Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell (8 page)

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 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.”