Port Mungo

by Patrick Mcgrath

  I told Jack that Eduardo knew what was at stake and must be left to handle it. He accepted this but only after we’d had a rather heated exchange. I think that had he not been so distracted by what he was doing in the studio he might have taken control of the situation and done something about it.

  We heard her coming in at dusk on the Tuesday evening. The house had been like a tomb. We only became properly aware of the extent to which she animated it when she was absent. We’d missed her, and I know Jack blamed himself for her absence. He did not say as much but it was clear he suspected that a lack of finesse or sensitivity on his part had driven her off. It is one of the grimmer aspects of growing old, how profoundly one experiences loss. One no longer has the confidence that whatever is lost will be replaced, nor much faith in one’s ability to attract a replacement. Loss begins to seem absolute, and creates a dismay that smacks of death.

  We listened to her coming in through the front door and crossing the hall. Had she just come back for her things? Had she seen all she wanted to of Jack, believing all this time—courtesy of Gerald—that he had sexually abused her sister to the point where the girl had killed herself? But why, if she thought her father capable of such a thing, would she then make herself so vulnerable as to stand naked in front of him day after day?

  Then the door opened, and I knew she was back to stay. So did Jack. And he experienced an emotion, he told me later, of which he had long since believed himself impotent, and so powerfully that he rose to his feet and crossed the room and took her in his arms.

  She clutched him tightly, stiffly, and when they broke apart there were tears on his face. Then she came to me and I too was hugged. I remembered a painting of the prodigal’s return, though Anna of course was no prodigal. But so effectively was I persuaded that my fears were without foundation that I cast about for the fatted calf. The best I could come up with was champagne.

  —Splendid idea, said Jack, and went off to the kitchen. Anna and I sat down across from each other, and I was beaming like a fond old hen.

  —You’ve been at Eduardo's?

  —Yeah.

  —You must know, dear Anna, that the last thing Jack wants is to cause you pain. You do believe me?

  —I think I’m just a bit confused right now. Gerald told me one thing about Peg, and now Jack says it’s not true.

  —Of course you’re confused. What does Eduardo think?

  This startled her. Up came her head. We heard a faint pop! from down the passage to the kitchen.

  —He’s on your side, she said.

  I thought: I should bloody well think so.

  —Meaning?

  —He says my father’s trying to tell me the truth but he’s afraid of what I’ll think if he makes Gerald look bad.

  Shy grin here, a glimpse of those yellowy tombstone teeth. Like a death's-head, I thought later. When I had to shelter her from the law. Here on West 11th Street, house of widows. Vera and Dora and Anna and me, the girl telling lies and me the only one who saw the thing clearly.

  —He does want to tell you the truth.

  She was about to ask me a question, but Jack appeared with a chilled bottle and three flutes and our attention shifted to him. It seemed he had made a decision and wanted to waste no time putting it into effect. He sat down and stared at Anna and said he wanted to tell her how Peg had died.

  Anna stared back at him.

  —Go on then, she said.

  So Jack described Peg and Vera’s last outing in the boat. The poor visibility, the collision with the coral head, the weather turning bad, the mangroves—

  Anna sat staring at the floor with her elbows on her knees. She let out a gasp when he finished. It had taken no more than a minute or two. There was a long silence.

  —Who was driving the boat? she said at last.

  —Your mother.

  —Was she drunk?

  —Yes.

  Another gasp. Not of surprise though, rather as if these hefty doses of unadulterated truth were going down like shots of some powerful liquor.

  —So why did Gerald say she killed herself?

  —Someone in Port Mungo told him. Someone unreliable.

  Silence. She frowned, it was enough, she had nothing else to ask. At last she lifted her head and grinned at us, and said how much better it was to know a thing, no matter how dreadful it was, than not to know and have to imagine it. What you imagine is always so much worse, she said, and we both agreed with this sentiment with some alacrity. Jack poured the champagne and we promptly drank it in a spirit of celebration. I had a chance then to study our returning prodigal, and again I was astonished by that certain quality I had detected before, I mean her ability to absorb experience raw. Here was a young woman who had just taken on board some pretty catastrophic information but had remained on the surface as placid as ever. It was hard not to think of the cliché of the still waters. I suppose it was what Eduardo referred to as her steely quality, which according to him was a dangerous Rathbone trait.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Spring was in the air. Jack said he knew by the light falling on the building across from the studio that the arc of the sun was higher in the sky. He knew the city would be lashed by at least one more storm, but still he was glad to see a sign that winter was almost over. He’d resumed work on the large canvas.

  He woke early the morning after Anna’s return and knew what he must do with it. Perhaps he had been dreaming about it. He did dream about his work, and often had fresh impetus afterwards, whether or not he had looked at it in weeks. He got up and went straight to his studio. He hauled the trolley over to the wall and began poking through the pile of cans and tubes until he found what he wanted. He went to work and stayed at it for four or five hours, until hunger drove him downstairs to the kitchen. Anna was at the table. She may have attempted a conversation, I don’t know, Jack was intent only on eating something and getting back to work: he was having a good day, and his joints were quiet. He fried two eggs and took them upstairs with a piece of toast and a mug of tea. He worked all afternoon then had a bath and a short nap. When he came downstairs again it was evening, and he found me home but Anna out.

  We talked for a while but the conversation was desultory. I saw he was slipping into that state of mind where the world, the real world, I mean, of other people, receded, and the picture being painted would expand until it permeated his entire existence. I was familiar with this pattern. I recognized the beginnings of a period of immersion, and an end to the anxiety that gnawed at him all the time he was not properly at work. Peace of mind was possible for him only when he was painting; all else was depression and anxiety, not in any melodramatic sense, simply that those feelings were the background noise of his mind when he was attending to life outside the studio, which he felt as a kind of exile. It was his good fortune to be painting again, because dear god, he would say, there was no taking it for granted any more; the years devoured the blithe confidence with which one went to work, the years displayed the fragility of one’s competence, and the looming gray wall of failure against which one struggled, that got higher—all this the psychic encumbrance of an artist of a certain age entering a room and preparing to go to work.

  So to feel a rising confidence in his ability to work unafraid, this was the good fortune to which he awoke the morning after Anna came home again.

  Ten days he had now. All the days in all the years he had gone to work—ten more. A storm was approaching. Ten more days before the storm broke and he was stopped in his tracks, and although he had far from exhausted the productive surge, was hauled bodily out of the studio by circumstance and responsibility and the rest of the grim machinery which all his working life he had tried to push to the periphery of things but which came back relentlessly, provoking the familiar dull useless anger. The days are numbered, he would say, glaring at me as though I were attempting to steal his days, they are finite; he could calculate them if I wanted him to, also how many more paintings he might reasonabl
y expect to complete, assuming the competence could be sustained till—what?—seventy-five, eighty? Would he be able to make good work at eighty?

  Would he be alive at eighty?

  During Anna’s absence he had been too distracted to paint. In fact since becoming absorbed by the portrait of Anna he had paid less and less attention to the Dream, and was losing touch with it. Nor had he any idea when he would once more have the vacancy of mind he required to resume serious work on it, there was no possibility of immersion while Anna held his attention. And when he was cut off from his work for more than a few days another more serious question would begin to form, that being: what is the point? He mentioned this to me once, and I remember saying: What is what point?—and he realized then, he said, why Vera had been right to discourage me from continuing to paint. For if I could not understand the question, so he bluntly told me, I had no business setting up as an artist. What is the point, he tried to explain to me, of life—of one’s actual existence, day by day—if one has no creative work to do? He could see the idea worried me. The idea that life, or oneself, should have meaning only as a function of the creative work one did—he saw that I could not live like that, and it was my failure, he said, that I lacked the—what?—disposition?—genius?—curse?—which drove the best of them, and which they grappled more closely to themselves than anything else. Houses, money, marriages, children—all will be abandoned, he said, if only we are permitted to keep making art. He said this was the meaning of the Narcissus myth, and it had inspired the many variations on that myth he had painted over the years, including of course the original Narcissus in the Jungle, which still hangs in the big room downstairs.

  But he had his ten days, and painting had this effect on him, it made him strong, strong enough, certainly, to confront the memories he seemed so very apprehensive about at other times. Peg rose up in his mind as he worked, a companion all shining and cleansed of mangrove slime, and Jack murmured to her as he moved about in front of the canvas, darting at it with small cries, then standing back, staring, turning away to the trolley and groping among the heaped tubes, and he thought: Dear Peg, she got lost in it just as Vera did, and it’s not a gift, no, you have to earn it, the freedom to make yourself a slave of painting. To stare unflinching into your own self as though into a mirror and ignore everything else.

  For ten days he worked well and happily and Anna was not at the centre of his thoughts. When he saw her in the evening he was not altogether there. He knew that I would have explained to her what happened when the work took over, and that I would have formed with her the same bond of amused complicity I had formed with Dora during earlier protracted periods when he had absented himself in all but body from the life of the household. We treated him as a sort of ghostly familiar, an entity more spirit than flesh, a thing to be seen drifting about the house at certain times of the day or night and even spoken to, but without any actual living connection to us. Anna was surprised by the change in him, but as I say, I was able to explain all this to her.

  Perhaps “more spirit than flesh” is not quite right. Perhaps it was the other way round, more flesh than spirit. He ate, he drank, he slept; his absence was that of the spirit, rather, for the spirit was up in the studio, in the canvas. We cohabited with one of the undead, the ghoul who made art in the attic.

  Then the storm broke, and it was catastrophic. Anna had found a job in a restaurant and was working as many shifts as she could so as to put some money together, though what she was putting it together for she hadn’t told us, her rather nebulous career in art I suppose. I assumed she went to Eduardo’s loft when she got off work, and I dreaded her discovery of this boy of his, though I had to conceal my apprehension when she was with us in the house. Jack was in his studio all day, and I had the impression the work was still going well, despite what I’d told him about the messy situation Eduardo had created.

  One evening we were having our cocktails when someone came to the door. We were not expecting a visitor and were not in the mood for company. We could tolerate each other, but that was all. We heard Dora shuffle across the hall, and then a familiar voice. Eduardo. I rose to my feet.

  —What’s happened? I cried.

  He sank into an armchair and softly struck his head with the heel of his palm.

  —She’s found out.

  —Jesus Christ.

  This from Jack, who strode to the far end of the room and leaned against the wall with his back to us.

  —How? I said.

  —She showed up this morning—

  —Anna did?

  —Yes, and the boy was there—

  —Oh no.

  —I did not know she was coming!

  Inarticulate groaning and cursing and hammering of the wall from the other end of the room.

  —Go on.

  —I was in the studio, so he opened the door—

  —And it was obvious?

  —Oh yes. He was wearing my bathrobe.

  At that point Jack seemed utterly to lose control and came striding down the room enraged, and what he would have done next I do not know because we all became aware that somebody else was at the front door, with a key.

  Anna.

  I remember with particular clarity seeing her in the doorway of the big sitting room, our Anna, apparently calm, staring at Eduardo, who, having turned towards the door, pushes himself heavily up out of his armchair and stands facing the girl, who then moves swiftly towards him, her face white and her lips pressed tight together, and holding out her hands to him—and me thinking, It’s going to be all right after all—and Eduardo offering her his hand, his right hand, and a second later a sharp cry of pain—“Fuck!”—as he pulls violently away, his hand crumpling like a leaf and blood flowing, and him staring at it with his jaws and eyes wide, the blood pouring from between his clawing fingers as though he is trying to cup a bowl of it in his palm and cannot, for it is streaming through his fingers and splashing onto the polished hardwood floor—

  —Fuck! he shouts again, as he gropes for a handkerchief and clamps it to his palm, and at last looks up, astonished and disbelieving and in pain, and stares at Anna, who has moved to the window, where she stands with her back to the glass, returning his stare, her mouth slightly open and her eyes bright, leaning against the sill and gripping it tight, her thin chest heaving.

  Later, after Eduardo had been taken off in a cab to St. Vincent’s, and Dora had mopped up in the sitting room, the three of us sat in the kitchen and talked. She told us everything, how she’d decided in the morning to buy Eduardo some flowers and take them over to his loft and surprise him, he was working so hard for his show. She’d walked down Broadway, feeling good, she said. West along Canal, south on Washington and west again on Eduardo’s block. She’d been buzzed into the building and knocked at his door.

  —This black kid opened the door, I knew him from the restaurant. He was squeezing oranges. He stood there with this piece of squeezed orange in his hand, it was dripping on the floor, and he was giving me this creepy smile and he was like, was my name Anna, because Eduardo had told him all about me, and I kind of woke up because of the dressing gown. It was the one he gave me to wear when I stayed over.

  —Then what?

  —I had to get out of there. I still had his fucking flowers! I just threw them into the street. Then I went into this bar on North Moore and had a whisky. I thought it would calm me down. Then I had another one. Then I started to get angry, so I walked around for a while and then I went to a movie. That’s about it, really.

  She gazed at us without any hint of remorse, or shock, or anything at all that I recognized as an appropriate reaction to what had happened.

  —So when did you think of cutting his hand?

  —During the movie.

  —And the razor blade?

  —I just thought of it.

  —How did you know he’d be here?

  —I was watching his building, and when he came out I followed him.

&nbs
p; Gingerly she reached into her leather jacket and extracted a razor blade wrapped in black electrical tape so only the edge was exposed. It was still smeared with blood. She set it down on the kitchen table and wiped her fingers on a paper napkin. We stared at the gruesome object.

  —You may have cut some tendons, I said.

  —Good.

  There were no tears. Her anger was still fresh. There was a sort of cold purity to it, it seemed a thing of impersonal passion rather than felt emotion, if that distinction means anything. Herself an agent of abstract retribution and her palmed razor blade the instrument. Later Jack said he thought this as robust a display of sound mental health as any he had seen in a long time but I was far from convinced. I was made profoundly uneasy by what Anna had done, and particularly by her own attitude to it, this stance of frigid righteousness.

  —What do you propose to do now? I said.

  —I never want to see him again.

  —Okay.

  —I never want to think about him again.

  —That won’t be so easy.

  Up came her head, the eyes hard and bright. She looked older than her years, in fact she looked ageless, it was her core I saw there, bedrock self, and it chilled me.

  —Why not? Get on with my life. Bad episode, all over now. I can live without men.

  Fearless and defiant, in a way I admired her for it; but not entirely realistic.

  —I do think that you should talk to someone about it. With us, if you like.

  —So I can talk to you about it if I want?

  —Of course.

  —All right.

  Another silence. That seemed to be it, as far as Anna was concerned. I opened a bottle of wine. Anna wanted to know if Eduardo had always been such a bastard and I had to tell her that yes, he had, and that I wished I’d warned her but I honestly didn’t think he’d pull a stunt like this with her. I said I was sorry and she said that it was okay, and we were all just beginning to calm down when there was a tap at the door. Dora put her head into the kitchen and gave me to understand that she had something to tell me, so I got up and went out into the passage.