The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “Maybe I could fix it,” he said.

  “I doubt that. I doubt you could, Lafe Krause. I don’t think I would want you to fix it anyhow, even if you could. . . .”

  “Don’t you want me to do nothing for you then anymore?” He turned with a slight movement toward her, his eyes falling on her breasts.

  “I can’t stand the pressure, I can’t,” she shouted back at him. “Why did you have to go and do it?”

  “I didn’t do nothing,” he explained, as though trying to remember what had been said and what had not. “That’s why it’s so odd. They just felt I looked like I was going to, and they fired me.”

  “Jesus, I don’t understand,” she said, but without any tears on her face now. “Why did this have to happen to me when I can’t bear to hear about anything that ain’t human.”

  But her husband was not listening to her words or noticing whether she had tears or not. He was looking only at what was she, this fat, slightly middle-aged woman. She looked as though she had come to her permanent age, and he knew then that though he was but twenty-eight, he might as well be sixty, and the something awful and permanent that comes to everybody had come at last to him. Everything had come to an end, whether because he had looked at boys, or whether because the men had suddenly decided that yes, there was something odd in his character.

  “Peaches,” he said, and as he paused in his speech, the name he had always called her seemed to move over into the silence and vacancy of the broken refrigerator. “I will always stand by you anyhow, Peaches Maud.”

  PLAN NOW TO ATTEND

  Fred Parker had not seen Mr. Graitop since college days and yet he recognized him at once. Mr. Graitop’s face had not changed in twenty years, his doll-small mouth was still the same size, his hair was as immaculately groomed as a department story dummy. Mr. Graitop had always in fact resembled a department store dummy, his face wax-like, his eyes innocent and vacant, the doll-like mouth bloodless and expressionless, the body loose and yet heavy as though the passions and anguish of man had never coursed through it.

  Fred on the other hand felt old and used, and he was almost unwilling to make himself known to Mr. Graitop. The fact that he remembered him as Mr. Graitop instead of by his first name was also significant. One did not really believe that Mr. Graitop had a first name, though he did and it was Ezra. Fred had remembered him all these years as Mister. And now here he was like a statue in a museum, looking very young still and at the same time ancient, as though he had never been new.

  “Mr. Graitop!” Fred cried in the lobby of the hotel. The hotel was said to be one of the world’s largest, perhaps the largest, and Fred felt somehow the significance of his meeting the great man here where they were both so dwarfed by physical immensity, their voices lost in the vastness of the lobby whose roof seemed to lose itself in space indefinitely.

  Mr. Graitop’s face broke into a faint but actual smile and his eyes shone as though a candle had been lighted behind his brain.

  “You are him,” Fred said with relief. He was afraid that perhaps there was another man in the world who looked like Graitop.

  “Yes, you are not deceived in me,” Mr. Graitop said, pale and serious.

  Fred was going to say twenty years, but he decided this was not necessary. He was not sure that Graitop would know it was twenty years, for he had always denied facts of any kind, changing a fact immediately into a spiritual symbol. For instance, in the old days if Fred had said, “It has been twenty minutes,” Graitop would have said, “Well, some time has passed, of course.” He would have denied the twenty because they were figures.

  “You are just the same, Mr. Graitop,” Fred said, and almost at once he wished he had not called to him, that he had hurried out of the world’s largest hotel without ever knowing whether this was the real Graitop or only his twenty-year-younger double.

  As they were at the entrance of the Magnolia Bar, Fred ventured to ask him if he would have a drink, although it was only ten o’clock in the morning.

  Mr. Graitop hesitated. Perhaps because he did remember it was twenty years, however, he nodded a quiet assent, but his face had again emphasized the bloodless doll expression, and one felt the presence of his small rat-terrier teeth pressed against the dead mouth.

  “Mr. Graitop, this is unbelievable. Really not credible.”

  Mr. Graitop made odd little noises in his mouth and nose like a small boy who is being praised and admonished by the teacher at the same time.

  Fred Parker already felt drunk from the excitement of having made such a terrible mistake as to renew acquaintance with a man who had been great as a youth and was now such a very great man he was known in the movement as the great man.

  “What is your drink now, Mr. Graitop?” Fred spoke as though on a telephone across the continent . . . “After twenty years,” he explained, awkwardly laughing.

  Mr. Graitop winced, and Fred felt that he did so because he did not like to be called by his last name even though he would not have liked to be called by his first, and perhaps also he did not like the twenty years referred to.

  As Graitop did not answer immediately but continued to make the small-boy sounds in his nose and throat, Fred asked in a loud voice, “Bourbon and water, perhaps?”

  “Bourbon and water,” Mr. Graitop repeated wearily, but at the same time with a somewhat relieved note to his voice as though he had recognized his duty and now with great fatigue was about to perform it.

  “I can’t tell you how odd this is,” Fred said nervously emphatic when they had been served.

  “Yes, you said that before,” Mr. Graitop said and his face was as immobile as cloth.

  “But it is, you know. I think it’s odd that I recognized you.”

  “You do?” Mr. Graitop sipped the drink as though he felt some chemical change already taking place in his mouth and facial muscles and perhaps fearful his changeless expression would move.

  Then there was silence and strangely enough Mr. Graitop broke it by saying, “Your name is Fred, isn’t it.”

  “Yes,” Fred replied, paralyzed with emotion, and with his drink untouched. He suddenly noticed that Graitop had finished his.

  “Graitop, won’t you have another?” Fred asked, no invitation in his voice.

  Graitop stared at him as though he had not understood actually that he had already finished one.

  “Don’t you drink, sir?” Fred said, surprised at once to hear his own questions.

  “No,” Graitop replied.

  “Another bourbon and water,” Fred told the bartender.

  “You know,” Fred began, “this reminds me of one semester when we were roommates and we neither of us went to the football game. We could hear the crowd roaring from our room. It sounded like some kind of mammoth animal that was being punished. It was too hot for football and you tried to convert me to atheism.”

  Mr. Graitop did not say anything. Everybody had heard of his great success in introducing “new Religion” to America so that when many people thought of “new Religion” they thought immediately of Graitop.

  It was a surprise to Fred to remember that Graitop had been a practicing atheist in the college quadrangles, for he remembered it only this instant.

  “You were one, you know,” Fred said almost viciously.

  “We are always moving toward the one path,” Graitop said dreamily, drinking his second drink.

  Although Fred was a hard drinker, he had swiftly lost all his appetite for it, and he knew that it was not the early hour. Very often at this hour, setting out as a salesman, he was completely oiled.

  “Is it the new religion that keeps you looking so kind of embalmed and youthful,” Fred said, as though he had had his usual five brandies.

  “Fred,” Mr. Graitop said on his third drink, with mechanical composure, “it is the only conceivable path.”

  “I liked you better as an infidel,” Fred said. “You looked more human then, too, and older. I suppose you go to all the football games
now that you’re a famous man.”

  “I suppose I see a good many,” Graitop said.

  “Fred,” Mr. Graitop said, closing his eyes softly, and as he did so he looked remarkably older, “why can’t you come with us this time?”

  Fred did not know what to say because he did not exactly understand the question.

  “There is no real reason to refuse. You are a living embodiment of what we all are without the prop.”

  “I’m not following you now,” Fred replied.

  “You are, but you won’t let yourself,” Graitop said, opening his eyes and finishing his third drink. He tapped the glass as though it had been an offering for Fred.

  Fred signaled for another drink for Graitop just as in the past he would have for himself. His own first drink remained untouched, which he could not understand, except he felt nauseated. He realized also that he hated the great man and had always hated him.

  “Well, what am I?” Fred said as he watched Graitop start on his fourth drink.

  “The embodiment of the crooked stick that would be made straight,” the great man replied.

  “You really do go for that, don’t you. That is,” Fred continued, “you have made that talk part of your life.”

  “There is no talk involved,” Mr. Graitop said. “No talk, Fred.”

  I wonder why the old bastard is drinking so much, Fred nearly spoke aloud. Then: “Graitop, nobody has ever understood what makes you tick.”

  “That is unimportant,” his friend replied. “It, too, is talk.”

  “Nobody ever even really liked you, though I don’t suppose anybody ever liked St. Paul either.”

  “Of course, Fred, you are really with us in spirit,” Graitop said as though he had not heard the last statement.

  Fred looked at his drink which seemed cavernous as a well.

  “Graitop,” he said stonily, “you discovered Jesus late. Later than me. I’d had all that when I was twelve. . . .”

  “You’re part of the new movement and your denying it here to me only confirms it,” Mr. Graitop informed him.

  “I don’t want to be part of it,” Fred began and he tasted some of his drink, but Graitop immediately interrupted.

  “It isn’t important that you don’t want to be part: you are part and there is nothing you can do about it. You’re with us.”

  “I couldn’t be with you,” Fred began, feeling coming up within him a fierce anger, and he hardly knew at what it was directed, for it seemed to be larger than just his dislike, suspicion, and dread of Graitop.

  Then Mr. Graitop must have realized what only the bartender had sensed from the beginning, that he was not only drunk but going to be sick. Fred had not noticed it at all, for he felt that he had suddenly been seized and forced to relive the impotence and stupidity of his adolescence.

  With the bartender’s help, he assisted Mr. Graitop out of the bar. In the elevator, Graitop grew loud and belligerent and shouted several times: “It’s the only path, the only way.”

  “What is your room number?” Fred said hollow-voiced as they got out of the elevator.

  “You are really part of our group,” Graitop replied.

  Fred took the key out of Graitop’s pocket and nodded to the woman at the desk, who stared at them.

  “You are completely oiled,” Fred informed Graitop when the latter had lain down on the bed. “And yet it doesn’t convince me any more than your preaching.”

  “I wonder if I had appointments,” Graitop said weakly. “I was to speak to some of our people. . . .”

  “I wonder which of us feels more terrible,” Fred replied. “This meeting after twenty years [and he shouted the number] has been poison to both of us. We hate one another and everything we stand for. At least I hate you. You are probably too big a fraud to admit hate. I’m saying this cold sober, too, although I guess just the inside of a bar oils me up.”

  “You are a living embodiment of sin and sorrow and yet you are dear to us,” Graitop said, looking at the ceiling.

  “What the hell are you the living embodiment of, what?” Fred said and he began loosening his friend’s clothing. Before he knew it, he had completely undressed Mr. Graitop as mechanically as he undressed himself when drunk. As his friend lay there, a man of at least forty, Fred was amazed to see that he looked like a boy of sixteen. Almost nothing had touched him in the world. So amazed and objective was Fred’s surprise that he took the bed lamp and held it to his face and body to see if he was not deceived and this forty-year-old man was not actually a palimpsest of slightly hidden decay and senility. But the light revealed nothing but what his eye had first seen—a youth untouched by life and disappointment.

  He looked so much like God or something mythological that before he knew what he was doing Fred Parker had kissed him dutifully on the forehead.

  “Why did you do that?” Mr. Graitop said, touching the place with his finger, and his voice was almost human.

  Fred Parker sat down in a large easy chair and loosened his necktie. He did not answer the question because he had not heard it. He felt intoxicated and seriously unwell.

  “How in hell do you live, Graitop?” he said almost too softly to be heard. “Are you married and do you have kids?”

  “Yes, yes,” Graitop replied, and he began to drivel now from his mouth.

  Fred got up and wiped off his lips, and put the covers over him.

  “A missionary,” Fred Parker said. “But of what?”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Graitop said sleepily. Suddenly he was asleep.

  Fred Parker watched him again angrily from the chair.

  “Who in hell are you, Graitop?” he shouted from the chair. “Why in hell did I run into you, Why in hell did I speak to you. . . . Why don’t you look and act like other men?”

  Fred called room service for ice, whiskey, and water. He began immediately the serious drinking he should not have been without all morning.

  “When the bastard is conscious, I will ask him who he is and what he means to do.”

  “It’s all right, Fred,” Mr. Graitop said from time to time from the bed. “You are really with us, and it’s all all right.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t use that goddamn language, Graitop,” he said. “You don’t have the personality for a missionary. Too young and dead-looking. Too vague.”

  From the bed there came sounds like a small boy sleeping.

  WHY CAN’T THEY TELL

  YOU WHY?

  Paul knew nearly nothing of his father until he found the box of photographs on the backstairs. From then on he looked at them all day and every evening, and when his mother Ethel talked to Edith Gainesworth on the telephone. He had looked amazed at his father in his different ages and stations of life, first as a boy his age, then as a young man, and finally before his death in his army uniform.

  Ethel had always referred to him as your father, and now the photographs made him look much different from what this had suggested in Paul’s mind.

  Ethel never talked with Paul about why he was home sick from school and she pretended at first she did not know he had found the photographs. But she told everything she thought and felt about him to Edith Gainesworth over the telephone, and Paul heard all of the conversations from the back stairs where he sat with the photographs, which he had moved from the old shoe boxes where he had found them to two big clean empty candy boxes.

  “Wouldn’t you know a sick kid like him would take up with photographs,” Ethel said to Edith Gainesworth. “Instead of toys or balls, old photos. And my God, I’ve hardly mentioned a thing to him about his father.”

  Edith Gainesworth, who studied psychology at an adult center downtown, often advised Ethel about Paul, but she did not say anything tonight about the photographs.

  “All mothers should have pensions,” Ethel continued. “If it isn’t a terrible feeling being on your feet all day before the public and then having a sick kid under your feet when you’re off at night. My evenings are worse than my days.
”

  These telephone conversations always excited Paul because they were the only times he heard himself and the photographs discussed. When the telephone bell would ring he would run to the backstairs and begin looking at the photographs and then as the conversation progressed he often ran into the front room where Ethel was talking, sometimes carrying one of the photographs with him and making sounds like a bird or an airplane.

  Two months had gone by like this, with his having attended school hardly at all and his whole life seemingly spent in listening to Ethel talk to Edith Gainesworth and examining the photographs in the candy boxes.

  Then in the middle of the night Ethel missed him. She rose feeling a pressure in her scalp and neck. She walked over to his cot and noticed the Indian blanket had been taken away. She called Paul and walked over to the window and looked out. She walked around the upstairs, calling him.

  “God, there is always something to bother you,” she said. “Where are you, Paul?” she repeated in a mad sleepy voice. She went on down into the kitchen, though it did not seem possible he would be there, he never ate anything.

  Then she said Of course, remembering how many times he went to the backstairs with those photographs.

  “Now what are you doing in here, Paul?” Ethel said, and there was a sweet but threatening sound to her voice that awoke the boy from where he had been sleeping, spread out protectively over the boxes of photographs, his Indian blanket over his back and shoulder.

  Paul crouched almost greedily over the boxes when he saw this ugly pale woman in the man’s bathrobe looking at him. There was a faint smell from her like that of an uncovered cistern when she put on the robe.

  “Just here, Ethel,” he answered her question after a while.

  “What do you mean, just here, Paul?” she said going up closer to him.

  She took hold of his hair and jerked him by it gently, as though this was a kind of caress she sometimes gave him. This gentle jerking motion made him tremble in short successive starts under her hand, until she let go.