Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  Those moments, I’d think of days I spent alone in deep woods, near our last town, times when I dreamed that people had vanished—painless but gone—and that now I was welcome to choose my life with nothing to see me but small wild beasts and the rare meat-eater, stronger than me but not as quick. In maybe three minutes, the man bent over to dry his feet. The hair of his head was thick, black and stiff as horsehair; but still his eyes and mouth were hid. Only enough of his arms were clear to show him, not just an agreeable singer but young and long-limbed, with firm tan skin.

  There at my chink on a whole new world, I managed at least a quick thanksgiving to whatever power had answered this much of my need. Now all that was left was some deed or characteristic act which would prove that this partial masculine body was a preview of mine, a credible promise that I would also grow with the years.

  But he only took one step in my direction, turned to face me and held rock-still. At first I was disappointed and hoped again that he’d act. Young as I was though, in an innocent time, I had no specific deed in mind, surely no blatant sex show. In fact, afflicted as I was by the mindless tumescence of a growing boy, there at the door that night, my parts were in unaccustomed abeyance. Not because I was scared—it was just my mind that burned with the sight. And in a few seconds, my mind understood the gift he was giving—for now at least, a warm anatomical model before me, almost in reach if the heat of my eye had widened the chink as it might have.

  His penis was a good deal bigger than mine and also calm. The hair above it was black and wiry as African hair, though he had to be white. Like a great many boys (I’ve since discovered), my main anxiety resided in the hair. I knew I had a penis and balls that promised to grow; but would I eventually sprout this hair, in the true man’s place? I tried to see how it differed from the texture of hair on my head. But aside from the curl and the wiry shortness, I got no closer to certainty.

  The odd thing was, he didn’t seem to know what a treasure he owned. He seemed to be drying the whole miraculous region absently, like an elbow or foot. But then he dropped his towel to the floor and spent the better part of a minute giving his parts a thorough inspection. I had no knowledge of syphilis then or even crab lice, so he may have been making a sanitary check. Whatever, he found no cause for alarm. His prying hands went back to his sides, and again he just stood frankly before me.

  But was he standing here for me? Did he know I was near? Had he drilled the hole in the door himself, that afternoon? And who could he be? I’d seen no body this young and strong anywhere but the bathhouse at our swimming pool, and then I was always rushing to hide my own white skin. I suddenly thought of a possible answer. I could go to my phone, call down to the desk-clerk and quietly ask who was in 211. I stood up to go before I was balked by the child’s steady fear, He’ll think I’m dumb and laugh and tell everybody.

  So next I told myself, “Go to sleep. You’ve got school tomorrow, and you’ll be worn out.” By then my mind seemed ready to be sensible; and I had actually touched my bed when the song recommenced, still nearer but somehow higher and milder. I had read a boy’s version of The Odyssey and knew about the sirens’ song. I even covered both my ears; but the voice came through, as piercing and magnetic as before. The light from the hole was a little dimmer but I knelt again.

  What was in there now was entirely different. It stood where it was the moment I left. And the size and lines of its body were the same—a male human shape, larger than me but no great giant. The change was, it no longer showed tan skin. It had put out a stunning coat of plumage. The best I could see, his feathers grew in all kinds and sizes, from stiff wing-vanes to the softest down; and they all aimed upward on the body in colors that far outclassed any peacock I’d seen. I recalled a painting in The National Geographic of Montezuma and his noble lords, dressed in robes of the finest bird-feathers, whole tribes of birds killed off in the making.

  This was no robe though; this was the actual skin of some creature unknown to science, not six feet from me. What had started as a strong but normal young man had just now changed his skin into this. Even the groin I studied was now all feathered in green and gold. And what had been a man’s calm penis was a single winglike thing, flared up boldly toward a face I couldn’t begin to imagine or hope to see. Yet strangely again, I felt no fear. And the human words it had sung before were now just notes in a seamless melody.

  If this had happened six years ago, before I started school and tamed my mind, I’d have watched all night, or fallen asleep upright at the chink or died from prolonged exposure to the man-bird or flown with it some place better than this. But foolishly rational as I’d now become, I came to a common adolescent conclusion—This is some kind of trick, intended to show the entire world, in garish red, what a fool I am. I took a last look as the song went softer still and higher and the gorgeous fraud began to lean forward, on the absolute verge of showing its face. Then I got up again, went to my bed and hid myself to the ears in cover. Wildest of all, I’d seen so much that I even managed to sleep fairly soon, though the voice never quit while I was conscious.

  In that town then, all twelve grades of school were housed in one building. I was in the seventh grade; but the next day at lunch, I heard the news that, over the weekend, the high-school math and physics teacher had suffered a stroke, was paralyzed and had been replaced by a man from Raleigh, named Simon Fentriss, just out of college. As soon as I knew, I began to hunt for him. Could he be my neighbor? But he wasn’t on view at the teachers’ lunch table. Nobody my age knew anything about him but his name; and only the wildest girl knew that much—Amantha Perry, with the premature breasts that everybody loved like a cause for pride that our class owned such a natural wonder.

  I kept my previous night a secret; but the minute I got to the hotel that afternoon, I walked to the front desk with all my courage and asked if Mr. Fentriss was back?

  The clerk said “I haven’t seen him come in yet. He could’ve slipped past me though and be upstairs.”

  “In 211?”

  “Right next to you, yes.”

  So the man I might take algebra from, two years ahead, was a curious trickster who practiced at home to fool more than me. I dropped in to let Mother know I was safe, then said I’d get right down to my homework in my new room. What I did though was actually lock my door, lie on the narrow bed and stroke my body to the ready relief it eagerly gave me. Then I fell straight to sleep, recovering what I’d lost in the night.

  The room was nearly pitch-dark when I woke; my luminous watch said five-thirty. And through the adjoining door, I focused on the sound that had waked me—water filling a basin. I crept to the door and tried the hole. Two legs in dark-brown corduroy trousers and heavy brown shoes, the waist of a sweater and again the flash of a towel, drying hands. It all constituted a sight as normal as bread on a table, no song, no word.

  But back in my room, the evening and night continued normal. He played his radio but kept it low, he made a short phone-call that I couldn’t hear, he peed maybe twice. In everything, far as I could see, Mr. Fentriss moved like the model I’d asked for—a competent grown man, young enough to watch. And when he brushed his teeth at eleven, he was wearing light-blue boxer shorts on normal skin, though shaggier than mine.

  After I heard him switch off his lamp, I also quit and climbed into bed. As I crouched up to sleep, I told myself to face the serious possibility that I might have dreamed the night before, might have put myself through fantastic hoops—a bird-man-neighbor—to celebrate my first chance to meet a whole dark night with no blood-kin in the sound of my voice.

  The next few days passed similarly. I never saw him in the hall, the lobby or the dining room. But the bottom half of him, through the chink in the door, went on being so natural and tame that I quickly lost my taste for spying. And when Amantha rushed up on Friday, pointed across the lunchroom and whispered “Ain’t he fine?” it took me a second to know who she meant. Simon Fentriss—I swear both names spoke out in my he
ad as clear as gongs. And by the time my eyes set on him, he was facing me from ten yards’ distance, past ten dozen children in the usual noontime barely contained riot. When our eyes met, I sheered off quickly and waited till old Mrs. Root spoke to him; then I got a long look.

  The way some people can guess your weight to within three pounds, I’ve always been good at fixing ages. Only the richest plastic surgeon can hide you from me. And here I’m speaking of the 1940s, four long decades before such doctors had got this far off the beaten track. Simon Fentriss was twenty-four; he must have been in the war and finished college a few years late.

  He had a strong face with the Indian skull I hoped to have—high cheekbones, a jaw you could make points with. The stiff black hair started high on his forehead; and though it was combed, it looked coarse and strong. In all, I thought he had the power to last for decades and work his will, both of which were my aim. Then his wide mouth opened on a long kind laugh. Nobody had laughed with old Mrs. Root in living memory, and she plainly liked it. After that, he didn’t look my way again.

  And I felt easier thinking he found my eyes by chance. But within five minutes, the way you do for the rest of your life, I picked Mr. Fentriss as my next magnet, the thing I’d try to grasp in secret and gain a man’s power and knowledge from. You could call it love and be nearly right; I’ve loved only two people more than him in all the years since.

  Yet I never met him, never shook his hand, though I did once brush his coat in the hall. I tried many times to draw his attention, in the lobby mainly; and he’d grin and nod as if I might have been a thriving houseplant or a Shetland pony, not the partner to the secret power of his manhood. Today boys twelve years old start babies on girls every minute, but back then we stood in shadows till they called us and asked our names. So I never spoke more words to him than “Hey”; and Mr. Fentriss never called me once, not by name as I hoped. I couldn’t ask Mother to invite him to supper; and in two more months, Father found us a house and moved us out of the hotel for good. Before I was old enough for algebra, we left the whole town and moved to Kentucky. But one more night truly happened and it changed me.

  Within a month of coming to town, Mr. Fentriss began having weekend dates. There were few unmarried women around, of his age and station; but he seemed to take them up one-by-one and give each a whirl. A whirl back then consisted of a trip twelve miles southwest to the next-larger town, a steak-supper there in the Glass House Restaurant, a movie maybe or (in summer) a dance in a big tobacco warehouse and whatever fun you could manage to take between then and driving her home at dawn.

  Most Friday nights I had no more to do than any other night, so I’d stay close to my room and hear Mr. Fentriss dress for his date. It gave me ragged scraps of feeling what a man might feel with a whirl in prospect and nothing to stop him. I’d mostly lie on my bed and listen, having given up watching him, early on, since nothing had happened after that first night. And anyhow he hadn’t sung one more note of audible music nor said a word, much less turned into whatever he was that first fine night. So listening to the sound of water was enough and the slap of his large bare feet on tile.

  By that far along in his preparation, the simple sound of his moving feet would be enough to sling me far, on a golden thread way over the ground, where I could trace my whole life’s path—a tall man making his dignified way, leading his wife and dependent children and earning respect. In flight, my body would stiffen and beg for the lightning moment my hand could give it, the finest drug on Earth and free. By the time Mr. Fentriss was ready to leave, I’d be serene as the Dalai Lama, gazing down on my homemade Himalayas of snow and dazzling white birds, riding the lustrous columns of air toward safe night and rest.

  Then I’d join my family to play board games or three-handed bridge, with all of us tuned to the radio. By quarter-past eleven I’d always manage to say I was tired and head for my room. Each Friday I vowed I’d stay awake till Mr. Fentriss got back in and showed whatever he’d learned or won, in the hours of dark, from whatever girl or woman he’d found to bear his weight or spurn his touch.

  But I almost always managed to sleep before he turned the key in his lock (more than once, when he was out, I tried his door handle). A time or two I woke to hear him brushing his teeth. My radiant watch might say three-thirty or, once, past five; and I’d lie awake as long as I could—a few stunned seconds—to check for music or any trace of song. I’d always hear water and sometimes the jingle of coins on his bureau. Once I thought I heard the beat of his iron bedstead as he lay down and used himself in whatever masterly way men employed. But even at the hint of that much news, I was too young to dredge myself upright from the bogs of sleep and rise to search what I could see of his legs and crotch for my own fate.

  There was one last chance though, the weekend before we’d leave the hotel; and by various means I struggled to keep myself in the shallows and welcome him back in a secret alert. My father was an abject coffee-fiend and would always let me drink along with him whenever I asked. So with supper that Friday, I drank a good deal. And I stayed with the family till nine o’clock before bowing out. When I went to my room, I took a hidden tablespoon of dry ground coffee that I laid by the bed. I set my Big Ben alarm for midnight. Then I cut off the lamp and, high as I was, I managed to rest. It was not sleep exactly but a good kind of waiting, with snatches of dream in which again I was sure of my step as I led two sons that looked like me on a rocky path toward a broad clean river.

  When the bell went off, I caught it at once. I said an earnest word of thanks to the god of sleep; then got up, washed my face at the basin and also peed. Any traveling man then, in the days of scarce toilets, understood that a basin with running water served nicely, provided you ran hot water once you finished. Then I fished my book from under the mattress, got back into bed, packed a big pinch of the coffee grounds into my lower lip and started to read, for the hundredth time, the most exciting words I knew.

  The book was the only thing I’d stolen till then in my life. Two friends of my parents lived on the third floor, overhead. They had just got married the previous summer, and one of their wedding presents was a book called Sacred ]oy: The Marital Beacon. I’d caught sight of its orange binding on visits upstairs, and a glimpse of its color and four-inch thickness was enough to thrill me dangerously. It was famous among the rare sex guides of those dark days for medical candor combined with a radical view of the “beauty” of sexual congress. Until moving here, I’d never seen a copy outside bookstores, much less run the risk of owning one. So hard temptation seized me; and one weekend when our friends left for Myrtle Beach, I walked in, seized it and hid it in my room. I figured they’d be bashful at owning a copy and wouldn’t complain. So far I was right.

  Whatever guilt I knew I should feel, it drowned the moment I cracked the pages. The paper was that old cream-colored stock I loved so well, fat and rough to the touch. I couldn’t know then how fast it was on the way to dissolving in its silent acids (slower than me, come to think of it now); so all I felt was the almost terrifying blaze of discovery—sacred joy!—as I ate the pages in a first quick skim. Here were actual words I’d dreamed of hearing and guaranteed genuine drawings of parts that I’d seen nowhere but bathroom walls in brutal guesses by fools no better informed than me. The thought that I had it in my own hands, in a private room with a lock on the door was almost more than a twelve-year-old could handle back then.

  I’d sometimes check five times a day to see if it still lurked under my bedding. And when I’d be with my parents and sister, I’d lapse into moments of shaking fear—the book would burst into sudden flame and gut the building, charring us all. Or worse, we’d hear footsteps on the stairs; and the sheriff would enter to chain me for larceny. But I never returned it; and strangely our friends never mentioned the theft, though I knew everybody was sure who did it.

  Still that last night, I counted on it as my best insurance of staying awake for Mr. Fentriss. In the weeks I’d owned it, I ricocheted
wildly through random sentences, too thrilled by my luck to read in sequence and pausing only to drain my pressure. Now I’d turn to page one and force myself to read straight on, with care not to sap my strength too soon. It was not a bit easy; the early chapters were about the virtues of youthful chastity and what unmappable joys await the virgin pair who meet at last on a blossom-strewn matrimonial couch. But I stumbled through the placing of “tapers” at safe yet strategic points round the bed, the moment of unison thanks to God, the exquisite patience required of you the groom, the tender use of your ample hand to coax her gates as wide apart as care can bring them, then your sadly noble conquering thrust and the hours of nurture incumbent on you as she learns to bear this lifelong breach that precedes your fertile life together in God’s great family.

  It got so anatomically vague that even I found myself half nodding; so I skipped to the third chapter, “Oral Tradition,” and was back on form in very few moments. It was near two o’clock when the sound of a turning key alarmed me. Had I locked my door; was Father coming in? I hid the book and reached for my light before I realized the lock was not mine. Simon Fentriss was finally back. I seldom let myself say both his names; but in that charged moment, they sounded so clearly I feared I’d said them. I went on and killed my light anyhow. Darkness would make these last few seconds of wait more exciting. And I’d stay in bed till I heard his bathroom light switch on. He was one human being who never performed his toilet in the dark.

  I never heard it. His entry to the bedroom had been nearly silent; and as I listened, the silence deepened. No old hotel, built mostly of wood, can keep quiet long. The more nights you stay, the better memory you get of each noise. Just in my short time alone, I’d learned the voice of every board in the two flights of stairs outside my door. You could have landed by silent helicopter on the twelfth step on the third-floor stairs, I’d have caught you blindfolded. And I knew not only the boards and tiles but the two kinds of carpet in Mr. Fentriss’s rooms. I could tell, just by the sound of the soles of his feet, each time he forgot to lay down a bath mat. On my last night, there were no sounds at all. Not while I waited.