“Well,” he said, “here we are.”
We walked directly into the living room, wallpapered with an intricate design of garden flowers. Crepe-paper flowers were everywhere, plus the scent of lilac room refresher. For a moment, I thought I would pass out.
Chuck offered me a drink. “Mary made all of the flowers,” he said with the sweet charm of an ambitious young mortician.
Muffling a laugh, I nodded. What was Chuck’s game? Already, I was getting a little uneasy. Boredom had touched me on the shoulder.
“Want another drink?”
“Nope.”
“Okay.” Chuck sighed. “Mary’s in the next room.”
Miss Mary lay on the wide pastel-covered bed, her body (the color of muddy water) was voluptuous. What appeared to be a long curly wig outlined her pleasant face. She was wearing nothing but a strong supporting white bra. I had never seen one like it, except on models in magazines. All the women I knew used little skinny bras.
Miss Mary had her eyes closed. A permanent smile colored her lips. I had a funny idea that Miss Mary might scream, and that her red lips might leap from her face and run out of the room.
“Hello, Chuck,” Miss Mary said painfully.
“Hi,” I chuckled. There was no door between the two rooms, and I could see Chuck sitting on the sofa. But he was not staring out the window. He was looking straight ahead at the floral papered walls. Junior was at parade rest, Miss Mary weighed at least 180. But what the hell! I stripped and sat down on the bed. Even after my hot hands touched her thighs, Junior was still at parade rest. I thought that Junior was retreating from the battlefield and told myself, Baby, you got your work cut out for you.
Miss Mary opened her eyes briefly and touched my arm. “It’s all right,” she said.
I didn’t answer her. My hot, greedy hands reached for the bra. Miss Mary’s hand had engulfed Junior, who still seemed in the act of retreating.
Good God! There must have been twenty goddamn hooks on the bra. My short arms could not encircle Miss Mary. Besides, she was trying to rise and anoint Junior, who was beginning to march.
“Wait a minute,” I said. Miss Mary appeared not to hear me. She had raised up, opened her mouth, was prepared to sing to Junior. He was at attention, and I had the bra off. Junior stood firmly at attention as Miss Mary lovingly caressed him, but depression touched my shoulder. I didn’t particularly want to get blown. But I lay back on the bed and let Mary work out. There was nothing extraordinary about her tongue and lips. I raised up and grabbed her tits—mini-blimps; a man could fly high and safe between them or, buoyed by their softness, sleep the sleep of rapture. I pulled Miss Mary up toward me. Now she was crying softly. She held on to Junior as if she wanted to squeeze the breath out of him.
Miss Mary wanted to baptize Junior again in the name of desire; I wanted to get laid.
“Come on,” I said.
Miss Mary was breathing very hard. She had a coughing spell, but I went ahead, while the woman who made crepe-paper flowers protested. Desire had reached its peak with me. All I wanted was to plow into those 180 pounds.
“Chuck—Chuckie, please. Oh, no—”
But it was pleasant with the pillow under her. Yes, lovely, for although she was a large woman, a baby cantaloupe couldn’t fit into her vagina. It didn’t take very long. Spent, happy, and grinning, I tried to pull away.
“No,” Miss Mary cried. Her large sweating body shook, and the most terrible sounds I had ever heard, fast and painful, seemed to come from her stomach. Junior was getting uneasy, and Miss Mary’s arms had me in a bind.
I took her again, took her slow and easy—this one was for her and the flowers. Those terrible sounds had stopped, and I could feel her pleasure as her body moved toward me.
Grind, slow and easy. Her face in my hands, her tongue in my mouth like a goldfish on a cake of ice, then suddenly she became rigid as her tongue sought mine and moans crept up from her throat.
“Don’t get up,” Miss Mary said.
I tried not to show my irritation. Leaning over, I kissed and caressed those fantastic tits. Oh! If Rubens were alive and I were a billionaire—I’d commission him to paint Miss Mary. The large, muddy-water-colored body against the pastel sheets and pillowcases, trimmed with lace (no doubt Miss Mary’s personal touch), and masses of crepe-paper flowers that never grew in Mother Nature’s garden. Henry Moore could do the boobs in bronze—what a bedside trophy.
“Chuckie,” Miss Mary whined.
“Love, I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”
I passed Chuck in the living room. “Okay, man?” He grinned.
Returning the grin, I said, “Right on, man.”
It was a very humid afternoon, and I had planned to shower. But I wanted to lay Miss Mary again, plow into those 180 pounds. I hosed down Junior and the surrounding hairy pond, made my swift exit, whistling—are you ready? whistling, “Wish I were in Dixie again.” Miss Mary was a pretty good lay, and I felt good.
In the living room, I drank from the Seagram quart bottle, then started toward the bedroom.
Chuck, clothed in the cook’s whites, was on the bed. I watched as he pulled Miss Mary’s legs apart. She had her eyes closed and moaned like an old female cat. There was something ritualistic about their movements. Something familiar, and I didn’t like it.
Chuck caressed the back-breaking large legs.
“Oh, Mama,” he moaned. Then buried his head between Miss Mary’s legs as if to sleep. Of course he did not sleep. A seemingly well-adjusted young man with a neat Afro crew cut, his medium-sized head became a spinning top. Several times he jerked his head back and stared into Miss Mary’s door of life, before diving back down. Miss Mary’s legs rested on Chuck’s slender shoulders. There was something crude about her movements as she pressed Chuck’s head tighter. But the young, black second cook was balling. Apparently, he preferred the leftover juices from our luncheon.
Nathanael West
First Comfort Station
Purgatorial Heights
Dear West:
Por favor—forgive the delay. True, it has been almost six years. Hope that it has been less than a day in your particular hell. It began in our New York and followed me through the small transient rooms of all your depressing hotels. Now Absurdity and Truth pave the parquet of my mind. The pain is akin to raw alcohol on the testicles. But I’m not complaining. Life’s eyedropper is being sterilized with ant piss. Hallucinations? Joshing? West—I-Am-Not-Spaced-Out, despite the East and West Village rumors. Slightly skulled though. Celebrating the Day of the Dead.
I suppose the dead dog at the bottom of Malcolm Lowry’s Mexican ravine is almost home now. But the yellow-button white daisies have taken root. I like that.
Take care and watch the shit.
Charles
P.S. Here’s a little clipping from The New York Times: “Aosta, Italy (AP)—Cold, avalanches, and lack of food killed about 20 percent of the wild Alpine goats and chamois in Grand Paradise.”
About the Author
CHARLES STEVENSON WRIGHT WAS BORN on June 4, 1932, in New Franklin, Missouri. In 1955, he moved to New York City, where he wrote and published three highly praised autobiographical novels about black life in Manhattan. He died at the age of seventy-six.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE COLLECTED NOVELS OF CHARLES WRIGHT. Copyright © 1963, 1966, 1972, 1993, 2019 by Charles Wright. Introduction © 2019 Ishmael Reed. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may b
e reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 1993; REISSUED IN 2019.
Cover design by Billz and Munday
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.
Digital Edition AUGUST 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-296642-1
Version 07122019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-283960-2 (pbk.)
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1 Charles Wright, Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About: The Complete Novels of Charles Wright (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993).
2 Ibid.
3 James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Partisan Review, June 16, 1949.
4 William Phillips, A Partisan View (New York: Stein & Day, 1983).
5 Hilton Als, “In Black and White,” New Yorker, May 27, 2001.
6 Ishmael Reed, Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico (Montréal: Baraka Books, 2019).
7 Charles Wright, Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About: The Complete Novels of Charles Wright (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993).
8 “. . . explodes with the crazy laughter of a man past caring. . . . THE WIG is a brutal, exciting, and necessary book.” Conrad Knickerbocker, New York Times, March 5, 1966.
9 James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York: Vintage International, 2013).
10 Charles Wright, Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About: The Complete Novels of Charles Wright (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993).
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Mario Puzo, “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone,” New York Times, June 23, 1968.
16 M. h. Miller, “A Blind Publisher, Poet—and Link to the Lower East Side’s Cultural History,” New York Times Style magazine, February 9, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/t-magazine/art/steve-cannon-david-hammons.html.
The Collected Novels of Charles Wright Page 38