Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell Read online

  She thought again about the place she'd been. Was there a fool it would nourish, real or not? What if the fool it would nourish was only the cook? The cook who lay under small hot gambols of surreal fog the idle live-long day wanting a bleachy yellow dog? Not wanting even, perhaps, probably, a real dog but just this prospect of a dog? No damned shed hair and Volvoing it to the vet where the labels on a vaccine read like computer applications and cost as much. She just wanted a dog.

  So maybe she should just cook. Cook the fool’s meal for herself, the fool cook. Then she saw the man who had left the bed and been left by the woman, who had been beaten by the boys and been left by the boys. He was in his cheap red plaid shirt, sober and alone. Anyone else on earth in that shirt was not sober and was not alone.

  He was puzzling in the realm of his father and his fathers mother. Mrs. Hollingsworth could not tell what he was after. He did not know himself, perhaps, probably. She was tired of that; “perhaps, probably” She’d make it “perbly.”

  Perbly he was wondering how his father could he a football hero and go to war and have been slapped with a knife by his mother and still love his mother, when he the son would not even go out for track, yet would run from war, or a street fight for that matter, and did not kiss his own mother beside her very grave. Perbly something like that. He had somehow come to be a bleached-out yellow dog, afraid even of love, if we are to judge from his travail with Sally and Helen of Troy, perbly Sally’s later incarnation.

  Perbly he was waiting for someone to cook him a fool’s meal. She was tired of perbly. He was waiting for a meal. He was waiting to be transformed into a man. He was waiting for Forrest to ride by and ask him if he wanted to go out for track, so to speak. It had been at Forrest High School, after all, that he first deigned not to participate, fearing a little pain in the legs. The legs had been good enough to attract the coach, whether the coach was a pederast or legitimate. He should have tried the coach, either way. For whatever reason, or complex of reasons, real or surreal, novel or not, that Mrs. Hollingsworth could dream up or not, that were to be found in her brain or in her heart or were not in either place and were possibly in some real place, the moment he did not regard the coach as a man is the moment he lost his way. Mrs. Hollingsworth was a woman who had lost her way.

  The man was getting his legs back by carrying sacks of grain. When Forrest came by, he would need nourishment to accept whatever role Forrest offered him—stopping in a leather-creaking surge of horse stink and steel, saying, “You aint no relation to Bragg or Floyd, saddle up, you want to fight. Put that hound dog in a saddlebag. We could use some rabbit,” and gone in a blur of saber and canvas and horse snort and clenching rump.

  Mrs. Hollingsworth would cook. She would be the campaign cook. That night Forrest would not remark of the food. He would never talk of food. He would say, “Picked up a boy with a yellow dog today. Dog looked like a ghost of a dog. Boy about the same. Boy looked like a Floyd. Hope to God he aint.

  Dog look like a damn lemon. Don’t nobody tell that Jackson character we got us a lemon dog.” There would be a round of chuckling, some polite and some earnest, at this levity Mrs. Hollingsworth made some notes in the air over the steamy water;

  1. The levity of the doomed has no equal.

  2. Only the airspace at Appomattox is original, where it was. The floor is not the floor they trod, the window not the window that admitted the light on the document they signed. The light is not the same, but it is in the same place. The space only is truly preserved.

  3. All those fraudulent bricks. Only 4 percent of them original, and none of them in the right place.

  4. All those fraudulent men. What if they all came through the door? Who was she waiting for? If Forrest himself came to dinner, would she not find fault even with him?

  Still, she would like this Forrest, for a moment. But then what? Then did not the old torment begin? And what was the old torment? The old torment was that she was alone now because she had been afraid to be alone when young. And, afraid to be alone young, she had made herself into the contemporary companion to whoever was at hand and handy. She had not made herself into herself. She had made herself into a model companion for other people who themselves were not waiting to become themselves but who were also modeling for companionship. So they had all become model companions.

  It went without saying that she had not waited for the person she might have loved, either. So it was not surprising that now, when her station in life suggested she was mature and sane, she was dreaming of wildly improbable men like a schoolgirl. Well beyond a schoolgirl: she was in a scalding tub of water in the throes of bourgeois idleness dreaming up the most ornery sonsofbitches she could. She had lost her mind. It was fortunate that that did not matter. There were certainly so many excess idle minds about that it did not matter if a few, or a lot, strayed. She could {ire out of this tub and make chicken cacciatore and Jell-O and plan a dinner party and buy some symphony tickets and sell a house and do Jane’s video workout, or not. Not looked right.

  0swald

  My existence is fairly tenuous, if you would have no objection to a man called Rape, whose demeanor and rhetoric thence would not allow you to anticipate it, using such a word. My tenuosity (there, that’s better, isn’t it?) is in fact what allows me to be, well, tenuous even in speech. I am in one sense but a figment, and a figment is nothing if not unstable. I can as easily, at her whim, say “I only exist, you want to put it that way, by just keepin on keepin on.”

  I am fortunate she likes me, or liked me. It came to that rather capital evening in which I got to eat with Mrs. Mogul and sleep with the hostess. It was a heady evening. No one could have predicted old Roopit’s crying like that. There are two explanations for that, or let us say one explanation in two forms: he was under considerable pressure, and everybody has their limit. She was hot, I can say that. She got what she wanted out of me, and done quit me. That is not a behavioral pattern in women with which I am unfamiliar with it. They regular animals it comes to getting what they want. They have learned to weep and coo to mask it. We buy it. Or let me elevate that; enthralled within the tyranny of desire, we pay all our cash and then apply for credit. We see no practical end to what we will pay The pedestal philosophy was a shrewd business intended to get the lioness off the ground. Give us some time to lick ourself in between rounds, in other words, moreso, so to speak, per se—I can be as ridiculous as you please. She preferred me that way, and I cannot maintain I mind it altogether. The labor of being colorful does not exceed that of being sane.

  But I would have you note that she prefers the other old boy to me, a matter on which even she is clear. This should surprise no one. To my publicly masturbating, a scene she lifts from one in her own life that she witnessed at a mental health hospital, over the unattainable and ineffably beautiful woman she tyrannized me with—I the only man articulate enough to come up with “tyranny of pussy,” therefore the one to pay—she prefers and allows numbnut’s having the woman, first, and then his lying there in a contemplative fugue so long he loses her. He loses her because he shows evidence that he is not fully under the tyranny of desire. He gets away, as it were. So it is he who must be pursued. I am thrown a cursory sexual favor, fed, given a bad haircut, and dismissed. There is nothing end a shaky relationship like a bad haircut in my experience, in other words.

  But cot boy, he gets off with a bad shirt. He limps on. She don’t know exactly where he’s at. He don’t either—to be precise, she would have you believe he doesn’t know what he is about. I have other information on this, which I will not share. Suffice it to say, before I leave here——which I am doing it as quick as I can (because after you have seen me sleep with the master you are not going to see me masturbate on a sidewalk again, which was not as fun as it looked) ——that cot boy finds the labor required to be in a father dither and mother muddle and life limbo to not exceed that of being undithered, unmuddled, and walking tall.

  I believe it a tenable pr
oposition that people in books or life do not do more work than is required of them.

  Date

  Give me some of your foo-foo water, lieutenant. I have a date. Should I go acourtin when Grant is out there at large`? No, I should not. If that sumbitch is drunk, hope to God he don’t sober up. They’d a had his butt in charge sooner we’d be resting now. Wrong people fought this thing, lieutenant. Saved ourself some boys, we could have been bettern what we were. Got to go to this address here in Holly Springs. I’ll ride over alone. It’s a note on this purple paper, parfumy.

  Find out what that new boy’s name is. Worries me. Still think he might be a Floyd, even a Buckner. Come up to me today with that lemon dog and a brace of rabbit he’d got, and I congratulated him, you know, and suddenly the fool is saying, “General, my daddy didn’t even teach me how to play cards? All I could do not to laugh.

  Lieutenant, I confess the boy had me stumped there. I had to resort to the Leader Act. I leaned down to him and looked at him with the electric fightin eye and said, deep—like, “Boy, I’mone teach you how to play cards and raise God.” Boy fell back teary and grateful from the horse like I’d done christened him. Made me blush. This Leader thang get on your nerves. I sprung off before it got any worser. Make sure he aint a Floyd—or related to anyone in command.

  How you tie these things? Women. I wouldn’t even go if people wouldn’t say maybe I'm gettin like Davis and Bragg. Don’t wait up. You in charge. Anything happens, fight. That don’t work, run.

  Frugging with Forrest

  When Forrest comes in the door, Mrs. Hollingsworth is wearing the same cologne he got from his lieutenant. She and Forrest smell so much alike they are put at ease and think themselves more familiar with each other than they are. Mrs. Hollingsworth has Jimi Hendrix playing, loud. Mrs. Hollingsworth is moving about in a strange, contortional way. “Do you frug, general?"

  “What is that shit?” Forrest says, holding his ears. Mrs. Hollingsworth begins laughing hysterically at this. Forrest himself begins to laugh. He has a slightly impish look unlike any Mrs. Hollingsworth has heretofore conceived. She has only seen the grim look and the electric look. He is putting her on!

  He has picked up the Hendrix album cover. “I be damn." Mrs. Hollingsworth decides this business will be funny but predictable, and cuts it off.

  “Have a seat, general?

  Forrest takes an order as well as he gives one. He notices the fabric of the sofa. It is a nubbly nylon that is utterly alien to his hand. He passes his hands absently over it for some time.

  Mrs. Hollingsworth has time to regard him: a man who will have fought so hard that he will wither away once this conflict is over and die, of nothing more certain than atrophy, at age fifty-six. A man this strong who can collapse.

  “General, have you found the woman you love?"

  “That has never occurred to me."

  “Does it interest you?"’

  “No, it does not. Not the way you put it."

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know."

  “That’s not a bad answer.”

  “That’s a relief"

  “General, you mock me.”

  "Ma’am, why not?"

  “That’s not bad either."

  "Well, we all do-si-do then.”

  While it was true that she could do with Forrest what she wanted, it was also not true. He was difficult. But this too, his difficulty she had given him, she thought. She wasn’t sure. The uncertainty was thrilling. He did not need a nurse—a peculiar man, in this respect. She had not known a man who did not need a nurse. The only man she could have imagined before this who did not need a nurse was a dead man. And the dead man would have needed a nurse, desperately, right up until he died.

  The proposition of having a man who did not need you was a bit frightening. It should not be, but it was. The thing she thought she had failed at was precisely this: waiting for the man who did not need her but wanted her. She had been afraid to wait for that, then, and when she saw it before her, now, the thing itself it too scared her. Perhaps she was merely afraid of everything. Most people, she thought, were, and she was perhaps finally not any better. It had been pretty to think so, she thought. A woman was not to be faulted for her pretty thoughts.

  “Is a woman to be faulted for her pretty thoughts, general?"

  “That has not occurred to me either,” Forrest said.

  Mrs. Hollingsworth realized why she had summoned the general. "General, could you send that boy with the lemon dog over tomorrow, if you are not fighting?"

  Forrest looked at her directly. He understood and accepted her rejection. His hand continued to move sensually on the sofa, feeling the fabric. “Sho I can do that, ma’am—that is what general means. What kind of hide is this?"

  “Hide?” She then understood him to mean the fabric on the sofa.

  "I don’t want to see whatever you skunt this off of," Forrest said. "Or hunt it.”

  “General, are you tired?”

  “I’m tireder than a dog lying underneath another dog.”

  Nor Nurse nor Need

  The man in the plaid shirt came into the house like something hunted and hunting. He was nervous and deliberate. Mrs. Hollingsworth could see that she had complicated him to a point that was not easy for him. He was hurt in some way that he did not wish to acknowledge; he felt that if he did, it would confirm and solidify and even deepen the hurt. There was an aura about him that, like Forrest’s hologram, showed a storm of improbable and distorted hallucinations that emanated from his real life. He was standing there in her foyer, surrounded by a spectral play of his injuries and failures that was as plastic and mobile and colorful and ridiculous as the kind of light show that had accompanied, in its day, the Hendrix music that she had played for the general.

  She had no music playing now, and this light show was not funny. The man’s mother unkissed and the coach unanswered and the father unapproached were there, in a swirl, and the impossibly beautiful woman was there, and she was crying, and she was crying for something the man had done or said to her. The man was aroused, and he looked at her— Mrs. Hollingsworth—with a piercing hunger that was at once honest and direct and simple and also hopelessly fraught with reservations and riders and provisos just beneath the surface of his leering desire. It was an irresistibly messy kind of desire. It promised as much pain as balm. He looked like the kind of cat who would bite you on the neck to hold you down and spend days kissing the wound.

  Was he a man who wanted but did not need her? Since she stood in a convenient relationship to getting the truth from this kind of man, Mrs. Hollingsworth asked him, “Do you want me?” To this he said, clear-eyed and broad of shoulder because of the grain sacks, and looking strangely elegant in the cheap shirt,

  "Yes."

  “Do you need me?”

  “Need?"

  They regarded each other a long time. The man looked at the floor. They heard a sound at the door and the man opened it and the lemon dog came into the house. It began snuffling the baseboards, raptly, undistracted. Every couple of increments forward the dog made a kind of cough, as if clearing its system, like a wine taster between tastes, and then resumed its eager inhalation of her house. It worked one of the boards until out of their sight.

  “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.