Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell (11 page)

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 proposition 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.”