Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell (9 page)

Ray was impressed at Mr. Mogul’s smooth delivery.
He thought it might be good to learn to speak that way himself, and
he certainly would have to consider it if he began wearing his hair
in a way that made people expect that kind of sound to come out of a
man. He thought he might, what the hell, try it right now: “These
ideers might appear in congress with my haircut, sir, as far as
blow-dry. I have oft pondered, moreso, more-over, why the brother
does not have his own entire industries a national bank, for example.
Prioritizing the brother. For all the fay-the-fair made about his
soul food, one does too see a dearth of restaurants in the brother’s
name, and certainly there is no national chain. And you would know
best the opportunities in mass communications, which it has already
brought us wrassling on TV and colored black-and-white movies. I
mean, why should not the brother have not merely his own phone but
his own net-work? His own satellites, even?”

Mr. Mogul looked at him in astonishment. "We
have discussed these things in bunkers,” he said. “As part of the
planning for the New South. You might be more of the team than I
knew. Do you want to be more of the team than I knew?" At this,
Roopit Mogul began weeping. It was a quiet, not very disturbed
weeping, which suggested as many positive emotions as negative, Ray
thought, rather as women may cry when they are happy fully as often,
and often as fully, as when they are sad. Mrs. Mogul seemed also not
much bothered by it, and made ready with a napkin as if to hand it to
Mr. Mogul momentarily when he came up for air. Bay fingered the raw
spots of his haircut and thought, Really.

He discovered that the hostess had left the room and
was now returning with dessert on a tray. It looked very good,
especially since he could not recall their having had anything else.
It was not that he was particularly hungry, it was merely that this
was the first food they had seen, and it looked particularly fetching
for that reason alone. He jumped up to help the woman with the tray,
saying to her, “Honey child!" This came out of his mouth as
oddly as a small toad. The woman took no exception to the toad, in
fact winked at him. She glanced at Mr. Mogul. “We are coming along
nicely,” she said. Then to him, “You’re a good boy."

This compliment went into Ray as true as a pang on
the pan of his heart. It had not been said to him in a long, long
time. It made him want the woman again, in the bed room, and soon.

“
I’m a voodoo chile,” he said.

“
That you are,” the woman said. “Now watch
this.”

The curtain behind Mr. Mogul opened. An image began
to obtain, not unreminiscent of the way the
Star
Trek
boys beamed into place, or the way
closed-circuit TV sometimes grainily gathered itself in the early
days of closed circuitry. “The artist Degas could talk any woman he
wanted into taking her clothes off and bathing in front of him,
apparently,” Ray said.

The woman said, "Shh."

On the screen Forrest appeared, hair shining, blowing
in a wind. Violins blowing a violin wind. Moss blowing in a wind. Sir
Walter Scott shook hands with Forrest. A guillotine tumbled by on the
wind. "The French were of no help to us," Forrest said.
Forrest appeared to be distracted. Ray had not seen him so before. He
was fidgeting with his person, patting about himself as if checking
for personal property in his pockets. The marvelous canvas coat was
there, in its perfect disorder: dirty and yet spectral, rucked up and
shot and torn and yet whole and sturdy and rugged as armor. Ray
wanted a coat like that.

Some kind of commercial intervened in the filmstrip,
or whatever it was. Ray had not heard the term “filmstrip” in a
long time. He had not actually heard it now. It had been heard, he
guessed, by his brain. The commercial was for Ronson lighter fluid.
Ray had never seen a commercial, or any other kind of advertisement,
for Ronson lighter fluid. “Ronson lighter fluid exists
independently of the exigencies of commerce,” Ray said aloud, and
they all told him by quiet gesture to be quiet. “And those yellow
cards with the little red flints,” he pressed on, “they don’t
have to advertise that.” They shushed him.

Forrest returned, his hair on fire. He was saying
something indistinguishable. It sounded like “Someone get the
phone,” but Ray thought what he was saying was cleverly designed to
sound like indistinguishable talk. That is to say you could decide
what he was saying for yourself and be no more inaccurate than your
neighbor, because Forrest was not saying anything ai all. They had
cleverly effected this phenomenon. It sounded like talk but wasn’t.
It was like some poetry.

Ray closed his eyes. He wanted to see Forrest ride.
He almost wanted to run the machine that projected him again himself
because Forrest was not doing interesting things here in this
professional film or whatever it was. Forrest could ride, list,
skull, stomp, gouge, pistol ball in hip, mercury pouring from his
feet where his thimble spurs melted back onto the fingers of the fair
ladies who hoped for him and loved him

and loved then, still, too, themselves

and the woman was on him again, the fog of flesh that
was her and that was him was on them again, and she was saying “Are
you hungry?” and he was saying “Yes, ma’am, I am hungry,"
and she smiled at him, a sweet smile that took a long time and made
him feel like ... what? . .. as if she were laughing at something, at
him, but she was not, and she said “And are you a fool?” and he
said “Oh, yes, ma’am, I am a fool," and she said "Then
you are a hungry fool?” and he said nothing because it was obvious
that he was, and the woman smiled again the long smile that made you
think she was finding something funny about you but she was not.
 
 

Real Fog

When Mrs. Hollingsworth returned from her dinner with
the Moguls and Ray and the irrepressible unredoubtable Forrest, as
fine as an immortal graying hound, she felt marvelously refreshed and
simplified. She felt she had traveled to a wonderful place, a
sentiment that was suspiciously brochure-sounding but that she had no
trouble holding anyway. I went to a place and I enjoyed it very much,
she said to herself. Now that she was “back"—— and she had
some reservations about that terminology too, because she sensed you
did not come all the way back and you did not ever really leave—she
kept smacking her lips for some of that place again.

Here she was again in what her daughters would call,
she supposed, the real fog—no, they wouldn’t, they were not that
bright—and it looked immeasurably worse. The newspaper contained an
item, among all the murders and barricadings and shooting sprees,
about the curvature of the president’s member. He had a peyroni
that did not, she read, get fully erect. The president of the United
States. This was real. Tell her this was not also then a fog, and a
worse one than the one she had learned to take lodgment in.

She had got to see a media mogul cry—where else
might you see that? And he had wept so ambiguously, so endearingly,
so unselfpityingly: She was already ready to go back. A phrase was
toying with her head. She had had more of the phrase than she had
now, and it had been better, meant more than the fragment of it she
now possessed. She had lost part of the phrase in the collision with
the real fog. The presidents limber peyroni had whapped it out of her
head. Everyone could be Coleridge, she supposed. This was why They
had taken laudiuium away from us, wasn’t it? They did not like us
all being Coleridge. If she were caught selling laudanum from the
back of a Volvo, she would do more time than if she shot someone.

What remained of the toying phrase was only this; "in
the ghost of her lies.” Something something in the ghost of her
lies. Maybe In the ghost of her; lies something something. No: the
original meaning was along the lines of the phantom of her
prevarications. The phantom of her prevarications, the ghost of her
lies—she was in love with the ghost of her lies, her ghostly lies,
and she would return to him, and to them, when she could. There was
nothing quite like the clarity of the surreal fog when you came out
of the muddy real.

For the rest of her life she would shop, for herself
and for whatever hungry fools came by to partake of her improbable
food. This resolve filled her with so much cheer that she hatted up
and headed out to the real store for some probable food. Waked up,
part of her vision intact, the ghost of her lies in her purse, she
was not altogether in despond. She Volvoed forth into the real fog.
 

Blueberries

At the grocery store Mrs. Hollingsworth found herself
stopped at a long chest freezer containing packaged vegetables and
fruits, The handsome simulations of the vegetables and the fruits on
the packages drew the eye agreeably to their gay colors through the
calming fog of frozen air hovering over them. She stood there,
absently handling this and that. She rarely bought any frozen food of
this sort, precisely because the packaging was so nice she felt it
had to conceal something fraudulent. She was aware that frozen food
had passed out of middle—class favor and was now a food of the
lower classes. But there was a brand of bulk vegetables from Georgia
of the country-people sort—cut green beans and okra and field peas
—sold in two-pound undecorated clear plastic bags that she would
buy. These vegetables were good, and they interested her because all
it said on the bag, virtually, was “Moultrie, Georgia,” as if
that would, or should, be enough to sell the food in the bag. And it
was. All the other frozen produce, in full-tilt packaging, which she
thought of as emanating actually from Hollywood, turned out to be
from a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Coca-Cola or
General Motors, in Battle Creek or Stamford or who knew where.

She imagined Forrest riding in here and laying in a
plain bag of cut okra for each saddlebag, to pop in his mouth like
popcorn all day through a long fight. She actually looked around for
him, realizing as she did that she looked exactly like the man on the
bed’s grandmother, who would slap childrens hands to protect her
pickled tongue, the time she escaped from her nursing home and
petered out in the sunny foyer of an apartment building two blocks
away saying to passing strangers whom she mistook to be her rescuers,
“What took you so long?" The old children-knife-slapping poker
queen mistook each passerby to be a saber-slapping Forrest. Mrs.
Hollingsworth had that same desperate lost hopeful look standing
there with a bag of okra in her hand. She put it down. Forrest could
do a lot, but rescuing her in here was not one of the things he could
do.

She beheld, next to the okra she had put down, a box
of` blueberries. She knew that the box itself was plain, gray, thin
cardboard folded together none too sturdily; what shored the affair
up was a perdurable waxed paper well sealed around the box, a light
unwettable paper as nice as good wrapping paper, and this delicate
slippery material held the coarse, loose box of berries together, a
kind of intimacy she found sexy. The wrapper was pure white, and on
it was printed a prospect of blueberries that looked like no
blueberries on earth, or none that anyone on earth had ever seen, at
any rate. They were cold-looking and “garden-moist,” the wrapper
proclaimed, a remarkable effect given that the blueberries she’d
seen had looked like hot purple peppercorns. These Hollywood berries
were princely, each with its dainty spiked crown. The photograph did
what Van Camps or General Motors or AT&T or whoever asked of it:
made the human being want to eat blue food, an improbable thing in
his general habit.

In the portrait of these surreal blueberries, Mrs.
Hollingsworth saw the man on the bed get up from it and look around
and see that the impossibly beautiful woman was gone. This perception
on his part put a waft of momentary desperation through him, followed
hard by a waft of determination to endure the loss of the woman.
Sexual deprivation quickens the step, Mrs. Hollingsworth thought,
seeing the sentiment penciled over the scene as if it were one in a
comic strip. It was a comic strip, she thought then. She had no
trouble with that. She herself was comic.

She saw the man put on a crisp new shirt of a plaid
fabric so thin it could be seen through. He dropped the tissue and
the straight pins from the shirt packaging onto the hard golden floor
of the room. It was the first time anything—even Helen of Troy’s
clawing through it—had detracted from the stunning perfection of
the floor. The momentary carp flowing over it had no more marred it
than fish mar water. The pins and the tissue fell to the floor and
stayed where they fell, the shiny glints of the pins random and
vaguely dangerous, the crumpling of the paper humanly messy. They
were harbingers of something, Mrs. Hollingsworth thought. She loved
that word. They were harbingers.

The man stepped lively onto the street. He had
complemented the hick shirt with a pair of pants too short to conceal
his brogans and white socks. He looked a perfect clodhopper. She
liked him very much. She had not liked him much lately. Now that he
was out of his moony phase he was looking okay. He had determined to
get himself a job, any job, that day, right there in Holly Springs
Mississippi. That was pluck. He wasn’t going to get a job that day,
or probably any other day, in Holly Springs Mississippi, where he
knew no one, and even he knew it, but that did not stop him or Mrs.
Hollingsworth from seeing the possibility of it. What mattered was
that he was taking himself in hand—this resolve was fairly pinned
on him, like a blue ribbon he’d been conferred at 4-H. He’d won
the prize for Taking Himself in Hand.