The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  A tiny screen was thrown up around the horsehair sofa, and while Mrs. Owens and Pearl waited as if for a performance to begin, Cole, a Norwegian, as it turned out, quietly got Mr. Evening’s old business clothes off, and clad him in gleaming green and shell silk pajamas, and in a lightning single stride across the room carried the invalid to the bed, propped him up in a layer of cushions and pillows so that he looked as a matter of fact more seated now than when he had spent those days and nights in the big chair downstairs.

  Although food had been brought for all of them, seated in different sections of the immense room, that is for Pearl, Mrs. Owens, and Mr. Evening, only Pearl partook of any. Mr. Evening, sunk in cushions, looked nowhere in particular, certainly not at his food. Mrs. Owens, ignoring her own repast (some sort of roast game), produced from the folds of her organdy gown a jewel-studded lorgnette, and began reading aloud in droning monotone a list of rare antiques, finally naming with emphasis a certain ormolu clock, which caused Mr. Evening to cry out, “If you please, read no more while I am dining!” although he had not touched a morsel.

  Mrs. Owens put down the paper, waved it against her like a fan, and having put away her lorgnette came over to the counterpane of the bed.

  She bent over him like a physician and he closed his eyes. The scent which came from her bosom was altogether like that of a garden by the sea.

  “Our whole life together, certainly,” she began, like one talking in her sleep, “was to have been an enumeration of effects. I construed it so, at any rate. . . . I had thought,” she went on, “that you would be attentive. . . . I procured these special glasses”—she touched the lorgnette briefly—“and if I may be allowed an explanation, I thought I would read to you since I no longer read to myself, and may I confess it, while I lifted my eyes occasionally from the paper, I hoped to rest them by letting them light on your fine features. . . . If you are to deprive me of that pleasure, dear Mr. Evening, say so, and new arrangements and new preparations can be made.”

  She pressed her hand now on the bed, as if to test its quality.

  “I do not think even so poor an observer and so indifferent a guest as yourself can be unaware of the stupendous animation, movement, preparation, the entire metamorphosis indeed which your coming here has entailed. Mark me, I am willing to do more for you, but if I am to be deprived of the simple and may I say sole pleasure left to me, reading a list of precious heirlooms and at the same time resting my eyes from time to time on you, then say so, then excuse me, pray, and allow me to depart from my own house.”

  Never one endowed with power over language, Mr. Evening, at this, the most dramatic moment in his life, could only seize Mrs. Owens’s pliant bejeweled hand in his rough, chapped one, hold her finger to his face, and cry, “No!”

  “No what?” she said, withdrawing her hand, a tiny indication of pleasure, however, moving her lips.

  Raising himself up from the hillock of cushions, he got out, “What about the things I was doing out there,” and he pointed haphazardly in the direction of where he thought his shop might possibly lie.

  Mrs. Owens shook her head. “Whatever you did out there, Mr. Evening”—she looked down at him—“or, rather, amend that, sir, to this; you are now doing whatever and more than you could have ever done elsewhere. . . . This is your home!” she cried, and as if beside herself, “Your work is here, and only here!”

  “Am I as ill as everything points to?” He turned to Pearl, who continued to dine.

  Pearl looked to her sister for instructions.

  “I don’t know how you could be so self-centered as to talk about a minor upset of the urinary tract as illness”—Mrs. Owens raised her voice—“especially when we have prepared a list like this”—she tapped with her lorgnette on the inventory of antiques—“which you can’t be ass enough not to know will one day be yours!”

  Mrs. Owens stood up and fixed him with her gaze.

  Mr. Evening’s eyes fell then like dropping balls to the floor, where the unobtainable ingrain carpets, unobserved by him till then, rested beneath them like live breathing things. He wept shamelessly and Mrs. Owens restrained what might have been a grin.

  He dried his eyes slowly on the napkin which she had proffered him.

  “If you would have at least the decency to pretend to drink your coffee, you would see your cup,” she said.

  “Yes,” she sighed, as she studied Mr. Evening’s disoriented features as he now caught sight of the 1910 hand-painted cup within his very fingertip, unobserved by him earlier, as had been the ingrain carpets. “Yes,” Mrs. Owens continued, “while I have gained back my eyesight, as it were”—she raised her lorgnette briefly—“others are to all practical purposes sand-blind . . . Pearl”—she turned to her sister—“you may be excused from the room.

  “My dear Mr. Evening,” Mrs. Owens said, her voice materially altered once Pearl had disappeared.

  He had put down the 1910 cup, perhaps because it seemed unthinkable to drink out of anything so irreplaceable, and so delicate that a mere touch of his lips might snap it.

  “You can’t possibly now go out of my life.” Mrs. Owens half-stretched out her hand to him.

  He supposed she had false teeth, they were too splendid for real, yet all of her suddenly was splendid, and from her person again came a succession of wild fragrance, honeysuckle, jasmine, flowers without names, one perfume succeeding another in enervating succession, as various as all her priceless heirlooms.

  “Winter, even to a Southerner, dear Mr. Evening, can offer some tender recompense, and for me, whose blood, if I may be allowed to mention it again, is incapable of thinning.” Here she turned down the bedclothes clear to his feet. The length of his feet and the beautiful architecture of his bare instep caused her for a moment to hesitate.

  “I’m certain,” she kept her words steady, placing an icy hand under the top of his pajamas, and letting it rest, as if in permanent location on his breast, “that you are handsome to the eye all over.”

  His teeth chattered briefly, as he felt her head come down on him so precipitously, but she seemed content merely to rest on his bare chest. He supposed he would catch an awful cold from it all, but he did not move, hearing her say, “And after I’m gone, all—all of it will be yours, and all I ask in return, Mr. Evening, is that all days be Thursday from now on.”

  He lay there without understanding how it had occurred, whether a servant had entered or her hands with the quickness of hummingbirds had done the trick, but there he was naked as he had come into the world, stretched out in the bed that was his exact length at last and which allowed him to see just what an unusually tall young man he was indeed.

  ON THE REBOUND

  “Frankly, gentlemen,” Rupert Douthwaite reflected one gray afternoon in January to a few of us Americans who visited him from time to time in his “exile” in London, “no one in New York, no one who counted, ever expected to see Georgia Comstock back in town,” and here Rupert nodded on the name, in his coy, pompous, but somewhat charming way, meaning for us to know she was an heiress, meaning she had “everything,” otherwise he would not be mentioning her. “She sat right there.” He pointed to a refurbished heirloom chair which had accompanied him from New York. “I would never have dreamed Georgia would sue for a favor, least of all to me, for, after all”—he touched a colorful sideburn—“if you will allow me to remind you, it was I who replaced Georgia so far as literary salons were concerned.” He groaned heavily, one of his old affectations, and took out his monocle, one of his new ones, and let it rest on the palm of his hand like an expiring butterfly. “Georgia’s was, after all, the only bona fide salon in New York for years and years—I say that, kind friends, without modification. It was never elegant, never grand, never comme il faut, granted, any more than poor Georgia was. She was plain, mean, and devastating, with her own consistent vulgarity and bad taste, but she had the energy of a fiend out of hot oil and she turned that energy into establishing the one place where everybody
had to turn up on a Thursday in New York, whether he liked it or not.

  “When the dear thing arrived, then, at my place after her long banishment, I was pained to see how much younger she’d gotten. It didn’t become her. I preferred her old, let’s say. It was obvious she’d had the finest face-lifting job Europe can bestow. (You know how they’ve gone all wrong in New York on that. You remember Kathryn Combs, the film beauty. One eye’s higher than the other now, dead mouth, and so on, so that I always feel when Kathryn’s about I’m looking into an open casket.) But Georgia! Well, she hardly looked forty.

  “Now, mind you, I knew she hadn’t come back to New York to tell me she loved me—the woman’s probably hated me all my life, no doubt about it, but whatever she’d come for, I had to remind myself she had been helpful when Kitty left me.” Rupert referred openly now to his third wife, the great New York female novelist who had walked out on him for, in his words, a shabby little colonel. “Yes,” he sighed now, “when all the papers were full of my divorce before I myself hardly knew she had left me, Georgia was most understanding, even kind, moved in to take care of me, hovered over me like a mother bird, and so on. I had been ready to jump in the river, and she, bitch that she is, brought me round. And so when she appeared five years to the day after New York had kicked her out, and with her brand-new face, I saw at once she had come on a matter as crucial to her as my bust-up had been with Kitty, but I confess I never dreamed she had come to me because she wanted to begin all over again (begin with a salon, I mean of course). Nobody decent begins again, as I tried to tell her immediately I heard what she was up to. She’d been living in Yugoslavia, you know, after the New York fiasco. . . .

  “When she said she did indeed want to begin again, I simply replied, ‘Georgia, you’re not serious and you’re not as young as you look either, precious. You can’t know what you’re saying. Maybe it’s the bad New York air that’s got you after the wheat fields and haymows of Slavonia.’

  “ ‘Rupert, my angel,’ she intoned, ‘I’m on my knees to you, and not rueful to be so! Help me to get back and to stay back, dearest!’

  “ ‘Nonsense’—I made her stop her dramatics—‘I won’t hear of it, and you won’t hear of it either when you’re yourself again.’

  “I was more upset than I should have been, somehow. Her coming and her wish for another try at a salon made me aware what was already in the wind, something wicked that scared me a little, and I heard myself voicing it when I said, ‘Everything has changed in New York, sweety, since you’ve been away. You wouldn’t know anybody now. Most of the old writers are too afraid to go out even for a stroll anymore, and the new ones, you see, meet only on the parade ground. The salon, dear love, I’m afraid, is through.’

  “ ‘I feel I can begin again, Rupert, darling.’ She ignored my speech. ‘You know it was everything to me, it’s everything now. Don’t speak to me of the Yugoslav pure air and haymows.’

  “Well, I looked her up and down, and thought about everything. There she was, worth twenty million she’d inherited from her pa’s death, and worth another six or seven million from what the movies gave her for her detective novels, for Georgia was, whether you boys remember or not, a novelist in her own right. Yet here she was, a flood of grief. I’ve never seen a woman want anything so much, and in my day I’ve seen them with their tongues hanging out for just about everything.

  “ ‘Let me fix you a nice tall frosty drink like they don’t have in Zagreb, angel, and then I’m going to bundle you up and send you home to bed.’ But she wouldn’t be serious. ‘Rupert, my love, if as you said I saved you once’ (she overstated, of course), ‘you’ve got to save me now.’

  “She had come to the heart of her mission.

  “ ‘What did I do wrong before, will you tell me,’ she brought out after a brief struggle with pride. ‘Why was I driven out of New York, my dear boy. Why was I blacklisted, why was every door slammed in my face.’ She gave a short sob.

  “ ‘Georgia, my sweet, if you don’t know why you had to leave New York, nobody can tell you.’ I was a bit abrupt.

  “ ‘But I don’t, Rupert!’ She was passionate. ‘Cross my heart,’ she moaned. ‘I don’t.’

  “I shook my finger at her.

  “ ‘You sit there, dear Douthwaite, like the appointed monarch of all creation whose only burden is to say no to all mortal pleas.’ She laughed a little, then added, ‘Don’t be needlessly cruel, you beautiful thing.’

  “ ‘I’ve never been that,’ I told her. ‘Not cruel. But, Georgia, you know what you did, and said, the night of your big fiasco, after which oblivion moved in on you. You burned every bridge, highway, and cowpath behind you when you attacked the Negro novelist Burleigh Jordan in front of everybody who matters on the literary scene.’

  “ ‘I? Attacked him?’ she scoffed.

  “ ‘My God, you can’t pretend you don’t remember.’ I studied her new mouth and chin. ‘Burleigh’s grown to even greater importance since you left, Georgia. First he was the greatest black writer, then he was the greatest Black, and, now, God knows what he is, I’ve not kept hourly track. But when you insulted him that night, though your ruin was already in the air, it was the end for you, and nearly the end for all of us. I had immediately to go to work to salvage my own future.’

  “ ‘Ever the master of overstatement, dear boy,’ she sighed.

  “But I was stony-faced.

  “ ‘So you mean what you say?’ she whined, after daubing an eye.

  “ ‘I mean only this, Georgia,’ I said, emphasizing the point in question. ‘I took over when you destroyed yourself’ (and I waited to let it sink in that my own salon, which had been so tiny when Georgia’s had been so big, had been burgeoning while she was away, and had now more than replaced her. I was her now, in a manner of speaking).

  “ ‘Supposing then you tell me straight out what I said to Burleigh.’ She had turned her back on me while she examined a new painting I had acquired, as a matter of fact, only a day or so before. I could tell she didn’t think much of it, for she turned from it almost at once.

  “ ‘Well?’ she prompted me.

  “ ‘Oh, don’t expect me to repeat your exact words after all the water has flowed under the bridge since you said them. Your words were barbarous, of course, but it was your well-known tone of voice, as well as the exquisitely snotty timing of what you said, that did the trick. You are the empress of all bitches, darling, and if you wrote books as stabbing as you talk, you’d have no peer. . . . You said in four or five different rephrasings of your original affidavit that you would never kiss a black ass if it meant you and your Thursdays were to be ground to powder.’

  “ ‘Oh, I completely disremember such a droll statement.’ She giggled.

  “Just then the doorbell rang, and in came four or five eminent writers, all of whom were surprised to see Georgia, and Georgia could not mask her own surprise that they were calling on me so casually. We rather ignored her then, but she wouldn’t leave, and when they found the bottles and things, and were chattering away, Georgia pushed herself among us, and began on me again.

  “At last more to get rid of her than anything else, I proposed to her the diabolic, unfeasible scheme which I claimed would reinstate her everywhere, pave the way for the reopening of her Thursday salon. I am called everywhere the most soulless cynic who ever lived, but I swear by whatever any of you hold holy, if you ever hold anything, that I never dreamed she would take me on when I said to her that all she’d be required to do was give Burleigh the token kiss she’d said she never would, to make it formal and she’d be back in business. You see, I thought she would leave in a huff when she heard my innocent proposal and that in a few days New York would see her no more—at least I’d be rid of her. Well, say she’d quaffed one too many of my frosty masterpieces, say again it was the poisonous New York air, whatever, I stood dumbfounded when I heard her say simply, ‘Then make it next Thursday, darling, and I’ll be here, and tell Burleigh not to fail u
s, for I’ll do it, Rupert, darling, I’ll do it for you, I’ll do it for all of us.’

  “The next day I rang to tell her of course that she wasn’t to take me seriously, that my scheme had been mere persiflage, etc. She simply rang off after having assured me the deal was on and she’d be there Thursday.

  “I was so angry with the bitch by then I rang up big black Burleigh and simply, without a word of preparation, told him. You see, Burleigh and I were more than friends at that time, let’s put it that way.” Rupert smirked a bit with his old self-assurance. “And,” he went on, “to my mild surprise, perhaps, the dear lion agreed to the whole thing with alacrity.

  “After a few hours of sober reflection, I panicked. I called Burleigh back first and tried to get him not to come. But Burleigh was at the height of a new wave of paranoia and idol worship and he could do no wrong. He assured me he wanted to come, wanted to go through with our scheme, which he baptized divine. I little knew then, of course, how well he had planned to go through with it, and neither, of course, did poor Georgia!

  “Then, of course, I tried again to get Georgia not to come. It was like persuading Joan of Arc to go back to her livestock. I saw everything coming then the way it did come, well, not everything.” Here he looked wistfully around at the London backdrop and grinned, for he missed New York even more when he talked about it, and he hadn’t even the makings of a salon in London, of course, though he’d made a stab at it.

  “I didn’t sleep the night before.” Rupert Douthwaite went on to describe the event to which he owed his ruin. “I thought I was daring, I thought I had always been in advance of everything—after all, my Thursdays had been at least a generation ahead of Georgia’s in smartness, taste, and éclat, and now, well, as I scented the fume-heavy air, somebody was about to take the lead over from me.