The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy Read online

  THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF

  JAMES PURDY

  Introduction by John Waters

  LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

  New York • London

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction by John Waters

  A Good Woman

  You Reach for Your Hat

  Sound of Talking

  Cutting Edge

  Don’t Call Me by My Right Name

  Eventide

  Man and Wife

  Plan Now to Attend

  Why Can’t They Tell You Why?

  63: Dream Palace

  About Jessie Mae

  You May Safely Gaze

  Color of Darkness

  Night and Day

  The Lesson

  Mrs. Benson

  Encore

  Everything Under the Sun

  Daddy Wolf

  Goodnight, Sweetheart

  Sermon

  Home by Dark

  Scrap of Paper

  Mr. Evening

  On the Rebound

  Lily’s Party

  Summer Tidings

  Some of These Days

  Short Papa

  Ruthanna Elder

  How I Became a Shadow

  Sleep Tight

  Rapture

  Mud Toe the Cannibal

  Dawn

  The Candles of Your Eyes

  In This Corner . . .

  Kitty Blue

  Bonnie

  Gertrude’s Hand

  The White Blackbird

  Brawith

  Geraldine

  A Little Variety, Please

  Easy Street

  Entre Dos Luces

  Moe’s Villa

  No Stranger to Luke

  Reaching Rose

  EARLY STORIES

  A Chance to Say No

  Dr. Dieck & Company

  That’s About Enough out of You

  Talk About Yesterday

  The Pupil

  FINAL STORIES

  Vera’s Story

  Adeline

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Works by James Purdy

  INTRODUCTION

  by John Waters

  Think of The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy as a ten-pound box of poison chocolates you keep beside your bed—fairy tales for your twisted mind that should never be described to the innocent. Randomly select a perfectly perverted Purdy story and read it before you go to sleep and savor the hilarious moral damage and beautiful decay that will certainly follow in your dreams. James Purdy writes gracefully disquieting stories for the wicked and here they all are at last. Together. Every single damned one of them!

  Many of Purdy’s characters are terribly sad. So distressed they “want to be dead like a bug.” So lonely that they call the prerecorded weather or time message on the phone for company or go to the doctor every single day for social contact. One man is so filled with sorrow in his old age that he retreats to a phone booth and speaks into the dial tone coming from the receiver about the dead: “They are all gone. All of them.” In towns so small (one is described as having a “population about four hundred people including the dead”), isolation is everywhere. “There isn’t anything to say about such private sorrow,” one of Purdy’s characters announces, but yes there is, and James says it with wit, incredible sympathy, and elegant understanding.

  His people are angry, too. They “never feel satisfied.” One heroine (if you could possibly call her that) is described as “like every damned thing in the world had been permanently screwed for her, like it had all been planned wrong before she even got here.” Many of his characters are defenseless against their own evil and suffer a tragic guilt no one will punish. Purdy loves being a shit-stirrer and can depict hate better than any writer (except perhaps Christina Stead). One fictitious husband is so overcome with fury at his wife’s tirade against him that he only “saw her mouth and throat moving with unspoken words.” In another story, a son wants his father’s love so badly, he hisses black foam from his mouth. Diseased bodies explode onto horrified loved ones. Even inanimate objects can add to the grief of living in Purdy’s fiction, like a refrigerator with an agonizing hum that exaggerates the pain of a couple’s divorce battles. Nature is treacherous too: the wind steals valuable possessions, even spreads gossip. Birds are dangerous creatures who pilfer precious jewelry from hidden places. Money is the root of all hell, a burden, a curse you can purposely leave to your despised heirs. Purdy’s lunatics are out of their minds, but unfortunately not enough so to be oblivious to their own despair.

  Yet with all this literary turmoil, Purdy can write about common sense. “Well, when there ain’t nothin’ else,” one damaged optimist reasons, “you got to stoop down and pick up the rotten.” His creatures are “crazier than the devil on Christmas,” as one announces, but Purdy has the same absurdist sympathy for a clueless dowager as he does for a homeless murderer. There’s even crackpot happy endings to some of his stories although the unadventurous reader may not initially understand how Purdy’s mismatched partners could possibly describe what they have as any kind of relationship, much less a successful one.

  The rewards of tiny sexual attractions and the intense secrets that most can never reveal are Purdy’s poetic strength. Erotic tension is always brewing and no one is spared the inner agonizing of frustration and desire. Desperate people, sometimes so horny they “touched you as though to determine if you were flesh or not,” do despicable things to one another. Longing is an agony you can’t avoid in Purdy’s world; searching, always searching for that one sexual being you lost. My favorite damaged soul? The hustler in “Some of These Days” who unsuccessfully hunts his onetime sugar daddy in every porno theater in Manhattan until he gives up, moves into a twenty-four-hour Times Square grind house to live forever, and is finally dragged away by the authorities to a mental institution. This is just one of Purdy’s love stories.

  Purdy can be as funny as Jane Bowles when he writes about inappropriate attractions, always fractured from reality. His prose may seem old-fashioned at first; a couch is a “davenport,” or “Madame Sobey looked at her TV machine a great deal of the time,” but when he uses “The End” after the final line of a story it seems so transgressive you can imagine a copy editor today getting nervous. He uses words you seldom hear in real life; a real vocabulary lesson in unpleasantness. “A kind of hoarfrost came over her mouth.” What the hell is a hoarfrost? Or “a bad odor, what a fellow I know called fetor.” I’m still trying to use the word “fetor” in a sentence and sound as well-spoken as Purdy. Are his pernicious words like one of his characters, written down so shockingly “even flames” will not be able to burn them?

  Can Purdy be bad? Well, in a box of chocolates this large, there’s bound to be a few left at the bottom that time has made stale. Purdy can be a misogynist. Women are often evil gossips, some even emit fetor (there I go!). A man brutally beats his wife after she endlessly nags she will leave him just because she suddenly finds her married last name ridiculous. Yet when a woman in her sixties shows up completely naked at a male neighbor’s front door in another story, Purdy writes about this man’s understanding and kindly reaction. His black characters may seem a little sexualized and cartoonish and he does use the N-word, but isn’t that a true portrait of how his characters would see things at the time they were written? Isn’t Purdy, a “prisoner of decision” himself, just like the flawed humans he writes about?

  James is not for everyone. I’m still surpris
ed that brilliant literary critic and novelist Edmund White is not a fan, claiming to be “allergic” to Purdy’s work. But for some readers, the special ones who delight in wickedly funny feel-bad books, James Purdy has never been on the “fringes of American literary mainstream,” as the New York Times has claimed. No, he’s been dead center in the black little hearts of provocateur-hungry readers like myself right from the beginning. Now we are ready to feel the exhilaration of devouring this exhausting new volume of literary treats. Yes, James Purdy is too much! But he’s like a drug one can never get enough of. He makes us light-headed. High. Even sick. Overdosing on James Purdy’s stories is a new kind of excitement. And not a bad way to die, either.

  —2013

  A GOOD WOMAN

  Maud did not find life in Martinsville very interesting, it is true, but it was Mamie who was always telling her that there were brighter spots elsewhere. She did not believe Mamie and said so.

  Mamie had lived in St. Louis when her husband was an official at the head office of a pipeline company there. Then he had lost his job and Mamie had come to Martinsville to live. She regretted everything and especially her marriage, but then she had gradually resigned herself to being a small town woman.

  Mamie was so different from Maud. “Maud, you are happy,” she would say. “You are the small town type, I guess. You don’t seem to be craving the things I crave. I want something and you don’t.”

  “What is it you want?” Maud asked.

  The two women were sitting in Hannah’s drug store having a strawberry soda. Mamie was reminded, she said, of some old-fashioned beer parties she and her husband had been invited to in Milwaukee when they were younger.

  Mamie did not know what it was she wanted. She felt something catch at her heart strings on these cool June days and she would purposely remind herself that summer would soon be over. She always felt the passing of summer most keenly before it had actually begun. Fall affected her in a strange way and she would almost weep when she saw the falling maple leaves or the blackbirds gathering in flocks in deserted baseball parks.

  “Maud, I am not young,” Mamie would say, thinking of how bald and whitish and grubby her husband was getting.

  Maud put down her ice-cream spoon, the straw hanging half out of the dish, and looked at her. Maud was every bit three years younger than Mamie, but when her best friend talked the way she did, Maud would take out her purse mirror and stare wonderingly through the flecks of powder on the glass. Maud had never been beautiful and she was getting stout. More and more she was spending a great deal of money on cosmetics that Mr. Hannah’s young clerk told her were imported from a French town on the sea coast.

  “If I could only leave off the sweets,” Maud said, finishing her soda.

  “Maud, are you happy?” Mamie sighed. But Maud did not answer. She had never particularly thought about happiness; it was Mamie who was always reminding her of that word. Maud had always lived in Martinsville and had never thought much about what made people happy or unhappy. When her mother died, she had felt lonely because they had always been companions. For they were not so much like mother and daughter as like two young women past their first youth who knew what life was. They had spent together many a happy afternoon saying and doing foolish young things, in the summer walking in the parks and fairgrounds and in the winter making preserves and roasting fowl for Thanksgiving and Christmas parties. She always remembered her mother with pleasure instead of grief. But now she had Mamie for a friend and she was married to Obie.

  Her marriage to Obie had been her greatest experience, but she did not think about it much anymore. Sometimes she almost wished Obie would go away so that she could remember more clearly the first time she had met him when he was an orchestra leader in a little traveling jazz band that made one-night stands near the airport in Martinsville. Obie had been so good-looking in those days, and he was still pretty much the same Obie, of course, but he was not Obie the bandleader anymore. But once he had quit playing in orchestras and had become a traveling salesman, Maud’s real romance had ended and she could only look out her window onto the muddy Ohio River and dream away an afternoon.

  Obie and Mamie had talks about Maud sometimes. “We spend too much,” Obie would say to her. He said he lived on practically nothing on the road. They both agreed she was not very practical. And she spent too much on cosmetics and movies. Mamie did not say so much about the movies because she knew she was the cause there of Maud’s spending more than her income allowed, but then it was not Mamie surely who advised her the night of the carnival to buy that imported ostrich plume fan with the ruby jewels in the center and a good many other things of the same kind. And how could Maud give up the pleasure of the movies, or the ice cream or perfumes she got at Mr. Hannah’s drug store? And what would Mr. Hannah do for star customers, for that was what Mamie said she and Maud were. They were actually out of all Martinsville his star customers, though they never purchased anything in his pharmaceutical department.

  “Maud,” Mamie said, “what do we get out of life anyway?”

  Maud was not pleased with Mamie’s taking this turn in the conversation. She did not like to get serious in the drug store as it spoiled her enjoyment of the ice cream and she had to think up an answer quickly on account of Mamie’s impatience or Mamie would not be pleased and would think she was slow-witted, and she was sure Mamie thought she was slow-witted anyhow.

  When Maud left Mamie that day she began to think it over. She walked slowly down the street, going north away from Mr. Hannah’s drug store.

  Mr. Hannah was standing by his green-trimmed display window, watching her as she walked to her yellow frame house over the river.

  “What do we get out of life anyway?” Mamie’s words kept humming about in her mind but she was so tired from the exhaustion of the warm dusty day that she did not let herself think too much about it. She did not see why Mamie had to keep thinking of such unpleasant things. It depressed her a little, too, and she did not like the feeling of depression. She did not want to think of sad things or whether life was worth living. She knew that Mamie always enjoyed the sad movies with unhappy endings, but she could never bear them at all. Life is too full of that sort of thing, she always told Mamie, and Mamie would say, pouting and giving her a disappointed look, “Maud, you are like all small town housewives. You don’t know what I am feeling. You don’t feel things down in you the way I feel them.”

  As she sauntered along she saw Bruce Hauser in front of his bicycle shop. Bruce was a youngish man always covered with oil and grease from repairing motorcycles and machines. When he smiled at Maud she could see that even his smile was stained with oil and car paint and she found herself admiring his white teeth.

  She heard some school boys and girls laughing and riding over the bridge on their bicycles and she knew that school was out for the summer and that was why they were riding around like they were. It had not been so very long since she had gone to school, she thought, and for the second time that day she remembered her mother and the warm afternoons when she would come home from school and throw her books down on the sofa and take down her red hair, and her mother and she would eat a ripe fruit together, or sometimes they would make gooseberry preserves or marmalade. It was all very near and very distant.

  The next day she felt a little easier at finding Mamie in a better humor and they went to a movie at the Bijou. It was a comedy this afternoon and Maud laughed quite a lot. On the way home Mamie complained that the movie had done nothing to her, had left her, she said, like an icicle, and she felt like asking for her money back.

  When they sat down in Hannah’s drug store, they began reading the Bill of Fair with Specialties—for though they had sat in the same booth for nearly five years and knew all the dishes and drinks, they still went on reading the menu as if they did not know exactly what might be served. Suddenly Mamie said, “Are you getting along all right with Obie, Maud?”

  Maud raised her too heavily penciled eyebrow
s and thought over Mamie’s question, but instead of letting her answer, Mamie went on talking about the movie, and when they were leaving the drug store, Maud told Mr. Hannah to charge her soda.

  “Why don’t you let me pay for yours?” Mamie said, pulling her dress which had stuck to her skin from the sticky heat of the day.

  Maud knew that Mamie would never pay for her soda even if she happened to be flat broke and hungry. She knew Mamie was tight, but she liked her anyway. Maud owed quite a bill at Mr. Hannah’s and nearly all of it was for strawberry sodas. If Obie had known it, Maud would have been in trouble all right, but she always managed to keep Obie from knowing.

  “I know,” Mamie said on the way home, “I know, honey, that you and Obie don’t hit it off right anymore.”

  Maud wondered how Mamie knew that, but what could she say to deny it? She said, “Obie has to work out of town too much to be the family man I would like him to be.”

  When Maud got home that night she found that Obie had arrived. He was a little cross because she had not prepared dinner for him.

  “I was not sure you was coming,” Maud said.

  She prepared his favorite dinner of fried pork chops and French fried potatoes with a beet and lettuce salad and some coffee with canned milk and homemade preserves and cake.

  “Where was you all day?” Obie asked at the table, and Maud told him she usually went to a movie with Mamie Sucher and afterwards she went to the drug store and got a soda.

  “You ought to cut down on the sweets,” Obie said, and Maud remembered having caught a reflection of herself that day in the hall mirror, and she knew she was a long way from having the same figure she had had as a girl. For a moment she felt almost as depressed as Mamie said she was all the time.

  While Maud was doing the dishes, Obie told her that he had some good news for her, but she knew from the first it was not really good news. Obie told her that he had quit his traveling job and was going to sell life insurance now. He said he was getting too old to be on the road all the time. He wanted to have a little home life for a change, and it wasn’t right for Maud to be alone so much.