The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  Then as she came slowly to herself, she began to raise herself slightly, stretching her arms and trying to get the words to come out to him:

  “George Watson, baby!”

  This time the words did come out, with a terrible loudness, and as they did so the light began to go from the place where he was standing: the last thing she saw of him was his bright forehead and hair, then there was nothing at all, not even the smell of flowers.

  Plumy let out a great cry and fell back in the chair. Mahala heard her and came out of her room to look at her.

  “What you got?” Mahala said.

  “I seen him! I seen him! Big as life!”

  “Who?” Mahala said.

  “George Watson, just like I laid him away seventeen years ago!”

  Mahala did not know what to say. She wiped her eyes dry, for she had quit crying.

  “You was exposed too long in the sun,” Mahala said vaguely.

  As she looked at her sister she felt for the first time the love that Plumy had borne all these years for a small son Mahala had never seen, George Watson. For the first time she dimly recognized Plumy as a mother, and she had suddenly a feeling of intimacy for her that she had never had before.

  She walked over to the chair where Plumy was and laid her hand on her. Somehow the idea of George Watson’s being dead so long and yet still being a baby a mother could love had a kind of perfect quality that she liked. She thought then, quietly and without shame, how nice it would be if Teeboy could also be perfect in death, so that he would belong to her in the same perfect way as George Watson belonged to Plumy. There was comfort in tending the grave of a dead son, whether he was killed in war or peace, and it was so difficult to tend the memory of a son who just went away and never came back. Yet somehow she knew as she looked at Plumy, somehow she would go on with the memory of Teeboy Jordan even though he still lived in the world.

  As she stood there considering the lives of the two sons Teeboy Jordan and George Watson Jackson, the evening which had for some time been moving slowly into the house entered now as if in one great wave, bringing the small parlor into the heavy summer night until you would have believed daylight would never enter there again, the night was so black and secure.

  MAN AND WIFE

  “How could it happen to you in good times if you didn’t do nothing wrong?” Peaches Maud said.

  “Peaches, I am trying to tell you,” Lafe replied. “None of the men in the plant ever liked me.” Then as though quoting somebody: “I am frankly difficult.”

  “Difficult? You are the easiest-to-get-along-with man in the whole country.”

  “I am not manly,” he said suddenly in a scared voice, as though giving an order over a telephone.

  “Not manly?” Peaches Maud said and surprise made her head move back slightly as though the rush of his words was a wind in her face.

  “What has manly got to do with you being fired?” She began walking around the small apartment, smoking one of the gold-tipped cigarettes he bought for her in the Italian district.

  “The foreman said the men never liked me on account of my character,” Lafe went on, as though reporting facts he could scarcely remember about a person nearly unknown to him.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Maud said, the cigarette hanging in her mouth and a thin stream of smoke coming up into her half-closed eyes. “Well, thank God we live where nobody knows us. That is the only thing comes to mind to be grateful for. And for the rest, I don’t know what in hell you are really talking about, and my ears won’t let me catch what you seem to be telling.”

  “I have done nothing wrong, Peaches Maud.”

  “Did you ever do anything right?” She turned to him with hatred.

  “I have no character, Maud,” he spoke slowly, as though still quoting from somebody.

  It was true, Maud thought, puffing vigorously on the Italian cigarette: he had none at all. He had never found a character to have. He was always about to do something or start something, but not having a character to start or do it with left him always on the road to preparation.

  “What did the men care whether you had a character or not?” Maud wanted to know.

  For nearly a year now she had worn corsets, but this afternoon she had none, and, it being daylight, Lafe could see with finality how fat she was and what unsurpassed large breasts stuck out from her creased flesh. He was amazed to think that he had been responsible so long for such a big woman. Seeing her tremendous breasts, he felt still more exhausted and unready for his future.

  “They told me in the army, Peaches, I should have been a painter.”

  “Who is this they?” she inquired with shamed indignation.

  “The men in the mental department.”

  Lafe felt it essential at this moment to go over and kiss Maud on the throat. He tasted the talcum powder she had dusted herself with against the heat, and it was not unwelcome in his situation. Underneath the talcum he could taste Maud’s sweat.

  “All right, now.” Maud came down a little to him, wiping his mouth free of the talcum powder. “What kind of a painter did these mental men refer to?”

  “They didn’t mean somebody who paints chairs and houses,” Lafe said, looking away so that she would not think he was criticizing her area of knowledge.

  “I mean why did they think you was meant for a painter?” Maud said.

  “They never tell you those things,” he replied. “The tests test you and the mental men come and report the findings.”

  “Well, Jesus, what kind of work will you go into if it ain’t factory work?”

  Lafe extracted a large blue handkerchief dotted with white stars and held this before him as though he were waiting for a signal to cover his face with it.

  “Haven’t you always done factory work?” Peaches Maud summarized their common knowledge in her threatening voice.

  “Always, always,” he replied in agony.

  “Just when you read how the whole country is in for a big future, you come home like this to me,” she said, suddenly triumphant. “Well, I can tell you, I’m not going back to that paint factory, Lafe. I will do anything but go back and eat humble pie to Mrs. Goreweather.”

  “I don’t see how you could go back.” He stared at her flesh.

  “What meaning do you put in those words?” she thundered. Then when he stared at her uncomprehending: “You seem to lack something a husband ought to have for his wife.”

  “That’s what everything seems to be about now,” he said. “It’s what I lack everywhere.”

  “Stop that down-at-the-mouth talk,” she commanded evenly.

  “All the way home on the streetcar I sat like a bedbug.” He ignored her.

  “Lafe, what have I told you?” She tried to attract his attention now back to herself.

  “I have always lacked something and that lack was in my father and mother before me. My father had drink and my mother was easily recognized as . . .”

  She pulled his arm loosely toward her: “Don’t bring that up in all this trouble. She was anyhow a mother. . . . Of course, we could never afford for me to be a mother. . . .”

  “Maybe I should go back and tell the men all the things I lack they still don’t know about.”

  “You say things that are queer, all right,” Maud said in a quieter voice, and then with her old sarcasm: “I can kind of see how you got on the men’s nerves if you talked to them like you talk at home.”

  “You’re beginning to see, you say, Peaches?” Lafe said, almost as though he were now the judge himself, and then he began to laugh.

  “I wish you would never laugh that way,” Maud corrected him. “I hate that laugh. It sounds like some kid looking through a bathroom window. Jesus, Lafe, you ought to grow up.”

  He continued to laugh for a few moments, giving her the chance to see he had already changed a little for her. It was his laughing that made her pace up and down the room, despite the heat of July, and listen with growing nervousness to the refrigerato
r make its clattering din.

  “I can see what maybe the men meant,” she said in her quiet-triumph-tone of voice, and at the same time putting rage into her eyes as they stared at the refrigerator.

  “Chris, I hated every goddamn man.”

  “You can’t afford to hate nobody! You can’t go around hating men like that when you earn your bread with them.”

  “You hated Mrs. Goreweather.”

  “Look how unfair! You know Mrs. Goreweather had insanity in her family, and she pounced on me as a persecution target. You never even hinted there was any Mrs. Goreweather character at the factory.”

  “I was her!”

  “Lafe, for Jesus’ sake, in all this heat and noise, let’s not have any of this mental talk, or I will put on my clothes and go out and get on the streetcar.”

  “I’m telling you what it was. The company psychiatrist told me I was the Mrs. Goreweather of my factory.”

  “How could he know of her?”

  “I told him.”

  “No,” she said stopping dead in the room. “You didn’t go and tell him about her!” She picked up a large palm straw fan from the table and fanned with angry movements the large patches of sweat and talcum powder on her immense meaty body. As Lafe watched her move the fan, he thought how much money had gone to keep her in food these seven peculiar years.

  “I am not a normal man, Peaches Maud,” he said without conviction or meaning. He went over to her and touched her shoulder.

  “I’ll bet that psychiatrist isn’t even married,” Maud said, becoming more gentle but suddenly more worried.

  “He wasn’t old,” Lafe said, the vague expression coming over his face again. “He might be younger than me.”

  “If only that damn refrigerator would shut up,” she complained, not knowing now where to turn her words.

  She went over to the bed and sat down, and began fanning the air in his direction, as though to calm him or drive away any words he might now say.

  “You have no idea how the refrigerator nags me sometimes when you can be gone and away at work. I feel like I just got to go out when I hear it act so.”

  “Maud,” he said, and he stopped her arm from fanning him. “I have never once ceased to care for you in all this time and trouble.”

  “Well, I should hope,” she said, suddenly silly, and fanning her own body now more directly.

  “You will always attract me no matter what I am.”

  “Jesus, Lafe!” And she beat with the fan against the bedpost so that it shook a little.

  Then they both noticed that the refrigerator was off.

  “Did I jar it still?” she wondered.

  But the moment she spoke it began again, louder and more menacing.

  “I am not a man to make you happy.” Lafe touched her shoulder again.

  “I thought I told you I couldn’t stand that mental talk. I have never liked having you say you felt like a bug or any other running of yourself down. Just because you lost your job don’t think you can sit around here with me in this heat and talk mental talk now.”

  “Maud, I feel I should go away and think over what it is I have done to myself. I feel as though everything was beginning to go away from me.”

  “What in Jesus’ name would you go away on?” she exclaimed, and she threw the fan in the direction of the refrigerator.

  “I realize now how much of me there is that is not right,” he said, as though he had finally succeeded in bringing this fact to his own attention.

  “Jesus! Jesus!” she cried. “How much longer do I, an old married woman, have to listen to this?”

  “Peaches Maud!” he said, standing up and looking down at her squatting bulk on the bed. “There’s no point me postponing telling you. Why I am without a job should be no sort of mystery for you, for you are after all the woman I married. . . . Have you been satisfied with me?”

  “Satisfied?” she said, becoming quiet again, and her hand rising as though still in possession of the fan. “Lafe, listen a moment.” Peaches spoke quickly, holding her finger to her face, as though admiring a strain of music. “Did you ever hear it go so loud before? I swear it’s going to explode on us. Can they explode, do you suppose?”

  He stood there, his face and body empty of meaning, not looking where she pointed to the refrigerator.

  Maud broke a piece of chewing gum in two and, without offering him the other piece, began to unfold the tin foil and then to chew the gum industriously but with a large frown between her eyes as though she could expect no pleasure from what she had put into her mouth.

  “You never let me show you nothing but the outside,” he said, his face going white and his eyes more vacant.

  “Well, that’s all anybody human wants to hear,” she shouted, but she felt a terrible excitement inside, and her mouth went so dry she could hardly chew the gum.

  “Peaches Maud, you have to listen to what I am trying to tell you.” He touched her jaws as though to stop her chewing. “First of all you must answer my first question. Have you been satisfied with me?”

  Peaches Maud felt welling up within her for the first time in seven years a terrible tempest of tears. She could not explain why or from where these tears were coming. She felt also, without warning, cold and she got up and put on her kimono.

  “Don’t tell me no more now.” She faced him, drawing the kimono sash about her.

  The refrigerator clattered on in short unrhythmic claps as though to annihilate all other sound.

  “Answer my question, Peaches.” He took her hand up from the folds of the kimono.

  “I bought this for you in Chinatown.” He made an effort to raise his voice.

  “I don’t want to hear no memory talks, Lafe, for the love of Christ!” And she looked down at him suddenly as though she had gone up above him on a platform.

  “Maud,” he coaxed, putting a new and funny hopeful tone into his voice, “I can forget all that mental talk like you say. I did before anyhow. The men in the army tried to make me feel things too, with their tests, and here I went and married you.”

  “Stop it now,” she began to make crying sounds. “I can’t bear to hear no more of that talk, I tell you. Put it off for later. I don’t feel up to hearing it, I tell you.”

  “We both quick change and make up our minds, don’t we?” he said, briefly happy. He kissed her on the face.

  “Don’t kiss me when I feel like I do,” she said peevishly.

  Then without any warning, shouting as though something had stung her: “What did the company psychiatrist tell you?”

  “You got to answer my first question first,” Lafe said, a kind of mechanical strength coming to him.

  “I can’t answer until I hear what he told you,” she said.

  “Peaches,” he pleaded with her.

  “I mean what I said now.” She began to sob a little.

  “No, don’t tell me after all, Lafe.” Her face was open now and had a new empty weak quality he had never seen on it before. “I feel if it’s what I am fearing I’d split open like a stone.”

  “How could it be that bad?” he seemed to ask himself this question.

  “I can tell it is because you keep making it depend on me being satisfied. I know more than you think I know.”

  Then she began to scream at him again as though to stop any tears that might have force enough to fall.

  “What did you do at the factory that wasn’t human? Oh, I thank Jesus we don’t live in the same neighborhood with them men that work for you. This apartment may be hell with nothing but foreigners around us and that busted refrigerator and no ventilation but heat from the roof, but thank Jesus nobody don’t know us.”

  “You won’t answer me, then?” he said, still as calm and empty in his movements as before.

  “You’re not a woman,” she told him, “and you can’t understand the first question can’t be answered till I know what you done.”

  “I asked the psychiatrist if it was a crime.”
>
  “Well, what did he tell you?” Peaches Maud raised her voice as though she saw ahead some faint indication of escape.

  “He said it depended. It was what the men thought where you had to work.”

  “Well, what in the name of Christ did the men think?”

  “They thought it was a crime.”

  “Was it a boy you were stuck on?” Peaches Maud said, making her voice both empty and quiet, and at the same time all the tears came onto her face as though sprayed there by a tiny machine, in one second.

  “Did the psychiatrist call you up, Peaches?” he said, and he took hold of the bedpost and stared away from her.

  Then, when she did not answer, he went over to her: “Did he, Peaches?” He took her by the hands and waited for her to answer.

  “You leave loose of me, Lafe Krause. Do you hear? Leave loose of my hands.”

  “Peaches,” he called in a voice that seemed to come from under the floor.

  “Don’t call me that old love name,” she wept. “I’m an old fat woman tied down to a . . .”

  She waited before she said the word, listening as though for any sound that might rescue them there both together.

  “Did he call you up?” Lafe kept on, but his voice carried now no real demand, and came as though at a still greater distance from under where they stood.

  Listening sharply, Maud felt it was true: the refrigerator had stopped again, and the silence was high and heavy as the sky outside.

  “Did he call you, Maud, did he?”

  “No,” she answered, finally, still feeling he had to be addressed at some depth under where she was standing. “It was your mother. She told me before we got married. I said I would take a chance.”

  “The old bitch told you,” he reflected in his exhausted voice.

  “Considering the way the son turned out, the mother can hardly be blamed,” Maud said, but her voice was equally drained of meaning.

  “Peaches,” he said, but as if not addressing the word to her at all, and going rapidly over to the refrigerator and opening up the door.

  “The little light is out that was on here,” he said dully.

  “There ain’t no point in fussing with it now,” she remarked.