“That’s a good dog,” the man said. “I had a life in which I would have needed you, once. It was not an honest life. I died. I have a new life. In it I want you, but it would be dishonest of me to need you. If I were to get succor from you, I would not be able to return it properly—I would only take. Then I would repudiate your succor and accuse you of giving it to me. The form of this accusation would be intractable, but that is its substance. You would have, in giving me succor which I could not return, exposed me to be a nonreciprocator of love, and I would have to hate you for this. This hate also would take intractable forms. One of the commoner intractable forms would be a declaration that I wanted yet another woman to do this to. I would tell you this to hurt you, and then hurt the new woman the same way. You do not want me to need you. You want me to want you.”
This was of course suspiciously convenient-looking to Mrs. Hollingsworth, given her own ruminations concerning men who wanted and needed. But it was also complicated enough that she was not sure she had generated it all. It had an integrity that was stronger than her own formulation would have been, she thought.
She approached the man and put her finger inside the hopeless shirt she had cruelly given him. It seemed a fit emblem of this new life he said he had, though. Previously the shirt would have been a nice powder-blue Brooks Brothers oxford cloth. “What I want,” she said, “is for you to take a bath with me.”
The lemon dog was working a spot on the living room carpet. It could not advance because it had to do the system-clearing cough at every sniff. It stood in its tracks, snuffling up and discarding invisible olfactory trash. “Too much weirdness in that carpet for him to know anything at all,” the man said. “He’s got the instinct to give up. He’ll move on. I must too.” Mrs. Hollingsworth did not like her man speaking this overtly—she was better than that, she thought, and he was. Still, he said it. She was going to have to get used to the idea of taking a man for what he was despite her cartoon of him. She had heard of Michelangelo’s cartoon on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, cut into the plaster, lines that he had had the genius to ignore once up there on his back with the truer paintbrush in his hand.
In the scalding tub—the man shied from the water, and whimpered and fretted getting in, almost asymptotically, and remarked that he needed to be sterilized anyway—she laid the man back against her and held him in her arms. She calmed his eyes by pressing her hot hands over his eyelids, and she held his breasts, and her own were trapped against his back in an exhilarating press of steam and heat, making them tender and alive. She pushed the man forward and checked them to see if they had turned into huge wontons, which is what they felt like. His broad back was gorgeous in that position, and she took a good coarse washcloth and good glycerine soap to him. She washed him as if, it occurred to her, they were in the nineteenth century, or whatever century it was or centuries it was that people sat in tubs and other people poured great gouts of hot water on them and washed them. How had that disappeared? Maybe that disappearance was the beginning of the hell-in-a-handcart ride the human world seemed set on. The man leaned forward and accepted this succor from her without protest.
He began to speak. He spoke at great length, and nothing he said was intelligible to the ear. Yet she understood everything he said. It was a modification of the curious phenomenon that Ray Oswald had observed in the Forrest film during the dinner party. It was talk that sounded like talk but was not talk, yet in the present case was understandable to an organ other than the ear and the brain. While he talked, the lemon dog came into the bathroom and stopped its snuffling and sat and regarded the man with its head held atilt as if it understood everything. Mrs. Hollingsworth realized she was listening in the same way.
She realized too she was not capable of reporting what the man was saying, any more than the dog was. But the man was speaking the truth of his life, and to her. It was of the pain of his life, and his smallness, and his failures, and it was offered to her not as something she would need to assume the burden of and help him with, any more than the dog would be asked to help him with it. It was being put into the air more or less as clothes are put into the air before lovers unite. He was taking his clothes off for her. Hers, she felt, were off. She realized that in this respect she was not unlike the dog. This was perhaps what was spectacularly lovable about dogs: their clothes were off at all times, and they did not even know it. People wanted to be that way.
She and the dog listened to the man go on. The room was filled with agreeable steam and the music of this confession that was so complicated, like the carpet the dog could not analyze, that you could only love it and go with it and hum along and kiss the ear of the man singing it, who was singing it not because he needed her to hear it but because he wanted her to hear it, and she did not want to hear it, but she needed to.
She began to see along with the man, to comprehend, as it were, because she could not apprehend what he was saying in the ramble of language that was not talk. The man was seeing that his father who had taken him out of football had also sold his shotgun rather than give it to him, a boy of thirteen who could have used a shotgun. So the disappointment the boy had given the father came before that. The mother was somehow approving of this, the not football and the not gun. The father was known to fight and the mother was also approving that the boy would not be known to fight, though she approved of the father’s violence. Had the father had the boy taken from him by the mother? What were the mother’s nonfootball nongun nonviolent plans and hopes for her boy, then? Plans so fond that she denied the plans the father had naturally had, in the absence of which the boy would grow up to be afraid of thick-shouldered high school boys because he had not been allowed to be one. And in the absence of which the boy would grow to look distrustfully upon the women who purported to give him succor—what were they really up to? Were they not like his mother? Did they have plans for you that were defined primarily by their not being someone else’s plans for you, that alone their virtue?
Facing a woman who meant him well, the boy had become a man in a hollow of doubt. He had kissed his father at the funeral but not his mother. Because of his mother he had not assaulted the man in the funeral home who had insulted them. His father would have assaulted the man, in the parlor or on the very embalming table had the struggle improbably moved from one room to the next. Yet the man who had been the boy whose father would not give him a shotgun or let him play football or teach him to fight or even to gamble at cards could only bluster and threaten and walk out into the blinding sun and see a vision of Forrest riding a horse through sunny hill and dale of grave upon grave.
The lessons he would learn in life would come from hired hands who bore him malice and aimed weapons at him and high school boys who beat him, not from his father. His women would be not sufficiently not his mother. The most honest way he would come to regard them was with the piercing open hunger for them with which he had looked at Mrs. Hollingsworth when he came in her door.
Confused and afraid of life, he would resort to honesty, a fool’s tool that would dig a grave more quickly than undiluted corruption. And he lay in Mrs. Hollingsworth’s arms in a tub of boiling water, saying all this without knowing what he was saying, but trying. She listened to every word that was not a word and thought him to be taking sustenance from her, from her surreal meal, from her having no plans for him that were not precisely and ineluctably and unpredictably her own.
Intruders in the Fog
WHILE THE MAN CARRIED on with the song of his essential self, articulate in its inarticulateness, important in its triviality, the man and the woman and the dog heard a noise outside the bathroom door. A voice whispered, “She’s in here.” The woman knew immediately it was the Tupperware daughter she had asked out of the house. She knew she was talking to her father, and that she had dragged him home from his office day on grounds that she, Mrs. Hollingsworth, had lost her mind. She knew that they could not have heard the man mumbling on about himself but that they could have
heard her mumbling along with him, completing his wordless squirreled syntax in the not language he was necessarily using. If they opened the door they would not see the man or the dog, only her in her thinning hirsuteness and pink flesh being a boiled human egg in the middle of the live-long day.
The daughter would have also told the husband about the crazy list-making, but she believed the husband to know about it already. She had seen him looking at it once or twice in the drawer where she kept it in the kitchen. He had closed the drawer and asked where the matches were, or the whatever he could think to ask about instead of asking her about the altogether strange thing in the drawer. He had had a queer look on his face that she had not seen there in a long time. It was a smile, an oblique look of impish bemusement. She realized as she lay there expecting to have to cover herself against their door-ramming rescue of her that the look was the same one she had seen on Forrest’s face after he said “What is that shit?” referring to the Hendrix music. With them hovering outside the door there was no time to give this revelation justice: had she put her husband’s expression on Forrest? If she had, there was more to her husband than she had thought. This was not surprising, because it seemed to her that she had not thought of him at all for about fifty years. And now he was a sanity detective hunched over with his ear to the bathroom door behind which she, whom for all she knew he had not thought of for fifty years, lay like a mad steamed dumpling. Nothing this delightful had arranged itself in her real life in a long, long time.
She braced for the invasion, wondering if they might not turn up the volume on NPR to a deafening level to cover the uncivil sounds of shouldering the door. You could be known to hang yourself in your carport in this neighborhood with a measure of dignity, but the breaking down of a door would not do. A woman down the street, it was alleged, had actually chopped apart the hollow-core door to her son’s bedroom with an ax to prevent his masturbating. The boy in question was thereafter regarded with small gratuitous kindnesses in the neighborhood, while the mother was shied from in the grocery store. Men in particular kept a cart between themselves and her. Thinking of all this now, Mrs. Hollingsworth realized that the invasion was not forthcoming. The bulk of the bourgeoisie was no longer holding its breath up against the hollow-core door preventing her rescue. She was hearing her husband’s voice.
From the sound of it, and some muted noises coming from her daughter, she judged her husband to be sitting where Turner had sat during the dinner party, at the head of the dining table. Her daughter was not where Jane had been but where Oswald had been, at a polite and reserved remove down the table. Oswald, for all his coarseness, and the haircut, had had a fine sense of propriety. “I’d say,” her husband was saying, “she is taking a bath.”
“Dayad,” her daughter said, as condescendingly as a teenager, “how can you—”
“And I’d say what she has written is, you are right, not a grocery list. And to your notion that she has lost her mind, I’d say that I hope you are right.”
One of the muted noises escaped her daughter at this. “You do?”
“I do.”
This was so congruent to Mrs. Hollingsworth’s way of thinking during all these days of making her list that she thought perhaps she had lost her mind. It was one thing to have Forrest speak the way you wanted him to, for you, or her wounded man with his not need and his want, but quite another to have your husband up and vote right along with you, without the least prompt. She realized that she had loaded in the breach of her mouth something to fire at them had they broken in the door, to protect herself along with the ridiculous gesture of trying to cover herself. She had been about to shout at them, “I’m an artist!” With the relief now of what she was hearing her husband say, and realizing she had had this bullet verily on her tongue, she started laughing, and she knew they could hear her. She could imagine her husband gesturing in the air toward her as she laughed, as if to say to the daughter, “See? She is happy. I am right.”
But he was saying something much more improbable than that. “Your mother is tired, honey. I am tired. Or I was. Today I am not. I am retired today.”
“What?” the daughter said, in a tone of shock and wonder that was extremely gratifying. Mrs. Hollingsworth loved her husband at this moment. She thought it a lie designed to take pressure off her in the daughter’s eyes, and to shock the daughter. But she did not believe her husband to be as malicious with respect to the children as she had become. And indeed he was not, for it appeared instantly that he was not lying.
He told the daughter that he was retired and that he and her mother had enough money to live on and that they were liquidating everything and hitting the trail. “I don’t know,” he said, “if we will take taxis or get a dope van.”
“Where are you going?” The tone was now accusing. How had this smooth pea come out of her wrinkled self?
“I don’t know that either. We might actually sit right here, but we are going somewhere else nonetheless even if we do not move an inch.” Mrs. Hollingsworth almost heard this as “a inch,” as if Oswald had said it. Had she put her husband in Oswald too? There was something aggressive in her husband’s voice. It was a good voice, a voice he used professionally as a judge, and he could use it well. He could scare a man into straightening up, a jury into nullifying all notion of nullifying itself. He was cranking it up in the living room on his own daughter. He was a quietly desperate man himself, Mrs. Hollingsworth realized. That she might be insane and he desperate gave her a thrill.
Her husband was now carrying on almost like the man in the tub, but with consummate articulation and elocution, bench-grade. Strangely, she could understand what he was saying much less well than she had understood the man in the tub with her, but she could hear that it was the same kind of song, if it was not the same song. The particulars were now daily and daylight ones, for the daughter’s benefit. Life was too short to be afraid of it all your life, he was saying, but like this: “There is no dignity in the Volvo. Would you like one?” Ho! He said that! Even odder noises were coming out of the daughter. “No, no, honey. Not give it to you, but Blue Book value,” and some huffing purse-sweeping outrage and the door closed and the daughter was gone.
A silence caught the house. It was the ticking of the middling day of the settling suburban house that drove her mad. But there was this new presence in it with her. It sat back at the table. It sighed and, she could see it well, folded its hands in calm regard. It brushed its good haircut back from its temples and looked modestly unkempt and drowsily wild. It was tired. It was retired. It was going to get up in a minute or two and come get in the tub with her. This development was positively luminescent in its improbability, in its corniness, in its fairy-tale dynamic and melodrama. She had written her husband back into her life, her life back into itself; they maybe had one where before they had not. That this had happened was not, she thought—adjusting some heat into the tub via a hose that would make no sound, so that she could hear her husband move toward her—to be looked hard in the mouth. It was to be ridden. If anything happened, they were to fight or run, according to whether it was time to fight or run. Mrs. Hollingsworth knew all about it.
Her husband’s cologne came through the door before him. It was of course the same cologne Forrest had worn and that she had dabbed on many times herself. He got in the tub in the same position as the wounded man. He did not say a word.
His legs were out in front of them, like something on exhibit, straight and narrow and suit-pale. He shimmied them, setting up a small standing wave of ripples in the tub, and stopped and held his legs still. “I wonder if I can still run,” he said.
Mrs. Hollingsworth put her whole tongue in his ear, like a teenager. “If I can still do that,” she said, “you can still run. Did you really retire?”
“I am as retired as a dog ready for another dog to lie on top of him.”
Startled, Mrs. Hollingsworth said, “Hey! General Forrest said that!”
Her husband said,
“I know General Forrest said that. Anybody went to Nathan Bedford Forrest High School knows that.”
“Anybody went” was Ray Oswald. Dogs under dogs was Forrest. The whole thing had been her husband, her apprehensions of fifty or a hundred too-familiar years with her husband, whom she had found again by making him a list, a list of her husband, a meal at last for him. And the man she had taken out of powder-blue oxford cloth and put in red plaid was her husband, wounded and tired on pin legs in her tub.
The best things in the universe are the out-of-mind and the invisible, those sunny caves of ice you forget when you wake up—as Coleridge put it before his hybridity was adjudicated. Mrs. Hollingsworth distrusted the fairy-taleness of all this, but not enough to not believe it. She and her husband had emerged from stupefaction, and she was not going to gainsay it. They were going to get on the horse of this new life, real or not, and ride. They were going to tear the very air with determination to win. They were not going to inspect the cause or weigh their slim chances. “Come in the bedroom, love,” she said to her retired skinny-legged husband. “You be canvas and I’ll be silk. I’ll be a thimble, you be silver. I’ll melt you into the ground. There is no operator’s manual for my gizmo.”
Her husband stood up and got himself a towel and headed for the bedroom. He had nothing on but that impish look, and he said not a word, a retired judge.
About the Author
Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including The Interrogative Mood and You & Me. His novel Edisto was a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Little Star, and the Paris Review, and he is the recipient of the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Whiting Writers’ Award. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches writing at MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida.
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