The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  They both laughed embarrassedly.

  “This is a big place you have here,” Clark said wonderingly. “And you look out over the water and all the skyscrapers!”

  “Excuse me if I take off my shoes,” Hayes said. “They pinch.”

  “You have big feet like me,” the boy looked at his friend’s feet. He relaxed a bit.

  “Want to try my shoes on for a fit?” Hayes joked.

  Clark went over to the chair near where Hayes was seated, and picked up one of the shoes.

  “Go on, try it on.”

  Finding the shoe more comfortable, Clark smiled broadly for the first time.

  “Try the other while you’re at it, Clark.”

  Clark obeyed.

  “Walk around now to see if they feel all right.”

  Clark walked around the room in Hayes’s shoes. He looked as carefree and joyful as a boy who is walking on stilts.

  “They’re yours, Clark,” Hayes told him. When the young man acted perturbed, Hayes walked over to a partly closed door, and opened it fully to reveal inside a whole closetful of shoes.

  “Look at my collection,” Hayes quipped. “Two dozen pairs of shoes, and every one pinches!”

  Clark laughed. “These do fit,” he said, looking down at his feet. “But I don’t think I should have such expensive shoes.”

  “Well if you don’t, I do.” Hayes’s voice had a kind of edge in it. At that moment, their eyes met. Hayes’s right hand raised, and then fell heavily against his thigh.

  “I’m glad you chose to come here tonight,” he managed to say. He had meant to say come home, but instead changed it to here.

  Hayes rose very slowly then like a man coming out of a deep slumber and walked in his stocking feet over to where Clark, seated in a big armchair, was looking at his new shoes.

  Hayes put his hand briefly on the boy’s yellow hair. “I know I need a haircut,” Clark looked up trustfully at his friend.

  “I like your hair just this length,” Hayes told him.

  Clark’s lips trembled, and his eyes closed briefly.

  “You should never have to sleep . . . out,” Hayes managed to say. His hand moved from the boy’s hair to his cheek. To his relief, the boy took his hand and pressed it.

  “I have only the one bed, Clark. Come on and look.”

  They walked over to the next room where a four-poster faced them.

  “Big enough for four people,” Clark’s voice came out rather loud.

  “Could you stand to share it? Be frank now. If not, I can always sleep on the davenport.”

  “Sure, share,” Clark agreed.

  Hayes strode over to a big chiffonier and pulled out from one of the drawers a pair of pajamas.

  “Here, Clark, you can put these on. Whenever you want to turn in, that is.”

  “To tell the truth, that bed looks good to me.” Clark sat down on a small stool and took off his new shoes. He yawned widely.

  There was a long silence.

  “Do you want to change in the bathroom?” Hayes wondered when the boy sat motionless holding his pajamas.

  “No, no,” Clark rose from where he was sitting, and then as if at a command seated himself again.

  “It’s just that . . .”

  “What?” Hayes prompted him, a kind of urgency in his tone.

  “It’s the change in everything, all around me. From being out there!” Hayes saw with acute uneasiness that there were tears in his friend’s eyes.

  “Talk about change,” Hayes began huskily. “Your coming here has changed a lot.”

  As if this speech of Hayes were a signal, very quickly Clark undressed, and even more quickly stepped into the fresh pajamas which gave off a faint smell of dried lavender.

  “Remember, though, if you would be more comfortable alone,” Hayes reminded him of his offer to go sleep on the davenport.

  Hayes’s eyes rested on the boy’s pajamas, which had several buttons missing, revealing the white skin of his belly.

  “Don’t you worry, Hayes,” the boy told him. “I’m so dead tired I could lie down in a bed with a whole platoon.”

  Hayes began taking off his own clothes. He deposited his shirt, undershirt, and trousers on a little chest.

  “I can see you was a boxer, all right,” Clark noted. “You’re pretty husky still.”

  Hayes smiled, and went to the bed and pulled back the comforter and the sheets under it. Then he helped himself in on the right side of the bed.

  “Would you mind if I prayed before I get in?” Clark wondered.

  Hayes was so taken by surprise he did not reply for a moment. Then he nodded emphatically.

  Clark knelt down on the left side of the bed, and raised his two hands clasped together. Hayes could only hear a few words, like I thank thee O Father for thy kindness and thy care.

  When they were both under the covers, Hayes extinguished the little lamp on the stand beside the bed.

  They could hear the boat whistles as clearly as if they were standing on the docks, and they could see out the windows the thousands of lights from the skyscrapers from across the water.

  To his sharp disbelief, Hayes felt the younger man take his left hand in his right, and the boy brought it then against his heart and held it there.

  “Clark,” Hayes heard his own voice coming from it seemed over water.

  The boy in answer pressed his friend’s hand tighter.

  Hardly knowing what he was doing, as when in the morning he would sometimes rise still numbed with slumber, Hayes turned his head toward the boy and kissed him lightly on the lips. Clark held his hand even tighter, painfully tighter. He felt the young man’s soft sweet spittle as he kissed him all over his face, and then lowered his lips and kissed his throat, and pressed against his Adam’s apple.

  Hayes had the feeling the last twenty-five years of his life had been erased, that he had been returned to the Vermont countryside where he had grown up, that he had never been married, had never worked in a broker’s office, and ridden dirty ear-piercing subways or had rented a flat in a huge impersonal building designed for multi-millionaires.

  He helped Clark off with his pajamas and turned a kind of famished countenance against the boy’s bare chest, and to his lower body.

  “Yes, oh yes,” the boy cried under the avalanche of caresses.

  IN THE MORNING, Hayes realized he had overslept. It was nearly nine o’clock by his wristwatch, and he would never be able to get to the office in time. The place where Clark had slept beside him was vacant, so that he assumed the young man was in the bathroom. He waited, then, hearing nothing, he walked down the hall. The door to the bath was open, the room vacant. The apartment, he knew, was also vacant, vacant of the one he had loved so deliriously.

  “Clark?”

  Hayes felt a kind of stab in his abdomen, as if a practiced fist had hit him with full force.

  After such a night when he had felt such unexpected complete happiness, and when he had felt sure the young man, despite the great difference in their ages, had returned his love—how could Clark then have left him? A rush of even greater anguish hit him when he saw that the shoes he had given Clark were resting under the chair near the closet.

  He knew then Clark had left him for good, left him, that is, for dead.

  He did not bother to shave or wash before going to work. Several of the secretaries looked at him wonderingly. They probably thought he had been out on a tear. His boss, an elderly man who favored Hayes, was, as usual, out of the office on a trip somewhere.

  He finally made no attempt to keep his mind on his work, but stared out at the vast gray canyons of buildings facing him from the windows. Each time he signed some letter or memorandum for a secretary, he would mutter to himself that at five o’clock he would begin his search for Clark.

  “And if I don’t find him,” he said aloud to himself, “what will I do then?”

  One thing he saw was certain: if he did not find him, he could not live.

&
nbsp; The sudden unforeseen upheaval in his life was just as difficult to understand as if he had fallen under a subway train and lost his arms and legs. He went over the implausibility, the impossibility even of it all, a 42-year-old man, married twice, had taken a young man home, and never having loved any man before, had fallen somehow ecstatically in love, had confessed his love, as had the young man, and then after this happiness, it had all been taken from him. He had been ushered to the gates of some unreachable paradise, and waking had found himself in an empty hell.

  IS SEARCH WENT on day and night. Often he did not go to work at all, and he did not even bother to call his employer. He quit shaving and soon sported a rather attractive beard.

  He looked crazily and brazenly into the face of every young man who crossed his path, hoping it would be Clark. He wore out one pair of shoes after another. He no longer was aware that his shoes pinched, and taking off a pair at night he saw with indifference that his feet were not only afflicted with new calluses and corns, but that his toes were bleeding from so much walking. Had he seen his toes had been severed, it could not have meant less to him.

  “Clark, Clark,” he would cry at night. He could still smell the boy’s hair against the adjoining pillow.

  One night while walking late on the promenade, two men approached him and asked him something. Hayes was so lost in his own misery he paid no attention to them. The next moment he was aware they were ripping off his jacket, and robbing him. After taking all he had they beat him with what seemed to be brass knuckles and then knocked him to the pavement.

  He lay there for a long time. He felt his jaw aching horribly, and he noticed that he had lost a tooth. The physical pain he found more bearable than his loss of Clark.

  He knew then that he would kill himself, but he did not know what means to choose: the wheels of the subway, jumping from his building, or swallowing countless painkilling pills.

  The elderly widows of his building were very much alarmed by the change in “young Mr. Hayes,” as they called him. They blamed it on the death of his wife.

  The mugging he had received left several deep gashes on his forehead and cheek which did not heal. He did not want to go to a doctor, but whenever he touched the wounded places, they would open and a thin trickle of blood would run down his face. He spitefully welcomed this purely physical anguish. It made his losing Clark at least momentarily less excruciating.

  The loss of Clark was equaled only by his failure to understand why the boy had deserted him. What had he done wrong to drive him away when they had felt such great happiness in one another’s arms?

  In late November a heavy wet snow began falling. Hayes went out only in a light windbreaker, and no hat. He walked to the end of the promenade and then as he was about to turn and go further north down the steep hill on Columbia Heights, he slipped and fell. The sudden sharp blow to his head and face opened his still unhealed cuts and abrasions.

  He lay as if lifeless with the snow quickly covering his face and hair. A few persons began stopping and looking down at him. Soon others began to gather.

  A policeman got out of a squad car and hurried over to where he lay. When he saw the policeman, Hayes rose on one elbow, and made every effort to get up.

  The cop kept asking him if he was going to be all right, or if he thought he should go to the emergency room of a hospital.

  Hayes managed somehow to get on his feet, and, shaking off the accumulation of snow, assured the policeman and the onlookers that he was all right. But his eye fell on someone in the crowd the sight of whom almost caused him to fall to the pavement again. There, watching him with a kind of lunatic fear, was Clark.

  Hayes moved quickly away from the last of the onlookers and sat down on one of the benches thick with snow. He was as a matter of fact not certain Clark had really been there staring at him. He decided that he had sustained a slight concussion and it had made him imagine Clark’s presence. He held his face in his hands, and felt the wet snow descending on his mouth and throat.

  Presently he was aware someone was standing close over him. He removed his hands from his face. It was Clark, no mistake.

  All at once a great anger took over, and he rose and cried: “Well, what’s your excuse?”

  When Clark did not respond, he moved close to him, and taking a swipe with his right hand he hit the boy a fierce blow knocking him to the pavement.

  Standing over him, Hayes muttered again, What’s your excuse?

  THEN HE MUST have blacked out, for when he came to himself he was again seated on the wet snow-covered bench, and Clark was standing over him, saying, “Can I sit beside you, Hayes?”

  “What ever for?”

  “Please.”

  “Well,” Hayes snarled, “to quote the way you talk, suit yourself. ”

  Clark sat down beside him, but Hayes moved vengefully away from him.

  “The reason I left, Hayes,” the boy began, “the reason has nothing to do with you, understand. It’s only what’s missing in me . . . I wanted to stay—stay forever,” he gulped and could not go on.

  But Hayes’s anger was only getting more intense.

  “That’s a lot of bull, if I ever heard any,” the older man roared. “You missionary people are all alike, aren’t you. All nuts. You should all be locked up from meddling with the rest of the human race.”

  “I’m not a missionary person, as you call it. I never was, Hayes. They took me in, true, but I couldn’t believe in what they believed. I couldn’t believe in their kind of love, that is.”

  “Love,” Hayes spat out. “Look at me when you say that. See what it did to me. . . .”

  Hayes stopped all at once. He could see that Clark’s own mouth and jaw were bleeding, evidently from Hayes’s blow.

  “I have done lots of soul-searching,” the boy was going on as if talking to himself. “But the reason, Hayes, I left, you ain’t heard, and maybe you won’t believe me. See,” he almost shouted, “I left because I felt such great happiness with you was . . . well, more than I could bear. I thought my heart would break. And I feared it couldn’t last. That something would spoil it. When I first left you I thought I’d come back at once, of course, once I got myself together. But a kind of paralysis took over. The night with you was the happiest in my life. And you were the best thing ever. I couldn’t take such happiness after the life I have led. I couldn’t believe it was real for me.”

  “Bull, bull,” Hayes cried. He rose, the anger flashing out of his eyes, but as he moved toward the street where he lived he fell headlong and hurt himself on the paving stones. He was too weak to rise too weak also to resist Clark picking him up.

  “Hayes, listen to me . . . you’ve got to let me help you home.”

  Hayes swore under his breath. Then, as if remembering Clark had been a missionary, he used all the foul language and curses he could recall from his army days.

  Impervious to all the insults and abuse, Clark helped him home, holding him under his arms. Hayes tried a last time to shake him off at the front entrance, but Clark insisted on coming up to his apartment with him.

  Hayes fell almost unconscious on his bed.

  “If you could only believe me,” Clark kept saying. He began taking off Hayes’s wet clothing. Then he went into the kitchen and heated some water, and put it in a basin he found under the sink.

  He began wiping Hayes’s face of dirt and blood and snow. When he had finished these ablutions he took off Hayes’s shoes and socks. He drew back for a moment at the sight of his naked feet, for they looked as if they had been run over, and at his touch the toes streamed with blood. He wiped them gently, bathing them again and again though Hayes winced and even cried out from the discomfort.

  All at once Hayes raised up for he felt Clark kissing his feet.

  “No, no,” Hayes cried. “Don’t humiliate me all over again.”

  “Let me stay,” Clark begged him. “Hayes, let me stay with you.”

  “No,” Hayes growled. “I don’t wa
nt you.”

  Hayes could feel the boy’s lips on his bare feet.

  “You need someone,” Clark beseeched him.

  “Not you, not you.”

  Clark covered his friend’s feet, and came up to the bed and lay down beside him. He refused to budge from this position, and then slowly without further remonstrance from Hayes he put his head over Hayes’s heart, and kissed him softly.

  At these kisses, Hayes began weeping violently. Almost like an athlete who has been told he must give up his place to another younger, more promising candidate, he yielded then any attempt to dispute Clark’s claim.

  Clark removed all of his own clothing now, and held Hayes to him in an almost punishing embrace. Still weeping, indeed almost more violently, Hayes nonetheless began to return Clark’s kisses.

  Then slowly began a repetition of their first evening of lovemaking, with perhaps even more ardor, and this time Hayes’s cries could be heard beyond their own room, perhaps clear to the river and the boats.

  “And tomorrow, I suppose, when I wake up, you’ll have cleared out again.” Hayes said, running his fingers through the boy’s hair.

  “No, Hayes,” Clark said with a bitter contriteness. “I think you know now wild horses couldn’t drag me from your side. Even if you was to tell me to leave you, I’d stay this time.”

  “And do you swear to it on that stack of tracts you used to peddle?” Hayes asked him.

  “I’ll swear to it on my own love of you,” the boy confessed. . . . “Cross my heart, Hayes, cross my heart.”

  KITTY BLUE

  for Teresa Stratas

  Many years ago in a far distant country there was a famous opera singer who was very fond of cats. She found her greatest inspiration in talking with her cats both before and after she sang in grand opera houses. Without the encouragement and love of these gifted beasts she felt she would never understand the various roles she interpreted on the opera stage. Her only sorrow was that very often a favorite cat would die or disappear or sometimes even be stolen by a person who was envious of her.

  Madame Lenore, the opera singer, was admired by the Crown Prince who at the time of this story was only fifteen years old. He never missed a single one of Madame Lenore’s performances and showered her with costly gifts, and after one of her appearances he saw to it that the stage was piled high with the most expensive and exotic flowers.