The Pornographer by John McGahern Page B

compared with her attack of an entrance. She had crossed her fine legs and was smoking.
    “I hope it’s all right,” I said as I put her drink down.
    “It’s fine. It’s just wonderful to be here. I don’t know what’s happening but I’ve hardly been able to think of anything else but you since the last night.”
    “It’s nice to see you,” I raised my glass.
    “It’s wonderful to be here and to see you. It’s one of those days everything had to be done two or three times over at the bank. I just couldn’t wait for five to come and the day to be over and to get out and to come here.”
    “You got home all right the last night?”
    “Sure,” she laughed. “I took off my shoes and carried them in and nobody heard me come in. Even my door on the landing was ajar. My aunt noticed that I yawned all through breakfast, that was all. I felt tired but I didn’t feel any guilt or anything and everybody seemed happier than usual. The milkman who always has a joke with me in the morning, though I’m mostly running, caught the tail of the long red scarf and shook it and asked me if I was in love. But the day was sure hard to get through. After lunch I could hardly keepmy eyes open, and the letters just kept coming and coming. I went straight home and fell into bed and must have slept sixteen hours straight. I had the most wonderful dreams. You were in the best of them. And when I woke I didn’t feel a shred of guilt. I just felt relaxed and wonderful. Don’t you want to hear about any of the dreams you were in?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “I’m not much interested in dreams. I’m more interested in the day.”
    “Many say that you can learn a great deal about the day from dreams and the night.”
    “I think the best way to learn about the day is from the day,” I had grown restless.
    “Why don’t you relax? You make me feel as if I was sitting in the dog’s chair.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “You know when you come into a kitchen and there’s a dog that’s used to sitting in a chair you happen to take by accident. All the time you’re sitting there you feel him agitatedly circling the chair.”
    It was so sharp I slowed. “I can see you write,” I said. “I’m sorry if I was restless. I’m afraid I was just feeling the need of another drink. What’ll you have?”
    “I’ll pass,” she placed her hand over her glass. “I can’t drink at that pace. You sure can shift that stuff.”
    “It loosens you up. But don’t worry. It’ll slow, as soon as the first injection starts to work.”
    The tension had gone when I came back from the bar. She was working, farther off. People are usually more charming when they are farther off. Perhaps she’d realized her own danger while I was getting the drink—that she had pushed too close. Such foresight makes the longest hells.
    I too had a reversal of feeling while I was away. We hardly knew one another and we were already hating. This evening was a gift we’d never hold again. We were a man and womantravelling through it together. We’d never pass this way again. We might as well make some joy of it.
    “Tell me about Amalgamated Waterways, this paper you write for,” and she grew excited as she told. The magazine was small but had fantastic growth potential. There was no country in Europe that had so much water and space per head of population as ours—in Germany, for instance, you had to wait for someone to die in order to get boat space—and it was just beginning to be recognized as the great natural resource it is, like oil or coal. There was this great scheme, which the Troubles had postponed, to connect the waterways of the Shannon and the Erne by reopening the disused canals of Cavan and Leitrim which had once been connected through the lakes. The North and South would join in friendship. “An embrace of water,” she said.
    “Or a watery embrace.”
    “Seriously, it’d open hundreds of miles of water, from Limerick to Letterkenny,