Eduardo was right at least in this regard, that one should not be too hasty in predicting the same appalling levels of discord every time. I took them out to dinner one evening, and I have to say Jack looked quite healthy. His hair had been cropped short, and he sat rubbing his bristled skull and grinning with pleasure as Vera was humorous at my expense. I can usually give as good as I get in conversation but Vera’s tongue, Vera’s mind—which I will charitably call mercurial—was often too quick for me. She too seemed healthy. She was in a tight black skirt and absurdly high heels, it was the cheap-tart look she had made her own in London and which still apparently bewitched my brother. How was my flock, she wanted to know. Vera enjoyed pretending that I was employed in an ecclesiastical capacity. She liked to think I was a lady bishop in the Episcopalian church.

  —Weeping and praying, I said.

  She grinned at me round her cigarette. There was the black slot, and it was hard to be altogether indifferent to her despite all the harm she had done. It seemed she was good for Jack just then, for he’d been sunk in grief for many months and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard him laugh. Purple Virginia, she called me, and I think that on some level we were actually beginning to grow fond of each other, even if I did regard her as a wicked and dangerous woman and endured her company only because Jack wanted me to.

  Our dinner was pleasant enough. We did not speak about Peg. It emerged that Vera had been living for some months in a farmhouse near Rhinebeck, but quite what the arrangements were, who was paying the bills, this was not stated. What did impress me during the course of the evening was the current of genuine tenderness between them, and this I attributed to their mutual loss: each recognized in the other the same private pain, and for this reason they were gentle and affectionate.

  Later, I walked home by way of Washington Square. It was early April, and after the rigours of a particularly bleak winter the air was warm, the trees were in blossom, and not a hint yet of the sweltering humidity of the summer to come. So, a mellow Sunday evening in spring, and I asked myself why I should not be surprised at the evident pleasure they took in each other, given that the Port Mungo years had been a time of such sustained shabbiness, in every sense, and had culminated so hideously. I’d have thought they would prefer to avoid each other so as to avoid confronting so much in their lives that was ugly.

  Not those two, apparently. Were they without vanity, then? Was it to do with the activity of painting—a daily discipline of vision unflinching? Or was it, rather—and this represented something of a shift, for me, towards Eduardo’s position—that here I witnessed a form of love I had not recognized before, so robust in construction—so stormproof—that it weathered tempests which would have scuppered any ordinary relationship?

  So I entertained the idea of love like a ship unsinkable. A ship unsinkable—I circled the idea and I asked it, was it real? Or was it, rather, a wisp of gothic romance, swallowed whole in childhood and rising now to the surface like an undigested scrap of salad leaf? But no, no. I had always seen it straight. Vera was chronically unstable, but she had always somehow convinced Jack to take her in, I think because he felt he was responsible for her frailty. She played on his guilt, and then she left him. The very repetitiveness of the pattern, the way it circled round on itself and never went forward, seemed to mark it for an unhealthy relationship, obsessive-compulsive in nature and quite emphatically neurotic. So enough of gothic romance, and more of clinical analysis, I thought, unless—and I paused on my doorstep, the key in my hand—unless the thing is a spiral, which even as it circles, rises?

  How long she stayed with him I’m not sure, but I think it ran into weeks. By all accounts this was Vera in her domestic aspect, a rare sighting indeed. She shopped for food, she cooked for him, she cleaned the loft. This I had from Eduardo, who was a frequent visitor to Crosby Street at the time. We laughed together at the bourgeois tendency of the Rathbone household, neither of us in any doubt as to its prospective duration. He too remarked on their evident tenderness for each other, and I wondered if something else had happened, an event which had served to clear away or otherwise resolve tensions to do with the death of Peg. I did not say this to Eduardo, of course. Not that it would have made any difference to him, for him love required no such design of cause-and-effect as it pursued its erratic course. Experience, and reading, have taught me to look deeper into things. I fired him soon after. I discovered he had four other lovers at the same time as me, not all of them female. We remained friends, however.

  One day that summer Jack called at the house and Dora brought him into the big sitting room. I at once guessed what had happened. Poor Jack. And things had been going so well. He smoked, he frowned, he stared at the floor. He had just come from Penn Station, where he’d put her on a train. Why had she gone? She wanted to work. Ironic, considering their history.

  —She can’t work in the loft?

  He shook his head. They couldn’t work in the same space. She had a studio upstate and she wanted to be in it. I asked him if he wasn’t getting a bit too old for all this.

  Up came his head, and he stared at me with an expression of disbelief, which changed in another moment to amusement. Too old? Too old?

  —What’s so funny? I said.

  But he wouldn’t tell me what was so funny. He sat there with his elbows on his knees, grinning at the floor. At least I had managed to lift his mood. I had by that time, with the dismissal of Eduardo, re-established a certain tranquillity in my own life, and I could see no reason why Jack should not enjoy the same. But the very idea amused him, and he left my house still grinning. He loped off up 11th Street, and without turning lifted an arm high over his head and flapped his hand at me where I stood at the front door watching him go.

  But a few years later Jack would move into this house, having come round to my view that the best life is the quiet life, and the best pleasures those enjoyed in moderation. It took him that long to accept that yes, he was getting too old for all this.

  But once again he was on his own, and finding the loft intolerable in her absence he accepted an offer to take a residence in Italy for six months. By the first of September he had left for Rome, and I didn’t see him again for almost half a year.

  There was a great change in him on his return. Much, clearly, had happened, and all of it for the good. He came to the house one evening and I was at once struck by how well he looked. When Jack had first come back to New York his skin had been burnt a leathery brown and his hair bleached out by the sun. His diet had consisted of too much fruit and not enough protein. He’d picked his way along the sidewalks of Manhattan like a man walking in sand. He’d been overly sensitive to the cold and soon experienced the first twinges of arthritis, doubtless brought on by the dramatic shift from the tropics.

  But within a year all that had changed. He had adapted to his Northern environment and begun to dress, and eat, and move like a New Yorker—that swift abstracted lope along the sidewalk, deftly passing slower-moving pedestrians, darting out through traffic as the opportunity presented. His hair grew darker but his skin got no paler. He ceased to crave the sun, and remembered his pleasure in the harsh wet winds of our childhood summers in the west of Ireland. He taught himself to live and work and cook in the chill drafts of his loft, and took satisfaction in its primitive functional simplicity. Just one year, and he sloughed off the skin of the Caribbean creature he had been and became a new man, a downtown man, at once a recognizable if starkly individuated member of the art tribe, in basketball boots and black jeans and an old black overcoat in the winter, and fingerless mittens for working in the loft when it was cold, and dark glasses and a baseball cap pulled low so that precise levels of toxicity in his system did not read. Thus the new Jack, the New York Jack of the 1980s, the Jack who lost a fall and winter to grief—and also, I suspect, bad cocaine, or worse—and had climbed back into the world only because my hand was there to haul him up.

  That was the Jack, more or less
, who left for Rome in the fall of 1985. The Jack who came back the following March had passed through another transformation. He’d again had the sun on his face, but not the fierce blaze of the Caribbean, it was the gentle golden glow of old Italy which was on him now, and he looked healthier than I’d seen him in years. Part of it, part of the sheen of health, I mean—even his wardrobe was transformed, and in his silk shirt and baggy linen suit he was almost a European dandy, old scarecrow Jack—part of it, or most of it, rather, came from a sense of well-being which was evident in his every word and gesture, and issued from every pore of his glowing skin. The man was in love, no other explanation possible.

  —My dear old toad, I said, what’s happened to you?

  He eased himself into an armchair. There was a small silver ring in his earlobe. I gave him a glass of wine and he sniffed it, and tasted it, with a discernment I had never seen in him before. Clearly some education of the senses had been undertaken, but wasn’t that the point of Europe, for New World men like Jack Rathbone?

  —So who is she?

  —Her name, he said, is Antonella.

  He gave the word its full Italian value, the slow, syncopated, full-mouthed inflection, syllable by languid syllable.

  —Antonella, I said, repeating his pronunciation. Is she beautiful and is she young?

  —She is beautiful, said Jack, and she is young, but she is not here.

  When his canvases arrived a week later, he showed me what he’d done. I remembered the thick-laid brushwork and deafening colours of the Port Mungo paintings, the raw eye of the primitivist, or the tropicalist, rather, assimilating with a fervour driven partly by fascination and partly by dislocation all he saw and felt down there. He was a stranger in a jungle, the man who painted those pictures, exhilarated and alienated at the same time, and he once told me that he’d stayed so long in Port Mungo because no artist could hope for a sharper spur to his work than that.

  But a new mood was evident in the paintings of Antonella. And all at once, as though awakening to a reality that had been in front of me forever, but unseen, somehow, I recognized the anger in Jack’s work. Exhilaration and alienation, yes, but above all anger. So accustomed had I become to the slashes and slaps and stabbings in his brushwork, and to the variety of instruments blunt and sharp, hard and soft, with which he worked his paint—sticks, fingers, shells, blades, damp rags, Q-tips, sponges—that I had long since ceased to see the violence with which he went at his canvas, how he practically violated it, as he discharged rage with an energy which translated in the finished work as passion, and imbued it with its considerable force. Drawn from where, directed against what, I didn’t know, but I could no longer regard his work as anything other than the product of anger: an art of tantrum.

  Why? Because it was not evident in the paintings of Antonella. Those paintings seemed to have been made by a man from whom rage had been drained like oil from the sump of an engine. They were lyrical.

  He took them from the rack and propped them against the wall, and as I moved down the loft I restrained any display of the delight and astonishment they aroused in me. He propped them up in the order in which they’d been painted so I could see the movement from the first portraits, in which I sensed him already searching for an idiom in which to express ideas remote from his usual pictorial range, to the last, which were studies of the girl nude: full-length figures which in their aching counterpoints of modesty and eroticism were close to perfect, I thought. He was sitting on the couch with his elbows on his knees and watching me intently. I stood a long time in front of the last picture, Antonella facing the viewer, one knee bent slightly so the foot trailed, and one slim hand caught at the hip, and staring out with what might in coarser hands have been mere pouting provocation but was here a display of trust and mild humour in an exquisite girl, no other word for her, and the touch of the painter so deft, so delicate, that it filled one with an odd longing, not sexual, not at all, though it was a sexual painting. No, it was some other longing, for some other joy, which I could not define.

  At last I crossed the loft and sat down opposite him. I was strongly affected by the work.

  —The best you’ve done, I said.

  A long pause, and I felt not so much his pleasure as his relief.

  —Nobody else has seen them. Except her, of course. One or two others.

  —They’re beautiful, Jack.

  —Good!

  It seemed he’d got what he’d wanted, what he’d feared he’d be denied—confirmation from someone he trusted that the work was as good as he thought it was. He sprang to his feet and stood gazing at the paintings stretched the length of the loft, and even in the cold air of early spring in New York City the glow of an ancient sun spilled out.

  —Better get Vera down to have a look, he said.

  Jack’s Italian paintings were shown in New York in the fall. They won praise from the reviewers, but sales were poor. In the meantime he had returned to Rome only to discover that the peculiar fires which had sprung to life in the course of Antonella’s sitting for him did not rekindle. He did not know why, nor did she, but they could not pretend it was otherwise. Their love had been specific to a given time, a given shared work—to Rome, of course—and it had not survived the separation. Jack was philosophical. He was grateful for the paintings she had enabled him to make. He said they wept when they parted. There had never been an angry word between them, never a misunderstanding, never a lie. She was seventeen years old.

  There is one more episode worth relating in connection to the Italian paintings, and it concerns Vera’s response to them. I was not present, of course, but Jack gave me a full account of her visit. It seems he wrote asking her to come down to the city and see the paintings, and she’d appeared at Crosby Street a few days later. She’d heard about his sexy pictures, she told him, and naturally she wanted to see them. She was pleased he’d asked her to come. Vera had burnt so many bridges in the art world, created so many enemies, Jack was one of only a handful of people who still knew the value of her eye.

  She turned up in the late morning. She was wearing dark glasses, she was hungover, and not in the best of tempers. Jack was still in what I thought of as his uomo-italiano phase. He continued to wear the linen suit, and he was taking his food and drink rather seriously, lingering over the wine list, questioning the sommelier, talking over dinner about Morandi, Visconti, Armani, whoever, just so long as their last name ended in a vowel. The morning Vera appeared he was still a man alive to the nuanced pleasures of table, cellar, wardrobe and bed—I exaggerate, of course, but Jack had had a brief glimpse of bella figura and had thought perhaps to assimilate a little of it into his own rather starkly minimal mode of life. Vera was suspicious as he embraced her at the door.

  —I hear you paint children now.

  A bracing dash of acid, this, and Jack recoiled, still drifting, as he was, on tissue of gossamer fragrant with oils of lambent nubility. He soon recovered.

  —On velvet, he said. Then I drink their blood.

  —Such stamina.

  —Oysters in olive oil, you should try it.

  —I have, Jack. It turned me into a simpering idiot.

  —You want some coffee?

  —Christ yes. You still allowed to smoke in this Temple of Youth, what’s she called, Salmonella? Salmonella the fish-nymph of Sardinia?

  Not a good start, and he began to realize that for once Vera’s eye might be less than scrupulously impartial to all considerations but those of art. She rapidly took in the canvases propped the length of the long north wall of the loft, moving down the line and pausing only once. She sniffed, she followed the curve of a breast with her finger.

  —Sweet.

  Then it was over, and she sat on the couch with her coffee and her cigarette, frowning and coughing.

  —What is it with middle-aged men and young girls anyway? Or need I ask. You want to paint with your dick, Jack, you go right ahead.

  —Oh, fuck off.

  He w
as starting to understand how badly he had miscalculated. A man cannot address male desire in front of a woman and expect a sympathetic hearing. And his paintings, he saw—and for the first time as though through a woman’s eyes, and a woman, what’s more, with whom he had a long sexual history—his paintings were nothing more than a hymn to male desire. Or a series of propositions, rather. An argument. A display. An excuse. All at once he hated them, he wanted to destroy them, they were shallow boastings. Angrily he began to turn them to the wall. Vera wheeled round.

  —Don’t do that!

  —Why the hell not?

  —Oh don’t be so ridiculous!

  She sat there, half turned towards him, laughing at him.

  —Christ, Jack, you are a touchy bugger. Leave the fucking things alone! They’re good, all right? It’s sweet work. It might have been sweeter, but then it'd be crap. But it’s not. So relax, okay?

  He slapped the wall with his palm and went to the window.

  —Stupid to get you down here, he said.

  —I wanted to come, I’m glad I did. She’s succulent. I’d have done the same myself. Not the same, but I’d have done it. I have done it. But come on, Jack, it’s like listening through the wall.

  —They make you jealous?

  She took off her dark glasses. She gazed at him, and in her expression was the question: did he really expect her to answer that? She gathered up her bag and her coat. I think in that moment my brother abandoned his newly acquired Italian persona and became standard Jack once more. He got the point, and being standard Jack, he shrugged. They’d hit each other harder than this before. He kissed her at the door, and she surprised him by seizing his hair in her fingers and kissing him back, hard and with her mouth open.

  —You dumb bastard, she whispered, and left him aroused as she clattered off down the stairs.

  This at any rate was how Jack described the meeting. But he would never again paint pictures like those he made in Rome that year, which does not mean that traces of Antonella did not recur in later work. There were passages in several of the large canvases he painted while living with me which showed that Antonella had clearly been assimilated into the evolving manner, this being another way of saying that the prudent artist wastes nothing, and that what Jack learned doing the Italian paintings he incorporated into his later work.