Port Mungo by Patrick McGrath Page A

know that Vera had rushed out after him, but that he’d walked away so fast she didn’t see where he’d gone, nor in the loud, mad city did he hear her shouting for him. He tramped the city streets, his thoughts in utter turmoil, alone in this alien place, and Vera a part of a world which offered no place for him, which rejected him. He tramped the streets and allowed the anger and misery to boil up and rage unchecked.
    Midnight, and he found himself down at the Battery, sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette, gazing out at the harbour where just a few weeks before he’d stood on the deck of a liner and felt the limitless promise of the city. The night was cold and clear. The crisis was on him, and he must make a decision, to go back or go on. To go back was unthinkable. But how to go on? He had to get out of New York. But he had to get out of New York
with Vera
—and that simple thought shed all the light he needed. It was a decision not to abandon her.
    I believe he made other decisions that night, or rather that certain ideas crystallized in his mind. He told me he waited for sunrise, for the first light of dawn to touch the Statue of Liberty and burn off the mist on the water. He said there had been other times in his life when the early-morning hours seemed to open new avenues in his mind, something to do with the edginess, the febrility that comes of not having slept, something to do with the sense of an empty world out there, a sleeping world, the space for one’s thoughts not contested but free, rather, for expansive movement, for the sweeping perspective. Gazing out at the harbour Jack at last found some clarity. He said he understood that years of obscurity lay ahead of him while he became a painter. He would suffer humiliation and neglect, but this he could endure: he would grow the hide of a rhino and become impervious to the opinions of others. Better by far, he thought, to spend those years elsewhere. He would come back to New York but only when he had something to
offer
New York: he would return a mature painter with a body of work. The city was no place for an aspirant, for a beginner. New York was full of aspirants and beginners, and they all seemed to be Vera’s drinking buddies. He would stagnate if he stayed, he would grow sodden and lazy, and delude himself into believing he was an artist when he was nothing of the sort. He needed rigour, he needed routine, he needed somewhere he could live cheap and work without distraction. Above all he needed Vera beside him.
    And then, as yet another stray beam of enlightenment came shafting in with the sunrise, all at once he felt with a sense of rising wonder—and he was still young enough that such sudden dramatic shifts of mood were possible—that the paranoia was lifting, that the knot of sexual suspicion he had been worrying at, obsessively, was dissolving—it was all in his imagination, of course it was, and he had to communicate this to Vera without delay, sweep away all the bad feeling, sit down and talk to her, consider their options, make a plan—
    When he got back to the hotel she was waiting for him in a state of great distress. They clung to each other and she told him how she had scoured the Village for hours, and so had Herb, but it didn’t matter now, none of that mattered, and they fell onto the bed, she wrapped her legs around him, and responded with joy to the love newly started from some secret spring inside him during the hours he’d been alone by the harbour. Afterwards they didn’t sleep, they sat up talking, and this he called the Rising. Later he made a painting inspired by that long dark night of the soul, as he thought of it:
The Rising,
probably the rawest of what I regard as his phallic paintings.
    They talked about the future, and he told her that he had to get out of New York, that he could no longer live the life they were living. He was moving on, and she could come with him if she wanted or she could stay where she was