The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “What on earth possessed you.” Lily was beginning to speak when all at once the preacher’s mouth fell over hers, and he let out a great smothered roar, punctuated by drumlike rumblings from, apparently, his stomach.

  Hobart took a seat near the standing couple.

  The preacher was now free of Lily’s body at last, and he had slumped down on the floor, near where Hobart was sitting, and was crying out some word and then he began making sounds vaguely akin to weeping. Lily remained with her back and buttocks pressed against the wall, and was breathing hard, gasping indeed for breath. After her partner had quit his peculiar sobbing, he got up and put on his clothes, and walked out unsteadily into the kitchen. On the long kitchen table, the kind of table one would expect in a large school cafeteria, Hobart, from his chair, could spy at least fifteen pies of different kinds, all “homemade” by Lily expressly for the church social which was tomorrow.

  He could see the preacher sit down at the big table, and cut himself a piece of Dutch apple pie. His chewing sounds at last alerted Lily to what was happening, and she managed to hurry out to the kitchen in an attempt to halt him.

  “One piece of pie isn’t going to wreck the church picnic. Go back there and entertain your new boyfriend, why don’t you,” the preacher snapped at her attempt to prevent him eating the piece of pie.

  “He’s Edward Starr’s brother, I’d have you know, and he’s not my boyfriend, smarty!”

  The preacher chewed on. “This pie,” he said, moving his tongue over his lips cautiously, “is very heavy on the sugar, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, I declare, hear him!” Lily let the words out peevishly, and she rushed on back into the living room. There she gazed wide-eyed, her mouth trying to move for speech, for facing her stood Hobart, folding his shorts neatly, and stark naked.

  “You will not!” Lily managed to protest.

  “Who says I don’t!” Hobart replied nastily.

  “Hobart Starr, you go home at once,” Lily ordered him. “This is all something that can be explained.”

  He made a kind of dive at her as his reply, and pinioned her to the wall. She tried to grab his penis, clawing at it, but he had perhaps already foreseen she might do this, and he caught her by the hand, and then slapped her. Then he inserted his membrum virile quickly into her body, and covered her face with his freely flowing saliva. She let out perfunctory cries of expected rather than felt pain as one does under the hand of a nervous intern.

  At a motion from her, some moments later, he worked her body about the room, so that she could see what the preacher was doing. He had consumed the Dutch apple pie, and was beginning on the rhubarb lattice.

  “Will you be more comfortable watching him, or shall we return to the hall?” Hobart inquired.

  “Oh, Hobart, for pity’s sake;” she begged him. “Let me go, oh please let me go.” At this he pushed himself more deeply inwards, hurting her, to judge by her grimace.

  “I am a very slow comer, as you will remember, Lily. I’m slow but I’m the one in the end who cares for you most. Tonight is my biggest windfall. After all the others, you see, it is me who was meant for you. . . . You’re so cozy too, Lily.”

  As he said this, she writhed, and attempted to pull out from him, but he kissed her hard, working into her hard.

  “Oh this is all so damned unfair!” She seemed to cough out, not speak, these words. “Ralph,” she directed her voice to the kitchen, “come in here and restore order. . . .”

  As he reached culmination, Hobart screamed so loud the preacher did come out of the kitchen. He was swallowing very hard, so that he did remind Hobart of a man in a pie-eating contest. He looked critically at the two engaged in coitus.

  A few minutes later, finished with Lily, Hobart began putting on his clothes, yawning convulsively, and shaking his head, while Ralph began doggedly and methodically to remove his clothing again, like a substitute or second in some grueling contest.

  “Nothing more, no, I say no!” Lily shouted when she saw Ralph’s naked body advancing on her. “I will no longer cooperate here.”

  He had already taken her, however, and secured her more firmly than the last time against the wall.

  Hobart meanwhile was standing unsteadily on the threshold of the kitchen. He saw at once that the preacher had eaten two pies. He felt un-understandably both hungry and nauseous, and these two sensations kept him weaving giddily about the kitchen table now. At last he sat down before a chocolate meringue pie, and then very slowly, finickily, cut himself a small piece.

  As he ate daintily he thought that he had not enjoyed intercourse with Lily, despite his seeming gusto. It had been all mostly exertion and effort, somehow, though he felt he had done well, but no feeling in a supreme sense of release had come. He was not surprised now that Edward Starr had left her. She was not a satisfier.

  Hobart had finished about half the chocolate meringue when he reckoned the other two must be reaching culmination by now for he heard very stertorous breathing out there, and then there came to his ears as before the preacher’s intense war whoop of release. Lily also screamed and appealed as if to the mountain outside, I perish! Oh, perishing! And a bit later, she hysterically supplicated to some unknown person or thing I cannot give myself up like this, oh! Then a second or so later he heard his own name called, and her demand that he save her.

  Hobart wiped his mouth on the tablecloth and came out to have a look at them. They were both, Lily and Ralph, weeping and holding loosely to one another, and then they both slipped and fell to the floor, still sexually connected.

  “Gosh all get out!” Hobart said with disgust.

  He turned away. There was a pie at the very end of the table which looked most inviting. It had a very brown crust with golden juice spilling from fancily, formally cut little air holes as in magazine advertising. He plunged the knife into it, and tasted a tiny bit. It was of such wonderful flavor that even though he felt a bit queasy he could not resist cutting himself a slice, and he began to chew solemnly on it. It was an apricot, or perhaps peach, pie, but final identification eluded him.

  Lily now came out into the kitchen and hovered over the big table. She was dressed, and had fixed her hair differently, so that it looked as if it had been cut and set, though there were some loose strands in the back which were not too becoming, yet they emphasized her white neck.

  “Why, you have eaten half the pies for the church social!” she cried, with some exaggeration in her observation, of course. “After all that backbreaking work of mine! What on earth will I tell the preacher when he comes to pick them up!”

  “But isn’t this the preacher here tonight?” Hobart, waving his fork in the direction of the other room motioned to the man called Ralph.

  “Why, Hobart, of course not. . . . He’s no preacher, and I should think you could tell . . .”

  “How did I come to think he was?” Hobart stuttered out, while Lily sat down at the table and was beginning to bawl.

  “Of all the inconsiderate selfish thoughtless pups in the world,” she managed to get out between sobs. “I would have to meet up with you two, just when I was beginning to have some sort of settled purpose.”

  Ralph, standing now on the threshold of the kitchen, still stark naked, laughed.

  “I have a good notion to call the sheriff!” Lily threatened. “And do you know what I’m going to do in the morning? I’m going back to Edward Starr in Chicago. Yes siree. I realize now that he loved me more than I was aware of at the time.”

  The two men were silent, and looked cautiously at one another, while Lily cried on and on.

  “Oh, Lily,” Hobart said, “even if you do go see Edward, you’ll come home again to us here. You know you can’t get the good loving in Chicago that we give you, now, don’t you?”

  Lily wept on and on, repeating many times how she would never be able to explain to the church people about not having enough pies on hand for her contribution to the big social.

  After drying her
tears on a handkerchief which Hobart lent her, she took the knife and with methodical fierce energy and spiteful speed cut herself a serving from one of the still-untouched pies.

  She showed by the way she moved her tongue in and out of her mouth that she thought her pie was excellent.

  “I’m going to Chicago and I’m never coming back!” As she delivered this statement she began to cry again.

  The “preacher,” for that is how Hobart still thought of him, came over to where Lily was chewing and weeping, and put his hand between the hollows of her breasts.

  “Now don’t get started again, Ralph. . . . No!” she flared up. “No, no, no.”

  “I need it all over again,” Ralph appealed to her. “Your good cooking has charged me up again.”

  “Those pies are too damned good for a church,” she finally said with a sort of moody weird craftiness, and Ralph knew when she said this that she would let him have her again.

  “Hobart”—Lily turned to Edward’s brother—“why don’t you go home? Ralph and I are old childhood friends from way back. And I was nice to you. But I am in love with Ralph.”

  “It’s my turn,” Hobart protested.

  “No, no.” Lily began her weeping again. “I love Ralph.”

  “Oh, hell, let him just this once more, Lily,” the “preacher” said. Ralph walked away and began toying again with another of the uncut pies. “Say, who taught you to cook, Lily?” he inquired sleepily.

  “I want you to send Hobart home, Ralph. I want you to myself. In a bed. This wall stuff is an outrage. Ralph, you send Hobart home now.”

  “Oh why don’t you let the fellow have you once more. Then I’ll really do you upstairs.” Meanwhile, he went on chewing and swallowing loudly.

  “Damn you, Ralph,” Lily moaned. “Double damn you.”

  She walked over to the big table and took up one of the pies nearest her and threw it straight at the “preacher.”

  The “preacher” ’s eyes, looking out from the mess she had made of his face, truly frightened her. She went over to Hobart, and waited there.

  “All right for you, Lily,” the “preacher” said.

  “Oh, don’t hurt her,” Hobart pleaded, frightened too at the “preacher” ’s changed demeanor.

  The first pie the “preacher” threw hit Hobart instead of Lily. He let out a little gasp, more perhaps of surprised pleasure than hurt.

  “Oh, now stop this. We must stop this,” Lily exhorted. “We are grown-up people, after all.” She began to sob, but very put-on like, the men felt. “Look at my kitchen.” She tried to put some emphasis into her appeal to them.

  The “preacher” took off his jockey shorts, which he had put on a few moments earlier. He took first one pie and then another, mashing them all over his body, including his hair. Lily began to whimper and weep in earnest now, and sat down as if to give herself over to her grief. Suddenly one of the pies hit her, and she began to scream, then she became silent.

  There was a queer silence in the whole room. When she looked up, Hobart had also stripped completely, and the “preacher” was softly slowly mashing pies over his thin, tightly muscled torso. Then, slowly, inexorably, Hobart began eating pieces of pie from off the body of the smeared “preacher.” The “preacher” returned this favor, and ate pieces of pie from Hobart, making gobbling sounds like a wild animal. Then they hugged one another and began eating the pies all over again from their bare bodies.

  “Where do you get that stuff in my house!” Lily rose, roaring at them. “You low curs, where do you—”

  But the “preacher” had thrown one of the few remaining pies at her, which struck her squarely in the breast and blew itself red all over her face and body so that she resembled a person struck by a bomb.

  Ralph hugged Hobart very tenderly now, and dutifully ate small tidbits from his body, and Hobart seemed to nestle against Ralph’s body, and ate selected various pieces of the pie from the latter.

  Then Lily ran out the front door and began screaming Help! I will perish! Help me!

  The dogs began to bark violently all around the neighborhood.

  In just a short time she returned. The two men were still closely together, eating a piece here and there from their “massacred” bodies.

  Sitting down at the table, weeping perfunctorily and almost inaudibly, Lily raised her fork, and began eating a piece of her still-unfinished apple pie.

  SUMMER TIDINGS

  There was a children’s party in progress on the sloping wide lawn facing the estate of Mr. Teyte and easily visible therefrom despite the high hedge. A dozen school-aged children, some barely out of the care and reach of their nursemaids, attended Mrs. Aveline’s birthday party for her son Rupert. The banquet or party itself was held on the site of the croquet grounds, but the croquet set had only partially been taken down, and a few wickets were left standing, a mallet or two lay about, and a red and white wood ball rested in the nasturtium bed. Mr. Teyte’s Jamaican gardener, bronzed as an idol, watched the children as he watered the millionaire’s grass with a great shiny black hose. The peonies had just come into full bloom. Over the greensward where the banquet was in progress one smelled in addition to the sharp odor of the nasturtiums and the marigolds, the soft perfume of June roses; the trees have their finest green at this season, and small gilt brown toads were about in the earth. The Jamaican servant hardly took his eyes off the children. Their gold heads and white summer clothing rose above the June verdure in remarkable contrast, and the brightness of so many colors made his eyes smart and caused him to pause frequently from his watering. Edna Gruber, Mrs. Aveline’s secretary and companion, had promised the Jamaican a piece of the “second” birthday cake when the banquet should be over, and told him the kind thought came from Mrs. Aveline herself. He had nodded when Edna told him of his coming treat, yet it was not the anticipation of the cake which made him so absentminded and broody as it was the unaccustomed sight of so many young children all at once. Edna could see that the party had stirred something within his mind for he spoke even less than usual to her today as she tossed one remark after another across the boundary of the privet hedge separating the two large properties.

  More absent-minded than ever, he went on hosing the peony bed until a slight flood filled the earth about the blooms and squashed onto his open sandals. He moved off then and began sprinkling with tempered nozzle the quince trees. Mr. Teyte, his employer and the owner of the property which stretched far and wide before the eye with the exception of Mrs. Aveline’s, had gone to a golf tournament today. Only the white maids were inside his big house, and in his absence they were sleeping most of the day, or if they were about would be indifferently spying the Jamaican’s progress across the lawn, as he labored to water the already refreshed black earth and the grass as perfectly green and motionless as in a painted backdrop. Yes, his eyes, his mind were dreaming today despite the almost infernal noise of all those young throats, the guests of the birthday party. His long black lashes gave the impression of having been dampened incessantly either by the water from the hose or some long siege of tears.

  Mr. Teyte, if not attentive or kind to him, was his benefactor, for somehow that word had come to be used by people who knew both the gardener and the employer from far back, and the word had come to be associated with Mr. Teyte by Galway himself, the Jamaican servant. But Mr. Teyte, if not unkind, was undemonstrative, and if not indifferent, paid low wages, and almost never spoke to him, issuing his commands, which were legion, through the kitchen and parlor maids. But once when the servant had caught pneumonia, Mr. Teyte had come unannounced to the hospital in the morning, ignoring the rules that no visits were to be allowed except in early evening, and though he had not spoken to Galway, he had stood by his bedside a few moments, gazing at the sick man as if he were inspecting one of his own ailing riding horses.

  But Mrs. Aveline and Edna Gruber talked to Galway, were kind to him. Mrs. Aveline even “made” over him. She always spoke to him over the hedge e
very morning, and was not offended or surprised when he said almost nothing to her in exchange. She seemed to know something about him from his beginnings, at any rate she knew Jamaica, having visited there three or four times. And so the women—Edna and Mrs. Aveline—went on speaking to him over the years, inquiring of his health, and of his tasks with the yard, and so often bestowing on him delicacies from their liberal table, as one might give tidbits to a prized dog which wandered in also from the great estate.

  The children’s golden heads remained in his mind after they had all left the banquet table and gone into the interior of the house, and from thence their limousines had come and taken them to their own great houses. The blonde heads of hair continued to swim before his eyes like the remembered sight of fields of wild buttercups outside the great estate, stray flowers of which occasionally cropped up in his own immaculate greensward, each golden corolla as bright as the strong rays of the noon sun. And then the memory came of the glimpsed birthday cake with the yellow center. His mouth watered with painful anticipation, and his eyes again filled with tears.

  The sun was setting as he turned off the hose, and wiped his fingers from the water and some rust stains, and a kind of slime which came out from the nozzle. He went into a little brick shed, and removed his shirt, wringing wet, and put on a dry one of faded pink cotton decorated with a six-petaled flower design. Ah, but the excitement of all those happy golden heads sitting at a banquet—it made one too jumpy for cake, and their voices still echoed in his ears a little like the cries of the swallows from the poplar trees.

  Obedient, then, to her invitation, Galway, the Jamaican gardener, waited outside the buttery for a signal to come inside, and partake of the birthday treat. In musing, however, about the party and all the young children, the sounds of their gaiety, their enormous vitality, lung power, their great appetites, the happy other sounds of silverware and fine china being moved about, added to which had been the song of the birds now getting ready to settle down to the dark of their nests, a kind of memory, a heavy nostalgia had come over him, recollection deep and far-off weighted him down without warning like fever and profound sickness. He remembered his dead loved ones. . . . How long he had stood on the back steps he could not say, until Edna suddenly laughing as she opened the door on him, with flushed face, spoke: “Why, Galway, you know you should not have stood on ceremony. . . . Of all people, you are the last who is expected to hang back. . . . Your cake is waiting for you. . . .”