Padgett Powell - Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men

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.