by John Waters
“You look completely . . . well, in business,” the bartender finished.
“Thank you, Richard,” Mr. Sendel retorted.
Then as Richard looked peculiar at him, he said, “I am terribly occupied,” and bartender and customer both laughed with relief.
“I admire you, sir,” Richard said.
“And you know what my estimation of you is,” Mr. Sendel winked.
Richard was one of the few persons whom Mr. Sendel actually knew any more. Everyone else, somehow, was somebody you talked generalities with, but occasionally he and Richard managed to say some particularity that made up the little there was of meaning.
Usually after exchanging one of these particularities, Richard would move on to another customer, but today something impelled him to stay, and not only stay, but to question or rather to comment.
“Sir,” Richard spoke somewhat awkwardly for him. “About the phone calls.”
Mr. Sendel’s mouth moved downwards and his pale brown eyes flashed weakly.
Seeing his look, Richard said, “It’s so wonderful.”
Mr. Sendel was vague and unhelpful.
“What I mean, sir,” Richard continued suddenly lost as he had never before been with his old friend, “it’s wonderful you have so much to . . . tend to.”
Then seeing the old man’s look of distant incomprehension, he continued, “For you to be so alive at your age is, to me, wonderful.”
“Thank you, Richard,” Mr. Sendel managed to say, and his old warmth and vivacity rushed back, so that the bartender was moved almost to tears.
“Richard,” the old man began, “have one drink with me, why don’t you,” and he handed the bartender some bills.
“For you it will be all right,” Richard said, grinning awkwardly.
Richard began to pour a drink for himself from one of the nearby bottles, but Mr. Sendel tapped imperiously and pointed to a large, seldom-used flask. “That one, Richard.”
The two men drank then to one another.
Outside the sound of a saxophone drifted over to them, and both men exchanged looks. Richard tightened the string of his apron.
Mr. Sendel wanted to look at the phone booth nearest him, the one he always used, but he did not.
“Of all the men who ever come in here,” the bartender said sleepily, “you’re the finest,” and with a special gesture of his hand, he moved off and out of the presence of the old man.
Mr. Sendel stared after him. He was not sure what Richard had meant exactly, as he thought it over, and his pleasure at Richard’s friendliness turned suddenly to anguish and fear that perhaps the bartender knew something. He had not liked his mentioning the telephone. And the more he thought about it, the more worried he became. Richard should not have mentioned the phone, he repeated to himself.
Then the thought came that perhaps Richard did know, that is, that there was nobody on the wire, and that he had no business whatsoever, that there was nobody, nobody but Richard and him. Bartenders, like Delphic oracles, are naturally defined by their very profession as anonymous. They administer haphazardly and are Great Nobodies by reason of their calling.
“He could not know,” Mr. Sendel said aloud.
He was surprised as he heard his own voice and, turning around, was relieved to see that nobody had heard, not even Richard.
He could NOT know, Mr. Sendel spoke almost prayerfully.
He thought how terrible it would be if Richard did know. There would be nothing left of his world at all. His mind had never before dwelt on the exact components of that world before, but now, at a glance, he saw everything just as it was: his world was merely this bar, was Richard, and most important of all the telephone booth; but all of them went together, the booth and the bar and Richard could not be disassociated.
He paused before the thought of all this.
If Richard knew, there would be nothing.
The thought—so simple and so devastating—completely unnerved him.
And now a second disturbing thing occurred to him. Tonight he had not telephoned. He had barely looked at the phone booth, and he knew that Richard was, after their conversation, waiting for him to do so. Richard expected, had to expect, him to phone.
And all at once he feared he could not go to the booth. And quite as suddenly he felt sure that Richard knew. He must know. Why would he have brought it up otherwise. In all the years he had been coming to the bar, Richard had never made so much as a sign that he saw Mr. Sendel go to the telephone booth, but tonight—perhaps Richard was growing old too—he had wanted to show comradeship, show pity, sympathy, what you will, and he had, Mr. Sendel saw with horror, destroyed their world.
The thought that all was destroyed came to him now with complete and awful clarity. Not only had Richard always probably known, but he had always kept the knowledge to himself, had told nobody. Perhaps he had nobody to tell, but then to whom could one tell such a thing, a thing as insubstantial as the mind itself.
“He knows,” Mr. Sendel said aloud.
He sat with his brandy whose delicate aroma suddenly resembled the faint perfume of flowers he had smelled many years ago in a room he could barely remember, perhaps forty years had passed since he had even thought of that room. The room was real, but its occupant was lost to him.
“And what does he expect me to do?” he said to himself. He was suddenly a prisoner of decision. He could not act, he did not know what to do next, he did not know what was expected of him.
He managed once or twice to look back at the phone booth, and as he did so he fancied Richard saw him from the far end of the bar where he was talking with a young man who was said to come from Sumatra.
Mr. Sendel could only sit there now with the brandy, hoping that his tired mind would give him at last the plan that he must pursue and the method by which he might extricate himself.
He saw weakly and with growing nausea that the final crisis that is said to come with old age had struck hard, peremptory, unannounced and with full authority. And he had not even the strength to drink.
Then forcing his hand which trembled badly, he gulped down the entire brandy.
With an unaccustomed energy and a tone never before used with him, he clapped his hands and shouted, “If you please, Richard.”
Richard stopped talking with the young man from Sumatra and came over to his favorite customer, but as Mr. Sendel stared at him he could see that in the few minutes which had passed Richard had changed just as fundamentally as he himself.
“Is this your best brandy?” Mr. Sendel wondered, and his voice resembled the whining complaint of men in hospitals.
Richard watched him.
“I’ll get you the best,” Richard spoke vaguely.
“And what would that be?” Mr. Sendel asked, as though he no longer knew what words were being put into his mouth.
Richard pointed to a bottle near them both.
“Of course, of course,” the old man said.
“This should make you feel less tired,” Richard said.
“Tired?” Mr. Sendel was loud and worried.
Richard poured, not speaking for a moment.
“Aren’t you a bit, sir?” he wondered.
Mr. Sendel observed the change in his bartender. Richard was all at once like a stranger. The change was complete, terrifying. And even this stranger whom he would have to go on of course addressing as Richard, this stranger seemed to have already joined the many passed-over voices to whom he spoke on the telephone. He could actually, he felt, now phone Richard.
But he knew that his bartender was waiting for him to say something, and a daring, even foolhardy plan crossed his mind.
“I’ve lost my most important telephone number.” He was intrepid and rash and looked boldly into the face of his bartender.
“A telephone number,” Richard wondered, and Mr. Sendel was sure now that the bartender knew, had known perhaps from the beginning.
“I’ve lost it.”
“A local
number?” Richard was cautious, quieter than he had ever been before.
Mr. Sendel hesitated. “Yes.”
“Can’t we look it up for you,” Richard’s voice was nearly inaudible.
“Oh no,” Mr. Sendel was calm now, deliberate, as though the offensive had passed to his hand. “It’s something that can wait. Only it’s irritating, you know.”
“But we could look it up,” Richard ignored the mentioning of irritation.
“But I can’t remember her first name, and her last name is so common,” Mr. Sendel told him.
Richard blinked rapidly.
“Maybe,” Mr. Sendel began. “Maybe if I just went and sat in the phone booth there,” and he turned and motioned toward it, wanting to be sure Richard saw which booth he meant. “Perhaps both the name of the lady and the number will come to me.”
He saw that Richard’s eyes narrowed under these words, and he was now more sure than ever of Richard’s knowing. A fierce anger made Mr. Sendel’s temples throb. He felt he hated Richard, that he hated everybody, and that he was ridiculously trapped.
“I think I may recall her number if I sit in the booth,” Mr. Sendel confided weakly, looking into his glass.
Wiping the bar dry with a long cloth, Richard spoke softly, “Call on me if you need anything, Mr. Sendel,” and he went off like an actor who has finished his lines for the evening.
Mr. Sendel sat on, his rage and despair growing, but a feeling of strength was returning after the frightening weakness he had experienced at his first suspicion of Richard.
Sipping his brandy, he tried to think what he must do next. He could not sit here of course all night, and it was imperative that he go to telephone.
At the same time he was not sure he would be able to reach the booth, a realization which wiped out once and for all the thought that his strength was being restored.
Suddenly, however, a thing happened then as though a message had been written in letters of fire over the bar mirror. The aroma of the brandy and the perfume of flowers in the forgotten room merged, and he could now remember—that is, the bridge to the past was visible, and he could, he felt, cross into that room of an obliterated time. He need not stay where he was.
He left the tip on the bar, for he believed he would not be back, not tonight at any rate.
“Not with the bridge ahead,” he said to himself.
He waited after he had got off his seat at the bar, then walking stiffly but he thought well he advanced toward the telephone booth under the silent gaze of everybody in the room.
Then miraculously he remembered the number! Effortlessly, clearly, completely!
This time he put in the coin meticulously, loudly.
He dialed slowly and effectively the number which he knew tonight would bring him closer to the forgotten room.
He waited.
He closed his eyes now because he knew that if they watched him, if they had watched him all those years, it did not matter tonight because he had remembered.
“Is Rose there?” he said with the quiet and satisfied tone of a man who knows that the answer to his question will be yes. He waited.
“This time, Rose, nothing kept you,” he began, and she laughed. He had forgotten what a complete joy her laugh was.
“I have something,” he said smiling, “that will amuse you. I found a counterpart of you somewhere. I found part of you, my dear, in a most out-of-the-way place.”
She spoke now quite at length, and he realized how tired he was, for he could not hear all of her words, and he found himself almost nodding over what she said.
“This has, my dear, to do with your special perfume.”
“Which?” she said in a rich contralto voice, “For I have so many!”
“Which but the one you always wore in the music room, of course,” he said.
There was suddenly no answer.
“Rose, Rose!” he called.
Then after a wait he felt she was again on the line.
“I thought that we had been disconnected,” he cried, happy to know she was there, was still listening.
“It’s been so long since I got even the slightest whiff of your perfume,” he went on.
She said something witty and rather cutting which was so typical of her.
“You won’t be offended if I tell you your perfume is in French brandy!” He laughed. “Of course it’s the best . . . the best Richard has to offer.”
His hand involuntarily went up to the door.
“Rose,” he almost cried, for there was a discordant hum now on the wires. In dismay his hand pressed against the booth door. It was, he saw, with horror, locked. Someone had locked the door!
He did not want to alarm Rose, but kept his hand tightly pushing the door, struggling against it at every conceivable point to measure the extent of its being sealed and locked against him.
“My dear, is everything all right otherwise,” he inquired in his desperation.
He waited for an answer.
“Rose,” he cried.
The phone slipped from his hand as though it had turned to a rope of sand.
His head fell heavily against the pane of glass which all at once broke sickeningly into scattered bits and fragments.
He remembered at the same time his old, long-standing fear:
Struck by an invisible hammer.
A blinding crash shook the telephone booth.
He stretched out his hand to grasp something, anything, but his fingers felt nothing, not even air.
“Mr. Sendel!” came Richard’s voice from very far off.
“Mr. Sendel! Can you hear what I am saying to you?”
Mr. Sendel did not reply.
EARLY STORIES
All archival material, the Early Stories were collected
posthumously and never submitted for commercial publication.
They represent Purdy’s growth as a writer.
Introductory Note
The use of variant and distinctive forms of English, including American idiom, is a characteristic of Purdy’s work. The author’s grammar and structure upend the ordinary, posing editorial challenges. In “Dr. Dieck & Company,” for example, the term wive—a word unusual to contemporary readers but used in the King James Bible—is likely intended. (Purdy himself had done a preliminary edit of the story.) The final text adheres to the author’s multilayered, if unusual, vernacular. The difficulties are purposeful: Purdy said, “I think I learned early on that the only subjects I could deal with were impossible. That is, they were impossible to write because they were so difficult; if I chose an easy subject, I couldn’t write it because it wouldn’t mean anything to me. So nearly all my stories are based on ‘impossible’ subjects.” (Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40, issue 1, 1998) The continual evolution of increasingly impossible subjects, the idiosyncratic speech patterns, and the nonconforming structure that Purdy begins to work with in these stories (written in a period in which his own impossibilities included the isolation of his life while teaching in Appleton, Wisconsin; awareness of a wider world that contained figures such as Gertrude Stein; and the frustration of not being published or recognized as a writer himself) set the pattern for the style for which he would become known.
A CHANCE TO SAY NO
dedicated to Carl Van Vechten
Written between 1935 and 1939 during the period Purdy
was a student at Bowling Green College.
The first inkling Buddy had he was not going to Europe with Hilda was one morning, without a hint of warning, she produced her disfigured passport before him in the Student Union.
They had planned their trip together for nearly four years—ever since they were freshmen, and the sight of her passport, savagely torn, with the photo missing, left him entirely wordless. He felt almost as though she had disfigured herself.
“You’ll have to send for another passport right away,” Buddy told her.
“But I don’t mean to!” Hilda said, laughing. She was
in wonderful humor.
They sat right by the window where she could wave to her friends who passed, and as she said she didn’t mean to, she waved to a girl.
“What do you mean you don’t mean to,” he said. He had been eating a dish of chocolate-marshmallow ice cream, and now he pushed it away quickly, nodded to the bus-boy, who with the rapidity of a walk-on in a play, took the dish from him.
“What did you say?” Hilda asked suddenly, bringing her attention from the window.
“How are you going to get to Europe?” he said.
“I’m using Corinne’s passport. My sister Corinne’s,” Hilda told him.
“Look, have you gone bats or what,” he picked up the pieces of passport and stared at them. “What in hell did you tear this with?” he inquired.
“Don’t be tiresome,” she said. “Seriously!” she exclaimed, and she looked at the window now.
“But Hilda, I mean,” he began, and his voice was suddenly like that of a man of forty.
“I told you what I’m going to do,” she said. “Stop nagging.”
“You can’t use Corinne’s passport,” he said. “It’s against the law.”
“My own sister’s? Why I look more like her than she does.”
Hilda finished her lime-ade, and smiling at the bus-boy handed the glass to him.
“You have really gone bats,” he told her.
“You say that much too much,” she replied.
“Why we could both get into terrible . . .” He stopped because he saw that there must be something he didn’t know.
“You don’t want to go to Europe, then,” he said, unconvinced that this statement had anything to do with their situation.
She looked at him. “Why of course I want to,” she said, and she sounded very sincere. “I’m dying to. I’ve waited four years!”
“Of course, I know you are crazy,” he told her. “I wouldn’t want to go with you if you weren’t. But I don’t think we should take on the whole United States Government.”
“Oh it’s only the passport people,” she replied. “And it’s only Corinne. If they arrested anybody, they would arrest her, for Pete’s sake.”