Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell Read online

  She wondered how these things, her children, had come out of her. How had she borne into the world the Tupperware sisters? And square canisters at that. Her daughters were with the world, with the program. They had gotten aboard the wagon with the rest of the NPR Rockettes. There was a great crowd of folk out there who had assigned themselves the task of watching out for the surreal fog. These were the same folk who thought you were a better person if you could hum along to Mozart. Who elected themselves to all the proprietary boards, local, state, national, and now global, that they could. They were an army of presumers who presumed to legislate what everyone did, thought, felt, should do, should think, should feel. They were the three-headed dog guarding the boat of the sane. They called it, moreover, being human. She could see that this was what Forrest was riding against with his boys, who, unable to articulate the evil, could nonetheless dress up against it and slouch against it and ride their insolent sleighs in their insolent pants, showing their asses, over the hills and through the woods to grandmothers house we go. Her daughters looked like the Doublemint twins in this cartoon. They had on matching lime-green sunsuits and cat’s-eye glasses and chewed confidently.

  Mrs. Hollingsworth was ready to go on a date with Rape Oswald if he came through the door. The Oswald she had left on a sidewalk in Holly Springs Mississippi furiously pulling surreal fog out of himself. She liked his pluck and his mettle. Maybe he was the man for her. To the fog: en avant!

  And was she demented if she wanted surreal-fog Rape Oswald more than her real-fog husband? There was nothing wrong with her husband, except two things. He was a human being, and after twenty-five years he resided indeed in a fog of familiarity next to her, as she presumed she resided in one next to him. When she had still had friends, she told one of them once, trying to put her finger on just what was wrong between them, “I don’t know—he’s just so. . .aloof.” She had felt ridiculous telling the woman this, watching her tsk her head in an expression of pity suggesting that she did not suffer the same aloofness at her familiar house. It got to where Mrs. Hollingsworth felt self-conscious telling anyone anything, actually, especially these Volvo tsk-tskers, all she or any of them had for friends, and she had gradually obtained an agreeable predicament wherein she did not say ridiculous self-conscious things to these women, because she stopped talking to them altogether. Was it demented to have no one to talk to? Or, more precisely, not to want to talk to anyone? She hardly thought so. Was it demented to want an imaginary man? Was that not the condition of all women, starting at about age thirteen? Did they not really keep on doing it all their lives? As did not men keep seeking imaginary women? What was so demented in wanting Rape Oswald if you looked at it this way? He beat hell out of the guy too tired to get off the cot for thinking he had somehow failed his father and because he was no longer in a transport of love, and he had the quintessential (imaginary) woman. Or was she imaginary? Let us posit she is real, by reason that she is quintessentially imaginary. She is so surreal that she enters a new dimension, of the real. And this woman is then, really, Mrs. Hollingsworth, who is getting tired of Lonnie Schmonnie on the cot and has been making eye contact with the man down on the square who wants her so bad he has swooned to the concrete and risked arrest in the most direct, most natural, least calculated expression of his desire for her that occurs to him. Let us say he is not a human being, even. The NPR Rockettes will not quarrel with that. The Tupperware ladies will admit, “Perhaps he wasn’t, um, fully human. Everyone will be very satisfied with that generous consideration of Rape Oswald, on the ground with his need. Cerherus guarding the boat of the sane will bark approval, looking like the RCA dog.

  She had worked herself up into a state. She found her daughter, off the phone, and said to her, “Lawnhoy and I never slept with each other, love, because he could not contain himself when I kissed him—a young thing who could not leave his mother.” Then she went back in the kitchen and removed the phone from the hook so that the girl would have to contain this thickening of the surreal fog by herself for a while. She looked at her prodigious list, her meal for the hungriest largest fool alive. She was in love with the fool who would eat this meal, and digest it, and profit from it, and know what it was.

  Forrest was the purest of foolish heroes, riding hard. He was canvas and light, leather and speed, and he did not abide instruction, moral or immoral.

  Oswald was the boy. Oswald was the boy listening only to himself, and to her. Oswald was hungry, and a fool, and hers.

  Sea Change

  When Oswald entered the room, Mrs. Hollingsworth said, “Hi, Ray.” He looked at her with a tilt to his head, and then straightened it, as if he had taken her meaning. He had; Rape was a nickname that had done him no good. It had come from a blending of Ray Payne, his First and middle names. A girl in high school had thought his name was Rape Hayne Oswald, and the business had stuck. How the woman handing him the drink she was handing him, in the house in which she was handing it to him, knew his real name, if she did, was beyond him. He was in one of those zones where what you knew, and even what you thought you knew, was far exceeded by what you could not possibly know. He sensed this. It happened more and more-- to him, rather than less and less, as he perceived was the normal expectation in human life. His had not been the normal life. This losing it agreed with him. There was no profit in saying to someone who somehow knew your real name, “How do you know my real name?” There was so much work involved in determining how she did, if she did—it was possible she mistakingly thought this his name, as had the girl in high school thought it else, for example—that he had learned over time not to try. This kind of indeterminacy had been hard for him to accept at first. He had fought it. The fight had given him hemorrhoids, literal and figurative.

  So he had a drink in his hand before a nice—looking woman, a scene that was surrounded by no meaningful frame—who she was, why he was here—and he was going with it. She was not the beauty he had recently watched for hire, but no one but that woman was, and his affair with her, conducted alone and on a sidewalk, was over. He pronounced, in fact, just that when he got up off the ground: “Baby, it’s been fun, but it’s over.” And now he was here. He thought he could advise presidents in the matter of conducting their illicit affairs, this recent one of his having been such a model of economy and uncomplication.

  A younger woman was emerging from deeper in the house. Showing her the door, the woman who had greeted him said to her, “The immediate forecast is for a deepening of the surreal fog. No need to let the door hit you in the ass." Ray Payne had never heard a woman tell anyone not to let the door hit her in the ass. He liked her—the one speaking. The one leaving was acting somewhat trembly for him.

  Seating them in the kitchen, the woman said, “Mr. Mogul’s coming over to dinner. Bring this thing to a head."

  “Roopit’s coming?"

  “Yes.”

  “Bringing Mrs. Mogul?”

  “You like Mrs. Mogul?”

  “She aint a tire patch on my last girlfriend," he said, "but I will admit her eyes are distracting to a man under the tyranny of . . .

  “Ray, you can speak your mind with me. Under the tyranny of pussy. It’s a fair phrase.”

  This was precisely the kind of thing you could not inquire into and still lead a hemorrhoid-free life —how she knew he was going to say that. “I have some questions for Mr. Mogul,” he said.

  “I do too,” the woman said. “Like what's to become of Forrest, and what the plan is for the New Southerner."

  Ray looked at her hard, started to question, and gave up. Resisting the urge to ask left him in a happy prospeet. He recalled a thing a child had told him once: “At the fish market with Mommy I see big flat fish with pimples on them. They are huge and fat and I wish I had never seen them.”

  He told the woman: “Running the machine was hard. I pressed Thimble and then Melt, without pressing both at once and Control, which I now think was necessary to show the ladies melting the thimbles. It
made Forrest talk about thimbles and melt into the ground. My bud Hod thew Forrest fifty foot high and on a skateboard. They is no telling what will become of him. He is indestructible, though. I know that. No matter what you push, you get something?

  The woman did not bat an eye. She was in the zone too, apparently. “I know all that. But what about the new boy who would save the South?”

  "Dweeb with the girl?"

  "Yes. Man on the bed.”

  “He a pistol ball.”

  “You liked that woman, didn’t you?”

  “You know, my bud Hod took exception to a man pleasuring hisself over her, and he all the time saying these Queer okay, I’m okay things. He got something against kids, dogs. . . .I don’t know about him."

  “You don’t need him.”

  “I know I don’t need him.”

  “Ray, do you have a headache?"

  “Headache?"

  “John F. Kennedy told Harold Wilson that he, John F. Kennedy, got a headache if he didn’t have a woman every three days.”

  “Oh, that kind of headache. John Effing Kennedy?

  "Let me get a smell of you, Ray, see about fixing that headache of yours."

  “Smell me? You want to smell me?”

  “Ray, at this point in life, everyone can more or less run his equipment. It’s what a man smells like, not what he does. I about know what you are going to do."

  In the action that followed in the bedroom, Ray had occasion to think of the rest of what the child had told him about the fish: “They are ugly and very weird. I do not like them.” There was an element of that in sex, Ray thought. Part of it was ugly and weird and not likable, but the firestorm of hormones kept you liking it. He and the woman wrestled well together, it seemed, for a first time. She seemed very comfortable with him. He entered a fog of flesh and got lost in her for a while. When he emerged, looking for air, he found her gasping too, saying, “Hodhawmighty damn. Son!” This was somewhat like hearing her tell the other woman not to let the door hit her in the ass--he had only ever heard a man say “hodhawmighty" and “son" that way. Yet it struck him as perfectly correct and fitting. He felt he had known this woman all his life.

  * * *

  When Mr. and Mrs. Mogul got there, they sat down to dinner, and the woman who was familiar to him now in two ways got right to it. She said to Roopit: “The man too tired to get up from the bed for fantodding all the live-long day about failing his father, even though Helen of Troy is in the room with him, has now decided that his problems with his father stem from not going out for the track team in the tenth grade when a coach at Nathan Bedford Forrest High School invited him to. That was the invisible point of failure, he now thinks. He can’t understand why he did not go out, other than that he did not like to run for its own sake, and his conviction that the coach was a sadist or pederast of some sort, which does not seem to him now sufficient grounds for disregarding the coach. Is this man, immobile on a bed in a rented room in Holly Springs Mississippi, truly the New Southerner?”

  Mr. Mogul looked at the woman and at Ray. "Oswald indicates he is the only man they found who was properly undone by the visions of Forrest."

  “He the only one we showed him to,” Ray said.

  “Helen of Troy?” Mrs. Mogul said. “She isn’t a patch on me.” At this Ray snorted. She turned to him. “What? You don't think my eyes are special?”

  The woman cut in: “Your eyes are special, but you are not Helen of Troy. No one is. That is what 'Helen of Troy' means. Now excuse us. We are about something important here. Your mogul here is engaged in a large project doomed to failure, and I want to wrap this up by making sure he knows that."

  Ray was delighted with all of this. His imprudent confession that they had only one candidate for Mr. Moguls New Southerner was apparently to go unpunished, unnoticed even. He was free to fiddle about the table, stealing little looks at Mrs. Mogul, whose eyes indeed suggested fried blue marbles but who did not, all in all, incline him to the ground with the hurt of need. The woman his hostess seemed to have fixed that somehow anyway For this he was grateful. He had had to throw himself to the ground with the hurt of need nearly all his life, which had once seemed an onerous thing, hut which now did not because of the inexplicable sensation he had in the presence of his hostess that he had not been alive all that long—“nearly all his life" seemed somehow a laughably short time. This was a curious sensation to have, sitting there in obvious middle age, wondering if he should have his hair styled as Roopit did, or if going to the Barber College and getting these whitewall specials for five dollars from tentative students and looking like he’d been treated for mange with foo-foo water was good enough anymore in the modern world. He had a feeling of being really out of it, there with Mr. and Mrs. Mogul and this woman drilling Mr. Mogul as if she owned him. He wanted suddenly not to be out of it.

  “Why does the black man take to the cell phone so hard? he suddenly asked Mr. Mogul.

  Mr. Mogul turned to him naturally and began speaking without pause or seeming interruption from whatever he had been saying to the woman. “I’m glad you have asked me that question, Oswald. I can answer it. The black man cannot own the land, we have seen to that. He does not want the water. He once wanted the road, but that really was a wanting of the land. When it was Cadillacs, he managed. Now that it is the BMW the Black Man’s Wish, he can’t. He now wants the air. From the beginning he wanted the air. This is why he got loud. This is why he carried the ghetto blaster. He virtually invented the sub-woofer. And now he can take command of satellites with the cell phone. He is equal in this respect to the whitest of white men, the astronaut. Were the market share any larger, a man would be fiduciarily negligent unto himself not to market a gold-colored phone exclusively for the brother.”

  Ray was impressed at Mr. Mogul’s smooth delivery. He thought it might be good to learn to speak that way himself, and he certainly would have to consider it if he began wearing his hair in a way that made people expect that kind of sound to come out of a man. He thought he might, what the hell, try it right now: “These ideers might appear in congress with my haircut, sir, as far as blow-dry. I have oft pondered, moreso, more-over, why the brother does not have his own entire industries a national bank, for example. Prioritizing the brother. For all the fay-the-fair made about his soul food, one does too see a dearth of restaurants in the brother’s name, and certainly there is no national chain. And you would know best the opportunities in mass communications, which it has already brought us wrassling on TV and colored black-and-white movies. I mean, why should not the brother have not merely his own phone but his own net-work? His own satellites, even?”

  Mr. Mogul looked at him in astonishment. "We have discussed these things in bunkers,” he said. “As part of the planning for the New South. You might be more of the team than I knew. Do you want to be more of the team than I knew?" At this, Roopit Mogul began weeping. It was a quiet, not very disturbed weeping, which suggested as many positive emotions as negative, Ray thought, rather as women may cry when they are happy fully as often, and often as fully, as when they are sad. Mrs. Mogul seemed also not much bothered by it, and made ready with a napkin as if to hand it to Mr. Mogul momentarily when he came up for air. Bay fingered the raw spots of his haircut and thought, Really.

  He discovered that the hostess had left the room and was now returning with dessert on a tray. It looked very good, especially since he could not recall their having had anything else. It was not that he was particularly hungry, it was merely that this was the first food they had seen, and it looked particularly fetching for that reason alone. He jumped up to help the woman with the tray, saying to her, “Honey child!" This came out of his mouth as oddly as a small toad. The woman took no exception to the toad, in fact winked at him. She glanced at Mr. Mogul. “We are coming along nicely,” she said. Then to him, “You’re a good boy."

  This compliment went into Ray as true as a pang on the pan of his heart. It had not been said to him in a long
, long time. It made him want the woman again, in the bed room, and soon.

  “I’m a voodoo chile,” he said.

  “That you are,” the woman said. “Now watch this.”

  The curtain behind Mr. Mogul opened. An image began to obtain, not unreminiscent of the way the Star Trek boys beamed into place, or the way closed-circuit TV sometimes grainily gathered itself in the early days of closed circuitry. “The artist Degas could talk any woman he wanted into taking her clothes off and bathing in front of him, apparently,” Ray said.

  The woman said, "Shh."

  On the screen Forrest appeared, hair shining, blowing in a wind. Violins blowing a violin wind. Moss blowing in a wind. Sir Walter Scott shook hands with Forrest. A guillotine tumbled by on the wind. "The French were of no help to us," Forrest said. Forrest appeared to be distracted. Ray had not seen him so before. He was fidgeting with his person, patting about himself as if checking for personal property in his pockets. The marvelous canvas coat was there, in its perfect disorder: dirty and yet spectral, rucked up and shot and torn and yet whole and sturdy and rugged as armor. Ray wanted a coat like that.

  Some kind of commercial intervened in the filmstrip, or whatever it was. Ray had not heard the term “filmstrip” in a long time. He had not actually heard it now. It had been heard, he guessed, by his brain. The commercial was for Ronson lighter fluid. Ray had never seen a commercial, or any other kind of advertisement, for Ronson lighter fluid. “Ronson lighter fluid exists independently of the exigencies of commerce,” Ray said aloud, and they all told him by quiet gesture to be quiet. “And those yellow cards with the little red flints,” he pressed on, “they don’t have to advertise that.” They shushed him.