A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell (17 page)

Titration (that is what the aliquots are about) is
precisely the model for my conclusions about loss and gain. This came
to me immediately after I talked to Friedeman and that afternoon set
up a run. It is precisely a series of excesses and shortages that
determines the resting point--I have been on a tour of titration,
admiring the true titrators of life as I found them. I was in this
rumination, deciding it was a bit forced to carry further, that it
was better to conclude my investigations somewhat less speciically,
after the fashion of, say, the Nose Chemist, when an extraordinary
thing happened. Minnie, the building's maid, came in and counted out
change and asked if I'd go get her a bottle of wine.

"
Ain't seen you in a time," she said. "You
been sick?"

"
No, Minnie. Took a trip."

"
That's nice."

I took her change and left for the wine. This was not
unusual. Minnie--a black woman, but so lightskinned students debate
her race--is a long story herself. Among the pleasures she affords
folk, besides her speaking nicely and well to you as she sweeps under
your very stool late at night, is that of stopping the nonsense you
are about and sending you to the campus bar ostensibly to get her
some wine. I am probably one of four or five trusted wine couriers.
After her order, at this time of evening--after talking to F riedeman
and setting up, it was late--I could expect to meet her on the roof
for a drink.

What is extraordinary is what happened in the bar. I
saw a fellow student, alone, and joined him with my beer and Minnie's
bottle. He and I were peripherally acquainted, I did not know him
well. He was known chiefly for his hair, which is red and wild,
visible at a half mile--a hirsute monument to 1969. He is also known
for his participation in a scandalous
ménage
a trois
involving two other graduate
students, and for his generally pleasant demeanor (he is sometimes
referred to as the Pacifist). I sat down.

We simply drank--Men at Science--after the initial
greeting. He was watery in the eye; I concluded his pitcher of beer
might not have been the first. As I finished my own mug, he refilled
it, generously washing the table with suds. The spill floated a
folded card on the table advertising a new product called Wine
without Alcohol.

"
Wine without alcohol!" the Pacifist
shouted.

"
That's like--like women without sex!"
Suddenly I knew him from somewhere, knew more about him than I
thought. He was a Veteran! He was a drunk, academic, foot-stomping
Veteran. As one would with the Veteran himself, I held my cards.

I recalled once standing with him on a fourth-floor
balcony watching students come and go, and we happened to witness his
girl leaving campus with the other corner of the notorious triad. My
man appeared to be the afternoon man. The other fellow, who resembles
less a hippie than a young athletic coach, had her, as the mill had
it, for the night. We stood on the balcony and watched Coach and the
shared lover leave campus.

"
Looks rough," I said.

"
You can say that again," he said. He said
it with such fidelity to its customary comic use that I nearly
laughed. He was not about to laugh, though. Now, in the bar, I was
sure his condition was owing to the Coach and the Devoted being home
together. I did not dare broach it. In the noise of darts and jukebox
I and pizza orders he started telling me about doing acid.

"
I was in Matagorda, Texas, man. I dropped some
acid and got in my tent and ate an apple. These crabs came up to the
tent. I started feeding them pieces of apple. They ate the apple,
man. They were huge. Claws like Japanese
monster
movies
. It was wild."

"
I bet."

"
They'd run up, you know, grab the apple, and
run away!
" He
laughed. Despite his momentary laugh, I still thought he looked as
wrung out as the Veteran.

"
Wine without alcohol!
"
he yelled again, noticing the card as if for the first time.

"
No human sorrow," he suddenly intoned,
"
ever stopped the world
."

I looked at him. I was right, then, apparently, about
his preoccupation, but I still did not know what to say. He poured me
another beer.

"
Thanks."

"
You need it."

"
I need it?"

"
Man, it's okay. The word's out about--" He
stopped. He meant Dr. Eminence in Norway.

"
That?" I said. It--she--truly felt a
million years ago and a million miles away. "Shit." I
dismissed it all with a gesture which he smiled at, as if he thought
me bluffing. I realized we had a bit more in common than I'd thought.
We'd both hung up on bright schoolgirls, at the least. And to, it
looked, no profit. The next thing is what stunned me.

"
You going to drink that?" he said,
referring to Minnie's bottle.

"
It's for Minnie."

"Hey! Minnie is a
quality
person!
"
I could not respond.
It was not simply that I had not impugned her in any way to provoke
his defense, and it was not that I could not have agreed more with
him and so felt doubly strange being accused of impugning her. It was
that he was regarding Minnie, in his present lovelorn straits,
exactly as I had come to regard Mary and Hazel and Wallace, and even
my own mother, and Minnie indeed was one of them, and, indeed--it was
too much--he was, it looked, on the brink of a plunge identical to my
own. The events were duplicable. I could prove my results. The
interlude had necessity, was not random, was not lunatic.

"
She's a
what
?"
I said.

"
She's a
quality person!
"
he shouted again, and I thought he was going to come over the table.
I shouted at him, "You can say that again!" and started
laughing, and he, after a minute, did, too. I left him there, no
doubt in my mind that he was launched in his own series of titrations
against and away from a certain sort of preoccupation.

Minnie and her custodial partner, Earl, were on the
roof when I got there. We sat on the parapet, where we could see
Earl's car parked in the vapor lighting of the loading dock. Earl was
most careful of his car, which he had painted aerosol-can gold. It
had the look, from where we were above it, of a huge, dull moth on
the ground.

"
It's all right, honey," Minnie was saying
to Earl, when nothing at all suggested that Earl was concerned. She
held my arm then, as if to say further assistance would not be
necessary. Earl looked at his car, wet-eyed, mumbling in his high,
singing tones nothing anyone but Minnie can understand. He talks like
a man with his tongue cut out, and yet every gesture--the whole
demeanor--looks rational. No one has a clue as to what's wrong with
him, what happened.

Minnie and I got into one of our discussions of
bigotry, a frequent topic.

"
Mr. Harry Truman, I believe," she said,
"was a spigot, but at least a straight-up one. I say spigot
because this is no world for name-calling."

She extended her glass for wine. In the vapor light
our teeth were already purple.

I put the wine into a mound of gravel, attempting to
insulate it: cooling wet green glass in gravel.

"
Entropy, Minnie. The wine has a bad case of
entropy." She will like new utterance, I thought.

"
I love entropy."

Earl was studying his furry car, a worried tune
coming from him.

I said to Minnie; "Minnie."

"
Yeahyess
," she
said.

"
Have you always swept floors?"

"
No, sir. I have not always swept floors."
She said this with a wistful ease that reminded me of Havana
Carlisle--as if she were content with a cigar and a sunny street and
a secret. "That," she said, "is my prerogative?

"
I know it is," I said.

She sat on the parapet, not inelegantly, with her
legs crossed. The Carlisle connection was not idle--why did the
reaction series put before me these land-mark blacks, and why now
what I took to be half-a-black? She was not unlike my mother in the
scheme: she was perhaps an isomer, an identical compound in a
different structure, to my mother. I thought this quite literally,
trusting that it was not strictly a matter of the wine and my purple
teeth.

She was isomer to my mother: half black and totally
prescient, and my mother, who'd been told she was, in the River Road
scheme of things, equivalently only half white, was totally
distracted. Earl came over to Minnie and faced her, moving to his own
noise in a little rumba motion. I noticed the wine was low, and in
the same instant I saw the Pacifist emerge from the shadows on the
ground.

"Get one of these," I called to him. He
looked up.

"What?"

"
With alcohol." I pointed to the bottle,
which I held up. He saw Minnie. He turned abruptly back into the
shadows. Impressed with the telegraphy of drunks, I turned to
discover Minnie and Earl dancing.

Beyond the notion of people with purple teeth dancing
a cappella on a roof, the thing to see was Earl. What wasn't coming
out of his mouth so clearly was with complete brilliance and
precision coming out of his feet. He was leading Minnie very strongly
in a fast honky--t0nk kind of swing, Minnie bandying about on the
spins like Lucille Ball, Earl like a matador, not disturbing a speck
of pea gravel. Minnie's legs flew up for balance, her head back; Earl
engineered the next turn, Teflon man. I had never seen a better
dancer than Earl.

It was a magical scene. They slowed down a bit.
Minnie recovered some form and suggested not so much a slapstick Lucy
as a proud, regal Lena Horne. Earl mumbled something very high to her
and she said, "You're welcome. Thank you, Earl," and they
parted.

The Pacifist was on the roof. "What are y'all
doing up here?"

"
Hey, sugar," Minnie said, sitting back on
the parapet.

"
Hello, Minnie," the Pacifist said, rather
formally, I thought, perhaps still defending her honor from before.

Minnie extended her glass toward the new bottle,
which the Pacifist and I went for.

"
Man, all the way down there you can tell you
guys are titrating with the purple indicator," the Pacifist
said. It was parlance in the department to speak of drinking as
titrating, and this Rit-dye wine--the only kind we could get on
campus--as "the purple indicator."

"
I thought that was
tit
rate
," Minnie said. "You boys is
always tit rating everything." I looked at her; it was hard to
tell if she was joking.

The Pacifist didn't care. "We are!" he
shouted, as overly loud as he'd been in the bar. "My girlfriends
never have any tits."

"
That's all right, mine don't, either,"
Minnie said.

This put the Pacifist into a knee slap. He came out
of it teary-eyed. "That's a good one, Minnie."

"
I'll tell you a good one," Minnie said.
The Pacifist slid down inside the parapet wall next to her in the
attitude of a child at storytime. He was a truly unhappy dude.

"
Mandy Smith was with the ladies down at the
Baptist Ladies' Aid, you know," Minnie said. "And she says,
Girls, don't tell Opal Brown about the bazaar because Opal Brown
don't have no class. She doesn't know Opal Brown walk up behind her.

"
Opal Brown says, Say what? Opal Brown don't
have no class? Who bought the genuine simulated crushed-velvet carpet
for the pastor to walk on? Opal Brown, that's who. Who bought the
dime-store expensive red glasses for the communion? Opal Brown,
that's who.
No class? Sheeeit.
"

The Pacifist started laughing hysterically, sliding
over onto the gravel, holding his sides. Before my very eyes I
thought I saw the initial reaction in the commencement of his tour
that would be identical to mine: when he could, he looked at Minnie
with what I took to be sober awe. He was stunned, if I've got the
entire thing right, to notice the pleasure afforded him by this most
noncustodial of janitors (the second one in these series--James in
mine, Minnie in his). She had startled him as I'd been startled by
Mary and no-bio gins and flowers and billiards.

Why did these wanderings--they were not Brownian
meanders, I was convinced, looking at our purple-mouthed gang--seem
to make use of older women early on, and why--I thought of
Ebert--James--The Boys--blacks? And why, now, in Minnie, what
appeared to be a person of both camps offering a powerful hybrid
vigor? Perhaps it was having set up a hundred stiff titrations hours
before and drawn a table to accommodate results, but I began to
speculate then and there in a fashion altogether too rigorous for the
Nose Chemist to approve.

What my reaction series had come to, or brought me
to, or made of me, I'm sure is better known at some considerable
analytical remove from the way I will have to know my pipette
doughboys. I am, perhaps, for example, just some odd precipitate that
fell out of a larger event, not the principal product, not
practically identifiable, not important. I knew, however, on the
roof, that I had had drinks with Minnie before my trip, and the
drinks now were entirely another affair. Before, I might have humored
her--without condescension and with considerable honest pleasure
taken in her company, but it was a humoring all the same. Now I was
prepared to have her humor me: I was the one on the roof with the
improbably high propensity to dalliance, the incalculable willingness
to step sideways and backward before forward.