The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “Everybody came that night—wouldn’t you know it, some people from Washington, a tiresome princess or so, and indeed all the crowned heads from all the avenues of endeavor managed to get there, as if they sensed what was to come off. There was even that fat man from Kansas City who got himself circumcised a few seasons back to make the literary scene in New York.

  “Nobody recognized Georgia at first when she made her entrance, not even Burleigh. She was radiant, if slightly drawn, and for the first time I saw that her face-lifting job wasn’t quite stressproof, but still she only looked half her age, and so she was a howling success at first blush.

  “ ‘Now, my lovely’—I spoke right into her ear redolent of two-hundred-dollar-an-ounce attar of something—please bow to everybody and then go home—my car is downstairs parked directly by the door, Wilson is at the wheel. You’ve made a grand hit tonight, and now go while they’re all still cheering.

  “ ‘I’m going through with it, love.’ She was adamant, and I saw Burleigh catch the old thing’s eye and wink.

  “ ‘Not in my house, you won’t,’ I whispered to her, kissing her again and again in deadly desperation to disguise my murderous expression from the invited guests. ‘After all,’ I repeated, ‘my little scheme was proposed while we were both in our cups.’

  “ ‘And it’s in cups where the truth resides, Douthwaite, as the Latin proverb has it,’ and she kissed me on the lips and left me, walking around the room as in her old salon grandeur days, grasping everybody’s outstretched hand, letting herself be embraced and kissed. She was a stunning, dizzy success, and then suddenly I felt that neither she nor Burleigh had any intention of doing what they had agreed to do. I was the fool who had fallen for their trap.

  “When I saw what a hit she was making, I took too many drinks, for the more accolades she got, the angrier and more disturbed I became. I wasn’t going to let Georgia come back and replace me, whatever else might happen.

  “I went over to where Burleigh was being worshipped to death. He turned immediately to me to say, ‘Don’t you come over here, Ruppie, to ask me again not to do what I am sure as greased lightning I’m going to do, baby,’ and he smiled his angry smile at me.

  “ ‘Burleigh, dearest,’—I took him by the hand—‘I not only want you to go through with it bigger and grander but megatons more colossal than we had planned. That’s the message I have to give you,’ and I kissed and hugged him quietly.

  “I couldn’t be frightened now, and what I had just proposed to him was a little incredible even for me, even for me drunk, I had gone all out, I dimly realized, and asked for an assassination.

  “But the more I saw Georgia’s success with everybody, the more I wanted the horror that was going to happen. And then there was the size of her diamond. It was too much. No one wore diamonds that big in the set we moved in. She did it to hurt me, to show me up to the others, that whereas I might scrape up a million, let’s say, she had so much money she couldn’t add it all up short of two years of auditing.

  “Time passed. I looked in the toilet where Burleigh was getting ready, and hugged encouragement.

  “Then I felt the great calm people are said to feel on learning they have but six months to live. I gave up, got the easiest seat and the one nearest to the stage, and collapsed. People forgot me.

  “Still the hog of the scene, Georgia was moving right to where she knew she was to give her comeback performance.

  “Some last-minute celebrities had just come in, to whom I could only barely nod, a duchess, and some minor nobility, a senator, a diva, and somehow from somewhere a popular film critic of the hour who had discovered he was not homosexual, when with a boom and a guffaw Burleigh sails out of the john wearing feathers on his head but otherwise not a stitch on him.

  “I saw Georgia freeze ever so slightly—you see, in our original scheme nothing was said about nakedness, it was all, in any case, to have been a token gesture, she had thought—indeed I had thought, but she stopped, put down her glass, squared her shoulders like a good soldier, and waited.

  “Burleigh jumped up on my fine old walnut table cleared for the occasion. Everybody pretended to like it. Georgia began to weave around like a rabbit facing a python. Burleigh turned his back to her, and bent over, and with a war whoop extended his black biscuits to her. She stood reeling, waiting for the long count, then I heard, rather than saw, owing to heads in the way, her kissing his behind, then rising I managed to see him proffer his front and middle to her, everything there waving, when someone blotted out my view again, but I gathered from the murmur of the crowd she had gone through with it, and kissed his front too.

  “Then I heard her scream, and I got up in time to see that Burleigh had smeared her face with some black tarlike substance and left a few of his white turkey feathers over that.

  “I believe Georgia tried to pretend she had wanted this last too, and that it was all a grand charade, but her screams belied it, and she and Burleigh stood facing one another like victims of a car accident.

  “It had all failed, I realized immediately. Everybody was sickened or bored. Nothing was a success about it. Call it wrong timing, wrong people, wrong actors or hour of the evening, oh explain it any way you will, it was all ghastly and cruddy with nonsuccess.

  “I stumbled over to the back of my apartment, and feeling queasy, lay down on the floor near the rubber plant. I thought queerly of Kitty, who had, it seemed, just left me, and I—old novelist manqué—thought of all those novels I had written which publishers never even finished reading in typescript, let alone promised to publish, and I gagged loudly. People bent down to me and seemed to take my pulse, and then others began filing out, excusing themselves by a cough or nod, or stifling a feeble giggle. They thought I had fainted from chagrin. They thought I had not planned it. They thought I was innocent but ruined.

  “I have never seen such a clean, wholesale, bloody failure. Like serving a thin, warm soup and calling it baked Alaska.

  “I didn’t see anybody for weeks. Georgia, I understand, left for Prague a few days later. Only Burleigh was not touched by anything. Nothing can harm him, bad reviews, public derision, all he has to do is clap his hands, and crowds hoist him on their shoulders, the money falls like rain in autumn.

  “Burleigh has his own salon now, if you can call his big gatherings on Saturday a salon, and Georgia and I both belong to a past more remote than the French and Indian Wars.

  “To answer your first question, Gordon”—Rupert turned now to me, for I was his favorite American of the moment—“I’ve found London quieting, yes, but it’s not my world exactly, sweety, since I’m not in or of it, but that’s what I need, isn’t it, to sit on the sidelines for a season and enjoy a statelier backdrop? I don’t quite know where Georgia is. Somebody says it’s Bulgaria.”

  LILY’S PARTY

  As Hobart came through the door of Crawford’s Home Dinette, his eyes fell on Lily sitting alone at one of the big back tables, eating a piece of pie.

  “Lily! Don’t tell me! You’re supposed to be in Chicago!” he ejaculated.

  “Who supposed I was to be?” Lily retorted, letting her fork cut quickly into the pie.

  “Well, I’ll damn me if—” He began to speak in a humming sort of way while pulling out a chair from under her table and sitting down unbidden. “Why, everybody thought you went up there to be with Edward.”

  “Edward! He’s the last person on this earth I would go anywhere to be with. And I think you know that!” Lily never showed anger openly, and if she was angry now, at least she didn’t let it stop her from enjoying her pie.

  “Well, Lily, we just naturally figured you had gone to Chicago when you weren’t around.”

  “I gave your brother Edward two of the best years of my life.” Lily spoke with the dry accent of someone testifying in court for a second time. “And I’m not about to go find him for more of what he gave me. Maybe you don’t remember what I got from him, but I do. . . .”

 
“But where were you, Lily? . . . We all missed you!” Hobart harped on her absence.

  “I was right here all the time, Hobart, for your information.” As she said this, she studied his mouth somewhat absentmindedly. “But as to your brother, Edward Starr,” she continued, and then paused as she kept studying his mouth as if she found a particular defect there which had somehow escaped scrutiny hitherto. “As to Edward,” she began again, and then stopped, struck her fork gingerly against the plate, “he was a number-one poor excuse for a husband, let me tell you. He left me for another woman, if you care to recall, and it was because of his neglect that my little boy passed away. . . . So let’s say I don’t look back on Edward, and am not going to any Chicago to freshen up on my recollections of him. . . .”

  She quit studying his mouth, and looked out the large front window through which the full October moon was beginning its evening climb.

  “At first I will admit I was lonesome, and with my little boy lying out there in the cemetery, I even missed as poor an excuse for a man as Edward Starr, but believe you me, that soon passed.”

  She put down her fork now that she had eaten all the pie, laid down some change on the bare white ash wood of the table, and then, closing her purse, sighed, and softly rose.

  “I only know,” Lily began, working the clasp on her purse, “that I have begun to find peace now. . . . Reverend McGilead, as you may be aware, has helped me toward the light. . . .”

  “I have heard of Reverend McGilead,” Hobart said in a voice so sharp she looked up at him while he held the screen door open for her.

  “I am sure you have heard nothing but good then,” she shot back in a voice that was now if not deeply angry, certainly unsteady.

  “I will accompany you home, Lily.”

  “You’ll do no such thing, Hobart. . . . Thank you, and good evening.”

  He noticed that she was wearing no lipstick, and that she did not have on her wedding ring. She also looked younger than when she had been Edward Starr’s wife.

  “You say you have found peace with this new preacher.” Hobart spoke after her retreating figure. “But under this peace, you hate Edward Starr,” he persisted. “All you said to me tonight was fraught with hate.”

  She turned briefly and looked at him, this time in the eyes. “I will find my way, you can rest assured, despite your brother and you.”

  He stayed in front of the door of the dinette and watched her walk down the moonlit-white road toward her house that lay in deep woods. His heart beat violently. All about where he stood were fields and crops and high trees, and the sailing queen of heaven was the only real illumination after one went beyond the dinette. No one came down this small road with the exception of lovers who occasionally used it for their lane.

  Well, Lily was a sort of mystery woman, he had to admit to himself. And where, then, did the rumor arise that she had been to Chicago. And now he felt she had lied to him, that she had been in Chicago after all and had just got back.

  Then without planning to do so, hardly knowing indeed he was doing so, he began following after her from a conveniently long distance down the moonlit road. After a few minutes of pursuing her, he saw someone come out from one of the ploughed fields. The newcomer was a tall still-youthful man with the carriage of an athlete rather than that of a farmer. He almost ran toward Lily. Then they both stopped for a moment, and after he had touched her gently on the shoulder they went on together. Hobart’s heart beat furiously, his temple throbbed, a kind of film formed over his lips from his mouth rushing with fresh saliva. Instead of following them directly down the road, he now edged into the fields and pursued them more obliquely. Sometimes the two ahead of him would pause, and there was some indication the stranger was about to leave Lily, but then from something they said to one another, the couple continued on together. Hobart would have liked to get closer to them so that he might hear what they were saying, but he feared discovery. At any rate, he could be sure of one thing, the man walking with her was not Edward, and also he was sure that whoever he was he was her lover. Only lovers walked that way together, too far apart at one time, too weaving and close together another time: their very breathing appeared uneven and heavy the way their bodies swayed. Yes, Hobart realized, he was about to see love being made, and it made him walk unsteadily, almost to stumble. He only hoped he could keep a rein on his feelings and would not make his presence known to them.

  When he saw them at last turn into her cottage he longed for the strength to leave them, to go back home to forget Lily, forget his brother Edward, whom he was certain Lily had been “cheating” all through their marriage (even he had been intimate once with Lily when Edward was away on a trip, so that he had always wondered if the child she bore him in this marriage might not have been after all his, but since it was dead, he would not think of it again).

  Her cottage had a certain fame. There were no other houses about, and the windows of her living room faced the thick forest. Here she could have done nearly whatever she liked and nobody would have been the wiser, for unless one had stood directly before the great window which covered almost the entire width of her room, any glimpse within was shut out by foliage, and sometimes by heavy mist.

  Hobart knew that this man, whoever he was, had not come tonight for the purpose of imparting Jesus’ love to her but his own. He had heard things about this young preacher Reverend McGilead, he had been briefed on his “special” prayer meetings, and had got the implication the man of the cloth had an excess of unburned energy in his makeup. He shouted too loud during his sermons, people said, and the veins in his neck were ready to burst with the excess of blood that ran through him.

  From Hobart’s point of observation, in the protection of a large spruce tree, nothing to his surprise he saw whom he believed to be the young preacher take her in his arms. But then what happened was unforeseen, undreamed of indeed, for with the rapidity of a professional gymnast, the preacher stripped off his clothing in a trice, and stood in the clear illumination of her room not covered by so much as a stitch or thread. Lily herself looked paralyzed, as rodents are at the sudden appearance of a serpent. Her eyes were unfocused on anything about her, and she made no attempt to assist him as he partially undressed her. But from the casual way he acted, it was clear they had done this before. Yes, Hobart confessed to himself, in the protective dark of the tree under which he stood, one would have expected certainly something more gradual from lovers. He would have thought that the young preacher would have talked to her for at least a quarter of an hour, that he would have finally taken her hand, then perhaps kissed her, and then oh so slowly and excitingly, for Hobart at least, would have undressed her, and taken her to himself.

  But this gymnast’s performance quite nonplussed the observer by the spruce tree. For one thing, the gross size of the preacher’s sex, its bulging veins and unusual angry redness, reminded him of sights seen by him when he had worked on a farm. It also recalled a surgical operation he had witnessed performed by necessity in a doctor’s small, overcrowded office. The preacher now had pushed Lily against the wall, and worked vigorously at, and then through, her. His eyes rolled like those of a man being drawn unwillingly into some kind of suction machine, and saliva suddenly poured out of his mouth in great copiousness so that he resembled someone blowing up an enormous balloon. His neck and throat were twisted convulsively, and his nipples tightened as if they were being given over to rank torture.

  At this moment, Hobart, without realizing he was doing so, came out from his hiding place, and strode up to the window, where he began waving his arms back and forth in the manner of a man flagging a truck. (Indeed Lily later was to believe that she thought she had seen a man with two white flags in his hands signaling for help.)

  Lily’s screams at being discovered broke the peace of the neighborhood, and many watchdogs from about the immediate vicinity began barking in roused alarm.

  “We are watched!” she was finally able to get out. Then she gave
out three uncadenced weak cries. But the preacher, his back to the window, like a man in the throes of some grave physical malady, could only concentrate on what his body dictated to him, and though Lily now struggled to be free of him, this only secured him the more tightly to her. Her cries now rose in volume until they reached the same pitch as that of the watchdogs.

  Even Hobart, who had become as disoriented perhaps as the couple exhibited before him, began making soft outcries, and he continued to wave his arms fruitlessly.

  “No, no, and no!” Lily managed now to form and speak these words. “Whoever you are out there, go, go away at once!”

  Hobart now came directly up to the window. He had quit waving his arms, and he pressed his nose and mouth against the pane.

  “It’s me,” he cried reassuringly. “Hobart, Edward Starr’s brother! Can’t you see?” He was, he managed to realize, confused as to what he now should do or say, but he thought that since he had frightened them so badly and so seriously disturbed their pleasure, he had best identify himself, and let them know he meant no harm. But his calling to them only terrified Lily the more, and caused her young partner to behave like someone struggling in deep water.

  “Hobart Starr here!” the onlooker called to them, thinking they may have mistaken him for a housebreaker.

  “Oh merciful Lord,” Lily moaned. “If it is you, Hobart Starr, please go away. Have that much decency—” She tried to finish the sentence through her heavy breathing.

  The preacher at this moment tore off the upper part of Lily’s dress, and her breasts and nipples looked out from the light into the darkness at Hobart like the troubled faces of children.

  “I’m coming into the house to explain!” Hobart called to them inside.

  “You’ll do no such thing! No, no, Hobart!” Lily vociferated back to him, but the intruder dashed away from the window, stumbling over some low-lying bushes, and then presently entered the living room, where the preacher was now moaning deeply and beginning even at times to scream a little.