Cain’s Book (14 page)

“Where’s he off to?” I spoke to a scowman who stood on his quarterdeck near by.

“His son’s in trouble.”

“His wife not go?”

“Her! Na. Not her son.” He spat in the water and went into his cabin.

A wind had sprung up. The water, a few feet away, was the colour of oiled slate and growing darker. Dark clouds overhead. It felt like rain. A fast ripple was spreading over the water like a
dark jingling mirror towards the distance of Manhattan Island, small and black, like jutting granite rock. The water choppy, dangerous. Most of the men had already hung out their lanterns which
swayed and creaked at the swaying masts.

I hung my own lanterns and returned to the cabin.

I must have decided to smoke some pot because I found myself lying on my bed with my pipe in my mouth. I was staring at the bulkhead on which the corpses of the previous
summer’s insects were encrusted.

Experts agree that marijuana has no aphrodisiac effect, and in this as in a large percentage of their judgements they are entirely wrong. If one is sexually bent, if it occurs to one that it
would be pleasant to make love, the judicious use of the drug will stimulate the desire and heighten the pleasure immeasurably, for it is perhaps the principal effect of marijuana to take one more
intensely into whatever experience. I should recommend its use in schools to make the pleasures of poetry, art and music available to pupils who, to the terrible detriment of our civilization, are
congenitally or by infection insensitive to symbolic expression. It provokes a more sensual (or aesthetic) kind of concentration, a detailed articulation of minute areas, an ability to adopt play
postures. What can be more relevant in the act of love?

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.