John McGahern - The Pornographer

“Or a watery embrace.”

“Seriously, it’d open hundreds of miles of water, from Limerick to Letterkenny, and it’d only cost a fraction of what the bombings and killings do, and stop the bombings and the killings. It’s our editor’s great cause, poor Walter’s. You’d like Walter. He gets paid too little and works far too hard and he worries, how he worries, and never more than whenever we try to give him a raise. It’s arranged that when we get a little bigger I’ll give up this boring bank job and go to work full time as his assistant, and he worries about that too. We could afford it almost now but he won’t agree. And everybody agrees the paper needs more zip. But you, how did you start?”

“I was a teacher. And then I got into this advertising agency. My work was to put out trade magazines for five or six of our accounts, which meant you had to write or rewrite them from cover to cover. I once wrote a whole number of Our Boys . It was dog’s work and I gave it up. Now I just freelance. I didn’t need all that money anyhow.”

“You get a great deal of money in those agencies?”

“A good deal. If they had paid less I’d probably be still stuck there.”

“I get hardly any money but there are perks and trips. One of them is that I can have a houseboat on the Shannon for completely free anytime outside the high season. Maybe we could go some weekend together before too long?”

“That sounds like fun.”

“It’s more than that. The boats aren’t like old boats. They have hi-fi, central heating, fridges, push-button starters. They’re like hotels out on water, and all that lovely quiet water.…”

The couples had started to come in, the lounge to grow noisy and smoky. The barmen seemed to know each couple, and there were smiles and nods and a few words before each first order. With the red and green peacocks on the walls and the blue eyes of the carpet it must have made them feel as if they were getting away from it all when they came here.

“What’ll we do?” I asked. “Will we get another drink or will we leave?”

“I’d rather leave. I can’t stand all this noise and smugness.”

I could see that she thought she was well above this suburban herd, a dangerous thought for anybody in case they happened to wind up in it.

“What would you like to do? Would you like to come back to my place?” I asked lamely because of my uncertainty. It passed for shyness or diffidence.

“Why not? I’d like that,” she said brightly and took my arm as we went out.

We took off our clothes in total silence. As I covertly watched her in this dumb show it struck me how terrible and beautiful was the bending of the back, the lifted knee, at once consenting and awkwardly pleading, before prostration, to be wrecked in nature’s own renewal. I reached and took a condom from an open drawer and drew it on as silently as I could under cover of slipping out of underclothes. We lay together in waiting silence, and when I moved against her she asked tensely, “What are you wearing?” She must have felt the rubber against the skin or noticed me draw it on as I undressed.

“A condom. Why?”

“I just couldn’t with that.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s unnatural. It turns the whole thing into a kind of farce.”

“I was just wearing it for you,” I lied.

“How wearing it for me?”

“You have more to lose. What if you got pregnant?”

“I don’t know. It’d seem more natural. It’d seem far less of a farce. At least something would be going on.”

You can bet your life something would be going on, I thought, but said, “If you don’t want it that way there’s no way you have to have it that way,” and pulled away the rubber and threw it to one side. Both of us heard the light plop on to floor.

Just like the nights of old, bollock to bollock naked, but I said nothing as she snuggled close in gratitude, her full woman’s body voluptuous.

“I couldn’t do it that way. It’d make it all feel just like mutton.”

I thought of those little light pale bags in which cooked olives and herrings were sold.

“It’s all right. It’s gone now. Seriously,” I was the more withdrawn now, “what would you do if you did get pregnant?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I’d go somewhere with my poor baby if the man didn’t marry me. The whole family’d be shocked,” she laughed. “Outraged.”

“If I got you pregnant I wouldn’t marry you.”

“Why do this, then?”

“It’s a need — like food or drink.”

“You could come to love me.”

“I don’t think so. I like you. I desire you.…”

“Even if I didn’t love someone to begin with, and I was doing this, I know I’d come to love after a time. I’d have to,” she said as if willing it.

“Maybe we’re talking too much,” without even touching I could feel the wetness between her legs.

“We’re talking far too much love,” she breathed.

“We don’t have to do it all the way. We can have this deliciousness of skin and.…”

“Now you are talking too much, love. I want to feel you completely inside me. And don’t worry. I’m as regular as clockwork and it’s only two days off.”

If it’s raw meat you want, raw meat you’ll get, I thought as she said, “Easy,” and as I went through like any fish feeling the triumph of breasting the hard slimy top of the weir I needed that sense of triumph to dull anxiety. Maybe it could not go easily and proudly through, I tried to lull myself, if it was weighted and made clumsy with the condom.

The moment is always the same and always new, the instinct so strong it cancels memory. To lie still in the moment, in the very heart of flesh, the place of beginning and end, to snatch it out of time, to move still in all stillness of flesh, to taste that trembling moment again, to hold it, to know it, and to let it go, the small bird that you held, its heart hammering in the cup of the hands, flown into the air.

“Now. Ο my God,” I heard her call as it flew.

“You are beautiful,” I said as we lay in sweat, our hearts hammering down.

“Wait,” she said as I stirred.

Death must sometimes come the same way, the tension leaving the body, in pain and not in this sweetness and pride, but a last time, the circle completed, never having to come back to catch the flying moment that was always the same, always on the wing.

“O boy,” she said. “That is what I seem to have been needing for ages without knowing it. I don’t feel any guilt or anything. I feel just wonderful.”

“How come you sometimes have a touch of an American accent?” I asked tenderly, now that she was stretched out, relaxing above me.

“There is, of course, the movies. I must have spent half my life at the pictures. My two best friends are Americans, Janey and Betty. They work at the embassy and they’re at Waterways too. They’re both crazy about Ireland. And they’re the only ones I’ve told about us, about the fairly big differences in our ages.…”

“What do they think?”

“They’re all for it. They say no one pays any attention to that kind of difference in the States. In fact, they drove me to the Green Goose this evening. I wanted them to come in for a minute but they said they’d meet you another time.”

“Would you like a drink?” I asked as the old fear of being enmeshed returned. “You can have almost anything.”

“I’d love a glass of white wine, if that’s possible.”

I poured it in the light of the open door of the fridge and got a very large whiskey for myself.

“What are you drinking?” she asked.

“Whiskey.”

“It’s just wonderful to have all this time and ease,” she said.