The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “Why egomaniacs, for God’s sake,” Philip wondered, putting his fork down with a bang.

  “Well, Philip,” Guy pleaded now. “To think of their own bodies like that. These are not young boys, you know. They must be twenty-five or so, along in there, and you would think they would begin to think of other people, other people’s bodies, at least.” Guy laughed as though to correct his own severity before Philip. “But no,” he went on. “They have to be Adonises.”

  “And their work suffers?” Philip wondered vaguely, as though, if the topic had to be continued, they might now examine it from this aspect.

  “The kind of work young men like them do—it don’t matter, you know, if you’re good or not, nobody knows if you’re really good. They do their work and get it out on time, and you know their big boss is still that old gal of seventy who is partial to young men. She sometimes goes right up to Milo, who will be sitting at his desk relaxed as a jellyfish, doing nothing, and she says, ‘Roll up your sleeves, why don’t you, and take off your necktie on a warm day like this,’ and it will be thirty degrees outside and cool even in the office. And Milo will smile like a four-year-old at her because he loves admiration more than anything in the world, and he rolls up his sleeves and then all this bulge of muscle comes out, and the old girl looks like she’d seen glory, she’s that gone on having a thug like that around.”

  “But you sound positively bilious over it,” Philip laughed.

  “Philip, look,” Guy said with his heavy masculine patience, “doesn’t it sound wrong to you, now seriously?”

  “What in hell do you mean by wrong, though?”

  “Don’t be that way. You know goddamn well what I mean.”

  “Well, then, no, I can’t say it is. Milo or whatever his name.”

  “You know it’s Milo,” Guy said positively disgusted.

  “Well, he is, I suppose, more typical than you might think from the time, say, when you were young. Maybe there weren’t such fellows around then.”

  “Oh, there were, of course.”

  “Well, now there are more, and Milo is no exception.”

  “But he looks at himself all the time, and he has got himself tattooed recently and there in front of the one mirror in the office, it’s not the girls who stand there, no, it’s Milo and this Austrian boy. They’re always washing their hands or combing their hair, or just looking at themselves right out, not sneaky-like the way most men do, but like some goddamn chorus girls. And oh, I forgot, this Austrian fellow got tattooed too because Milo kept after him, and then he was sorry. It seems the Austrian’s physical culture instructor gave him hell and said he had spoiled the appearance of his deltoids by having the tattoo work done.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Philip said.

  Guy stared as he heard Philip’s laugh, but then continued: “They talked about the tattoo all morning, in front of all the stenogs, and whether this Austrian had spoiled the appearance of his deltoid muscles or not.”

  “Well, it is funny, of course, but I couldn’t get worked up about it the way you are.”

  “They’re a symbol of the new America and I don’t like it.”

  “You’re terribly worked up.”

  “Men on their way to being thirty, what used to be considered middle age, developing their bodies and special muscles and talking about their parts in front of women.”

  “But they’re married men, aren’t they?”

  “Oh, sure,” Guy dismissed this. “Married and with kids.”

  “What more do you want then. Some men are nuts about their bowling scores and talk about that all the time in front of everybody.”

  “I see you approve of them.”

  “I didn’t say that. But I think you’re overreacting, to use the phrase . . .”

  “You don’t have to work with them,” Guy went on. “You don’t have to watch them in front of the one and only office mirror.”

  “Look, I’ve known a lot of women who griped me because they were always preening themselves, goddamn narcissists too. I don’t care for narcissists of either sex.”

  “Talk about Narciss-uses,” said Guy. “The worst was last summer when I went with Mae to the beach, and there they were, both of them, right in front of us on the sand.”

  Philip stiffened slightly at the prospect of more.

  “Milo and the Austrian,” Guy shook his head. “And as it was Saturday afternoon there didn’t seem to be a damn place free on the beach and Mae wanted to be right up where these Adonises or Narcissuses, or whatever you call them, were. I said, ‘We don’t want to camp here, Mae,’ and she got suddenly furious. I couldn’t tell her how those birds affected me, and they hardly even spoke to me either, come to think about it. Milo spit something out the side of his mouth when he saw me, as though to say that for you.”

  “That was goddamn awful for you,” Philip nodded.

  “Wait till you hear what happened, for crying out loud. I shouldn’t tell this during my lunch hour because it still riles me.”

  “Don’t get riled then. Forget them.”

  “I have to tell you,” Guy said. “I’ve never told anybody before, and you’re the only man I know will listen to a thing like this. . . . You know,” he went on then, as though this point were now understood at last between them, “Mae started staring at them right away. ‘Who on earth are they?’ she said, and I couldn’t tell whether she was outraged or pleased, maybe she was a bit of both because she just fixed her gaze on them like paralyzed. ‘Aren’t you going to put on your sun tan lotion and your glasses?’ I said to her, and she turned on me as though I had hit her. ‘Why don’t you let a woman relax when I never get out of the house but twice in one year,’ she told me. I just lay back then on the sand and tried to forget they were there and that she was there and that even I was there.”

  Philip began to light up his cigarette, and Guy said, “Are you all done eating already?” and he looked at his own plate of veal cutlet and peas which was nearly untouched. “My God, you are a fast eater. Why, do you realize how fast you eat,” he told Philip, and Philip said he guessed he half-realized it. He said at night he ate slower.

  “In the bosom of your family,” Guy laughed.

  Philip looked at the cafeteria clock and stirred unceremoniously.

  “But I wanted to finish telling you about these boys.”

  “Is there more?” Philip pretended surprise.

  “Couldn’t you tell the way I told it there was,” Guy said, an indeterminate emotion in his voice.

  “I hope nothing happened to Mae,” Philip offered weakly.

  “Nothing ever happens to Mae,” Guy dismissed this impatiently. “No, it was them, of course. Milo and the Austrian began putting on a real show, you know, for everybody, and as it was Saturday afternoon, as I said, nearly everybody from every office in the world was there, and they were all watching Milo and the Austrian. So, first they just did the standard routine, warm-ups, you know, etc., but from the first every eye on the beach was on them, they seemed to have the old presence, even the lifeguards were staring at them as though nobody would ever dare drown while they were carrying on, so first of all then they did handstands and though they did them good, not good enough for that many people to be watching. After all somebody is always doing handstands on the beach, you know. I think it was their hair attracted people, they have very odd hair, they look like brothers that way. Their hair is way too thick, and of course too long for men of our generation. . . .”

  “Well, how old do you think I am?” Philip laughed.

  “All right, of my generation, then,” Guy corrected with surliness. He went on, however, immediately: “I think the reason everybody watched was their hair, which is a peculiar kind of chestnut color, natural and all that, but maybe due to the sun and all their exercising had taken on a funny shade, and then their muscles were so enormous in that light, bulging and shining with oil and matching somehow their hair that I think that was really what kept people looking and not wha
t they did. They didn’t look quite real, even though in a way they are the style.

  “I kept staring, and Mae said, ‘I thought you wasn’t going to watch,’ and I could see she was completely held captive by their performance as was, I guess, everybody by then on the goddamn beach.

  “ ‘I can’t help looking at freaks,’ I told Mae, and she gave me one of her snorts and just kept looking kind of bitter and satisfied at seeing something like that. She’s a great woman for sights like that, she goes to all the stock shows, and almost every nice Sunday she takes the kids to the zoo. . . .”

  “Well, what finally did come off?” Philip said, pushing back his chair.

  “The thing that happened, nobody in his right mind would ever believe, and probably lots of men and boys who saw it happen never went home and told their families.”

  “It should have been carried in the papers then,” Philip said coolly and he drank all of his as yet untouched glass of water.

  “I don’t know what word I would use to describe it,” Guy said. “Mae has never mentioned it to this day, though she said a little about it on the streetcar on the way home that afternoon, but just a little, like she would have referred to a woman having fainted and been rushed to the hospital, something on that order.”

  “Well, for Pete’s sake now, what did happen?” Philip’s ill humor broke forth for a moment, and he bent his head away from Guy’s look.

  “As I said,” Guy continued quietly, “they did all those more fancy exercises then after their warm-ups, like leaping on one another’s necks, jumping hard on each other’s abdomens to show what iron men they were, and some rough stuff but which they made look fancy, like they threw one another to the sand as though it was a cross between a wrestling match and an apache dance, and then they began to do some things looked like they were out of the ballet, with lots of things like jumping in air and splits, you know. You know what kind of trunks that kind of Narciss-uses wear, well these were tighter than usual, the kind to make a bullfighter’s pants look baggy and oversize, and as though they had planned it, while doing one of their big movements, their trunks both split clear in two, at the same time, with a sound, I swear, you could have heard all over that beach.

  “Instead of feeling at least some kind of self-consciousness, if not shame, they both busted out laughing and hugged one another as though they’d made a touchdown, and they might as well both been naked by now, they just stood there and looked down at themselves from time to time like they were alone in the shower, and laughed and laughed, and an old woman next to them just laughed and laughed too, and all Mae did was look once and then away with a funny half-smile on her mouth, she didn’t show any more concern over it than the next one. Here was a whole beach of mostly women, just laughing their heads off because two men no longer young, were, well, exposing themselves in front of everybody, for that’s all it was.”

  Philip stared at his empty water glass.

  “I started to say something to Mae, and she nearly cut my head off, saying something like why don’t you mind your own goddamn business in a tone unusually mean even for her. Don’t look damn you if you don’t like it was what my own wife said to me.”

  Suddenly Philip had relaxed in his chair as though the water he had drunk had contained a narcotic. He made no effort now to show his eagerness to leave, to hurry, or to comment on what was being said, and he sat there staring in the direction of, but not at, Guy.

  “But the worst part came then,” Guy said, and then looking critically and uneasily at Philip, he turned round to look at the cafeteria clock, but it showed only five minutes to one, and their lunch hour was not precisely over.

  “This old woman,” he continued, swallowing hard, “who had been sitting there next to them got out a sewing kit she had, and do you know what?”

  “I suppose she sewed them shut,” Philip said sleepily and still staring at nothing.

  “That’s exactly correct,” Guy said, a kind of irritated disappointment in his voice. “This old woman who looked at least eighty went right up to them the way they were and she must have been a real seamstress, and before the whole crowd with them two grown men laughing their heads off she sewed up their tights like some old witch in a story, and Mae sat there as cool as if we was playing bridge in the church basement, and never said boo, and when I began to really let off steam, she said Will you keep your big old ugly mouth shut or am I going to have to hit you over the mouth with my beach clogs. That’s how they had affected my own wife.

  “So,” Guy said, after a pause in which Philip contributed nothing, “this country has certainly changed since I grew up in it. I said that to Mae and that was the final thing I had to say on the subject, and those two grown men went right on lying there on the sand, every so often slapping one another on their muscles, and combing their hair with oil, and laughing all the time, though I think even they did have sense enough not to get up and split their trunks again or even they must have known they would have been arrested by the beach patrol.”

  “Sure,” Philip said vacantly.

  “So that’s the story of Milo and the Austrian,” Guy said.

  “It’s typical,” Philip said, like a somnambulist.

  “Are you sore at me or something,” Guy said, picking up his and Philip’s checks.

  “Let me pay my own, for Christ’s sake,” Philip said.

  “Listen, you are sore at me, I believe,” Guy said.

  “I have a rotten headache is all,” Philip replied, and he picked up his own check.

  “I hope I didn’t bring it on by talking my head off.”

  “No,” Philip replied. “I had it since morning.”

  COLOR OF DARKNESS

  Sometimes he thought about his wife, but a thing had begun of late, usually after the boy went to bed, a thing which should have been terrifying but which was not: he could not remember now what she had looked like. The specific thing he could not remember was the color of her eyes. It was one of the most obsessive things in his thought. It was also a thing he could not quite speak of with anybody. There were people in the town who would have remembered, of course, what color her eyes were, but gradually he began to forget the general structure of her face also. All he seemed to remember was her voice, her warm hearty comforting voice.

  Then there was the boy, Baxter, of course. What did he know and what did he not know. Sometimes Baxter seemed to know everything. As he hung on the edge of the chair looking at his father, examining him closely (the boy never seemed to be able to get close enough to his father), the father felt that Baxter might know everything.

  “Bax,” the father would say at such a moment, and stare into his own son’s eyes. The son looked exactly like the father. There was no trace in the boy’s face of anything of his mother.

  “Soon you will be all grown up,” the father said one night, without ever knowing why he had said this, saying it without his having even thought about it.

  “I don’t think so,” the boy replied.

  “Why don’t you think so,” the father wondered, as surprised by the boy’s answer as he had been by his own question.

  The boy thought over his own remark also.

  “How long does it take?” the boy asked.

  “Oh a long time yet,” the father said.

  “Will I stay with you, Daddy,” the boy wondered.

  The father nodded. “You can stay with me always,” the father said.

  The boy said Oh and began running around the room. He fell over one of his engines and began to cry.

  Mrs. Zilke came into the room and said something comforting to the boy.

  The father got up and went over to pick up the son. Then sitting down, he put the boy in his lap, and flushed from the exertion, he said to Mrs. Zilke: “You know, I am old!”

  Mrs. Zilke laughed. “If you’re old, I’m dead,” she said. “You must keep your youth,” she said almost harshly to the father, after a pause.

  He looked up at her, and the b
oy suddenly moved in his father’s arms, looking questioningly at his father. He kissed his father on the face.

  “He’s young yet,” the boy said to Mrs. Zilke.

  “Why, of course. He’s a young man,” she said. “They don’t come no younger for fathers.”

  The father laughed and the boy got up to go with Mrs. Zilke to his bed.

  The father thought about Mrs. Zilke’s remark and he listened as he heard her reading to the boy from a story-book. He found the story she read quite dry, and he wondered if the boy found anything in it at all.

  It was odd, he knew, that he could not remember the color of his wife’s eyes. He knew, of course, that he must remember them, and that he was perhaps unconsciously trying to forget. Then he began to think that he could not remember the color of his son’s eyes, and he had just looked at them!

  “WHAT DOES HE know?” he said to Mrs. Zilke when she came downstairs and sat for a moment with the newspaper. She lit a cigarette and blew out some smoke before she replied to him. By then he was looking out the window as though he had forgotten her presence and his question.

  “He knows everything,” Mrs. Zilke said.

  The father came to himself now and looked at her gently.

  “They all do now, don’t they,” the father said, meaning children.

  “It seems so,” the woman said. “Yes,” she said, thinking. “They know everything.”

  “Everybody seems forty years old to me,” the father said. “Even children maybe. Except they are complete mysteries to me. I don’t know what to say to any of them. I don’t know what they know, I guess.”

  “Oh, I understand that. I raised eight kids and I was always thinking the same thing.”

  “Well, that relieves me,” he told Mrs. Zilke.

  She smiled, but in her smile he thought he saw some thought reserved, as though she had not told everything.

  “Of course we never know any other human being, do we?” he told Mrs. Zilke, hesitating as though to get the quotation right.

  She nodded, enjoying her cigarette.