A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell (18 page)

I decided to call it the anti-actualization quotient.
Looking at Earl and Minnie and the Pacifist and a campus full of
shadows, the function defined itself as ambition, times self-centered
custodial purpose, divided by one's natural opportunities for going
up in the world.

People started to key out nicely. The Orphan, I
decided, was the Low Quotient Standard and Ebert was the opposite
Definitive Standard; his natural opportunities for going up so low
that no matter what his ambition, his sense of self-preservation, his
anti-actualization value would remain astronomically high. James is a
peg lower (lower value equals higher actualization potential), having
developed sufficient verbal skills to go up to a secure, ironic
position of the deliberately idle, grandly titled factotum. Blacks in
general, I thought, despite legislation and whatnot, sense such low
values in their denominators, their true opportunities for worldly
advance, that they automatically adjust to a reasonably low sense of
self-importance to keep things, as it were, in balance (like their
blood pressure); and their ambition, which can be high, becomes moot.
(Sweeping floors, Minnie says, is her "prerogative.")

An opposite kind of case, with a nearly equal final
quotient, is a Bobby Cherry; these good-old-boy gas station dandies
have high opportunities, and though their honest ambition is
middling, their sense of self-importance is so extremely high that
the entire quotient climbs into range with the blacks. It is these
identicalanti-actualization quotients that keep the tush--hogs hating
the humbler blacks.

And so one can go on. I wanted to rush from the roof
and get some graph paper and begin keying people out, but Minnie and
the Pacifist, talking as if at the late stages of a loud party,
brought me to. The Pacifist was no longer morose. He was en route, in
his series. Before Minnie said No class, he was as hooked on the
parade of pert tits and young brains as I was--these onward
debutantes of science are the arbiters of low anti-actualization. His
Shared Devoted and my Dr. Eminence give us headaches and heartaches
trying to keep up. High ambitions, bloated importance, normal natural
opportunity (higher if you figure afHrmative action)--they balance
into an egregious, self-aggrandizing machine that eats people up.
These modern whippets are climbing the ladder of success busting the
rungs out. They hurl us who would pursue them into courting widows
while wearing the deceased's pastels and falling in love with the
maid.

Minnie smoking on the parapet, the Pacifist sitting
on the roof with his head not a foot from her lap, Earl becalmed into
a swaying surveillance of his car, I shaped the gravel around the
wine. We looked like a guerrilla camp.

And so what is it, the older--women thing, that put
the Pacifist and me into our revolts? Discovery of discoveries,
looking at Minnie as I am, it comes to me: they have adjusted
anti-actualization quotients like the blacks have. Thus, Minnie
doubly is the queen bee that she is in this universe of practiced
loss.

Mary was like a ball glove handed to you in the
seventh inning, used by someone else during the critical innings, and
you get to play when the game is nearly won or lost with a trained
glove that promises to be error-free. She was frayed, she was
wrinkled, she had a cotton-candy softness, but all in all, she was a
package of reticence and careless ease so correctly balanced I had
never been so attracted to a person in my life.

"
Sheeeeeit," the Pacifist suddenly said,
going into a fit again. Minnie grabbed his hair and shook it gently
and let go; the Pacifist looked up, around, to see what the pressure
had been. I was pouring her another wine and he did not know she had
touched him.

Things were, at this moment, clear and not clear to
me. Overall, I had taken a little downside sabbatical that had shown
me something I would find it best to know only as the Nose Chemist
knew his ketones: with Havana Carlisle in the back of my mind, I
could inherit a two million net deal with enough grace that I would
not worry about acquiring a $400 River Road plate, not haze a
yardman--not much more, finally, was certain. Havana kept appearing
to me: instead of cigar-waving down the main street of his town in
Missouri, he was waving his cigar across my crushed-shell trucking
lot. He was telling the company: Let's raise our anti-actualization
quotients to comfortable levels and go on about our business with
these pipes.

The world seemed a place of improbable wild hope. I
told my father I will run his business--my business--and all I see,
all I can hold probable about that, is gathering these fools together
and seeing how far we can go on two million dollars. Bonaparte washes
trucks, whistling shrilly all the live-long day, and drives. Wallace
dispatches trucks by heaving darts into the territory board. The
Veteran watches the grounds at night. My bus driver takes a load of
oil pipe, and another, here, and there, and never has to return. When
I get ambitious, I'll have Tunkie Friedeman come down and formulate a
revolutionary synthetic that will set the pace for the next
generation of pipe.

And Mary. I resolve, in the morning, to drop by. One
does not, when calling on Mary, need pause to buy flowers.