The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  Mr. Evening, ignored by both ladies, had sat down. He had not been drinking, Mrs. Owens’s first impression, but his cheeks were beet-red from cold, and he looked, she saw with uneasy observation, more handsome and much younger than on his first call.

  “I hate snow intensely.” Mrs. Owens studied his pants cuffs heavy with flakes. “Yet going south somewhere”—it was not clear to whom she was speaking from this time on—“that would be now too much in the way of preparation merely to avoid winter wet. . . . At one time traveling itself was home to me, of course,” she continued, and her hands fell on a massive yellowed ivory paper-opener with a larger than customary blade. “One was put up in those days, not hurled over landscape like an electric particle. One wore clothes, one ‘appeared’ at dinner, which was an occasion, one conversed, listened, or merely sat with eyes averted, one rose, was looked after, watched over, if you will, one was often more at home going in those days than when one remained home, or reached one’s destination.”

  Mrs. Owens stopped, mortified by a yawn from Mr. Evening. Reduced to a kind of quivering dumbness, Mrs. Owens could only restrain herself, remembering the “agreement.”

  A butler appeared wearing green goggles and at a nearly imperceptible nod from Mrs. Owens picked up a minuscule marble-topped gold inlaid table, and placed it within a comfortable arm’s reach of Mr. Evening. Later, another servant brought something steaming under silver receptacles from the kitchen.

  “Unlike the flock of crows in flight today”—Mrs. Owens’s voice seemed to come across footlights—“I can remember all my traveling.” She turned the pages of Flaxman with critical quickness. “And that means in my case the globe, all of it, when it was largely inaccessible, and certainly infrequently commented or written upon by tradespeople and typists.” She concentrated a moment in silence as if remembering perhaps how old she was and how far off her travel had been. “I didn’t miss a country, however unrecommended or unlisted by some guide or hotel bursar. There’s no point in going now or leaving one’s front door when every dot on the map has been ground to dust by somebody’s heavy foot. When everybody is en route, stay home! . . . Pearl, my dear, you’re not looking at your plate!”

  Pearl, who had finished her fish, was touching with nearsighted uncertainty the linen tablecloth with a gleaming fork. “Wear your glasses, dear child, for heaven’s sake, or you’ll stab yourself!”

  Mr. Evening had closed his eyes. He appeared like one who must impress upon himself not to touch food in a strange house. But the china on his table was stunning, though obviously brand-new and therefore not “anything.” At last, however, against his better judgment, he lifted one of the cups, then set it down noiselessly. Immediately the butler poured him coffee. Against his will, he drank a tablespoon or so, for after the wet and cold he needed at least a taste of something hot. It was an unbelievable brew, heady, clear, fresh. Mrs. Owens immediately noted the pleasure on his face, and a kind of shiver ran through her. Her table, ever nonpareil, might win him, she saw, where nothing in her other “offerings” tonight had reached him.

  “After travel was lost to me,” Mrs. Owens went on in the manner of someone who is dictating memoirs to a machine, “the church failed likewise to hold me. Even then” (one felt she referred to the early years of another century), “they had let in every kind of speaker. The church had begun to offer thought and problems instead of merging and repose. . . . So it went out of my life along with going abroad. . . . Then my eyes are not, well, not so bad as Pearl’s, who is blind without glasses, but reading tires me more and more, though I see the natural world of objects better perhaps now than ever before. Besides, I’ve read more than most, for I’ve had nothing in life but time. I’ve read, in sum, everything, and if there’s a real author, I’ve been through him often more than twice.”

  Mr. Evening now tried a slice of baked Alaska, and it won him. His beginning the meal backwards was hardly intentional, but he had looked so snowy the butler had poured the coffee first, and the coffee had suggested to the kitchen the dessert course instead of the entrée.

  Noting that Mr. Evening did not touch his wine, Mrs. Owens thought a moment, then began again, “Drinking has never been a consolation to me either. Life might have been more endurable, perhaps, especially in this epoch,” and she looked at her glass, down scarcely two ounces. “Therefore spirits hardly needed to join travel in the things I’ve eliminated. . . .” Gazing upwards, she brought out, “The human face, perhaps strangely enough, is really all that has been left to me,” and after a moment’s consultation with herself, she looked obliquely at Mr. Evening, who halted conveying his fork, full of meringue, to his mouth. “I need the human face, let’s say.” She talked into the thick pages of the Flaxman drawings. “I can’t stare at my servants, though outsiders have praised their fetching appeal. (I can’t look at what I’ve acquired, I’ve memorized it too well.) No, I’m talking about the unnegotiable human face. Somebody,” she said, looking nowhere now in particular, “has that, of course, while, on the other hand, I have what he wants badly, and so shall we say we are, if not a match, confederates of a sort.”

  Times had passed, if not swiftly, steadily. Morning itself was advancing. Mr. Evening, during the entire visit, having opened his mouth chiefly to partake of food whose taste alone invited him, since he had already dined, took up his napkin, wiped his handsome red lips on it, though it was, he saw, an indignity to soil such a piece of linen, and rose. Both Mrs. Owens and her sister had long since dozed or pretended to doze by the carefully tended log fire. He said good night therefore to stone ears, and went out the door.

  III

  It was the fifth Thursday of his visits to Mrs. Owens that the change which he had feared and suspected from the start, and which he was somehow incapable of averting, came about.

  Mrs. Owens and her sister had ignored him more and more on the occasion of his “calls,” and an onlooker, not in on the agreement, might have thought his presence was either distasteful to the ladies, or that he was too insignificant—an impecunious relative, perhaps—to merit the bestowal of a glance or word.

  The spell of the pretense of indifference, of not recognizing one another, ended haphazardly one hour when Pearl, without any preface of warning, said in a loud voice that strong light was being allowed to reach and ruin the ingrain carpet on the third floor.

  Before Mrs. Owens could take in the information or issue a command as to what might be done, if she intended indeed to do anything about protecting the carpet from light, she heard a certain flurry from the direction of the visitor, and turning saw what the mention of this special carpet had done to the face of Mr. Evening. He bore an expression of greed, passionate covetousness, one might even say a deranged, demented wish for immediate ownership. Indeed his countenance was so arresting in its eloquence that Mrs. Owens found herself, going against her own protocol, saying, “Are you quite all right, sir?” But before she had the words out of her mouth he had come over to her chair without waiting her permission.

  “Did you say ingrain carpet?” he asked with great abruptness.

  When Mrs. Owens, too astonished at his tone and movement, did not reply, she heard Mr. Evening’s peremptory: “Show it to me at once!”

  “If you have not taken leave of your senses, Mr. Evening,” Mrs. Owens began, bringing forth from the folds of her red cashmere dress an enormous gold chain, which she pressed, “would you be so kind, I might even say, so decent, as to remember our agreement, if you cannot remember who I am, and in whose house you are visiting.”

  Then, quickly, in a voice of annihilating anger, loud enough to be heard on a passing steamship: “You’ve not waited long enough, spoilsport!”

  Standing before her, jaws apart, an expression close to that of an idiot who has been slapped into brief attention, he could only stutter something inaudible.

  Alarmed by her own outburst, Mrs. Owens hastened to add, “It’s not ready to be shown, my dear, special friend.”

  Mrs.
Owens took his hands now in hers, and kissed them gently.

  Kneeling before her, not letting go her chill handclasp, looking up into her furrowed rouged cheeks, “Allow me one glimpse,” he beseeched.

  She extricated her hands from his and touched his forehead.

  “Quite out of the question.” She seemed almost to flirt now, and her voice had gone up an octave. “But the day will come”—she motioned for him to seat himself again—“before one perhaps is expecting it. You have only hope ahead of you, dear Mr. Evening.”

  Obeying her, he seated himself again, and his look of crestfallen abject submissiveness, coupled with fear, comforted and strengthened Mrs. Owens so that she was able to smile tentatively.

  “No one who does not live here, you see, can see the carpet.” She was almost apologetic for her tirade, certainly she was consoling.

  He bent his head.

  Then they heard the wind from the northeast, and felt the huge shutter on the front of the house struggle as if for life. The snow followed soon after, hard as hail.

  Tenting him to the quick, Mrs. Owens studied Mr. Evening’s incipient immobility, and after waiting to see whether it would pass, and as she suspected, noted that it did not, she rang for the night servant, gave the latter cursory instructions, and then sat studying her guest until the servant returned with a tiny decanter and a sliver of handsome glass, setting these by Mr. Evening, who lightly caressed both vessels.

  “Alas, Mr. Evening, they’re only new,” Mrs. Owens said.

  He did not remember more until someone put a lap robe over his knees, and he knew the night had advanced into the glimmerings of dawn, and that he therefore must have slept upright in the chair all those hours, fortified by nips from the brandy, which, unlike the glass that contained it, was ancient.

  When morning had well advanced, he found he could not rise. A new attendant, with coal-black sideburns and ashen cheeks, assisted him to the bathroom, helped him bathe and then held him securely under the armpits while he urinated a stream largely blood. He stared into the bowl but regarded the crimson pool there without particular interest or alarm.

  Then he was back in the chair again, the snow still pelted the shutters, and the east wind raved like lunatics helpless without sedation.

  Although he was certain Mrs. Owens passed from time to time in the adjoining room—who could fail to recognize her tread, as dominating and certain as her resonant voice—she did not enter that day either to look at him or inquire. Occasionally he heard, to his acute distress, dishes being moved and, so it seemed, placed in straw.

  Once or twice he thought he heard her clap her hands, an anachronism so imperial he found himself giggling convulsively. He also heard a parrot screech, and then almost immediately caught the sound of its cage being taken up and the cries of the bird retreating further and further into total silence.

  Some time later he was served food so highly seasoned, so copiously sprinkled with herbs and spices that added to his disinclination to partake of food, he could not identify a morsel of what he tasted.

  Then Giles reappeared, with a sterling-silver basin, a gleaming tray of verbena soap, and improbably enough, looking up at him, his own straight razor, for if it was one thing in the world of manhood he had mastered, it was to shave beautifully with a razor, an accomplishment he had learned from his captain in military school.

  “How did they get my own things fetched here, Giles?” he inquired, with no real interest in having his question answered.

  “We’ve had to bring everything, under the circumstances,” Giles replied in a hollow vestryman’s voice.

  Mr. Evening lay back then, while he felt the servant’s hands tuck a blanket about his slippers and thighs.

  “Mrs. Owens thinks it’s because your blood is thinner than we Northerners that the snow affects you in this way.” Giles offered a tentative explanation of the young man’s plight.

  Suddenly from directly overhead, Mr. Evening heard carpenters, loud as if in the room with him, sawing and hammering. He stirred uncomfortably in his stocking feet.

  In the hall directly in line with his chair, though separated by a kind of heavy partition, Mrs. Owens and two gentlemen of vaguely familiar voices were doing a loud inventory of “effects.”

  Preparations for an auction must be in progress, Mr. Evening decided. He now heard with incipient unease and at the same time a kind of feeble ecstasy the names of every rare heirloom in the trade, but these great objects’ names were loudly hawked, checked, callously enumerated, and the whole proceedings were carried off with a kind of rage and contempt in the voice of the auctioneer so that one had the impression the most priceless and rarest treasures worthy finally of finding a home only in the Louvre were being noted here prior to their being carted out in boxes and tossed into the bonfire. At one point in the inventory he let out a great cry of “Stop it!”

  The partition in the wall opened, and Mrs. Owens stood staring at him from about ten feet away; then after a look of what was meant perhaps to be total unrecognition or bilious displeasure, she closed the sliding panel fast, and the inventory was again in progress, louder, if anything, than before, the tone of the hawker’s voice more rasping and vicious.

  Following a long nap, he remembered two strangers, dressed in overalls, enter with a gleaming gold tape; they stooped down, grunting and querulous, and made meticulous if furtive movements of measuring him from head to toe, his sitting posture requiring them, evidently, to check their results more than once.

  Was it now Friday night, or had the weekend already passed, and were we arrived at Monday?

  The snow had continued unabated, so far as his memory served, though the wind was weaker, or more fitful, and the shutters nearly silent. He supposed all kinds of people had called on him at his lodgings. Then Giles appeared again, after Mr. Evening had passed more indistinct hours in his chair, and the servant helped him into the toilet, where he passed thick clots of blood, and on his return to his chair Mr. Evening found himself face to face with his own large steamer trunk and a pair of valises.

  While he kept his eyes averted from the phenomenal appearance of his luggage, Giles combed and cut his long chestnut hair, trimmed the shagginess of his eyebrows, and massaged the back of his neck. Mr. Evening did not ask him if there was any reason or occasion for tonsorial attention, but at last he did inquire, more for breaking the lugubrious silence than for getting any pertinent answer, “What was the carpentering upstairs for, Giles?”

  The servant hesitated, stammered, and in his confusion came near nipping Mr. Evening’s ear with the barber’s shears, but at last answered the question in a loud whisper: “They’re remodeling the bed.”

  The room in which he had sat these past days, however many, four, six, a fortnight, perhaps, the room which had been Mrs. Owens’s and her sister’s on those first Thursday nights of his visits, was now only his alone, and the two women had passed on to other quarters in a house whose chambers were, like its heirlooms, difficult, perhaps impossible, to number.

  Limited to a kind of speechless listlessness—he assumed he must be very ill, though he did not wonder why no doctor came—and passing several hours without attendance, suddenly, in pique at being neglected, he employed Mrs. Owens’s own queer custom and clapped his hands peremptorily. A dark-skinned youth with severe bruises about his temples appeared and, without inquiry or greeting, adjusted Mr. Evening’s feet on a stool, poured him a drink of something red with a bitter taste, and, while he waited for the sick man to drink, made a gesture of inquiry as to whether Mr. Evening wished to relieve himself.

  More indistinct hours swam slowly into blurred unremembrance. At last the hammering, pounding, moving of furniture, together with the suffocating fumes of turpentine and paint, all ceased to molest him.

  Mrs. Owens, improbably, appeared again, accompanied by Pearl.

  “I am glad to see you better, Mr. Evening, needless to say,” Mrs. Owens began icily, and one could see at once that she app
eared some years younger, perhaps strong sunlight—now pouring in—flattered her, or could it be, he wondered, she had had recourse to plastic surgery during his illness, at any rate, she was much younger, while her voice was harsher, harder, more actresslike than ever before.

  “Because of your splendid recovery, we are therefore ready to move you into your room,” Mrs. Owens went on, “where, I’m glad to report, you’ll find more than one ingrain carpet spread out for you to rest your eyes on. . . . The bed,” she added after a careful pause, “I do hope will meet with your approval” (here he attempted to say something contradictory, but she indicated she would not allow it), “for its refashioning has cost all of us here some pains to make over.” Here he felt she would have used the word heirloom, but prevented herself from doing so. She said only, in conclusion, “You’re over, do you realize, six foot six in your stocking feet!”

  She studied him closely. “We couldn’t let you lie with your legs hanging out of the bedclothes!

  “Now, sir”—Mrs. Owens folded her arms—“can you move, do you suppose, to the next floor, provided someone, of course, assists you?”

  The next thing he remembered was being helped up the interminable winding staircase by a brace of servants, while Mrs. Owens and Pearl brought up the rear, Mrs. Owens talking away: “Those of us who are Northerners, Mr. Evening, have of course the blood from birth to take these terribly snowy days, Boreas and his blasts, the sight of Orion climbing the winter night, but our friends of Southern birth must be more careful. That is why we take such good care of you. You should have come, in any case, from the beginning and not kept picking away at a mere Thursday call,” she ended on a scolding note.

  The servants deposited Mr. Evening on a large horsehair sofa which in turn faced the longest bed he had ever set eyes on, counting any, he was certain, he had ever stared at in museums. And now it must be confessed that Mr. Evening, for all the length of him, had never from early youth slept in the kind of bed that his height and build required, for after coming into his fortune, he had continued to live in lodging houses which did not provide anything adequate for his physical measurements. Here at Mrs. Owens’s, where his living was all unchosen by him, he now saw the bed perfectly suited for his frame.