The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “Cleo, I can and I will make trouble for you if you speak in front of that boy.”

  “You old goat,” she cried, and her hand now fell on the head of her son.

  “You whoring old goat!”

  THE LESSON

  “This is not ladies’ day at the pool,” Mr. Diehl said. “I can’t admit her.”

  “But she pleaded so.”

  Mr. Diehl was about to give his lesson to a young man and wanted no women in the pool. He knew that if a woman entered the pool during the lesson she would distract the young man, who was already nervous about learning to swim. The young man was quite upset already, as he was going to have to go to a country house where there was lots of swimming and boating, and if he didn’t know how, his hosts would be very put out with him. They might never invite him again. At any rate that was his story, and besides, he was the commander’s son.

  “But my grandmother always wants as many people to come into the pool as possible,” the girl said. Her grandmother owned the pool.

  “I have worked for your grandmother for a long time,” Mr. Diehl, the swimming instructor said, “and I’m sure that she would not want a woman in the pool at this hour who does not belong to the club and so far as I know doesn’t even know how to swim.”

  “Well, I asked her that,” the girl said.

  “And what did she say?” the swimming instructor wanted to know.

  “She said she could swim.”

  “Just the same she can wait until the lesson is over. It takes only half an hour.”

  “I told her that, but she wanted to go in the pool right away. She has gone downstairs to change.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Mr. Diehl said.

  His pupil, the commander’s son, was already splashing around in the shallow water, waiting for the lesson.

  “Go and tell her in a half hour.”

  The girl looked as though she was not going to tell the woman.

  “If your grandmother were here she would back me up on this,” Mr. Diehl said.

  “But she’s not here and my instructions were to do as best I thought.”

  “As best you thought,” Mr. Diehl considered this, looking at the girl. She was sixteen, but he knew she had a slow mind and he wondered what had ever made Mrs. Schuck leave the pool in the hands of such an immature person.

  “Look,” Mr. Diehl said. “Just go and tell the woman that I can’t have her in the pool while I am giving this special lesson.”

  “Well, I can’t forbid her the pool very well, now, can I. If she wants to come in! This club isn’t that exclusive and she knows one of the members.”

  “I don’t care if she knows the man who invented swimming, she can’t come in. Is that clear?”

  “Mr. Diehl, you forget that I am the granddaughter of the owner of the pool.”

  “I am responsible for what goes on in the water, am I not?”

  “Yes, I’ll go along with you there.”

  “All right then,” Mr. Diehl said, as though having made his point. “Go tell her I can’t have her in the water until after the lesson. Can’t you do that?”

  “No,” the girl said. “I can’t tell that to a perfectly good customer.”

  “You have this pool mixed up with a public dance hall or something. This is not exactly a money-making organization, as your grandmother must have told you. It is a club. Not open to everybody. And this unknown woman should not have been allowed in here anyhow. Not at all.”

  “I know better,” the girl said. “Many nice people come here just for an occasional swim.”

  “Not unless they are known,” Mr. Diehl said.

  “But she knows a member,” the girl pointed out.

  “Who is the member?” Mr. Diehl wanted to know.

  “Oh, I can’t remember,” the girl told him.

  “But I know every member by name,” Mr. Diehl was insistent. “I’ve been swimming instructor here now for nine years.”

  “I know, I know,” the girl said. “But this woman has every right to come in here.”

  “She’s not coming in the water.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to tell her. She’s already putting on her suit.”

  “Then she can take it right off again,” Mr. Diehl said.

  “But not here, though,” the girl tried a joke. Mr. Diehl did not laugh.

  “What I’m trying to get you to see, Polly,” Mr. Diehl said, and it was the first time he had ever called her by name, “is that this is a pretty high-class place. Do you know by chance who that boy is who is waiting for the lesson.”

  Mr. Diehl waited for the girl to answer.

  “I don’t know who he is,” she replied.

  “That is Commander Jackson’s son.”

  “And he doesn’t know how to swim?”

  “What has that got to do with it?” the swimming instructor said.

  “Well, I’m surprised is all.”

  “Look, time is slipping away. I don’t want to have any more argument with you, Polly. But I’m sure your grandmother would back me up on this all the way if she were here. Is there any way we can reach her by telephone?”

  “I have no idea where she went.”

  “Well, this strange woman cannot come into the pool now.”

  “I am not going down to the locker room and tell her to put her clothes back on, so there,” Polly said.

  She was very angry, but she had also gotten a little scared.

  “Then I’m going to have to tell your grandmother how nasty you’ve been.”

  “How nasty I’ve been?”

  Mr. Diehl went up to the girl and put his hands on her shoulder as he often did to his students. “Look here now,” he said. He did not realize how he was affecting the girl and how the water fell from him on her blouse. She looked at his biceps as they moved almost over her mouth and the way his chest rose and fell. She had always lowered her eyes when she met him in the hall, avoiding the sight of his wet, dripping quality, the many keys held in his hand, his whistle for the days when they practiced champion swimming. He had seemed to her like something that should always remain splashing about and breathing heavily in water.

  “Polly, will you please cooperate with me,” Mr. Diehl said.

  “I don’t think I can,” she said.

  He put down his arms in a gesture of despair. “Will you please, please just this once go down to the ladies’ dressing room and tell that woman that you’ve made a mistake and that she can’t come into the pool just now?”

  Polly looked out now into the water where the commander’s son was floating around by holding on to a rubber tire.

  “I just can’t tell her,” Polly said, turning red.

  “You can’t tell her,” Mr. Diehl observed. Then: “Look, do you know who the commander is?”

  “Well, doesn’t everybody?” Polly answered.

  “Do you know or don’t you?” Mr. Diehl wanted to know. Some more water fell from him as he gesticulated, wetting her blouse and her arms a little, and she was sure that water continued to fall from him no matter how long he had been out of the pool. She could hear him breathing and she could not help noticing his chest rise and fall as though he were doing a special swimming feat just for her in this room.

  “Polly!” he said.

  “I can’t! I can’t!” she cried.

  He could see now that there was something else here, perhaps fear of something, he could not tell, he did not want to know.

  “You’re not going to run into any difficulty in just telling her, are you, that you didn’t know the rules and that she will have to wait until the lesson is over.”

  “I can’t and I won’t,” Polly said, and she refused to look at him.

  The commander’s son was watching them from the middle of the shallow part of the pool, but he did not act as though he was impatient for the lesson to begin, and Polly remembered what a severe instructor Mr. Diehl was said to be. Sometimes while she had sat outside in the reception room she had
heard Mr. Diehl shout all the way from the pool.

  “Look, do we have to go all over this again?” Mr. Diehl said. “You know the commander.”

  “I know the commander, of course,” she said.

  “Do you know he is the most influential member of the club here?”

  Polly did not say anything.

  “He built this pool, Polly. Not your grandmother. Did you know that?”

  She felt that she might weep now, so she did not say anything.

  “Are you hearing me?” Mr. Diehl wanted to know.

  “Hearing you!” she cried, distracted:

  “All right, now,” he said, and he put his hand on her again and she thought some more drops of water fell from him.

  “I can’t see how anybody would know,” she said. “How would the commander know if a young woman went into his pool. And what would his son out there care.”

  “His son doesn’t like people in the pool when he is taking a lesson,” Mr. Diehl explained. “He wants it strictly private, and the commander wants it that way too.”

  “And the commander pays you to want it that way also.”

  “Polly, I’m trying to be patient.”

  “I’m not going to tell her she can’t come in,” Polly said.

  She stood nearer now to the edge of the pool away from his moving arms and chest and the dripping water that she felt still came off them.

  “Step away from the edge, please, Polly,” he said, and he took hold of her arm drawing her firmly over to him, in his old manner with special pupils when he was about to impart to them some special secret of swimming.

  “Don’t always touch me,” she said, but so faintly that it was hardly a reproach.

  “Polly, listen to me,” Mr. Diehl was saying to her. “I’ve known you since you were a little girl. Right?”

  “Known me?” Polly said, and she felt the words only come vaguely toward her now.

  “Been a friend of your family, haven’t I, for a good long time. Your grandmother knew me when I was only a boy. She paid for some of my tuition in college.”

  “College,” Polly nodded to the last word she had heard, so that he would think she was listening.

  “You’ll feel all right about this, Polly, and you will, I know, help me now that I’ve explained it to you.”

  “No, I can’t,” she said, awake again.

  “You can’t what?” Mr. Diehl said.

  “I can’t is all,” she said but she spoke, as she herself recognized, like a girl talking in her sleep.

  The hothouse heat of the swimming pool and the close presence of Mr. Diehl, a man she had always instinctively avoided, had made her forget in a sense why they were standing here before the water. Somewhere in a dressing room, she remembered, there was a woman who in a little while was going to do something wrong that would displease Mr. Diehl, and suddenly she felt glad this was so.

  “Mr. Diehl, I am going,” she said, but she made no motion to leave, and he knew from her words that she was not going. They were going on talking, he knew. It was like his students, some of them said they could never be champions, but they always were. He made them so. Some of the timid ones said they could never swim, the water was terror to them, but they always did swim. Mr. Diehl had never known failure with anything. He never said this but he showed it.

  “Now you listen to me,” Mr. Diehl said. “All you have to do is go and tell her. She can sit outside with you and watch television.”

  “The set isn’t working,” Polly said, and she walked over close to the edge of the pool.

  “Please come over here now,” Mr. Diehl said, and he took hold of her and brought her over to where he had been standing. “Polly, I would never have believed this of you.”

  “Believed what?” she said, and her mind could not remember now again why exactly they were together here. She kept looking around as though perhaps she had duties she had forgotten somewhere. Then, as she felt more and more unlike herself, she put her hand on Mr. Diehl’s arm.

  “Believed,” he was saying, and she saw his white teeth near her as though the explanation of everything were in the teeth themselves—“believed you would act so incorrigible. So bad, Polly. Yes, that’s the word. Bad.”

  “Incorrigible,” she repeated, and she wondered what exactly that had always meant. It was a word that had passed before her eyes a few times but nobody had ever pronounced it to her.

  “I would never want your grandmother to even know we have had to have this long argument. I will never tell her.”

  “I will never tell her,” Polly said, expressionless, drowsily echoing his words.

  “Thank you, Polly, and of course I didn’t mean to tell you you didn’t have to. But listen to me.”

  She put her hand now very heavily on his arm and leaned there.

  “Are you all right, Polly,” he said, and she realized suddenly that it was the first time he had ever really been aware of her being anything at all, and now when it was too late, when she felt too bad to even tell him, he had begun to grow aware.

  “Polly,” he said.

  “Yes, Mr. Diehl,” she answered and suddenly he looked down at her hand on his arm, it was pressing there, and he had become, of course, conscious of it.

  He did not know what to do, she realized, and ill as she felt, the pleasure of having made him uncomfortable soothed her. She knew she was going to be very ill, but she had had at least, then, this triumph, the champion was also uncomfortable.

  “You’ll go and tell her then,” Mr. Diehl said, but she knew now that he was not thinking about the woman anymore. The woman, the lesson, the pool had all lost their meaning and importance now.

  “Polly,” he said.

  “I will tell her,” she managed to say, still holding him tight.

  “Polly, what is it?” he exclaimed.

  He took her arm off him roughly, and his eyes moved about the room as though he were looking for somebody to help. His eyes fell cursorily upon the commander’s son, and then back to her, but it was already too late, she had begun to topple toward him, her hands closed over his arms, and her head went pushing into his chest, rushing him with a strength he had seldom felt before.

  When they fell into the water it was very difficult for him to get hold of her at all. She had swallowed so much water, and she had struck at him so hard, and had said words all the time nobody could have understood or believed but him. It was her speaking and struggling, as he said later, which had caused her to swallow so much water.

  He had had to give her partial artificial respiration, a thing he had not done really in all his life, although he had taken all the courses in it as befitted a champion swimmer.

  “Get out of the pool for God’s sake and call somebody,” Mr. Diehl yelled to the commander’s son, and the boy left off hanging to the rubber tire, and slowly began to climb out of the shallow water.

  “Get some speed on there, for Christ’s sake,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” the commander’s son replied.

  “I can’t be responsible for this whole goddam thing,” he shouted after the retreating boy.

  “Now see here, Polly, for Christ’s sake,” Mr. Diehl began looking down at her.

  She opened her eyes and looked at him.

  “You certainly pulled one over me!” he cried, looking at her, rage and fear on his mouth.

  She lay there watching his chest move, feeling the drops of water falling over her from his body, and smelling behind the strong chemical odor of the pool the strong smell that must be Mr. Diehl himself, the champion.

  “I’ll go tell her now,” Polly said.

  Mr. Diehl stared at her.

  “She must never come here at all,” Polly said. “I think I see that now.”

  Mr. Diehl stretched out his hand to her to lift her up.

  “Go away, please,” she said. “Don’t lean over me, please, and let the water fall from you on me. Please, please go back into the pool. I don’t want you close now. Go b
ack into the pool.”

  MRS. BENSON

  “Idon’t know why Mrs. Carlin entertained,” Mrs. Benson admitted. “She didn’t like it, and she couldn’t do it.”

  “I had to sit an entire hour under one of those potted palms she had in her house,” Mrs. Benson’s daughter, Wanda, recalled. “There was a certain odor about it—whether from the soil, or the plant, or the paper about the container. I felt terribly uncomfortable.”

  The two women, Wanda Walters, unmarried and thirty, from Philadelphia, and her mother, who lived in Europe, and had been married many times, and who was now Mrs. Benson, had nearly finished their tea, in an English tearoom within walking distance from the American Express, in Paris.

  Mrs. Benson had known the English tearoom for many years, though she could never exactly remember its French name, and so could not ever recommend it to her friends, and she and her daughter, when they had their yearly reunions in Paris, always came to it. Their meeting in Paris this year had been rather a prolonged one, owing to Wanda’s having failed to get a return passage to the States, and it had been a summer that was hot, humid, and gray—and not eventful for either of them.

  This year, too, they found themselves going less and less anywhere at all, and they were somewhat embarrassed—at least, Mrs. Benson said she was—to find that they spent the better part of the day in the English tearoom, talking, for the most part, about people they had both known in Philadelphia twenty-odd years ago, when Wanda had been “little,” and when Mrs. Benson—well, as she said, had at least had a different name!

  It was the first time in many years, perhaps the first, that Mrs. Benson had really talked with her daughter at length about anything (they had always traveled before, as the older woman said), and certainly the first time in Wanda’s memory that they had talked at all about “back home,” as Mrs. Benson now called it with a chilly, condescending affection. And if their French or American friends happened by now, Mrs. Benson, if not Wanda, expressed by a glance or word a certain disappointment that their “talk” must be interrupted.

  Mrs. Benson had made it a fixed practice not to confide in her daughter (she had once said to a close friend of hers: “I don’t know my daughter, and it’s a bit too late to begin!”), but the name Mrs. Carlin, which had come into their conversation so haphazardly, as if dropped from the awning of the café, together with the gloominess of their Paris, had set Mrs. Benson off. Mrs. Carlin came to open up a mine of confidences and single isolated incidents.