Padgett Powell - Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men

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 w hat 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.”