The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  “But nobody can live with a tiger or spiders, either. And sometimes it seems to me that the spiders were the chief reason for me leaving her big old beautiful house. Every time I see a spider or hear about one, I bet I see and hear something different from anything anybody else does.”

  THE PUPIL

  Written in 1956.

  The boy from Havana watched the civics teacher, who was also the coach, with steady unflinching gaze. Whether it was in gym class or in civics, the boy gazed almost without ceasing, even when the teacher stared boldly back. In civics class the teacher noted that the boy, who was a good artist, was drawing his picture. The teacher was somehow not displeased, yet he felt that he should say something to the boy about it. It was his first teaching assignment anywhere, and he did want to do the correct thing, so he said nothing, and the boy continued to gaze and draw. The boy from Cuba was furthermore well-liked by all the students and teachers, and his attention to the new teacher was not hostile, it was almost, the coach thought, reverent. He would never say such a word to anybody if he had to describe the boy’s behavior, but reverent was, he knew, how the boy acted. The boy’s attitude toward him was not only reverent, it was more: it was, he knew, worshipful also.

  After the first few weeks of school, a kind of silent understanding had been established between pupil and teacher. They often found themselves gazing silently at one another when the others were doing their written work. And during gym class, when the teacher would throw the basketball to someone near the pupil, they would often exchange long looks.

  The teacher was perhaps not clearly aware that when he was at the school his eye always sought Gonzalez, and Gonzalez’ eye was always already on him. Once the man had automatically smiled at the boy and the boy had smiled a full resplendent smile in return and had nodded slowly. The coach had at that moment noticed that the boy resembled him very much. They both had light brown curly hair and long eyelashes, and their fair skin was covered with pale brown freckles. The boy was slim and lithe and the coach, five or six years older at most, had the same body, but thicker and heavier from the muscles he had consciously and assiduously gained.

  At night when the coach was at home with his wife and small daughter his eyes dimmed with the exhaustion of teaching, settled slowly on his memory of the boy’s gaze.

  THE HEADMASTER HAD wanted to be especially friendly with the coach. Coaches who could teach well, the headmaster told him, were extremely rare, and he wanted to hold on to him.

  “Is anybody giving you trouble?” the headmaster wondered.

  “Gonzalez,” the coach said mechanically and without hesitation.

  “Gonzalez!” the headmaster was astonished. “The late consul’s son?”

  “No, no,” the coach amended at once, but without the force of denial which might have been expected. “He gives me no trouble.” A deep blush spread over his face and his open throat.

  The headmaster sighed with relief.

  “I wondered,” the headmaster cried. “A wonderful lad!” he went on musing. “Talented! Cultured! Knows everything.”

  “That is what I meant,” the coach said lamely. “He is so talented in everything.”

  “Is he good in gym class?” the headmaster wondered.

  The coach thought a moment.

  “Perhaps you could give him special attention,” the headmaster said. “His father was very wealthy and would have liked to have his son have this extra attention.”

  The coach nodded.

  “I will begin tonight,” the coach said after a pause.

  “Well, you don’t have to begin that soon,” the headmaster laughed, surprised. “But I’m glad you like Gonzalez, coach. His family extends quite a bit of financial support to the school, you see,” he spoke with relief.

  The two men shook hands.

  All the way down the hall the coach, who hardly remembered now having spoken to the headmaster, kept thinking of Gonzalez’ gaze. He felt slightly dizzy. He had never thought about a boy before, he dimly knew, but of course he had never taught boys before. He had never taught. It was the excitement of teaching, he knew. His uncle, who had once been a teacher, had warned him how strenuous and exciting it would be. You will be terribly upset at first, the uncle had warned.

  He was not so much upset, he knew, he was rather taken over, he felt.

  He stopped in the school cafeteria and drank some milk with the other teachers. He could feel, he believed, a wave of popularity gathering around him. He was extremely popular, and this was, he knew, a fact as easy to recognize as one recognizes he is tall and strong. The coach was immediately liked by everybody. He had a presence which attracted all as though he gave out light in darkened rooms.

  As he drank the milk he talked with the mathematics teacher about Gonzalez, and then turning to the other teachers who were listening he explained to them also about Gonzalez.

  The civics class was the last class of the day and as though he were now sleepwalking the coach walked up to Gonzalez and tapped him. The other students had all gone, as though they had melted away in time, and as though also in a dream he and the boy were alone together in the classroom. Outside one could hear the students opening and shutting their lockers prior to their leaving the building for their homes.

  “You need extra help,” the coach said, and he expelled his breath as in an exercise, and a deep blush extended itself over his face and neck.

  “In what, sir?” the boy spoke quietly to the coach as from a distance.

  “Well, in gym . . . or English,” he said.

  The boy laughed. It was so obvious he needed no help there.

  “What are these,” the coach said after a moment looking at some drawing paper which the boy was holding.

  The boy showed him. They were drawings of the coach, and the coach showed his astonishment only after his pleasure at seeing his likeness.

  “You like to draw,” the coach said, and his eyes clouded as though they would now close.

  “You’re not angry, sir,” the boy said calmly, and of course they both knew the coach was not angry.

  “I would like to make a full length drawing of you,” the boy said as the coach continued to hold the drawings before him.

  “A nude, I suppose,” the coach said. Perhaps he had meant to make this remark witty, but it sounded merely calm and practical, so that the boy replied:

  “That would be best, of course, sir.”

  The boy spoke now as though he were on a moving vehicle, the expression on his face gradually receding and blurring as space came between them.

  “Well, if you wish it, you may,” the coach said still looking at the drawings.

  “Where would I sketch you, though,” the boy wondered.

  The coach’s face was very pink now, but he spoke with cold insistence, as though his being sketched were the one thing now he wanted most in the scheme of things. “The shower room would do, wouldn’t it. That room just before the showers, that is.”

  “Oh, the old football room,” the boy laughed. “All right.”

  “Whenever you wish, then, Gonzalez,” the coach shook hands with him.

  “You have the perfect build for a study I have been making,” Gonzalez said, but suddenly he blushed too. “It’s called The Evening of Adonis.”

  A bell rang in the corridor.

  “When do you want to draw me,” the coach said looking at his watch.

  “Oh any time.”

  “Since you have your drawing tablets with you now,” the coach said.

  “I couldn’t tonight, sir,” the boy said, and his eyes seemed suddenly in their warmth to have changed color.

  The coach remembered a time when as a boy he had swum far out beyond his depth and could feel the fatigue and cold of the water closing over him, but he refused to give up the still distant goal, and continued swimming. He felt this same iciness and suspension of breath now, this dizziness, as he went on with Gonzalez.

  “What night do you want me then?�
�� the coach continued.

  The boy thought. “Tomorrow night, sir, you see there is nobody in the old football room then.”

  “That is so,” the coach said. “Tomorrow is Friday.”

  “All right then, Friday after classes,” the boy said. They shook hands again.

  The coach stood there after the boy had left and the feeling of dizziness came and went over him.

  Several times that evening his wife had to repeat questions put to him.

  “The work of teaching is hard for you,” she said, just before they went upstairs to bed.

  The next day a kind of controlled dizziness took possession of him. He kept saying all through the classes that today was Friday. In the gym classes of that day he had taken off all his clothes but his jock strap, while he instructed the boys in the use of the “horse.” They seemed to accept his nudity as not unusual, and he seemed to look on his own action as necessary in testing his way for what was to come later here. He went down into the shower room with them after the class and carefully took off his clothes and bathed slowly in the showers so that each successive boy could not miss him there.

  At the noon lunch with the faculty several of the older men teachers had to put questions to him many times before he heard them.

  My first teaching position, yes was the usual answer he seemed to hear himself giving to every question. No I have never taught before.

  He did not see Gonzalez that day until civics class which was just forty-five minutes away from the day’s end.

  Today, Friday, he noticed that Gonzalez did not draw him or gaze at him, though occasionally his pencil came down on the paper as though he had sketched one line of the coach’s face, but it always came up immediately again. They avoided one another’s gaze.

  As the class came to an end, the coach, his face drained of blood, kept one of the other boys after class, talking to him about the bicameral system of legislation which, the boy said, he now understood, but which the coach continued to explain to him.

  Gonzalez, however, sat down in the front row with his calm Latin face watching the coach.

  When the boy went out the coach turned to him questioningly.

  “All ready, sir?” the boy said.

  The coach stared. “Why, this is Friday,” he said weakly, and he knew he was very pale.

  As they went out and down the hall together the coach looked about as though he might find one of the faculty members or a student who would at the last detain him. The coach felt now, as he had felt from the beginning, the power of the boy, and the inevitability of their walking down the hall together. His dizziness returned again.

  Everybody in the building seemed to have gone. It was nearly five o’clock, even the janitors had disappeared. A feeling of listening silence presided everywhere.

  They went into the small sweaty room that led to the showers. The coach sat down heavily on the long gray bench before the lockers. He put his hand out and touched his own locker.

  Gonzalez sat down on a chair and began arranging his drawing tablets.

  “You don’t feel like it maybe?” Gonzalez said, silently laughing.

  “I always keep my promise,” the coach said professionally, his mouth pale.

  The boy nodded.

  The coach began taking off his clothes, slowly at first and with a kind of forced, somber quality, then more quickly. He had stripped off everything but his jock strap, which he had kept on since the gym classes today. He took this off slowly, snapping the rubber of it over his legs at the last.

  Gonzalez was calm, collected, critical. He squinted.

  “Move over here, now, sir, and we will make this a complete drawing.”

  “Put everything in,” the coach said almost bitterly, threateningly, but the boy did not appear to hear him.

  “I’m going to turn on this other light,” the Cuban said, and the room was flooded with a kind of gold luminescence.

  The boy suddenly let his eyes come fully open under the thick lashes.

  “You’ve made this your life, haven’t you, sir,” the boy said.

  “What?” the coach said suddenly, tensing.

  “I mean building your body.”

  The coach stared at him.

  “It’s obvious you have modelled every part of yourself, like a sculptor.”

  The coach smiled. He had hardly known this consciously perhaps, but it had, of course, been his life. The boy had merely told him what he had done.

  He began to feel strong now again, his dizziness passed, and he was calm with the boy. He knew too that everybody had left the building. They were alone here with their male knowledge.

  “I would like to sketch you very carefully,” the boy said.

  “Do anything you like,” the coach told him.

  The boy looked at him, and then began to draw.

  He drew for some minutes without saying anything.

  “Tired?” the boy said in his adult manner, commanding and yet obedient to the coach.

  “A little,” the coach admitted.

  “You hold yourself a little too stiff,” the boy said, and laughed.

  The coach laughed too and looked down briefly.

  “Relax,” the boy said.

  “All right,” the coach said.

  “Hold your arm up just a little, like this,” the boy told him, and went on drawing. He drew some more in silence.

  “Now you are tired,” the boy said.

  The coach nodded and sat down on the gray bench to rest. The boy went on correcting his work.

  When he looked up the coach was staring at him as he had never quite even done in the classroom, and they both suddenly looked at one another with the knowledge that the barriers of others were no more. They both registered their customary blush, the blush they had exchanged with one another for these long weeks.

  “You are unusually and beautifully developed, sir. Perfect for the artist who wants to sketch,” he said, and his lips and throat revealed their dryness in his voice.

  The coach nodded to thank him.

  Then to cover his terrible excitement, the coach reached for his jock strap and threw it roughly over his middle.

  “You don’t need to do that, sir,” the boy said hoarsely, and all the nervousness which the coach had experienced earlier in the day came now to him.

  “It must be the heat in the room,” the coach laughed awkwardly.

  As though hypnotized the boy put down his drawing tablets and then glided over to the bench.

  The coach sat there helplessly, as though suddenly ensnared by the development he had given his own body.

  “I haven’t seen anyone else so perfect,” the boy said. “I had suspected you might be, but I did not know.”

  He touched the coach on his chest.

  Giving him a look that resembled an exhausted animal in a net the coach lay back on the bench, his hands loosely hanging down. His face and body were covered with a deep rose that seemed to come as though hot burning clothes had been laid upon him. His penis bobbed wildly, throbbingly as though it too suddenly sprang for release, and with its struggles forced him back on the bench. He was the image of prey, capture, helplessness.

  The young boy merely sat there now watching him.

  The coach looked up at him imploringly trying to raise his head. Tears, whether of helplessness, rage, fear, or love descended his cheeks.

  The boy put both his hands on the neck of the coach as if to hold him down now, and then his own head fell slowly upon the man’s chest, and he opened his mouth on one of his nipples. The man gave out now great sobs of an emotion impossible to define. The boy’s breath was like something from a terrible concentrated tiny furnace and brought the red blush of unexpectedness to a flaming crimson on the man’s body. The boy’s lips descended now slowly and heavily.

  The coach now felt imprisoned, lost, forever changed, and that in his change he had grown a white hairless tail from his backside and that this tail, another agent of his imprisonment, a
long with his penis, was thrashing powerfully but impotently on the rough floor, wounding itself, wounding him, splitting open something inside himself.

  As the young Cuban tasted his flesh, his tropical appetite long depressed by the North American dryness suddenly revived, and brought to his mind the thought of his long famishment. His mouth opened like the jaws of a beautiful but mythical monster, and brought itself down upon the organ of the coach.

  Suddenly neither of them could bear any restraint.

  “Tear me,” the coach implored in the agony of a man who must command a friend to slay him.

  The Cuban nodded.

  “You don’t understand,” the coach cried, breathing as though near death. “Wound me, wound me!” the coach cried.

  The boy continued his passionate embraces.

  “Tear me!” the coach cried. “Let me see how I can stand the pain.”

  The Cuban’s head, with its thick intwined locks, fastened securely to his organ like some great revolving planet of the heavens, was suddenly lifted and the eyes which had pursued the coach all those long weeks stared at him. “I can’t hurt you, sir.”

  “If not there, then here,” he cried, and he pointed to his chest.

  The boy turned back to his embrace.

  “Tear me before you bring me,” the coach cried.

  Suddenly he struck the boy. “Obey!” he cried.

  And he brought the boy up to his breast, and made as though to crush his neck.

  As he crushed him to his chest the boy fastened his teeth tightly into the coach’s chest bringing easily from it blood and a kind of foam from his saliva that resembled milk. The coach sighed with release and pushed the boy’s head now down to his organ again.

  “Bring me now,” the coach said.

  WHEN THE BOY had at last disengaged himself the coach rolled onto the floor writhing still, his imaginary white tail still twisting in the dust and sweat of the young men he had trained, his seed and blood alike flecking himself and the floor.