The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “I have always hated spiders,” Percy Fairfield said, “but the place that was the most full of them wasn’t any place you would expect them to be at all. It was the most elegant and famous place probably in this city, and I worked there. You’ve heard of Madame Sobey (she wasn’t any more French or Madame than I am) and her penthouse. Her old house was full of spiders. None of the bug powders or sprays or anything had the least effect on them. The only thing to do was in the evening when they seemed to be running around more than other times get out the broom and knock them down on the floor and squash them. No matter how many you killed, though, that way, the next night there seemed to be just as many or maybe even more of them than the night before. And so the massacre went on.

  “Madame Sobey looked at her TV machine a great deal of the time, and of course she knew every minute there was spiders up there, but she said her penthouse was made so old-fashioned there was nothing you could do about fixing the screens in the windows right and so they just came in all the time and lived with her there, along with the starlings, the ants, and the occasional droves of mayflies and wasps.

  “She almost welcomed winter, she said, because she hated so many forms of insect life. But spiders she hated almost as much as I did. She said she woke up one night and one was biting her on the eye. Her eye did swell up a great deal, and she said she thought she would call the doctor maybe, but then nothing serious happened and she forgot about it. She had me go around, though, everywhere spraying, even though that didn’t do no good, and killing them with the broom. I don’t believe, though, she ever got to hate them like I did.

  “Once a young bird fell down the chimney into her house and though it was dead she screamed all afternoon. She said things had got much too much for her in the house, and she missed her husband after all, who had just divorced her on the grounds of their not living together as man and wife.

  “Madame Sobey told me that she liked colored people much better than white people and that was why she hired me. She said she wanted me to stay with her to the very end. She loved to say that over and over: to the very end, dear heart.

  After she would say that she would usually get up and say, ‘Well, it’s time to go to the doctor.’

  “ ‘Now you keep the house up while I’m gone,’ she would say, ‘and if the delicatessen people come, you let them in, but you mustn’t entertain, Per- (she started to say Percy, but I had forbid her ever to use that name) and—FAIRfield!’

  “I didn’t feel Fairfield sounded good up there either, but I hated Percy as a name and as I say made her call me Fairfield.

  “Madame Sobey didn’t pay me money because she said she hadn’t collected any alimony in so long from her husband, who was, she said, living with the rottenest woman in Chicago down on the South Side, where they both belonged.

  “ ‘You don’t know what I’ve suffered,’ Madame Sobey used to tell me, ‘at the hands of that weasel alone.’ The weasel was the woman. I couldn’t tell you in a public place like this what she called her husband.

  “ ‘Don’t entertain any of your friends now,’ Madame Sobey would say, putting on her last year’s furs. ‘That’s the only rule I have to enforce,’ she said. ‘No visitors. You know,’ she went on, ‘I’m not well and my doctor doesn’t even want me to see my own friends. And you know what happens when you bring yours, Fairfield.’

  “ ‘I do,’ I told her, and I did. Every time I ever brought any of my own friends she would get drunk and want to dance with them. They didn’t want to dance, but out of respect for my job, they would do it. She would have danced to the middle of next week with them, if they hadn’t give out. They didn’t have all those fancy medicines and drugs in them like she did. I don’t know how old she was, due to her wearing the Mask of Youth makeup on her, something she put on early and that lasted most of her waking hours. Once I saw her with the Mask off, and she looked not so much older, as all pinched up like a monkey. She saw my look and tried to explain her appearance by saying she had put on her night cream by mistake and it made her look like another woman.

  “ ‘Listen to the records, Fairfield,’ she told me, ‘if you get lonesome, or turn on TV or call up those different numbers on the telephone, you know. I often do that when I’m lonesome. There is a telephone number for religious guidance that is awfully interesting; and another for serious trouble or desperate situations; then you can call the Weather Bureau and find out what kind of weather we’re going to get, and there’s the time of the day, of course,—all those things you can get by calling a number on the telephone. But don’t go out of the house, as I hate to come back to it empty, and you know now, Fairfield, that was one of the reasons you were hired, to always be here.’

  “ ‘Yes, Madame Sobey, I know,’ I would say, and then she would always say right back; ‘Call me Madge. It sounds more relaxed and we have so much time to spend together anyhow.’

  “I knew there was not a chance that I would be with her to the very end like she was always saying, and like I was already her husband or something.

  “She always drank enough for a pirate before she went to this doctor. She said she couldn’t think up anything to tell him unless she was crocked.

  “ ‘What are you being treated for?’ I asked her, straightening my new uniform before the mirror.

  “ ‘Oh, Fairfield, for heaven’s sake!’ she said. ‘I don’t have to tell you.’

  “ ‘Well you’re awful sick, I guess, if you have to go every day,’ I told her.

  “ ‘I’m not getting anywhere with him,’ Madame Sobey said. ‘Of course, my former husband pays for it all or I wouldn’t go near. I just hate myself, though, for going.’

  “ ‘What’s wrong with stopping, then,’ I asked her.

  Madame Sobey smiled and smiled when I said that. I don’t think she could laugh due to an operation she had had for her face, but she smiled terribly hard to show she was laughing. Then she got serious immediately, so fast, you know, it looked like a curtain fell on her smiling face, and this new mad old face showed at you.

  “ ‘I told the doctor about you,’ she said.

  “ ‘That you had a colored servant,’ I said in a kind of a mean voice.

  “ ‘Oh, I didn’t mention your color,’ she lied. ‘Goodness, what do you think I am . . .’ She stopped a moment or two, and then smiling again, said, ‘He thought it was a good idea.’

  “ ‘What was?’ I wondered.

  “ ‘You being here with me,’ she said.

  “ ‘Well, you can’t live all to yourself all the time,’ I told her.

  “ ‘That isn’t why he liked it, though,’ Madame Sobey said.

  “ ‘Why did he then?’

  “ ‘Why, he feels you’re good for me just now for one thing . . . You know all the others up here stole.’

  “I didn’t wonder they had because she wouldn’t pay you and yet she wanted you to sit up with her at all hours and talk; due to her having been in the nut-hatch so often she didn’t for some reason ever like to be alone, and just TV, the radio, and the phonograph all going at once as they often did wasn’t enough: she had to have the living breathing flesh of men around her or she got just wild.

  “I didn’t see how the doctor knew I was good for her or honest or anything, because how did she know I was going to be good for her or honest or anything. Yet every day she came home from the doctor, and she went damned near every day, and she had all this talk to tell me about how he knew everything.

  “ ‘Well, is this here doctor a spiritualist or something,’ I said one day when I was tired of hearing about how he knew everything.

  “ ‘Fairfield, Fairfield,’ she said weary-like, reaching for her earrings on the lamp stand—she took on and off her earrings all the time as she was so nervous from trying to quit drinking. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘You know what kind of doctor he is without my telling you.’

  “ ‘He sounds like one of those spiritualists, Madame Sobey,’ I persisted.

  “ ‘Plea
se, can’t you say Madge,’ she begged.

  “ ‘My doctor thinks you’re prejudiced against white women,’ she said suddenly, and I wanted to laugh out loud but I kept on sitting there just as though I couldn’t care less about everything.

  “ ‘I told him I just didn’t think so,’ she added, kind of crafty, and awfully weak-sounding, I thought.

  “ ‘Oh, I don’t know what I’m prejudiced against,’ I said, crafty right back at her, and I laughed and let her see all my teeth then because she did compliment me more on my teeth than on almost anything else. She saw my teeth and smiled.

  “ ‘Fairfield, I appreciate you I bet more than anybody else ever has,’ she said finally.

  “ ‘Thank you, Madge,’ I told her.

  “ ‘You’re a fine boy,’ she said in a voice as sad as at a funeral.

  “ ‘I wish I knew what I was going to do, though,’ I told her.

  “ ‘Oh, Fairfield,’ Madame Sobey said. ‘You know you always have a house here. I wish you wouldn’t act as though you were—well, as though you had to leave.’

  “I thanked her with my teeth again, and she said, ‘Don’t leave!’ She acted very upset. ‘I’m used to you, Fairfield, and I want you to stay.’

  “I wanted to tell her about her not paying anything, but I think she had got all that by telepathy waves because she cleared her throat and said, ‘I’ve put by several bonds of mine with you as beneficiary, Fairfield.’

  “When I just stared at her thanking her with my eyes, she said, ‘In case I should die, Fairfield, you would have those bonds.’

  “I thanked her and she said, ‘They’re not large, but they would make you comfortable at a later date.’

  “I couldn’t help laughing, it was something, I think, about the word comfortable, I guess: I couldn’t think of me being that ever, and she laughed a little bit too, which, come to think of it, was kind of odd because she couldn’t.

  “ ‘Fairfield, should we watch TV,’ she said, and I told her, ‘Why don’t I go out and bake a pineapple upside-down-cake or some Danish bread, you know, the sweet kind . . . You see, I had worked as a pastry cook, and she loved pastry, but she was trying to cut down on sweets, and didn’t like to eat hardly anything at all. If she had cut down on her liquor she could have eaten ten or twelve upside-down-cakes and still had a lower calory count, but she just wouldn’t give up the old juices.

  “ ‘I would rather you just sat here,’ Madame Sobey said after I proposed baking the pastry to her. ‘I don’t like to think of you,’ she said, ‘out there in the kitchen working when it’s so late in the day.’

  “She saw how disappointed I was, so she said, ‘All right, Fairfield, if you want to go out and bake something.’ She was awful put out and I knew she would begin to drink now she was alone for a few minutes.

  “ ‘Why is it so few people will sit down and just talk with a person,’ she said.

  “ ‘People don’t want to talk to me really because they fear I will bring up the tragedy of my divorce!’ she said to me.

  “She had told me about her last divorce several million times, and I don’t think any new facts were known even to her own imagination. But I knew—eventually—even if I made the pineapple upside-down-cake and the Danish bread, she would tell me all about her husband and how he had run off with a tart.

  “ ‘Why do men prefer those women,’ she would begin on that topic, and I would say, ‘Oh, it is a mystery!’

  “ ‘What’s so mysterious about it?’ she always answered me, and then we were off on that. She cursed her husband up one end of the South Side and down the other, and then she began on that tart he had married, and she cursed her to the doors of hell and back. She said they were both diseased and that was why they acted that way.

  “This disease they had, I gathered, was one that infected every organ and nerve, and was especially bad in the centers that controlled their animal nature and their reasoning power. She said they were actually, though, queer for disease, and for that reason, diseased as they undoubtedly were, they thrived on disease and would outlive her.

  “She told me how much she hated especially the tart and how she was going over to their big old modern-style glass house and mash that front big modern window that was nearly twenty feet across and about as many high.

  “ ‘You’ll cut an artery,’ I warned her laughing.

  “ ‘Don’t advise me, you cheap clown,’ she said suddenly, and that was her signal to begin. First some mild drink like Dubonnet, which she said wasn’t liquor, then bourbon, then gin, and then the big race to the finish with vodka.

  “But by the next afternoon she was sobered up enough to go back to her doctor (though she always had to drink some more to get there) and hear how he knew everything she had been doing anyhow, and that encouraged her to go home, talk to me, and start her life all over again from there.

  “After I made her her cake or Danish bread in the evening, she would eat just a little to be polite, and then she would always always say, ‘I bet you think I’m prejudiced against you, don’t you?’

  “ ‘What for?’ I always said.

  “ ‘Well, I think you think I am,’ she said.

  “ ‘Everybody’s prejudiced,’ I told her.

  “ ‘Not me!’ she said.

  “ ‘Well, I bet I am,’ then, I laughed.

  “ ‘You don’t like me, is that it?’ she said suspiciously. She had begun on the bourbon now, and was pretty well through her second installment of that.

  “ ‘Why don’t you drink with me,’ she said. ‘Is that your prejudice?’

  “ ‘Uh-huh,’ I giggled.

  “ ‘Nobody will drink with me,’ she confided.

  “ ‘I know,’ she went on, ‘I may not be promising now, but people have treated me awful bad. Nobody would ever know I was a white woman if they read my life story.’

  “ ‘Well, you’re rich anyhow,’ I told her. ‘You’ve got that!’

  “ ‘Rich,’ she coughed out the word. ‘You’re rich!’

  “I laughed: What am I rich in? Outside of being black,—all of a sudden I had said that without even knowing I was going to.

  “And then, bang, her other face came down over her and she looked as mean as a snake at me: ‘You’re trying to insult me, aren’t you,’ she said. ‘You’re trying to pretend I’m prejudiced,’ she moaned.

  “ ‘No, I’m not,’ I soothed her. ‘I said I was the prejudiced one!’

  “She stared at me. ‘Let’s talk about something pleasant,’ she said.

  “ ‘We neither of us know the same pleasant things,’ I said to her.

  “ ‘Don’t be smart,’ she said, ‘just because you’re prejudiced against me, and don’t be witty!’

  “Then she was sorry and she got up and kissed my hair.

  “When she was drunk enough she called it wool, but usually she was sober enough to say flax, or silk, or something.

  “ ‘I don’t have a chance with you, do I,’ she often would say along about eleven o’clock at night just before she left the gin to begin on the vodka.

  “ ‘Madame Sobey,’ I said,—‘excuse me, Madge, I’m too tired, I’ve been cleaning this old house all day . . .’

  “ ‘The spiders keep you busy,’ she said.

  “I nodded.

  “ ‘Can’t we do anything about them spiders,’ I asked her.

  “ ‘No,’ she said. ‘You know we can’t.’

  “ ‘Aren’t there companies that come and get rid of them for people?’

  “ ‘Oh, I suppose,’ she said. ‘But I couldn’t stand men up here poking around. After everybody’s been reading about me in the newspapers, especially.’

  “ ‘You could wear a mask,’ I laughed.

  “ ‘Yes,’ she sneered.

  “ ‘Or an artifical head!’ I said.

  “Oh I did laugh on that, an artificial head. I kept laughing at that, and all of a sudden she had thrown the bottle right at my mouth. It knocked out two teeth. I was too s
urprised to be mad.

  “I went right into her bathroom and looked at the damage. Them two teeth were completely out.

  “She come running after me still holding her drink and asking me to forgive her.

  “ ‘I’ll call a doctor,’ she said.

  “ ‘Huh-huh,’ I said. ‘He would recognize you from the newspapers.’

  “ ‘Don’t be mean,” she cried.

  “ ‘I’m not mean: I’m bleeding.’

  “She patted my cheek. ‘Come into the front room, please, when you’ve got yourself doctored up.’

  “She went out and I could hear her after a while crying in the front room.

  “All banged up as I was, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for old Madame Sobey.

  “I went back on in and I was thinking that in a way it was true what she said, that everybody had everything but her. She was a woman who had a good deal and she wasn’t really old or ugly, she just never felt satisfied. There was hardly a moment of the day when she was ever satisfied with anything or anybody.

  “And most people, you know, just maybe one hour or one half hour or maybe only five minutes feel some tiny little bit of satisfaction, but Madame Sobey told me herself, both drunk and sober, that she never felt any least teeny bit of satisfaction, and she felt, she said, like every damned thing in the world had been permanently screwed for her, like it had all been planned wrong before she even got here. And so she never slept unless she took drugs and she said even they made her have all-night nightmares.

  “That is why sometimes I am almost sorry I left her, and run off. I think she really meant what she said about me staying with her to the very end, dear heart. But being she was a white woman, I couldn’t tell.

  “Anyhow that was a phrase I have often thought of since working for all the various and sundry people I have worked for, and I don’t think she really did care about me being colored. But she busted so many of my teeth and she hurt my head so much throwing bottles, and then she was just like a tiger, even when she didn’t keep bothering me with her kissing and hugging, she just looked at me like a big old hungry tiger and when she wasn’t doing that, she was talking all night about what a big old criminal her husband was, and what a big old tart he had got married to, and I honestly felt more sorry for her than almost any human being I have ever seen or talked to.