Sensation, being the raw material with which any probable metaphysic must contend, a hypocritical attitude towards it can be disastrous. In the Middle Ages the passionate love of a man’s own wife was reckoned to be adultery. In the modern world all attachments which are not to the state are coming to be regarded as at least frivolous. While the medieval Church couldn’t burn every heretic, it is just possible that the modern state can, even without recourse to the atomic bomb. Before we give up any sensual pleasure we should have explored it thoroughly, at least in sympathetic imagination; otherwise, history moving forward primly on its moral bicycle (in morals, nothing as complicated as the internal combustion engine has been invented) may leave something primal and essential behind.
These, more or less, were the thoughts which came and went as my mind moved ineluctably towards the deserted woman from whom I had borrowed sugar. Gradually, as my mind began to dwell on her, thoughts were replaced by images and images by premonitions of sense.
I had known Bill ever since I got the job on the scows. A man around fifty, he had that kind of tawny, greying hair which reminds one of pepper and salt. His eyes were pale blue, his short straight nose had some kind of growth upon it at the left nostril, and his thin lips, drawn tautly downwards on the left side, gave to his expression a permanent air of disbelief. We had towed together a number of times and we had often exchanged remarks about the weather. His wife had attracted me from the beginning.
It came over me gradually that she was beautiful. A vague shock. She was taller than average, her body loosely knit yet oddly graceful. Her face gave the impression of being archetypal, ageless, the face of a young clown. Her soft brown hair was twisted in an untidy tail at the nape of her neck and a few stray wisps – I often had the impression that she had just washed the upper part of her body – still wet, dark featherflecks, clung to the pale skin of her shoulders. Usually she wore a man’s collarless shirt stuffed at the waist into a pair of faded and tattered blue jeans. Her eyes were brilliant, clear, luminous, grey-green, the gaze almost hypnotic, and sometimes I had found it difficult to tear my own eyes away from them. At such times I felt the impulse to step close to her and take her in my arms, as though only she and I existed, the rest background, out of focus, expressing without speech and through a sudden perfection of my whole organism the nullity of everything else.
Sometimes she shrugged her expressive shoulders and looked at you in a wide-eyed, limpid way. Sometimes she seemed to have come right out of a daydream, a strange, wild creature, almost like Medusa.
I spoke of her thick white legs and I was aware of being inexact at the time, for of course she was wearing jeans.
As she hung up the clothes she stood on the balls of her feet, foot, I should say, for she had only one leg. The other one was artificial. It came to you all of a sudden as you watched her limping movement, the way she stretched, the way her hips swayed to find balance. As she stepped back from the line, the clothes pegged and fluttering, she almost toppled into the water, and as she saw me she laughed. She sat down on the heavy beam above the gunwale, stuck out her lower lip and made a wry face. Sitting there in her blue jeans and the collarless, smock-like shirt, her soft hair untidy, her face was not exactly elfin, and yet it was. She had the long shallow nose of a young witch, very high cheekbones, vast, delicate mauve eye sockets in which her large green eyes, long-lashed, outlined and elongated boldly with a dark pencil, took on a look that was haunted, not quite of this world. She used no colour on her lips. Her teeth were yellowish and looked fragile, almost like a rodent’s. The bones of her shoulders had a birdlike delicacy, and there was something wing-like about the way she used them. She had a long, pale, yellow neck whose length was exaggerated by her collarless shirts, and she had long, pale, white arms.
She got in the way of my request and I asked her for sugar instead of milk.
I went outside in the dusk but it was too windy to linger on deck. I returned to the cabin. Through the window I saw a light approaching across the water and wondered for a while if it was a tug. It soon veered away to starboard and moved into the distance. It began to rain.
I suddenly became conscious that I was trying to avoid thinking of the woman. So I began to think of her. Her image fled. I began to verbalize. Tallish, lanky, soft front. Breasts. Three nipples, one extra to give the devil suck. My reaction to the leg that wasn’t there. Creak, creak, creak as she walked, swinging her wooden leg. Only the pink stump, like a withering tuber. So near her cunt. Remove the man’s shirt. The chest almost hollow and the breasts falling like two soft things, close together, towards her navel. The body like pale ivory. Ageless. About twenty-three? And the clownface. She didn’t need more than one leg.
Although comings and goings between the scows were infrequent, a small and temporary shanty town formed there every night between dusk and dawn, about two miles off the southern point of Manhattan Island at Battery Park. More than a dozen scows huddled together, a wooden island beleaguered during that night by driving rain.
I put on my oilskin and sou’wester and stepped out onto the quarterdeck. The water was sliding away fast beyond the anchor chain of the stake boat. It was quite dark, only the dim lights from the lanterns at the masts and the pale oblongs of light from the cabin windows. It wasn’t likely I would meet anyone on the way. Because of the foul weather most of the scowmen would be in for the night.
I walked quickly along the load of the scow behind my own, crossed the quarterdeck of another to reach the third chain, and climbed up the side of another load. A dog barked somewhere nearby and a gruff voice cursed it. Across the beam of my flashlight the rain fell in long silver needles. I moved forward, my shoulders hunched to bring the rim of the sou’wester well over my neck.
It wasn’t too late to go back. What would I say to her? My mind was inoculated against every objection. I was telling myself over and over again: “You have nothing to lose.”
I reached the quarterdeck and walked round to the cabin door. There was a light on inside. That was the one thing I had been afraid of. If she had been asleep I couldn’t have woken her up.
I drew a deep breath and knocked sharply on the door. Noise of stirrings inside. A chair scraped across the floor. The sound of her walk. “Who’s there? What is it?” The door opened a few inches and she stared out at me. “Oh! It’s you?”
“Can I come in for a minute?” The rain had somewhat dampened my style. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
She opened the door and allowed me to step in. She was dressed as usual. The cabin was stuffy, dirty, and, if possible, more dismal than my own. There was a shelf of well-fingered paperbacks near the large double bed on which a rumpled and patched red bedspread had been thrown. The stove, crowded, it seemed, with dirty pots, had been painted a shiny black and the two small rooms with no dividing door were lit by two battered kerosene lamps.
“The lamp in there’s smoking.” It saved me from saying anything else for the moment. I pointed.
A tremulous black thread of oil smoke was suspended between the scorched globe and a spot on the bulkhead where the fine particles of soot densened and wavered in a flat, spider-like cloud, while the globe itself, a chancre of red and yellow and black in suppuration, shed less and less light on the objects in the bedroom.
“So it is!”
She moved quickly and turned down the flame. I took advantage of the delay to loosen the coat at my neck.
“Listen to that rain,” she said as she came back. “What do you want?” she said. “Are you out of sugar again?” She was smiling, her lips barely apart and turned up puckishly at the corners, her mouth a dark elliptical slot.
“As a matter of fact I made a mistake this morning,” I said. “It was milk I wanted but I asked you for sugar.”
“You looked distracted,” she said.
“Did I?”
“Sure. You nearly always do. Bill talks about it all the time. He calls you the absent-minded professor.”
“Do I look
like a professor?”
“I didn’t say it. He did. At the moment you look like wet soap. Take your things off. You might as well now you’ve come all this way. I’ll make you a cup of coffee, with milk.”
“Thanks.”
I took them off and sat down by the table and lit a cigarette.
“When do you expect him back?” I said.
“Oh...” She turned to look at me. “How’d you know he was gone?”
“I saw him go in the boat,” I said.
“I don’t know. He said he’d try and get back tonight. But I don’t know now. It’s getting pretty rough. There’s no rush for the load evidently. They’re going to leave us here until he gets back.”
“He won’t come tonight now.”
“No. Probably not.”
She must know, I was thinking. In many subtle ways Jake and I – her nickname, short for Jacqueline – had already and even explicitly reacted towards one another. Nothing had been said and yet the bond between us was explicit. Or so it had seemed to me. Now I began to wonder. Was it all inside my own skull?
“So you came because you knew he wasn’t here?”
There was no anger in her voice. Her tone was permissive and curious. And so I hadn’t been mistaken.
“Yes. That’s why I came.”
“OK. I guess it had to happen some time.”
“I was hoping that was how you felt.”
She carried over two cups of coffee.
“Well, it is,” she said. And she laughed again. “You picked a fine night!”
“Bill picked it,” I said. “Anyway, I’m glad I came.”
“I kind of like it, the rain I mean. It isolates us. Makes you feel the rest of the world can go to hell.”
I laughed. “It’s probably radioactive. That’s the trouble with the external world. It keeps impinging on you.”
“I’m glad you came, Joe. I was feeling pretty low. God it can be hell marooned out here!”
“What about Bill’s son?”
“He was still on probation. I don’t know what he did this time.”
We sat in silence for a while. And then she began to tell me how she lost her leg in a car accident, how they had amputated above the knee. She said her hair had been blonde before that, but she said it idly, in passing.
We talked for hours, the ambiguous presence of rain and night silence seeming to hold us closer together within the small wooden shack. I must have talked incessantly about myself, about how I didn’t really want to do anything, about how, even if I still wrote, and used to think of myself as a writer, I didn’t any longer, how I thought of myself as a man with nothing to do in the world ever, except to remain conscious, and that was what the writing was for, for my own use and the use of my friends. I told her that the great urgency for literature was that it should for once and for all accomplish its dying, that it wasn’t that writing shouldn’t be written, but that a man should annihilate prescriptions of all past form in his own soul, refuse to consider what he wrote in terms of literature, judge it solely in terms of his living. The spirit alone mattered.
I told her how the war had in a sense clinched matters for me, about air-raid warnings on the east coast of England, how I and the other recruits were made to run on the double from the barracks to the air-raid shelter, how we ran down the long stone corridors of the training ship and over scabrous dark ground near the cliff to the brick entrances, and then down the concrete steps into the narrow underground passages to the nearest wooden bench, there to sit, elbows on knees, an illicit cigarette cupped in our hands, waiting away hours for the all-clear. All during the war no bomb had been dropped within miles. Naturally. The bombers were more interested in civilians. But night after night, haggard from lack of sleep, we streamed obediently into the burrows, and at six o’clock in the morning, an hour after the all-clear sounded, we formed squads on the parade ground. We were dressed, turned about, stood at ease, called to attention; we were shouted at, marched, and run at the double in long lines. And sometimes we did the slow march like they do for the dead. At seven we fell out to fall in to eat breakfast. We fell in outside the dining hall according to messes and fell out of a long single file to eat our mash. Afterwards we fell in.
I told her that the first six weeks of training finished me, how I spent the remaining three and a half years in the lavatories of various training ships, armed with a long-handled broom so that I could pretend to be scrubbing the floor if anyone important came in; my best trick, for it never occurred to anyone that a man would impersonate a lavatory cleaner. I did most of my reading there, Plato, Shakespeare, Marx, and I masturbated myself thin. I never saw the enemy until after the war and that was in Norway from whose King Haakon20 I had a red, white and blue certificate thanking me for liberating his country.
She said she felt exactly as I did, like being unwilling to commit herself to anything, ever. She didn’t want to do anything, travel a bit perhaps, just be, have a child maybe, but simply have it and let it grow up with her.
“Bill thinks we haven’t got enough bread. He thinks I’m irresponsible. But we can get bread without making the kind of scene he wants to make. He wants to buy a motel. I’ve had an abortion before. I don’t want another one.”
The atmosphere had become conspiratorial. She went on talking and her voice grew soft and I sensed her nearness. She was no longer talking about Bill, but about the present moment, all present moments, about us really, not complaining any longer.
We sat talking for another hour or so. I found myself taking her hand and when we got used to that feeling, the vast sense of possibility touch implied, she extinguished the oil lamp. As we lay down on the bed I heard her draw in her breath. She smelt sweet and warm. The other lamp was still burning, but low, and it gave off almost no light because of the soot on the globe. I moved my hand over her buttocks and she moved her stump between my thighs and pressed her belly close to me.
Afterwards, as we lay in each other’s arms beneath the rough blanket, the sides of her belly and her flanks were covered in a thin lather of sweat. We breathed in and out together and flesh fell away, leaving a slight prickle on the skin. It was still raining. We could hear its fall on the water, on the gravel load, on the wood of the deck. It was there with our breathing, something objective to which we both listened as, with our eyes open, and with our own thoughts, we looked at each other in the dark.
At the age of five I walked with my elder brother to school, along grey streets in a sprawling grey city; on my back a little burden I was to carry through life with me, a cheap leather bag with shoulder straps to carry knowledge in. Cold pink thumbs in the straps of my schoolbag, lifting their cutting weight off my collarbones, against the weight of books and into the driving sleet. A pain in the nose in search of an identity.
AUNT HETTIE DEAD. SHE was the first woman I ever saw naked. She slept in the cavity bed in her kitchen. One afternoon I went in and she was alone, standing naked in the middle of the floor. I surprised her in a pose that she would subsequently have to explain to herself.
I was sixteen, her favourite nephew. She was about fifty at the time, with grey, almost white, hair. But the hair on her mound wasn’t grey. It was the colour of a hazelnut.
She was angry at me for barging in unannounced. She was a little drunk. But she calmed down, put on a dressing gown, and made tea. We sat in front of the fire. She said in her husky chain-smoker’s voice that I would be making women dance “bare-nekit” soon enough.
When I was younger I was afraid to kiss her. The skin of her face was porous and she was old and smelt of port and soiled underwear. But that day my attitude changed. The house was empty, she was naked, and I was nearly seventeen and deadly curious.
“Where’s Hector?” I said.
“He just went round the corner. He’ll be back in a few minutes.”
We sat in silence, each conscious of the other in a new and disturbing way.
That night I stayed at my aunt’s, sleepin
g with my cousin Hector. In bed I contemplated the possibility with vague lust before I went to sleep. Hector was sleeping soundly and I could hear my aunt moving around in the kitchen. But at the last minute, standing outside the kitchen door in the dark hall, listening, breathing softly, I lost my nerve. I’m inclined to think that I knew I would from the beginning, that I knew I should not have the nerve, that the satisfaction I sought was in the danger of the dark passage, naked in the hall. Anyway, I didn’t go in, and afterwards I didn’t say anything to Hector, a boy a year younger than I. It was his mother and I thought he might be angry.
Two factors combined to give the impression that my aunt was fat. Her paunch had spread with middle age. Her cheap, fitted skirt made an inverted pear of her lower torso. Then, she wore no brassiere, and her large, pendulous breasts were slung within the stained woollen jumper like a bag of meat almost at the level of her navel. When she moved about, her broad Slavic countenance sailed under a bell of grey hair. Or she sat, feet on the hob, her knees up and causing her thighs to fall like Gladstone bags below the hem of her skirt. Seated like this, a smouldering cigarette at her lips, she shot spittle or fart at the fire, drank tea or port, and directed the complex prenuptials of two unmarried daughters who in their later teens were groped and punctured on the couch in the parlour. Christ died there nightly on wood hewn at Jerusalem, and Elvira, a dead member, was pale within the mahogany frame to which memory and a cancerous tumour had transposed her.
It was my father’s opinion that his brother’s house was unclean.
From time to time, in a variety of places, my mind has travelled back to the dead Elvira, to the couch whose old springs creaked under human weight, to the silver photograph frame containing snapshots of my uncle in Naples, in Jaffa, in Suez. He died eventually of coronary thrombosis, the disease which killed my grandfather. In our family, amongst the menfolk, it is the heart which cracks first.
There were many visitors at the house of my aunt. The sex of two young females, and, in their absence, the various articles of a personal spoor, was the catalytic influence which governed the confluence of things, of the stewing meat, of the bottle of ruby port secreted beneath the disordered cavity bed, of teacups accepted and discarded by the perpetual stream of visitors who came there in the afternoons and in the evenings and late at night when the girls appeared in the kitchen with their smoking rumps and ate finnan haddock which their father, retired from the sea and working as a chef on the trains, had carried south from Aberdeen.
Cain’s Book Page 11