Blood and Water and Other Tales

by McGrath, Patrick

  Jack gave him a cigarette, and as the match flared Jack saw that he was very young, about thirteen, and slim, his eyes lined with kohl. The face was soft, like a girl’s, lit from beneath by the glowing tip of the cigarette. Again the hooter sounded on the Jersey shore, and the boy walked away, glancing back once.

  Jack did not follow him. He rose from the concrete and headed for home. Where Gansevoort meets Washington three manholes were spewing up thick clouds of steam, and the narrow street, a ravine between darkened, long-porched warehouses, was filled and choking with it, like a sort of hell. Jack moved forward into this hell, breasting it like a swimmer, and for a moment the whiteness swirled about him and rendered his black-coated form indistinct, phantasmal even, before it swallowed him up. The steam continued to pour silently from beneath the street, and then a huge garbage truck with silver horns mounted on the cab came thundering through, and on its radiator in flowing golden script was painted the word MYSTIC.

  He decided to have a nightcap in Dorian’s. It was a Sunday, late, and the restaurant was empty. Once, this had been an unpretentious diner: a formica-topped counter with aluminum napkin dispensers and bottles of ketchup running the length of the west wall, seating on the right, a narrow channel between. But all that had changed. A series of Doric columns, structurally useless, set off the dining area, where, upon fluted, semicylindrical pillars placed at intervals flush to the wall, stood half-draped plaster figures in a variety of pseudoclassical poses. From the high white ceiling, vertical clusters of pastel-hued fluorescent tubes suffused the space with a glow that tinted the figures and columns to subtly decadent effect; and to see Dorian’s running at capacity, the babble of chatter punctuated by whinnies of laughter and clinking glass, one suspected that this was the frenzied banquet that would witness at midnight the sudden cessation of music, the revelers’ silence, and the entrance of some masked figure of mortality. So it seemed to Jack Fin, at any rate. But not this night; this night it was late, it was empty, and he eased himself onto a stool at the marbled bar and ordered a Scotch.

  Jack sat with his elbows on the bar, the glass between his fingers, and stared at his reflection in the beveled glass behind the bottles. He saw the square face of a man in his mid-forties with untidy, ill-cut black hair, whisky-paunched cheeks, and a small chin berthed in the nascent swell of a thickening throat. His coat collar was turned up, and he was unshaven. He was thinking, though, not about his appearance but about his work, his painting, his single consuming passion.

  Jack rose early and worked for an hour. He did not use an easel; the canvas was stapled directly to the wall, and standing before it was his work trolley—a stainless steel structure which had come from the kitchen of a defunct restaurant and ran on casters. Its shelves were clogged now with jars of soaking brushes and crusted tools, tubes of paint in varying states of constriction, rags and bottles and cardboard boxes paint-smudged with fingerprints. When he pushed the trolley to one side, the jars and bottles all clinked together and the fluids sloshed about. He retired to the far side of the loft, where he sat on a hard chair and smoked a cigarette, gazing at the canvas as the sunshine of the morning settled on it in thick bright bars.

  It was a night scene, a nocturne, called Wharf. The river was black, the wharf itself ruined and broken, a confused structure of tarred timbers lurching at drunken angles. Where everything is falling, nothing falls: Jack had attempted to translate Montaigne’s words into graphic terms, such that his river and night sky offered no stable plane against which falling or sinking could occur. There was no horizon, and when the painting worked, thought Jack, there would not even be the memory of a horizon. Tarred timbers obsessed him: bitumen—mineral pitch, asphaltic residue, distilled essence of wood tar—“blacked and browned in the depths of hell.” Such a painting had no place for a figure, and yet there was a figure, a ghost for the ruin, a black ghost with hooded, hanging head, gazing at the black river-sky from amid the cluttered timbers. Jack recognized the figure as the boy from the Plymouth; and rising from the chair, he hauled the trolley in front of the canvas and began to paint.

  After an hour he left off to go for breakfast. The meat district was very much alive this time of the morning; in a cloud of blue exhaust fumes a truck backed up across the sidewalk, and from the opened warehouse came a blast of refrigerated air. Within, the headless carcasses of skinned hogs hung from hooks, and white-coated, misty-breathed men in bloodstained aprons unhurriedly butchered huge sides of meat. Jack skirted a large red garbage can with the word inedible stenciled on the side and containing a heap of kidneys, heads, chunks of fat, pieces of feet, and a single unblinking eyeball. The air was pungent with the smell of cold meat, and black garbage bags lay piled against the wall beside an unsteady structure of wooden boxes. Jack stepped into the street, inadvertently kicking a stray chipped liver, which skittered into a puddle and sank from sight. It was a bright day, but cold, and Jack was briskly rubbing his hands as he entered the steamed-up coffee shop where he took most of his meals. He pushed through the knot of white-coated meat packers to the counter and, settling on a stool, ordered breakfast. The coffee came at once, and taking the cup in both hands Jack gazed absently at the back of the man at the grill and allowed his mind to go blank. He ate his sausages, paid his check, and left.

  As soon as he was in front of the canvas again, the figure of the boy by the water occupied him exclusively. The canvas thickened and grew heavy, and when Jack left off, late in the day, he was drained and clear and tranquil, and he went down to Dorian’s and sat at the bar and ordered a steak and fries. He drank a bottle of red wine with it; and upstairs, he went to sleep on the couch not unhappy, not without a vague sense of hope.

  But the next day’s work destroyed utterly any hope of a successful resolution. Jack had always in the end to abandon his paintings. That there was always something wrong, something unrealized, became the impetus for the next one, the engine that drove him on. The work itself was hell, for the most part, a perpetually frustrated striving to manifest some ill-glimpsed possibility that was pure and perfect only in the idea, never in the reality. He walked east on Fourteenth Street, shoulders tight with tension and his overcoat unbuttoned despite the chill of the evening. He smoked one cigarette after another. He was filled with despair, and drank for some hours at the Cedar Tavern, where he took solace from the ghosts of dead painters who clustered about him at the empty bar. It was after ten when he reached the meat district again, and, passing the corner of Little West Twelfth Street, he was observed by a group of seven men, three in white coats, seated on planks about a blazing trash-can brazier and sharing a bottle. He went straight into Dorian’s, which was packed and noisy, found a space at the bar and ordered a large Scotch. An hour later he was still there, walled up in a dungeon of self as the prattle and twitter of people at ease washed round him like swift waters streaming by a foundered hulk. Whisky is not good for a man in Jack Fin’s state of mind; whisky is diabolical: it inflames and enrages, it fuels anger, exacerbates conflict, spreads havoc. They didn’t exactly throw him out, but after there had twice occurred nasty little snarl-ups, little knots in the smooth grain of the evening, for each of which he knew he was somehow responsible, he found himself on the sidewalk. The cold air revived him somewhat, and he walked unsteadily down Gansevoort toward the river.

  On the far side of Washington Street the old West Side Highway, elevated on huge studded girders, rears dripping and rusted from block to block, dead-ending into the south wall of a building, resuming its empty journey to the north. Weeds and bushes spill from the abandoned roadway high overhead. As Jack tottered beneath it, his passage was tracked by a stray dog, sniffing round the darkened warehouses on Washington Street, and by a figure in the shadows half a block to the south, who followed at a distance as Jack crossed Tenth Avenue and fetched up once more by the river. There he settled himself among the debris of the waterfront. No light yet pierced the turmoil of his brain; the moon was hidden by clouds, and the water was
black against the sky. Jack sat hunched on a rock, immobile, with his back bowed and his forehead fixed in the palm of his right hand.

  Time passed; and then the clouds began to drift south, and suddenly the moon emerged, to shed a livid, glowing ribbon of light across the river. Something stirred in Jack at this point. His head came up; he turned to the west and gazed, apparently transfixed, at the moonlight on the water. He heaved himself upright and stood there, swaying, on the waterfront. Then he did a most peculiar thing: he began to get undressed. He struggled with the overcoat, and he had to support himself against a post getting his shoes and socks off; but after some moments his garments lay in a heap beside him and the man himself stood naked and shivering with his thick white back turned toward the city. And then he scrambled, crablike, down to the water’s edge.

  The figure who had shadowed Jack from Washington Street now crouched on his haunches and watched from a dark place down the waterfront. He saw Jack go under—and come up, thrashing wildly, with a shout of shock, as the chill bit into him and sliced through his drunkenness like a butcher’s knife! Out of the water he came, the kraken, with his hair plastered across his face and his white slabbed body pimpled and twitching with cold. He dressed himself hurriedly and made his way back across the highway and into the meat district; and the watching figure slipped away and was swallowed by the night.

  When Jack awoke the next morning, fully clothed, on the couch, he could not remember what had impelled him to go into the river. He took a long, hot shower and despite the hangover managed to snort with some amusement at the thought of it. Perhaps he’d intended to swim to Jersey. He scrubbed himself with unwonted thoroughness, though, for the very idea of swimming in the Hudson was repulsive: baptism by filth, he thought. And then he stopped thinking about it, simply banished it from his mind: such things happen in the night, that’s all. He put on clean clothes and, his hair still damp and his head throbbing, sat on the hard chair with a cigarette and gazed at Wharf.

  At this stage it was a painting that seemed to be exclusively about tarred timbers. They floated in a crude, massy heap on a ground that was now more fog than river-sky, a noxious fog touched with flecks of yellow and gray. The leading timbers loomed from the fog with massive physicality, dripping tar like diseased thick limbs perspiring; the stump of one of these timbers had begun to assume the characteristics of a rudimentary hoof, a horny plate fringed by hanks of bristle the same brown as the timber. The figure remained problematic; it had become essential to the composition—a mere black splinter of a thing though it was— but its relation to the timber and the hoof was unclear. Jack gazed at it a long while. From the street below came the sounds of the meat district, shouts and engines. It was a cold day, and overcast. At noon he drank a can of beer and felt better. Then he went out and ate a cheeseburger in the coffee shop, and thought about his “swim.” He should, he supposed, have been alarmed at behaving so bizarrely, and so imprudently; the waterfront at Fourteenth Street was not the choicest spot for a carefree midnight dip. But Jack was not alarmed. An ironic snort was the extent of his reaction. Such things happen in the night. He was curious, though, about the chain of reasoning that had led him to do it, for in the cold light of sobriety it was inexplicable.

  When he returned to the loft there was a message on his machine. The voice was one he had not heard for three years: it was Erica, his wife.

  Jack went back to work, and spent the afternoon worrying at Wharf. Painting is not a cerebral activity; even as he worked his brain was handling large blocks of information quite unrelated to the business at hand. Memories came bubbling up in clusters, all charged with bad affect. The failure of his marriage was his own doing, of this he had never been in the slightest doubt. His analysis of that failure was not complicated. The superficial causes were (a) his drinking and (b) his painting: he pursued both these activities with such obsessive dedication that no time, no emotional energy had been available for Erica. Why did he behave this way? Because he was, by nature, incapable of generosity, consideration, tenderness and sensuality: all the things a woman wants. He was, in short, unable to love. Or so he assumed. There is a tradition in dramatic narrative whereby the alcoholic always dies. Sometimes he’s the faithful sidekick who despite his undependability comes through for the hero when he’s most needed—and then, with pathos, expires. Or he may be a hero himself, like Lowry’s Consul, a tragic hero whose spiritual infirmity is masked by drink—“no se puede vivir sin amar”—and then expires. Of whatever type, though, from the first trembling shot downed you know that he, or she, is probably doomed. Not Jack Fin. Jack Fin represented a new type: built like a bull, incapable of suicide, he would bluster, blinkered, down his narrow alley into a fractious old age. He was the lush triumphant—victor bibulus—unrepentant, incorrigible, and equipped with an apparently imperishable liver. The sound of his wife’s voice evoked in him no tremor of remorse or regret: it was better this way, better for all concerned. She was in the city for only two days, and wanted to see him this evening, as there was something she had to discuss with him. Money, he imagined.

  Something odd had in the meanwhile begun to happen to Wharf. As the stump of the leading timber more strongly assumed the look of a hoof, so the other timbers by association became the legs of galloping beasts. The hooded figure hung like a dark conspiring angel close upon the ghostly herd as it came stampeding out of the yellowy fog, an eerily silent chaos of headless, bodiless, tar-smeared limbs. From what world had they come? On what foul plain had these hellish cattle grazed? Jack gave it up for the day. He opened a beer. He had arranged to meet Erica at eight, not in the loft but in Dorian’s. He was feeling anxious, but doubtless that was the hangover. At least he was clean.

  The streets were quiet in the late afternoon. A sea gull cried from the edge of a warehouse roof, and a single forklift moved back and forth on the sidewalk, between wired bales of compressed cardboard and a stack of wooden pallets. Jack crossed the highway to the waterfront, where scraps of black plastic and thin, hardy weeds fluttered and flapped in the wind, and a sudden motion of waves washed against the rubble of concrete and dirt and old tires as a long, low barge moved downriver, far out in the middle of the stream, and the light of the wintry sun blazed up fiercely off the water despite the cold. This was the site of his “swim.” He walked out on the landfill, down the side of a long gray hangar in which was piled to the roof a vast hill of coarse dirty salt, for spreading on the roads in winter. Somewhere atop the hill of salt a fire was burning, he could smell it, and he stood at the open end of the hangar gazing up into the roof where the smoke poured out through a missing panel. From high in the salt a figure appeared and gazed down at him. For some moments they stared at each other, and then the other turned back to his fire and was lost to sight. A group of men had been camping in the salt for two years now, living on the meat market’s leftovers and handouts. Jack had been up there drinking on occasion; they were young white men, and they probably ate better than most of the city: there had been fresh lobster and prime steak the night he’d dined with them. His particular friend was Blue, a red-bearded hillbilly in a baseball cap from West Virginia. Blue told him stories about life in the salt, about rats the size of dogs and crack-heads who murdered one another with shotguns. Jack always gave him a few bucks, and Blue always spent it on liquor. “We live good up here,” he said. “Can’t beat the rent.” They all laughed about that.

  Jack sat down by the river and watched the light thicken over the Jersey shore. Already to the east the sky was dark, and to the south the twin towers reared up amid the forest of high buildings that rise beyond the roofs of Tribeca, all hazed in the last light and oddly unreal, like a film set.

  Erica was already in Dorian’s when Jack came in at twenty past eight. He had had some drinks since returning from the river; he imagined she would find him crumpled and likable; this was the impression he intended to give, at any rate. But Erica was English and had common sense. “My god, Jack,” she said, �
��you look bloody terrible.”

  “Thanks, Eric,” he said. He always called her Eric. “You’re looking well.”

  Then, without preamble, and simultaneously searching her bag for cigarettes, she told him she needed a divorce. Jack turned away, looking for a waiter. “Well?”

  “Why now?”

  “I’m going to marry someone.”

  “Paul Swallow?”

  “Yes, I’m going to marry Paul. Don’t make faces, Jack!”

  “All right, all right. Do you want a drink?”

  “No. So there won’t be a problem?”

  “Of course not.” Jack sniffed. He ordered a beer. “Good. Thank you.” Her cigarette barely lit, she ground it out in the ashtray and reached for her coat. She began to slide out of the banquette.

  “You’re not leaving?” said Jack, rather shocked. “Yes, I’m leaving. You obviously don’t want to see me—”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Erica paused. “You ask me to meet you here, not upstairs. You arrive late. You’re drunk already. I don’t like watching you get drunk, Jack. I did it for four years.”

  “Christ, Eric, get off it,” said Jack. “You mean you’re going back to London tomorrow and that’s it?”

  “Not tomorrow, Friday. But yes, that’s it.” She slid out of the banquette.

  “Jesus.” They shook hands and said goodbye. She left. That was it.

  Quite predictably, Jack Fin got very drunk that night. But he was not murdered, he was not arrested, he didn’t even go for a “swim.” He was, in fact, asked to leave only one bar, and that because it was closing. The tone of his night was maudlin, and at several points he informed sympathetic strangers that his wife was divorcing him. He was back on his couch by five in the morning, and awoke the next day with a compound hangover. But it was a rule with Jack that a hangover must never keep one from working. He took a shower, and made coffee, and settled on a hard chair in front of Wharf. It was not easy to concentrate, for Eric’s face, and the sound of her voice, kept rising unbidden into consciousness. But he forced her down and anchored his gaze in Wharf. The secret to making work, he knew, was very simple: you just had to be with it until you saw it clear and straight, without illusion. The trouble with a great many artists was that they couldn’t accept that all work must fail. Fear, that was what kept them from making good work. Fear of seeing it straight. Not Jack Fin. He could stare into the teeth of his failure hour after hour after hour. That was his strength. In the early afternoon he realized it had to be a bull, and he saw the bull very clearly: it was a beast with massive shoulders, heaving slabs of sheer muscle, and blazing eyes, galloping straight out of the yellow depths of hell, a thousand pounds of concentrated animal fury, timber-brown and oozing tar from every pore—now, that was power! He hauled the clinking paint trolley in front of the canvas and began to work.