Read Online Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell by Padgett Powell - Free Book Online Page B

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